skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder at what point this kind of thing is enough to tip the Bay Area tech labor market into a new equilibrium.

In the recent past there have been a lot (hundreds?) of startups and a few dozen larger players fighting to hire in an environment with virtually zero unemployment. There are thousands of empty jobs waiting to be filled. Hence if you live around here and have tech something on your resume, it's 3-5 recruiter emails a day.

Across three rounds, Uber has let go ~1000 people. I have no idea how many are in the Bay Area, but to pick a random number and say "half," that's ~500 new people in the labor market who are probably well qualified for the rest of the open jobs.

By itself that's pretty healthy, and should actually help a lot of smaller companies in particular to be able to get "butts in seats."

But with this whole thing of "the window being open," and a lot of recent IPOs, if we start seeing a lot of the other IPO companies engage in similar layoffs, it's not hard to imagine we end up with a few thousand qualified people suddenly looking for jobs.

Is there still so much demand that the market swallows that up without noticing? Is it just enough that it helps take some of the pressure off locally, that labor demand dips but remains healthy? Or is it enough that employers can start being pickier, or stingier with their offers?

I don't know, and I'm not sure how you estimate the impact of something like that, but it's an interesting question to me. Anyone with a labor economics background have an idea how many layoffs it would take to get Bay Area supply/demand in balance?
I use this one when I'm traveling. It almost always works.
It's nearly 100 years since the matter of Catalan independence was first mooted and 80 years since the end of the Spanish Civil War and matters surrounding the formation of an autonomous Catalonian State remain far from any real resolution. This just isn't just a political dispute that if given sufficient time will eventually dissipate, rather it's a fundamental one of cultural and language differences and the heavy-handedness of the Spanish state is only making matters worse.

In a world where modern democracies everywhere are coming under increasing stress because state authorities are increasingly breaking the long-held covenants of trust that bind a state and its citizenry, these outrageous sentences only make a further mockery out of the law. Ultimately, cool heads soon need to resolve this stand-of or inevitably it will lead to further civil disobedience and possibly worse. And one must never forget that the last time this happened in 1936-'39 many hundreds of thousands died over the issue.

In the modern Europe of today, borne out of the horrific chaos of WWII (and its prelude the Spanish Civil War), there should be no place where people should be subject to such authoritarian rule as they have been subjected to here.

It's now time for Europe to pressure Spain to finally give the people of Catalonia both their autonomy and freedom. Catalonia has been in Spain's chains far long enough.
With big corporations it's sometimes the case that your people "budget" differs from your project budget. Even if you have to fire employees you might still have the budget for your project, which is usually what you pay contractors or externally developed software from. Plus the work a contractor puts into the project is "balance sheet neutral" when it's capitalized.
There’s an interesting theory that we don’t actually like cats, but are tricked by a parasite (toxoplasmosis, which cats are the primary carriers of) into thinking that we do, and caring for them even though they don’t really serve any purpose.
Would you mind sharing your deck?
Ask HN: Why are there not more OS competitors?
Every other day I see threads lamenting the Linux experience, begrudging Apple changes, and hating on Windows' problems.

It seems there is a huge opportunity for disruption in the computing/OS space. Why are there so few companies working on this problem? What are the main challenges?
On a slightly unrelated note, I was trying to figure out why this guy is using a .ca domain when I realized, his name is Jon Luca. At first I thought his name was Jon Lu (and therefore asian). Good use of domain name.
Google HQ used to be Silicon Graphics building
There is a book that goes into the ambiguous ethics of pet ownership written by a Bioethicist (who owns some pets)

https://www.amazon.com/Run-Spot-Ethics-Keeping-Pets-ebook/dp...

From a review "no matter how well loved they are, our pets are essentially being held captives…. She reminds us that the animals we love and treat as companions ‘are denied nearly all of their natural behaviors, not to mention their freedom"
I blame the numbskulls that keep ordering from Amazon after getting burned.

I am always perplexed and bemused on these threads by all the people who will openly admit, "Amazon sent me junk and didn't care, but I still buy things from them."
It's not really a rabbit hole. It has a clearly defined end.

I transitioned from GNOME to i3wm quite a while ago (after like 15 GNOME upgrade cycles, where I always had to figure out what changed, and fix what broke), and it was basically a day or two figuring out what I want and inventing/learning the shortcuts (not fulltime days, mind you). And maybe 2-3 instances of "this feels stupid, how can I improve it".

Certainly orders of magnitude less time than I ever spend making Windows do what I want on every damn re-install.

Now that I had my configs, I just copied them to all my 4 or so desktop/laptop machines, and it's such a timesaver. i3wm being ultra stable, there's no ongoing maintenance.
Speculators have shorter windows than retail investors looking to store value for long-terms gains. Owning a non-dividend stock in my retirement fund is not equivalent to speculation.
> Not selling shares. Having smaller dividends. That doesn't assume anyone is willing to loan them money.

They already sold the shares and used the money to buy trucks and stuff. The dividends are effectively the interest on that money.

Suppose (made up numbers) that they have ten billion dollars in assets, but a twelve billion dollar market cap because of the expectation that those assets will be used to make future profits. Now you say "just make smaller profits" which means their market cap falls to eight billion dollars because of the expectation of smaller dividends.

Someone on Wall St then notices that they can make two billion dollars by buying them for eight billion and selling their assets for ten.

> I'm not sure via what mechanism, exactly, but it should not be possible for a monopoly power company to just dissolve and sell off the trucks for a tiny quick profit.

The government always has the option to be the buyer itself, or find one that wants to continue operating as a power company. But then it either has to raise its own capital or bring about a regulatory environment that allows a private company to meet the market rate of return and thereby raise a sufficient amount of private capital.
Perhaps. But obviously they'd want to make this appear as the "final" wave to not overly-agitate existing employees. It'll be interesting to see how this quarter's earnings go (especially since the lockup expires in Nov). If the market reacts poorly, expect additional cost cuts.
Man - DragonFable & MechQuest were great fun. I still think of Sir Valence and the various knights with punny names!

I hope between godot, procreate 5, and open source flash runners, long term Flash will be properly succeeded; for now it appears we have regressed unless you pay Adobe for a CC subscription.
> (the temperature of the steam doesn't really matter as far as driving turbines)

This goes against everything I seem to remember from thermodynamics - superheated steam is exactly what is used for driving turbines, with saturated steam as the cold side outlet of the turbine. It's what makes district heating useful - there is still heat energy left in the saturated steam, too low grade for driving turbines, but still useful for heating apartments etc
The 737 Max would not pass certification requirements without MCAS. Agreed?
Agreed. Just to add to your point, snipping off the reproductive organs of said pets also feels cruel to me. Almost to the point of owning a living toy for your amusement.
It's for Uber Elevate (flying taxis) and they plan to use Dallas as an initial test city. Supposedly they're going to start testing next year but it's a little hard to imagine they'll hit that deadline.
> I don't really consider sandbox Minecraft a game any more than building something out of Legos or a stick fort in the woods is a game. Is it fun? Yes! Is it creative? Yes! Is it a game? I would say no.

So now kids playing with legos isn't a game becuase it lacks conflict? ... That's... not a very realistic definition in my book.

> The scarcity in KSP only comes into play in science mode (science points that you need to unlock technology is a scarce resource) and career mode (science points + money to build your rockets is a scarce resource)

There is a scarcity mode if you want it, yes. But it's not exactly actual scarcity. It's more like, "You just need to wait longer to do action X." There aren't hard choices to be made nor are there ever dead ends from those choices.

> Goals != person on person conflict. In Candy Crush you are trying to complete a level that is designed to make that a hard task (Man vs Nature where the level is the "nature"). I haven't heard of Neko Atsume so I can't comment on that.

Even the words you're using are begging the question. Is that lens of "man vs ____" actually a valid one? Why? The designer isn't trying to actually be in conflict with users. Candy Crush isn't trying to make levels hard. They're trying to make them fun.

> For rougelikes, isn't the goal often to beat the end boss? Obviously the journey has to be fun or people won't play, but they still have a goal or give you enough space and tools to let you define your own.

Not really? Lost of the famous ones have a goal that is not "kill a thing" but rather "escape with an object" which is always harder. Rogue never had an end. Nethack has you escape with an item; actually fighting the Wizard of Yendor is a waste of resources. Dead Cells has tons of endings and a few don't even involve final bosses.

> Building a pyramid in Minecraft is a self imposed goal, there is nothing about Minecraft that says "you must build a pyramid to win." Again, I view sandbox Minecraft as a building toy like a box of Lego bricks, not a game in the traditional sense. Also, you are completely ignoring survival mode which hey what a surprise features conflict between the player and the environment (creatures that want to kill you) and sometimes conflict between players.

Well this is another subtle cultural perspective, isn't it? Success, PUBG and Fortnite's Battle Royale posit, come from external validation. You have to want both the validation and agree that getting it is an accomplishment. I can see how folks like trying to make this perspective appealing to kids, but it's not really a reflection of reality nor the human psyche. There are an unlimited number of kinds of external validation we all ignore.

> . I'm just saying that for a game to be fun it needs to let the player have goals to work towards and some kind of conflict (NOT necessary person on person conflict) that makes the player work to achieve their goals

With all respect: I think you want to say this but in fact your words betray you. Your first instinct for game conflict is violence. I somewhat agree with the point you've made, but I want to point out how your worldview undermines that point.
One thing that struck me in terms of this. Is Outlook and Microsoft any safer to use than Google services? I have not been able to find any real random account suspensions for Microsoft accounts
This is typically what you’ll see when they want to fire people. They classify them as “layoffs” without requiring all the paperwork.

When it occurs they’ll email departments and say something along the lines of “we have an ongoing lay-off, please stack rank employees by need”

Then you cut the bottom. It’s something GE did for quite a while.
“Interscholastic sports spread rapidly from the 1930s through the 1950s, at a time when the medical and physical education communities were opposed to competitive sports for elementary and junior high, and occasionally high school, students.” — https://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2443/Sports-Scho...
NewPipe doesn't hit any YouTube APIs; it scrapes the website.
Curious to know how many of those are iOS engineers. It could easily be dozens or even 100+ given how many Uber has in SF alone.
The mention of Minecraft makes me think that it could be used for artistic competition purposes (not explicitly framed that way, to go easy on the nerves of the kids who are 'bad at art'). Have teams compete to make the most interesting or coolest map, and have teachers sneak in tips on perspective (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr0USak_IB4) or on historical architecture styles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPxcldEDHts).
Unless the domain was purchased using Google Domains? Then what happens if the owner's Google account is killed?
Note that he doesn't use the term "stable" incorrectly. He points out an issue (that would indeed preclude the 737 Max from being certified without MCAS, as I understand it).
The site doesn't link the source code file
I have heard of prompting people with something like "imagine we proceeded as planned and the project failed. Write a brief history of that failure." I havent seen this tried, but would be interested to hear from people who have.
I know you are just playing devil's advocate but why "without authorization"? You are using your account and your cookies so it should be fair game?
Lazard's Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis for 2018 has utility scale PV at $36-$46/MWH vs solar thermal w/ storage at $98-$181. Haven't seen an estimate that attempts to add storage to the PV to make it more directly comparable to thermal + storage.

https://www.lazard.com/media/450784/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
Skyscraper Index?
So... It's a self-correcting problem that will naturally find some equilibrium? The price goes up, it becomes worth using as a bank, but eventually bank usage leads to price reduction and thus not as valuable as a bank.

I'm not clear how you conclude regulation is needed; self-regulating systems are exactly where gov intervention is not required.
Congrats to authors and good luck.

Have a question. I do pay for few things (netflix, amazon prime and couple of others). Their services are natural candidate in my opinion for being billed monthly.

Now everyone my cats included are trying to sell their wares however small they are as a service. If I've paid monthly fee for every notepad sized program I use I'd be out of commission.

How does this business model manage to survive is puzzling to me.
> That sounds like you abdicated your part in the decision, then?

Given that the so called decision was ripe with voting fraud (I mean, separatists storing voting ballots at home?) then the process actually has nothing to do with deciding and everything to do with a Putin-istic imposition of a policy hidden with a thin façade of an election.
One company did just that in the early 90s -- SNK, with their Neo-Geo console. In fact, the meaningless-looking technobabble that appears on the system's boot screen ("MAX 330 MEGA PRO-GEAR SPEC") actually has a meaning: the system supports a maximum ROM size of 330 megabits (more with tricks like bank switching), and the console's hardware specifications are identical to those of the arcade-cabinet hardware (or "pro gear").

But the Neo-Geo and games for it were expensive -- well outside the price range of all but the most hardcore of game consumers -- and it took until the 90s to make the economics work.
Those simulations are almost entirely about developing muscle memory.

If you're talking driving or flying games with appropriate controllers, then they might provide some useful instruction. But first person shooters played with a controller or a keyboard and mouse are so disconnected from the reality of combat, that I can't imagine any kind of instruction that is applicable to the real world could possibly apply (actual training sims do exist and they work nothing like popular video games).

Militaries around the world learned decades ago that the only way to desensitize troops to shooting to actually kill another human (as opposed to just firing in the general direction) was by developing the muscle memory through repeated exercises of actually firing a rifle at a man shaped target.

I've seen no evidence of increased propensity to violence, or increased skill at violence over the last 30 years. If anything violent crime rates have dropped drastically, and recruits are worse performing because they are more likely to be out of shape, and less likely to have actually fired a gun.
How will an AI decide what the optimal allocation of food for the hungry is, how many computers everyone needs, and whether we should build basketball courts or if it's just a waste of time?

Those are all value judgements, and capital allocation is a value judgement too. I don't think an AI can optimally make decisions like that without the input of people. And an economy based on the input of people is still a free market. Perhaps with an AI in control and personal input we could make a much more democratic market though, which would be interesting.
Could you tell me the process for switching the Windows default WM to something else?
Oh, there isn't one?

Okay, how about switching the default file system?

No? Okay, how about switching kernels?

No? Come on, they must do something well. What about automating things, certainly Windows would be better at that?
Serving adverts? Oh, snap, I guess Windows does do something better.
There is a standard management speech that goes something like “these cuts hurt me more than those former employees but now we are perfectly sized for our amazing new plan for growth”? Don’t worry, you will hear it one day...
When we fed a rabbit or squirrel to the farm cats, they always ate the guts first. That's where the vital nutrients are.
> probably smart enough to plop a GPS jammer in their trucks when moving around the hot nuts.

Or they transported them in a Faraday cage, eg. a metal truck trailer.
Not whataboutism, if the case can be made that 350 million people need protection then the case can more easily be made for 1.3 billion people.

Wikileaks also showed us that US agencies were engaged in industrial espionage, stealing German/French industrial technology using the Five Eyes tools and giving it to GE & friends ...

The problem is, my more "reality-based" framing destroys the "China is uniquely evil" narrative that western media/gov is pushing everywhere for primarily economic reasons.
1%!!! There are 35,000 people working for Uber?
Friendster is the only platform I can think of that failed primarily due to scaling problems. They were in the right place at the right time, had a great set of features and an audience that wanted to use them. Engineering killed them, pure and simple. I honestly can't think of another case like it.
Preemption isn't a concept that applies to a task scheduler like Tokio. You can't just inject more states into a finite state machine at runtime.
What's the company's overall margin?

Everything objective you stated sounds like it could describe either a good company or a bad company, all conditional upon whether the margins are huge or fair.

Any pharma company that spends on R&D will have to rake in profits from somewhere to subsidize R&D efforts. R&D is extremely risky (most drug R&D projects fail) and has a very long time period before payback if it succeeds.
Here is a better demonstration:

https://youtu.be/6RtVdmsx4qU?t=71

The plane goes way above the normal climb attitude. He doesn't take it to the full stall, but has to push heavily on the control column to arrest it-- he never pulls.

(Really, it's pretty astounding how hard you have to push, and how high the nose rises anyways-- even if you weren't fully trimmed for glide, and even in mild-handling airplanes... I tend to fully trim for whatever flight condition I'm in, --except glide-- and then am holding light backpressure just to control this).
That’s what LinkedIn says. So I hope that’s the case.
An 80s Terminal for Modern Computers
They have been declining if you look at the prescription drug CPI[1], which is more closely related to what people are actually paying, rather than this article which references a document that only lists increases of wholesale prices. I'd like to see a comparison of increases and decreases. If 3 drugs increased an average of 300%, but 10 drugs decreased an average of 300%, for example.

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUSR0000SEMF01?output_view=p...
I would've had a job lined up before I quit my first. Then I could've still pursued starting my own company without burning up my savings.
How is this true in the case of indoor + outdoor cats? Particularly if you have a cat-door, or if you keep the garage door open a crack, so that the cat is free to come and go as they please: is this not freedom?
IIRC it was normal for large companies (Sun, Intel, Oracle, etc) to terminate the "bottom n%" where n=5+ by some performance metric?
And in typical fashion, this person lists the exact problem I'm having with my mac (disk space not reclaimed after deleting files) and says "fixed it" without ever saying what steps they did to actually fix the problem. Now they'll get indexed by Google and show up on top so the next person with this problem will find the post, but not find any helpful solution.
> "might"

You're still making a prediction about the future. Some predictions are safer than others: I predict I will see the sun rise tomorrow. Some predictions have little rational basis in reality: I predict you will agree with me. Your prediction about automomous cars being safer than human drivers? That falls somewhere in the middle.

From my perspective, all computer vision systems are abysmal crap and spend orders of magnitude more power to accomplish results many orders of magnitude less impressive than the human brain is capable of. The human brain uses something like 10-20 watts, how much CV/ML can you do with 10-20 watts? Not much at all. There is clearly a huge disconnect between our current approach to solving the problem technologically and how the evolutionary wetware solves the problem. That gap may be bridged sometime in the future, but I'm not holding my breath. I think the problem is being approached from the wrong direction, like trying to drive a screw with a hammer. Maybe we'll still get the job done, but I do not consider that a foregone conclusion.
> The implication to this sentence is that the west is unique in this regard. The only non-violent exemplar game you presented being a non-western game strengthens this implication.

Unique? No. Distinct in character, yes.

> The only non-violent exemplar game you presented being a non-western game strengthens this implication.

Minecraft. Night in the Woods. Slenderman. Kerbal Space Program. SpaceChem, TIS-80, InfiniMiner, InfiniFactory, a huge portion of Stellaris's gameplay. Untitled Goose Game. Online Go. Candy Crush. Many many subgames in Roblox.

Can you stop this line of questioning now? It's boring.
Well, I just added a tiny bit to that 3%...I hadn't heard of Krita before, but it looks great. Looking forward to trying it out.