skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to not get laid off?
I'm a senior marketer at a Series A b2b startup in Asia. We had to let a few junior people go, cut-back on salaries, and with careful cash management, will have roughly 18 months runway.

Currently, my role is needed (might not be in Q4). But some of my peers in different industries (e.g. food technology, banking, other startups) are mentally struggling and daily worried that they'll be laid off. This fear is affecting their productivity. Moreover work environment has become more stressful when in virtual meetings their managers are constantly asking them to "make some noise" for the head office or come up with amazing moonshot ideas, not in order to actually produce them but to show relevance of their department.

Given HN's has people from diverse background, how are you staying relevant when your job might not be the most essential one when compared to others in your org? Are there any best practices here? In software, you have moats like switching cost, data, network effects etc. Is there something similar for people?

P.S. I understand that this is a difficult time and if a company is forced to cut-back then obviously there are no guarantees.

Note: If it helps, you might want to check this HN thread "Ask HN: Have you been laid off?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22618788
It's not a bubble, it's price inflation. Assets are fairly priced with a looming collapse of the dollar value in mind.
Ok. I didn't realize uBlock Origin and uBlock were two separate things.
Exactly. Assume that governments and large companies can and will spy on you and act accordingly. Do not get suckered into some simplistic nationalistic narrative in which "our" side is good.
Your other points in this thread are inadequate.

Compatibilism may make perfect sense for you but that doesn't render your opinion correct against someone that disagrees with your definition of free will and the common definition of free will. I find it humorous you're attempting to use mob rule now and which is why I decided to comment.

If by any chance you would like to have a discussion by maybe voice? I would very much like to discuss your views vs my own and go over why I'm a hard determinist compared to being a compatibilist such as yourself.

I do like to discuss these topics once in awhile with someone over chat. I try to keep an open mind and hopefully learn something new whenever that may be in my fate. Although if you're a person that's fixated on semantics and or just assumes your 60% of philosophers must be right. There isn't much point.
IIRC, blacklisting the <something>-graphql subdomain is enough to evade private window detection. Can be done easily with uMatrix, a DNS or a hosts file.
>Do you love the company, its leadership, its product, or its pricing?

you didn't ask me, but imo they haven't existed long enough to garnish love for their company and leadership.

They had a product and a price point at a time with huge & abnormal sudden demand. I think this alone was enough to make them successful in the short term.
After seeing plenty of discussions on HN where people expressed how they'd rather keep using Zoom despite 1) clear security issues and 2) the development teams living in China, I didn't feel there was any other way to express the issue (and the discrepancy in values). There seems to be a blindness to geopolitical realities in the tech world, and this occurrence is the perfect example.
what's your view on healthcare? I feel it's essential infrastructure - but is that your sense?
What are BLM's goals?
Wire.com may be of interest to you. I have been checking out a few as well.
Copyright is a legal fiction - it doesn't exist except by force of the state, and there's plenty of evidence that it has a large variety of downsides. I think it's entirely reasonable to argue for alternative methods of providing benefit to society that don't rely on having the state threaten people for you.

Or, in other words - the default state of things is that copyright does not exist, not that it does. It's on copyright proponents to prove that we have a better world with it than without.

Great software developers already largely make their fortune doing bespoke work for clients with a need for it. So do great lawyers, great doctors, great system administrators, great technical writers, and so on. This isn't a new idea.
Lawmakers could seek out experts to ask for advice, rather than the experts coming to them. They could read papers, or have their staff do so. They could send staff to talk to people about the issues they're facing.
Is that a joke? We know nothing about what data they collect for what purposes. Just that they do.
1080p Netflix is 2-2.5 Mbps in practice because of video compression. You only get 1080p or better with certain browsers too. Many people use Netflix in Chrome or Firefox and only get 720p
I think you're talking about bufferbloat? If so, I hope the answer is no...
I try my best to contribute for things I care about. I'll send the occaisionally donation into the guardian, ETF, Patron for a youtuber, wikipedia, or whatever. I do have a couple subscriptions like for Spotify or the economist, but otherwise I try to give to stick to donations whenever I feel like I have money to burn.

That being said, I live with the fact that certain content creators get nothing from me, I don't feel great about it but I would never consume their content if I had to go through ads, either.
Sounds good but turn down the music!
I've tried Google Meet, Jitsi, and some other things, but Zoom is the only service that my 6+ year old laptop can handle for more than 5 min without nosediving into 100% CPU usage and freezing up.

Does anyone have other suggestions? Either for other services or for troubleshooting Jitsi?
> I’m not sure that we need men or women 11 km down except for media coverage. I’d rather see thousands of small/cheap fully autonomous sea floor landers taking benthic core samples worldwide than one giant expedition doing gimmicks to get media coverage.

Well, but men and women want to be there.

This last paragraph of yours is a mirror image of the same argument against manned space exploration - wouldn't it be better/easier/cheaper if it was all done by autonomous robots? The answers are also similar: we don't have the necessary tech, we likely won't have it without intermediate missions involving humans, even in robotic missions there will be a benefit of having humans near the mission site (in case of space: light lag), and media coverage is actually a good thing, because both fields are starved for funding.
If the company itself is compromised, e-2-e doesn't matter.
I can't recommend Donna Tartt's books enough, especially The Secret History and The Goldfinch. I've read both 3 times now.
And, of course, a huge difference in number and quality of 3rd party libraries.
How to Save Money: The Methods That Work
How to get your brain to focus during moments of chaos
I think it's a misunderstanding that led to a reveal (edit: which actually reinforces OP unintentionally; at least that's my reading); not sure which side the downvoters are on. This is fascinating.
This requires oversight.

The U.S. government has no business telling Zoom what it must or must not host. But it can prohibit federal procurement of Zoom, prohibit contractors from using Zoom in connection with government work, keep a close eye on Zoom and its employees as potential intelligence threats, and prohibit Zoom from accessing federal benefits.

It should require pre-emptive disclosure by of foreign ownership, control and influence; as well as public disclosure of government censorship requests and fulfillments by publicly-traded companies.
> Most people don't own assets

Almost everyone owns a pension.
"Easy to deploy" and "Many cheap webhosts are already configured for it" are still very different things. I never found it helpful to conflate them. For example, a VPS with CPanel/Plesk is quite the dependency. As is "a cheap PHP webhost with servers configured for your PHP scripts".
> he dare not dismount

Sounds as if you think he wants to dismount
What a crazy world this is
> Does anyone know if there is some philosophy to this I don't understand?

I've worked for two companies that made most of their money from (online) advertising. While working for those companies it was important for me to experience the web as our users would --- mostly without an adblocker, and trying to avoid overpowered hardware; my users were running mostly low end android phones, so it I've got a GalaxyS or a Pixel, what I experience is nothing like what they experience.

I'm not working there anymore, so maybe I'll do an adblocker eventually, but I'm IT support for my family, and it helps if I can se what they see, and I don't want to manage adblockers for them, so....
I've never routinely run an adblocker in, whatever, 25 years online.

I've experimented with them here and there, and tend to find that the unintended consequences are as much of a hassle as the ads.

I keep meaning to try a PiHole but I'm not sure I'll have much better luck.
In a similar tangent, if you want to bypass age checks without logging in, you can use the embed link for a video.

For a link like this (this one is not actually age restricted or NSFW):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScVi_L817ec

Just visit this instead:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ScVi_L817ec

This one is a lot more interesting, though. I guess I assumed that sites wouldn't even respect the FQDN like that, but it's definitely interesting to see a changed site returned instead.
Dammit now I'm curious and have to research microwave pain rays
Then maybe help unionize your workplace and advocate for that. Unions don't have to protect poor performers. They could just as well be stringent about them.

I think a lot of the impression people have of unions is from places with really hostile labor/manager relationships. Under those conditions, it's easy to treat the workplace as a zero-sum battleground. But especially in tech, where we have a culture of shared gain and literal shared ownership, it's possible for workers to advocate for things like improved efficiency.
Becoming employed by a car company that wants to improve the experience of their vehicle is a perfectly reasonable option though. Or writing software for someone else's car - there's more than enough gearheads who'd spend a ridiculous amount of money on custom code for their vehicle if only they were permitted to.
Exactly, it's more like a default choice than a "really good one".
All invalid certs/403, even google webcache is 404ing, how elusive...
I don’t understand what “words in the way” means. The words are what she is using to convey the ideas that you are pretending to want to understand.

“TERF”s do not exist. This is just a slur invented by men who object to lesbians not wanting to have sex with them. It goes hand-in-hand with the idea that they should be forced, coerced,
or shamed into doing so, regardless of their desires. The use of this term is an implied rape
threat, like the related expression “cotton ceiling”.
Caveat: I haven't touched Java in years, and that was not even a current version of Java at the time (well, it was old code made to run on the then-current JVM, but not utilizing any features introduced after 2006 or so). I'm assuming these are good resources, but I'm not sure.

https://developer.ibm.com/technologies/java/series/java-8-id...

List of articles relating to idiomatic Java 8 code. Some of these touch on using lambdas and functional idioms.

https://developer.ibm.com/articles/j-java8idioms3/

This one shows a few of the functional-styled methods that can be used (foreach, takewhile, iterate, etc.).

https://developer.ibm.com/articles/j-java8idioms2/

Shows the collection pipeline pattern.

I have experience with the same things in C# and other languages, the way they're using them in these articles are what I'd expect from a comparable API.
>But for some reason the moment the police are involved, that presumption is reversed. Why?

Because the testimony by police is treated as a proof more reliable than nearly any contrary evidence, short of very clear video.
What Are Unit Tests For?
I have definitely started a job search after a superior joked about us being "replaceable". It wasn't even directed at me particularly, but there was a chance it was in reference to either the departments performance in general or possibly financial constraints of the department. The risk analysis on that from an employee perspective is a no-brainer: start making contingency plans.
This sounds entirely the same and this time the industry probably thought they were so clever because companies are likely still less risky than individual consumers and then oops Corona!
Meh, the article doesn't mention recovery rates. If a loan defaults it's not usual you are getting 0 back. Typically 30-40% is the assumed rate. That means if all the loans default then the top 30% of tranches shouldn't take a loss.

So now consider, most of the underlying loans have to default and the recovery rate has to be below battle tested assumptions before the top tiers get risky. This is very very unlikely to happen given the Fed and the US Govt. have done so much and are committed to do more to stave off a severe depression / recession. It's more like people were killing it buying the safer parts at distressed prices as over leveraged funds shed them on the back of margin calls in March.
Ruins of the Future – An Extract (2010)
That's a steal here in Germany. My company is paying ~500€/mo for 35/35 Mbps...
I wonder what are the odds of finding dead pixels today. I saw lots of them in the past, and in a few cases they were really nasty to stand (imagine a pixel stuck at full brightness in the center of a screen mostly containing dark terminals) , but admittedly in the last 10 years or so I can't remember of a single one. However, although all vendors bury the dead pixel disclaimer, being so open about it makes one wonder if their quality checks are cheaper than others.
I would happily pay more to be 100% sure there are no dead pixels btw.
There is a difference between a parabolic reflector and any other reflector. Reflectors that concentrate energy make the damaging effects more intense.

It is difficult to find an analogy -- it is as if the LRAD operator has thrown a punch and the reflector turns that punch into the stab of a rapier. If and only if the reflector is properly aligned will the redirected-and-concentrated beam have the reflector-bearer's desired effect. If not, someone else may get harmed. The reflector-bearer must accept responsibility for the change in consequence between the punch and the rapier.

There is a third option -- one can readily design reflectors that disperse the energy or generically attempt to reflect it upward. Those are the tools of true pacifists.
I believe that the degree to which security negatively affects usability is variable, and in some cases could be negligible, depending on engineering and product teams’ competence.

(Edit: remove many words)
I tried to create a throwaway account using Tor to provide a sincere personal view of this topic, with valuable experience and which also needed strong anonymity as not to put specific people at risk, but the recatchpa rejects the Tor connection.

That this seemed necessary at all is itself sufficient to describe where we are.
Does anyone have a book or library recommendation that would cover a canvas, and operations on it that draws vector primitives?

I made a hell of a lot of progress with Tkinter because it's so simple. Is there anything that simple and vector based?

It seems like the only options are "ugly" and "pretty but really complicated".
For most countries, this is true. The US is in a unique position because it is the global currency.
It's technically a different domain. HN cookie is created for a domain without dot at the end, so there's no match when you open a domain with the dot.

In the same way, if a website does not do www->nowww / nowww->www redirect (example.com / www.example.com), you might have www version be logged in and nowww version be logged out or vice versa (depending how exactly it creates its cookies).
Government budgets are not the same as corporate budgets.
I think working in the financialization industry is a form of destructive waste. That's the gist of the idea. But that judgement is a very subjective thing, because why is my software helping society any better? I'm making new and better ways to program robots. Sooo, could better autonomous systems lead to job loss? Potentially, sure.
You can use static_assert but compilers observe assert already. assume is another commonly used invariant.
A Black Tech Ethicist Talks Next Steps for ATX’s Tech Community
There's Senior SWE title. I assumed that was what you meant. They comprise the bulk of Google's engineering, and their base is about $180K. Everything else depends on performance or lack thereof.
There was a video from near me of a police officer punching a handcuffed man in the head multiple times.

It was deemed ok because the man spit at the officer and spitting is considered assault where I live.

Man I can only imagine what would happen to me if I beat the hell out of a guy and told the judge it was self defense becausehe spit at me.
Only last week, it was announced by Zoom's CEO that free accounts are unencrypted, to enable law enforcement agencies.

Now we read that PAID accounts are suspended for their contents.

Hence, the encryption is obviously a farce.
Thanks @dkn775

Yeah, to accept nihilism seems very destructive. Ultimately, to me, like you; it seems to equate to accepting zero value for others and ourselves

Yet life burns to exist. We are desperate to live and to have meaning. It is no proof, but every fiber of our being cries out for a value beyond zero

> Though believing that such actions are actually a net benefit may be considered "faith" because I can't know for sure.

Nice. Personally, and from personal experience, I would base "faith" on concrete facts, and this provides a safe foundation for logic, etc -- I think you can know for sure

Thanks for sharing
It is rather astonishing that rational people continue to believe that there is enough future tax revenue to justify this. It's entering dotcom-boom territory, where even the most optimistic future profitability can't justify this level of backing.

Part of it, I imagine, is that the US government is likely to benefit from future tech booms, as it has in the past (despite tax shenanigans from the tech companies themselves). It gets a piece of stock market profits -- a stock market whose own levels are also currently out of keeping with rational revenue expectation.
I was thinking that the author was going to be arguing that anything more than 2 screens is a bad idea. (Because seriously, where the heck did my mouse go? I can't find it and it's somewhere on one of these 3 monitors in front of me).

I can't fathom being a professional in the tech world and not having two monitors.
Like it would identify what you're hearing? "Trumpet!" "Wind whistling through oak leaves!" "Male child!" etc?
Haven't seen that before. Now I can recreate the opening to Contact at home!
I believe you continue to ignore the obligation of businesses to protect data.

Yes, access to sensitive data is one layer of defense in depth for data exfil - absolutely on point there. But then you throw up your hands and say "oh well" if they do get data, or if they have legitimate need to see it, and try to get it out. I don't buy that.

I agree with some of your thoughts in principle: Just like I don't agree with backdoors in crypto, I applaud TLS getting stronger toward PFS and eliminating MITM. But you're naive if you think companies don't have a right or desire to monitor the systems that hold their intellectual property, and their customers' personal data.

Your bio says you work at Intel. I'd bet a month's rent that there is a MITM proxy on your corporate network.
You can also contact the-eye.eu who host, among others, a curated list of covid articles. Helping make knowledge available is an interesting cause.
Second screens are a productivity boost. But this article is a poorly-concealed submarine [1] for Zoom.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
> it's a very small and relatively easy change to make to CREATE hiccups down the road.

Fixed that for you.
Yes! And it really is so easy to implement all of this validation and checking without it being too complicated. How is parsing some numbers and running a few math equations the source of so much trouble?
Imagine that we lived in a world where new technology is developed all the time, although not everyone gets access to all new technology simultaneously. In such a world, wouldn't it be possible for the powerful dictator of the most populous and technologically advanced nation in that world to receive seemingly miraculous life-extension treatments before most people knew of their existence?

Besides, if current dystopic trends continue, most of us won't have 40 years to wait for the expiration of our despotic sovereign overlords...
It would depend on where the friends' views are rooted.

If the friend is saying "My uncle is a cop who's never done anything wrong and he doesn't deserve to be lumped in with the ones causing trouble", I could actively sympathize with that.

If the friend is saying "I still think it's only a few bad cops and that the protesters are causing more trouble overall than the cops", I would tend to think that person was misinformed and maybe try to share new information with them if I thought it would make a difference, but I would also leave it be if I had to for the sake of the friendship (this is my situation with my parents).

If the friend is saying "Strong-man governments are great, people should bow down and stop trying to hold the police accountable, they shouldn't have to be accountable to anybody", then that would tell me something about the person's moral center and I don't see myself wanting to remain friends with that kind of person at all.
> Google has also been pushing sites that do on-page SEO right heavily in the SERPs.

I can't echo this loud enough - I made great profit by out-ranking heavily established retail outlets for years with super spammy and terrible sites purely with correct on-page SEO and garbage 'keyword optimized' content.

I, as well, now have to append things to searches in order to get real answers. (Or start with a twitter search, depending on the topic)
Thats an interesting introspective.

It really sounds like he needs to get away from his 12 year old daughter, whom unfortunately doesn't know him or have an opinion about him but is tolerating his obligatory presence.

Despite the assumptions about tech proficiency thrown onto Millenials and "everyone younger than me while I make excuses about being tech illiterate": Gen Z doesn't know anything about computers, and would have a much more foreign form of "meaningful human interaction" than what really is happening.
I also read it this way; but rereading OP it's unclear.
The above China concern is legit but a lot of the issues in the above links have been fixed in the updates ~2 months back.
It's kind of chicken and egg. Everything ends up on YouTube because people don't have the bandwidth to self-host video, so then people go to YouTube to look for videos.

If more of them were self-hosted then the default search method would be one that finds them everywhere. At this point there is more work to be done than only getting people more bandwidth in order to get there from here, but one step at a time.
Well, the point is to not spend too much time in video-meetings, so you can be fine with a laptop for work
“An invariant is an expression which should be true for the whole life-time of the block/function/program/anything”

It should hold at both entry and exit of a block, but practically always doesn’t for the entire block.