skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Overall this is the sticking point to the argument that being a better manager will solve it.

Tech has awful leadership development pipelines and programs at the Junior and mid levels. I sort of struggle to think of anyone that actually does this at non-managing director levels other than the military with its Junior officer corps and maybe a very select few companies.

Not to be extremely pedantic, but the fact that the term “management” is thrown in as a solution and not “leadership” sort of proves this point.

OP is referring to generally strong and sound leadership techniques. These can and are taught by a select few orgs I just referred to; there’s definitely a science there to learn.

The issue is that so, so much of professional America doesn’t produce good leaders or bother to train them. The idea that strong management is a tenable, broad based solution, when the ball is currently at the line of management == don’t be an a* when you make schedules for your team, is not a good one.

Until corporate America, and especially tech, starts planning how to produce leaders and not just managers, a blanket ban is the only thing that makes much sense as an org policy that could actually work.

It’s true, fwiw. This is a leadership challenge that is solvable, and the orgs that grow leaders have track records of solving it without total bans. It’s usually just a matter of enforcing professionalism, diverting attention, steering attitudes, and most importantly working to create extremely high trust environments by designed. But: too many managers try* to hang in this brutal forum where* the best engineer who wanted to do EM stuff is a manager, and suddenly has to handle this. Leadership dev programs for junior leaders/EM-equivalent take years to do, not a promotion.
The concern is usually that (made up numbers) school is budgeted at 100M/yr from the general fund. Then they get a lottery that provides 30M/yr, and 100% goes to the schools. Now the schools have 130M/yr right? But the worry is instead they reduce the funds from the general budget to 70M. The lottery money all went to the schools, but the extra 30M went to the general fund.
My point here is that the percentage is based off the price you're selling at, not the amount you're making. So someone who makes a profit of $0.50 off a $1 sale keeps more after Apple's cut than someone who makes a $0.50 profit off a $3 sale.
This is really simple, it's about the policy and the way it was announced, there's little more to read into the situation.

Minor points:

There was no corporate gym membership, it was just "Here's $100, spend it on fitness".

> A 10% profit share between 50 people is replacing a solid perk with an unpredictable annual bonus.

Basecamp was a phenomenally profitable company. The profit share was brought in after I left, but I'd have taken it over the other benefits if it had been either/or.
Separate micro-op cache per core, and no hyperthreading, so ARM would seem better equipped to defend against this.
You've made up some convenient numbers here to create a strawman.

If the liquidity is 500k, that's a $17.5k tax. I'm not going to stay at a job for 10 years for 30k less than market. That's a terrible decision. Most people would be looking after year 4, which is when options commonly fully vest.

With my made up numbers, that's a $30.4k tax over four years versus a $17.5 tax over one year. My made up ratio is far less appealing than your made up ratio.
There is no direct access. These exploits use a side channel attacks. They feed the CPU code where the execution reveals information indirectly.
It doesn't break the defense I used: Stop buying Intel x86 chips.
When I click on the url I get...

This site can’t be reachedtimur.mobi refused to connect.
Try:

Checking the connection
Checking the proxy and the firewall
ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED
I'm a big fan of both Dürer and Blake's woodcuts. Their appeal is certainly enduring, but I don't think any single work is as recognizable to the average person as the Great Wave.
Near equivalent to me would be right to fixed price repairs. That would allow the customer to better estimate the total cost of ownership. I think it's a worthy alternative because repair is only going to get harder with components becoming miniaturized and unified.
Fair point, I think. It's a very impactful company, for sure. But again, the hyperbole around "1/3 of employees" is just too much for me to take seriously. That's 15-20 people? Not that interesting of a story, even for the influence of Basecamp.
I can give you an example though I have to be sort of vague for obvious reasons too. In fact, I have been bisecting to find the cause of a bug 3 times in the past 3 to 4 weeks.

Customer Service reported a problem with something that my team is responsible for. I knew almost for certain that we didn't break it. I had a vague idea that another team might have broken it by a recent-ish change to a different service that we both rely on but aren't the maintainers of (we have a monorepo). In fact they made multiple changes to it recently (they put me on the PR for awareness).

I don't know the code for that service but it was really easy to check for the occurrence of the bug (literally two clicks in the UI to reproduce or not reproduce). Instead of trying to understand a service that I don't own, which would require mental concentration, I randomly checked out a commit from 4 weeks ago, tested => bug not reproducible and started a bisect. I was actually gonna be stuck in some meetings for the next few hours but bisecting is mechanical, so I was able to just do it on the side (deploying is a little bit of waiting in between, you gotta refresh etc.) and a little later I was able to just paste a very neutral "XYZ is the first bad commit" into the ticket. Totally cuts down on the 'drama' too as you're not simply 'accusing' someone else of causing an issue in _your_ part of the application. It's just there, very neutral, there's the commit that caused it. Git told me!
Hundred year old, 240lb sturgeon caught in Detroit River
They don't need to make any power play, they founded and own the company. The power is theirs.

>They made it clear they don't want employee input, criticism.

No, they just made clear they don't employees diverting the discussion to BS arguments such as that "a list of funny names" is in any way similar to endorsing genocide. If that's the kind of "ideas" people would bring in, then they prefered to keep it to work talk. Who wouldn't?

It's like many people today were pampered children throwing tantrums, and don't know the basics of logic, what's relevant and what's not, how to not slippery-slope things to death, how to deal with their "feelings", and so on.

Or, that would be the case, if it was legit rage, but a lot of it is fashion, hypocrisy and power-plays.

On top of that there are people jealous at DHH and co, who can't stand their success and advocacy, and will rejoice at the first chance to turn them into scapegoats.
if you want to know what its like ask your coworkers
It's pretty common in a situation like this to also carry a no disparagement clause along with the severance. That's also why you see a lot of "today is my last day at Basecamp" with no other "because I disagreed with the policies", etc.
Minimum wage was never intended to cover all the above, and it never has. Minimum wage is for teenagers working after school or weekends, or students with no (yet) marketable skills.
Average consumers don't care about codecs. Google runs a video streaming service. Paying codec royalties is a cost of doing business unfortunately.

If we could snap our fingers and make it go away, then great but holding consumers hostage on some impractical FOSS crusade is ridiculous.
I'm not arguing for low wages. But it's dishonest to conflate household income and individual salary.

More specifically, having a roommate or two or living with some family unit is fairly normal at that age. So other income needs to be accounted for to make that semantic argument stick.

Of course not everyone can have employed housemates. But even in those cases, it's not clear to me that banning 16 year olds from working those jobs helps all those 16 year olds. It seems likely that many of them end up worse off.
Part of the problem is the GPS resolution, which isn't accurate enough to know exactly which individual on a street has your stuff, or even which house it might be inside.

A long while back, on a early Saturday morning, I was awoken by my doorbell and accosted by an angry father of a crying daughter who had had their iPhone stolen by someone at a bar the previous night. Well, "Find My iPhone" showed the dot location of the phone was my house, so it must be me... turned out it was a neighbor two houses down - thanks Apple.

The best GPS resolution available to civilians is about 8 meters (26 feet) - and that's under the best, most ideal situation using the best GPS receiver and a large antenna... things a small cell phone in a pocket or bag doesn't have.

Cell tower triangulation isn't much better either... although the two used in unison can provide better resolution, but still far from good enough to pinpoint an exact individual, or even house (if the device is near an exterior wall, it may appear to be in the neighbor's house).

Police can't exactly go up and search people on the street because some Apple service says somebody within 20-40 feet or whatever might have the device - doubly so for searching a vehicle or house without a warrant.

So, while these devices are great for personal use - they probably cannot be used for real law enforcement purposes.
Yep. Jealous. Best of luck on the build!
A lot of people I know who stop being software engineers do it because they found something more profitable. (Management, executive track, founding their own company, etc.) Part of the reason is that salary progression after the first 10 years is generally flat for IC level. Yet, it continues almost indefinitely for other tracks or roles related to software.
Indeed. Imagine you’re paying for Basecamp and you need to file tickets and get support ASAP this week? What do you think of them when 1/3 of the employees are gone in a flash? Whatever you think of the debate’s impact on workplace culture, the capitalist point of view is that the founders have most certainly scuttled their company because they couldn’t manage their chosen workforce.
Employees as "resources" I've heard of, but employees as displacement or maybe even ballast? Damn! That's a new one by me.
I can see why that's not a nice feeling but honestly, if you realize this is pretty much an alternative lifestyle, then it should be completely fine when told: "hey there's a team dinner", to mention the fact that you are meat-free.

What's wrong: if they decide to not care about that.
What's right: they accommodate your dietary preferences.

Don't think you should put the burden on other people to consider these kinds of things beforehand.

It's great if they do, but it's not an issue if they don't.
>DHH has been very vocal in the last few months in public tirades against Apple, government lobbying, etc. While he has every right to his views, he's also the public face of Basecamp. So it comes across as a teeny bit hypocritical to issue a no-politics diktat on his workforce.

Being vocal about apple's business practices isn't necessarily political. It sounds more about business to me.
This (among other reasons) is why I quit a previous job.

The head of the department would often use politics as small talk leading up to meetings while waiting for everyone to show up.

There was literally no safe way to engage in the conversation- disagree, and you paint a target on your back today, agree and have a target painted on your back tomorrow when someone else is in charge (not to mention alienating people who might currently be on your team).
Julia does this. The only caveat is that if you write

function foo(a, xs)
function bar(b)
b * a
end
res = 0
for x in xs
res += bar(x)
end
res
end

what the author desires (the lifting of a to a compile time constant) won't happen automatically because compiling a new bar for every value of a is going to be a bad idea unless the loop over xs takes longer than compiling a function. Hence, we make people 'opt-in' to this by lifting a from a runtime variable to a type parameter (julia types are parametric and their parameters can contain values).

Hence, one way to do this would be to write

foo(a, xs) = foo(Val{a}, xs)

function foo(::Type{Val{a}}, xs) where {a}
function bar(b)
b * a
end
res = 0
for x in xs
res += bar(x)
end
res
end

Now, when you run foo(2, v) (where v is some iterable), this will turn into foo(Val{2}, v) which then gets specialized on the type parameter {2}, and then can compile a new bar function that's aware of the value of a.

Here's an example at the repl where we can inspect the generated code more easily:

julia> f(a) = f(Val{a})
f (generic function with 1 method)

julia> function f(::Type{Val{a}}) where {a}
function g(b)
b * a
end
end
f (generic function with 2 methods)

julia> g1 = f(1)
(::var"#g#4"{1}) (generic function with 1 method)

julia> @code_llvm debuginfo=:none g1(4)
define i64 @julia_g_442(i64 signext %0) {
top:
ret i64 %0
}

julia> g2 = f(2)
(::var"#g#4"{2}) (generic function with 1 method)

julia> @code_llvm debuginfo=:none g2(4)
define i64 @julia_g_444(i64 signext %0) {
top:
%1 = shl i64 %0, 1
ret i64 %1
}

Notice that g1 and g2 have different optimizations applied that depend on the different runtime values of a.
It might be possible that candidates are afraid that their solution is not clever enough for you, i.e they assume that you want something like a one line formula that only contains numbers and basic arithmetic operators.

The way I would solve something like that is by mentioning that it is a good approach to do time calculations with some library functions so that I won't have to deal with all the weird edge cases, then start with a loop over the months and later refine that to get rid of the loop, but it is very much possible that an interviewer might view this loop negatively.

There might also be some cultural aspects. While the Gregorian calendar is probably somehow used everywhere in the world, I think there might also be some other calendar formats being used in parallel.

If it is the first interview of the day, maybe the candidates are also just nervous? I remember when I had my on site interview at Google, the first warm up question had something to do with probability and could be easily solved with linearity of expectation. In the months before that interview I had dealt quite a lot with probability for my master thesis - but at that day I was quite nervous and I had not slept well, so I spend quite a lot of time on that question. I think I answered later questions better, although it was not enough in the end.

Do you usually see some correlation between the warm-up question and later performance?

I am not sure if that is necessary, but what might help is by starting to calculate the number of days from the start of the month and then adapt the question.
Yeah, strongly agree on automation/export of jobs.

I imagine the political class will of course make it illegal to automate them!
It's not that cut and dry; There's a difference between disagreeing about [issues I don't have strong opinions about] and [issues I do have strong opinions about].

Now scramble those weakly / strongly held opinions for every individual...
> The 6 months free money is hard for anyone entering a strong job market to pass up.

Money is a funny business. I'm convinced that anyone who's a skilled software engineer makes more money than they ever imagined after 5-6 years of working at a regular tech company. All the RSU upside, bonuses yada yada.

Folks who worked at Basecamp are top-notch programmers with close to a decade or more of experience. I'm certain that their motivation to work is driven in large part by craftsmanship, taste etc. Not to mention that social aspect of work -- building rapport with peers you consider intelligent/admirable; consistent record of work; crunch-time camaraderie, all of those things make up for their worth in 6 months of free money. 6 months isn't that long. Like someone else on this thread said, getting a new job, interviewing, building up trust in new team takes time.

I'm convinced that social policy at Basecamp, more than 6 months of money, influenced many people to leave. Particularly people with a lot of capital; cultural, intellectual or even financial. Personally, I'm glad. I want to live in a world where people take responsibility everywhere and not shy away from topics meant to drive morality/politics forward.
I don't think this is really about making fun of people's names, or holocaust references. It's about power.

The managers at basecamp were unhappy that their employees asserted power over them in the workplace, and decided to assert their own power in turn over what they view as their personal fiefdom and retract some of the freedoms they had so graciously granted their workers, because those ungrateful workers actually expected them to live up to their words about openness and owning mistakes. At least 1/3 of the staff, when confronted with their true relations with their management, then decided to quit.

I did find it amusing they announced this new policy of no personal/political stuff at work on his personal blog on hey.com, not on a company blog, and DHH continues to rant on twitter about a very political and public fight with Apple, one he chose to enter on behalf of the company.
I worked minimum wage jobs when I was 16, there were 14 year old kids working at the same jobs.
It wasn't like the kids who didn't work spent their after school time focusing on school. From what I recall, they mostly spent their time dropping by the fast food place to make fun of how stupid we looked in our fast food place uniforms.
Has it reduced demand in Europe?

In general. Americans regularly have deep-rooted fears about giving fellow humans a chance at a decent life. Are any of those fears substantiated?
Talk to other employees about it outside work and/or using personal accounts?

Or talk to management (this is not a moratorium on bringing up what employees see as issues with management, this is obviously about communications between employees which is tangentially work related at best.

It doesn't need to be a clean room, but a lot of people have been treating it like the equivalent of a polling place/church (more the former, I think most businesses and employees still know enough to avoid the latter unless they are explicit about it). I don't need to know your political leanings at work, I don't need to know your religious beliefs, and for the same reason I don't need to know your sexual orientation, preferences or kinks. You can make it obvious to me, and I don't care, but work is not the appropriate place for a discussion of any of those things unless the discussion is management or HR telling you that a) none of that matters for your job so you shouldn't care about other people's details with respect to that, b) to stop if you're making it an issue with people, and c) if you don't like that, take a hike. The only other case is when you're telling them someone else won't follow those rules.
Cool! I thought about using skip lists a bunch before I settled on this, trying to think of various ways to reduce complexity and memory usage. My best skip lists designs still had some pointer overhead that the implicit approach avoids, but it was pretty small and they seemed reasonably simple. I briefly tried thinking of what an implicit skip list would be, but then just ended up thinking about implicit search trees.
A tag defines an endpoint, not a group of related commits.

Yes, I could roll my own adhoc layer on top of git but it wouldn't have any tooling support.

"Well, you see you can infer the start of the rangE of commits for this feature by going back to the previoNOOOOOPE
"and now the exploited have been drained dry".

I do not think this is true in the absolute currently. I do think that the modern economies are imparting pressures that will make this more true over time.

The question every one asks is "What is the point?". The answer is increasingly, there is no point.

What about the answers previous generation might have had; send money home, improve life chances with an education, provide for a family, get a foot on the ladder, eat.

I think 20 years from now on one side looks like very low birth rates, mass homelessness and high suicide rates. For those that own assets now - a Parisian utopia surrounded by the former.

And for those that do continue to try, a room the size of a double bed containing an on-suite bathroom, kitchen diner, living-room and sleeping space - all in one! with no prospect of ownership.
I had a good time with Facebook groups before leaving. They were much more controllable than the algofeed
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26999909 has the right answer, IMO: you can have multiple equality comparators (and/or orderable comparators) and specify which to use in your collections like sets.

It's not clear that there should be a single notion of equality for any class/struct/whatever, but that there might need to be context-specific notions of equality.
I think "couldn't agree to stop bitching about politics on the company dime" is really minimizing the leadership vaccuum that caused this in the first place.

As someone who hires I'd have zero issue with a talented person who also felt passionately about not working with people who enable racism or toxic environments. That's part of how you build good companies.
God damn right. God bless Anne peterson for writing this, I could not have said it better. For once I have nothing to add. This world could be so much more than it is.
And I worked minimum wage and it allowed my poor household to make ends meet. And another minimum wage job helped me stay solvent enough to survive university.
Ha thanks for the insight!
> I'm guessing not the most popular opinion, let the downvotes commence.

Please don't break the site guidelines like this. Your comment would be just fine without it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Note that Tile already does this mesh network of crowdsourcing. The issue is that Apple pushes privacy so much that it's bound to be a bigger story when they mess up compared to others, as stated in the OP.
I believe the profit-sharing plan is new, announced as part of these "changes".

> In addition, we recently introduced a 10% profit sharing plan

If so, it's hard to say for sure how lucrative it would be either, especially if you aren't privy to the details of what they say they are offering.

But if so, nobody's gotten it already, you'd have to stay to get it.

https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5
The 2x2 Inflation Debate
Precisely, which is why the "don't buy a home more than 2x annual salary" doesn't seem like a good rule: there are too many variables. Where I am, total cost of ownership for a small two bedroom house is generally slightly less than the cost of 2 bedroom apartment that is also smaller, and comes with the benefit of building equity. A clear advantage (in my mind) if you're going to stay there for a few years because you'll build at least a little equity and average property values will increase at least a little bit. In my case I have a moderate sized home and pay about than 70% of the rent rates for anything nearby with the same # of bedrooms & about 500sqft smaller, even after property taxes, utilities, and average monthly maintenance costs.

On the other hand I have family that live in an area where apartment rents are much cheaper than the monthly TCO for buying, and even if you can afford to buy renting makes more sense (unless you need 3-4 bedrooms for a family) because rents are so much cheaper & it is better to put the difference between monthly costs into an index fund and build equity that way.
You could have made this same point without being antagonistic about it. The parent's comment was valid and not in disagreement with yours