skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You underestimate the power of a false balance, and in a way, Elon Musk. When searching about "whistleblowing tesla" (or "whistle blowing tesla"!) there should be zero stories about the Tesla whistle. You turn facts that are 100% negative (Tesla has a big whistleblowing problem) into something that's 30% positive (or neutral). That's a PR win on a massive, almost unheard of scale. Just imagine the VW CEO doing a stunt like this to soften Dieselgate ...
WhatsApp is end to end encrypted, but its owned by Facebook who can’t be trusted so it does not preserve privacy at all.
Qualcomm doesn't fear custom chips – in a weird way its modems matter more
Yeah if they brought them in and someone (depending on how many it could be inevitable) had COVID... just to fire them.

I'm not sure I see that as being better.
Rising interest rates + rising house prices = fewer mortgage applications
So, we have a dumb CEO who couldn’t manage his employees to the extent they were idle most of the time. How is his salary not “stealing from customers”?
While barbecuing last summer one afternoon I fell down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole and for a few days afterwards I was an expert on the chemistry, physics, history and economics of charcoal.

Sadly now all I've retained are a few dirty smudges.
No, I am being specific here. I am referring to rules regarding market manipulation in lit order books of publicly traded securities and derivatives. Those rules are stupid.

I don’t think all rules are stupid, just these particular rules.

The reason I think the rules are stupid is that they don’t prevent fraud, they just prevent behaviour which is considered pretty legitimate in every other marketplace. Like, a spoofed ask price isn’t fraud - you can actually buy the price, and you will be filled.

There is no chance order spoofing will cause your life savings to disappear in a black hole. I think regulation to ensure that remains the case (ie around custody) is very important.
Retrofitting the execution environment to your abstractions is typically not a good idea.
Filesystem IO on windows is noticeably slower than on Linux (of course fixing Windows would also solve that, but they've had quite a while for that...)
NixOS and the changing face of Linux operating systems
Maybe not, but more often than not you really have an array of objects, and that's where JSON helps.
Good outcome, but having to be on the front page of HN doesn't scale.
No, that still seems inflated. That's like counting installs of Word or Excel by counting the number of documents that exist.
I would invest into it, as I guess their profitability will increase further as they won't even need to hire writers in the future, thanks to GPT-3.
To anybody affected by this layoff, my company Placement.com created a Better.com Alumni Job Board [0] to help smooth the transition. We've seen over and over how much easier it is to get a job at a company where:

1. You have a connection (or can build one easily)

2. The company recognizes the companies you previously worked for

Targeting companies that ex-colleagues work at is a powerful strategy! So we made this board for everybody affected. Also, if you are interested in talking to a career coach, I'm happy to give a free intro session to everybody affected here. Just email me sean@.

The lack of empathy shown in this situation is intense and I hope y'all know that there are amazing companies that will value you more waiting with open arms!

[0] https://www.placement.com/boards/bettercom-alumni-companies
> 1: stealing wages

why is Better.com using that language? all that workers can do is sell their labor time, while the property-owners they work for do not (since they earn rents from ownership). in this case, the workers create and develop some intellectual property (software), yet do not own the fruits of their own labor and are instead paid a wage. in other words: workers work on things that are not democratically held in common ownership (even actively made artificially scarce as an intellectual property).

my point is: we could argue the workers are rightfully taking back more than what they are paid under our current economic system, since the property-owners take too much to begin with; they steal — to use your word — by not sharing the (intellectual) property, the source of wealth.

edit: i've edited to clarify that I am responding to the definition of the word stealing used by Better.com. as Kye/OP pointed out below, this is not Kye's personal definition for the word stealing and it was terminology they copied verbatim from this current context (used by one of the parties involved).
A fine example of Betteridge's Law [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines?...
What was he supposed to do? Have 900 people come in to the office in-person? Send individual emails?
> The commercial tools are changing out of necessity. If they stop changing they die.

Change by itself is neither good nor bad. But change for the sake of change is rarely good.

Evernote is a classic example for me. Sometime around 2014, it was perfect for me. The Windows application was small, fast, and easy to use. The web clipper solved a real problem for me and the mobile applications were good enough. I was on the $35 / year plan (and still am) which felt like a decent value. I loved hearing Phil Libin talk about building a company that will be around in 100 years. It made me believe they would be conservative and value stability and it was exactly what I wanted to hear.

Today I'm working out how to move everything from Evernote to either Apple Notes or Obsidian. Evernote's Windows client got fat and slow and feels terrible to use. It's a bummer for me because I used to love the product.
If 4 vulns in 10 years for 1 package is acceptable, you are accepting that your OS will constantly have bugs. Sure there are other security problems than memory safety, but of the exploitable bugs, buffer overflows of some sort account for a majority.
It should probably be handled one by one via Zoom with the persons immediate manager and a representative from HR.
Hey HN,

I made this free browser extension that modernizes the Wikipedia design. I started making this for myself just because I wanted more of a "reader mode" like experience (narrower column, nicer fonts, dark mode etc). Then I got a bit carried away and implemented everything I could think of for a modern redesign of Wikipedia. Hope you like it!
Should’ve taken notes from Carta’s CEO when they did a RIF. Took ownership, and expressed both remorse and gratitude for the folks let go, instead of making it about themselves like a narcissist.
Tom Leykis, who was basically the Howard Stern of LA in the late 90s/2000s, gave a good interpretation of McLuhan. He saw (in his case) talk radio's typical audience as a father who's outside on a ladder cleaning his gutters listening to a radio that's face down in the lawn so he only hears every 4th or so word. Taking that into account, he modeled his cadence and his entire radio show (and later his call-in podcast show) around that kind of premise.
You’re utterly confused. Non-notarized paper signatures or apple preview signatures are obviously a questionable practice.

They’re still legally binding, but not binding evidence. If there’s a dispute regarding the authenticity of the signature, that’ll require unnecessary litigation that would have been avoided by using a notary or an accepted cryptographic signature. (Or simply a video recording of both parties agreeing to the contract, this is really flexible)

Let me quote your original comment:

> I just had this conversation with my lawyer, in the Netherlands, and probably most or Europe, signing digitally is not legally binding. I’m sure this will be different for different jurisdictions.

This is completely wrong, you are 100% bound by a contract you signed with Preview.app. Does that mean it’s a good practice? No.

> it’s not a good practice and there’s no guarantee it will be accepted on its own.

See, this is completely different from your original claim. I’m not sure why you are continuing with this bullshit, I think we both know that your original comment was incorrect.
I like this management style, quick and dirty! No meddling or prodding. The people know where they stand and not waste time in limbo.
I just experienced the same thing! It was so frustrating to see that no one was looking over the documents. Finally I took a day off and sat on the phone with them all day to figure it out. It was a worse process that dealing with an actual mortgage broker.
I'm only now noticing you've replied to almost everything I've said, and quite negatively, so I think some apology is in order as it seems I've maybe touched a nerve I was not aware of. I want to be the bigger person and wholeheartedly apologize to my esteemed colleague.

I'm sorry.

Original comment [1] made me aware that I've inspired some emotions in you about this particular topic, which was not my intent, bless your heart. Take care, have a great day, and hopefully we can both enjoy our own cake respectively.

[1] - laumars 1 minute ago | unvote | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: No Easter Eggs in Curl

> Your expectations of someone's free cake are too high, or you didn't understand the analogy

You’re conflating disagreement with misunderstanding.

Also calling your bullshit cake story an “analogy” is giving it far too much credit.

> I'll leave you with a bit of wisdom my father once gave me as I made a similar complaint about a free donut: "You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friend's nose."

That’s both crass and irrelevant.
- 20/20/20 rule: every 20 minutes, take a 20 second break from the screen and focus on something 20 feet away

- Bias lighting behind the monitor

- Blue light and anti-glare glasses while working

- Little to no computer on the weekend

- Limit phone use by removing addictive apps

Not a cure but it helps a lot.
As a Linux user for now 20 years, I think the author is under some kind of delusion that windows doesn't provide enough value to exist on its own.

I thus assume the autor must be very young, and has little experience with the reality of the corporate world, which loves:

- compatibility

- inertia

- deployment automation

- technical support

- strong legal support (compliance, contracts, DOD approval...)

- social proof (reputation, certification, etc)

- have a big player that can be held responsible

- predictability

Apple is not interested in it, Red Hat is not big enough, Google has desmontrated its incapability to do it, and so on. But MS provides all that, and better than any Unix shop in town.

It would be economically ridiculous to turn Windows into Linux and lose all that stuff.

Merging the two could happen if they manage to keep all their pieces of the pie, and I assume WSL is a first step in that direction.

Or maybe it's the embrace stage, I don't know.
As someone considering taking a gap year, can you expand upon what you did in your gap year, and what made it a special experience?
If even half of those engineers are overseas, which I'd say it's highly likely (but I would like to know), it's even possible the average per year is lower than that.

Working on an operating system (or generally working on anything low-levelish) is not as enticing as many people seem to think it is.
Glad I got a great rate before they're going under.
Since I've written about Bitgrid in public for a decade, I've got no IP to protect, I just want to see the thing actually implemented at some point before I die. Any helpful hints would be greatly appreciated.
That DB better inherit those test cases however, those are incredible assets
Shitty job for temporary. Nobody wants to stay forever.
Rest of the employees know now what to do
I was wondering that too. I think ideally you would have a 1-1 video chat with someone. But at such a big, 900 employee, layoff, maybe that wasn't easy to do.

I think the CEOs affect on the call made it worse. It was very strange to hear him say stuff like "last time I had to do this, I cried. I hope to be stronger this time." It felt like his focus when laying off 900 people was too much on how it made him personally feel uncomfortable.
My anecdotal evidence says yes. My wife was confused on how to "install an app" for something that wasn't in the Mac app store. She had been used to the iPhone/iPad model for so long that she had forgotten how it was on her Windows PC 10 years ago: if not in app store -> google company/go to company website, download the installer, install program.

I feel like general computer skills have decayed quite a bit in the general public, especially with people who don't work with computers 8 hours/day. See this recent article: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc... The advent of the smartphone/tablet overtaking PC use for general/casual use, e.g. emails, photos, social media, online banking/billpay has really reduced the general public's skill level with desktop operating systems. Probably similar overlap with the subset of people who always dumped every file to the desktop directory instead of organizing files in specific directories.
$30M Bezos Earth Fund for National Fish and Wildlife Foundation
Yeah, I did work at one tiny startup previously and the CEO there also happily obliged
That's exactly what's being counted. A database is a SQLite document.
Uhhh……

What?

Pretty sure the ratings were from the NHTSA

Are you saying Elon controls the NHTSA?
Because eventually the costs might offset the benefits. I'm not holding my breath -- they're going to milk Windows until the bitter end, that's for sure.

But never is a long time, even more so in a world where Windows on the server is such a joke not even MS believes in it and consumer products are tablets and smartphones, not desktops and laptops.
In addition to that, I find it respectable that the CEO made the announcement himself directly to those concerned, although the way he communicated it might not have been that great.

He could have delegated to the direct managers of those concerned and HR.
Call them individually. It's not the fact it was done by zoom that's surprising/unusual, it's the fact it was done en masse.
Exactly this. Autopilot was nowhere road ready when it launched. There have been multiple accidents that a normal person would've easily avoided. Plus the fact you are not playing with your own safety but that of others as well, be it drivers or pedestrians.

You can give so many warning to people to not rely on Autopilot and keep their hands on wheel. Well, people will be people.. You cannot hide your responsibility behind user instructions and warning messages IMHO.
It looks like they were removed several years ago.

> Update 12-04-2017: This feature was removed in PHP 5.5.
What “broad and sustained” opposition? You’re off in fantasy land. And again, the fact that these changes long predate the political issues you’re talking about suggests your theory is wrong.
But think of all the money saved by the company! /s
How to Run a Criminal Network in a Pandemic
I've heard of all of those - mostly through my friends.

However, as to your larger point - you're right, most people don't know about these.

I would argue that those who want to escape Google's grasp should be willing to encourage person-to-person sharing as an alternative to the recommendation algorithm. Sure, 99.99% of the population isn't browsing PeerTube, but I bet you that most of them would be willing to watch a video hosted there if it was suggested to them by their friends.

This might be a good idea in general. Think of how much better ecosystems we would have if people relied on their friends to make personalized recommendations to content on any platform, as opposed to engagement-optimizing automated algorithms that exclusively recommend content on a single platform.
Sounds like a tricky situation with respect to the visa. In my experience, it is pretty common for universities to operate in this way.

The default position from legal teams ( uni or corporate) will always be to own everything.
I don't really get the outrage here. It's absolutely terrible for the employees, as all layoffs are.
Maybe they could've just sent an email.

Even SpaceX did a mass layoff couple of years ago.
Someone eventually has to build the hardware and that's the really expensive part. Arm has the upper hand here as they deliver more than just an ISA, they can sell you a whole silicon and software stack including engineering expertise to help get your thing to market. Plus they control the ecosystem so you're not going to run into odd edge cases (e.g. Loongson which is sorta MIPS). Not saying that companies like SiFive are not competent but they are just one player in what will become a very big game.
Buzzfeed reminds me of fast food, where there’s a few specials of options for show like “Look we have a salad! Look healthy!” but 98% of everything else produced is crap made as cheap as possible to sell it at volume.

Buzzfeed’s money maker is “fast-news, volume-articles”, and I expect investors to double down on that. They are not going to be ok with producing 6 high quality articles a month that take a ton of time to produce with a short window of monetizing when they could just pump out 1000 crappy articles a month and use those as hooks to siphon ad revenue from.
Firefox appears to utilize a custom clang toolchain to enable this without documenting how to make such toolchain (wasi sysroot). And expects you to just download the precompiled version from their servers.

Fedora and Fennec F-Droid have since disabled this feature.

https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/firefox/c/4cb1381d80a94c9...

https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild/-/commit/12cdb51bb045c3...
How does this affect process isolation? If only some components can be sandboxed at this fine grained level, aren't we still subject to process isolation to sandbox everything else? It would seem like one still has to run fission.autostart true to isolate the components that cannot be compiled in this way, therefore not gaining the benefit of less overhead as stated in the article.
IMO the issue is that this is right after a funding round.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/30/better-com-gets-750m-cash-...
Don't really understand the outrage over this video. Sure, he could have been more eloquent and talked a bit less about how it affected him. Though, nothing he said or did in the video is worthy of this attention in my opinion.

Do people expect them to bring everyone in and fire them in-person? Even if it wasn't a pandemic, why would I want my time wasted like that? Just tell me I'm fired and email me any info about severance, insurance, etc.

It's also funny that this person finds it surprising given the company and the org within that company they were working. Refi loans are not a stable market.
You’re basically describing Scaled Agile. They have big planning meetings every 8-12 weeks (called PI Planning) where devs make a plan based on priorities, work out dependencies and get agreement with the business side of the house about the plan itself.

In my opinion, it’s the ideal balance of concerns.
I was subject to a mass layoff in spring 2020. They did individual vid calls with all affected individuals. It was only a 10m call, with two people from a couple levels higher in the org than me, and an HR rep, but I appreciate that they took that time.
Ask HN: Rate My Pitch?
No, because once you let the first person know on their 1:1 meeting there will be miscommunication / rumours, and everybody is going to be somewhat aware.
However some people are going to have 1st party information, and others have heard of the rumours,
and those people will feel offended to not have been made aware like everyone else.
The Zoom call part isn't really the issue, although individual Zoom meetings would have been better.

> In another email obtained by Forbes last year, Garg wrote:

> > ‘You are TOO DAMN SLOW. You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS and…DUMB DOLPHINS get caught in nets and eaten by sharks. SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.”
Don’t forget to count all the cruise missiles, too!
Which would take days while rumour flies and chaos reigns.
Most people don't have suggestions, they just have complaints. If you've never been in the position as a business leader where you are forced to lay off employees then it can seem capricious.
I don’t want to micro-diagnose his intro, but I think about half of his intro was needed. I don’t need to hear about how this is the second time or how hard it was last time, but I do think a few sentences of context serves as a “hey, pay attention!” intro to the news.

It needs to never be about the manager (CEO in this case) doing the termination, but a few sentences of intro is standard and appropriate I think.
Giving away this $10k Gucci Xbox to a follower
The problem with this rationale is that it's how you end up with stuff like this:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man...

Easter eggs can get invoked in unintuitive ways and as a result can cause serious issues. Sure you can make easter eggs that are "safe" but the mental overhead to doing so just is absolutely not worth it for anything that could potentially end up in a security critical or automated path.

It's easier to just take a hard line stance and say "I don't want my projects to ever run the risk of losing someone millions of dollars or worse get somebody injured/killed because we decided to add an unnecessary joke".
Dolphins are notoriously imprudent mortgage lenders though
Stripe acquires app marketplace OpenChannel
> The way management handled this looks horrible but if there’s any truth to these employees essentially stealing wages from their employer then they’re lucky they’re just being fired and not being prosecuted.

Not excusing laziness/fraud, but it’s an open secret that billable hours from consultancies of all ilks are wildly overstated.
With the number of bullshit meetings companies have, it wouldn't be too hard for each direct manager (+ HR rep) to inform employees individually instead of in a mass-firing video.
It is also heavily automated. I used to work for a company that sold a document management package that was integrated with a variety of high speed scanners with OCR and for a time almost all of the new business was with US banks wanting to speed up the processing of mortgage documents.

After talking with one of the customers we were all very sure that the US mortgage business was in trouble. Not 'crashing and destroying the economy' bad but on unstable ground.
Garg is documented in this article as abusive. This is a fact. Now given that he has a track record of abusive behavior, I wouldn’t believe anything negative he’d say about the layed off employees.

The CEO is in charge. He mishandled scaling the company, and so the blame for the failures of the company fall to him. Even if there was massive fraud inside the company, that’s still the CEO’s fault for letting it get so bad. Abusive failures always blame everyone else.

If I want to charitable, maybe he thinks by trashing a bunch of people that lost their jobs, will stem the loss of morale by the remaining employees.

Either way, it’s gross.
Do it the way AirBnB (or most other companies) did it: announce that large scale layoffs will be happening due to X and Y reasons, and that the individuals losing their jobs will be contacted over the next week. Then someone phones/zooms them individually and answers questions and lets them know right away what'll happen.

This isn't about Covid, this is about the CEO making this easier on himself. I'm guessing he expected that if the video leaked, he would look sympathetic because he did it personally and talked about how hard it was for him.
Off topic but this might be the first time I've seen someone use the noun affect correctly.
You bring up a valid point, though I don't know that even that much is necessary. The internet will find it soon enough and document it for us. But, hey, takes ten minutes to write down the flag and what it does, right? Are we still talking about an Easter egg at that point, though? :-)