skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Each person being laid off deserves a private meeting with their manager where they are told this. The fact that they hired 900 people they now no longer need is a failing of the CEO by itself. If they work remotely, it can be a zoom meeting.

Being told in a meeting with 900 people by someone you don't know is rude and tells me that anyone in leadership in this company are people I would not like to work for. The fact that he was more concerned about his feelings than the feelings of the 900 is even more evidence that this person has absolutely no empathy and managing people is the wrong job for them.
I mostly come across MySQL for simple web applications that need to store some data. For that it works fine and is cheaper than MSSQL for instance. Not really the prime use case for Postgres.
So did the managers for those people get fired first?
I’m saying it’s not really deceptive or fraudulent.

Is it fraudulent that you offer your house for sale, but when you get a few buyers willing to pay the asking price, you move the price up?

Not really. But that is WAY more manipulative than anything that is even POSSIBLE in the public markets, let alone what’s allowed. (The FX markets are an exception where this can happen on certain platforms).

I’m saying we tolerate these behaviours in every other market because they are not really fraud. It’s not lying to say you are bid and then cancel it later, so long as you honor any trades you do get.
I ask on the community forums or on the Discords. These websites have no direct feedback mechanism.

The feedback I get is like "That's a confusing paragraph", or "That's a bad strategy. You should be writing about X instead".

No one actually cares about the auto-playing videos, unless they're not working. (On page X on Safari, that video doesn't seem to be working was one complaint I got... and then I had to transcode my MP4 settings to get it working there).
It's because you don't care if you're actually right. The proposals you're presenting are obviously not solved nor does Bitcoin solve them. If you have a problem paying 5% transaction fees than why would use Bitcoin (not to mention every transaction is subject to tax which gov'ts haven't been aggressive at collecting now, but can choose to collect it retroactively at any point having a public ledger to reference whenever they need it).
Ask HN: Advice to make platform release funds it took away without proper reason
A seller had more than $20,000 taken away by a platform without proper reason and needs help for the funds to be released.

The funds have already been taken away for 1 year and the posted amount does not account for inflation yet.

Hope this will help early stage entrepreneurs like that seller.
Indeed. I don't think the company should be slammed for this but his delivery was really poor here.
They already run Linux machines in Azure because that's what we want, right? I could see them making a specific distro with custom features.
I think the virality of it comes from this guy's general tone, e.g. a prior email in which he wrote:

> You are a bunch of DUMB DOLPHINS...SO STOP IT. STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.

but I agree that there's nothing obviously good about being fired in person. I prefer my difficult conversations to be as impersonal and private as possible. I remember being flabbergasted when a firm once scheduled a call with me to tell me about the outcome of my interviews -- the outcome was that I did not get the job! -- and wondering why it couldn't have just been an email. Ditto with a part-time job for which, on my final day, I was called into the office for a morning meeting in which I was let go; this which happened to take on 03/02/2020 in midtown Manhattan.
Pots of Gold
I used to have this long running thing I would tell people - that eventually MS will rewrite Windows to run on-top of Linux.

I actually have completely changed my mind about it though. I don't think it will ever happen. Younger people see perfection as everything being similar. Older people appreciate the differences. I'm getting older.
Iran had lost 41-9 but their goalkeeper Fatemeh Khalili Behfar was named MVP
Anecdotally, I have a significant cold boot time speed-up on an Intel Core 2 Duo HP Compaq Elite 8000 desktop system booting with a PCIe SSD. Since forcing Win 11 to upgrade it from Win 10, it will get me to the desktop less 60 seconds.
I imagine 900 1-on-1s could not be done quickly and word would spread very fast that firings were ramping up around the company. This would cause a whole lot of stress for those not being fired, just waiting for a call.

Given the alternatives, the 900-wide bandaid-ripping-off method seems best.
》organization would provide four weeks of severance and one month of full benefits, as well as other coverage as part of a package.

I find this sort of honest and refreshing. My goverment fired people without any severance or unemployment benefits, with way more BS!
Everyone keeps bringing up the $750MM that the company raised and juxtaposing that news with the layoffs. But I don't think people get that the money probably came with many strings including reducing costs (read people) as well as the CEO getting a new boss in the form of an additional board seat.

Regarding telling 900 employees they were fired over a zoom call...well you can't buy class I guess.
I think it has to do with too many products being companies.

If your SaaS company is one product, then you HAVE to keep developing, and tweaking, and optimizing.

If you claim you're "done" you have to downsize to a maintenance skeleton crew.

So instead we feature bloat and everyone has to have this huge dashboard.

If instead we had something like Johnson and Johnson for software this could be avoided. They'd just make thousands of Saas products that do a single thing extremely well
>why did Garg wait til the mortgage market started cooling off to fire them

When the tide goes out, you find out who is swimming naked
for #1 you can take it step by step. get your own domain, name@domain.com for $10 a year. hook that address up to gmail so you can send as name@domain.com. then get comfortable with that, set it as your default reply from, tell friends, etc. then 6 months later, a year later or whenever youre comfortable you can move off gmail. only send from name@domain, and have gmail forward all your emails to that account. no one you contact will see anything different. then if you ever need to again switch in the future you're free to do so, and you're always name@domain.com.
The pays says: "Billions and billions of copies of SQLite exist in the wild". Which seems reasonable and is counting the number of installs as you preferred.

Later on the page says "it is seems likely that there are over one trillion (1e12) SQLite databases in active use" which is the quoted title and seems like a reasonable claim and is counting "documents" not installs.

I don't think "documents" is an uninteresting statistic. It is just a different one.
China has no military interests in Europe at all. Russia could have, but has no economy to pull this off, and won’t have in foreseeable future.
Yes this was how the original contracts (and amendments) were in my original anecdotes. The purview over my non-tech projects was actually more disturbing to me than the tech projects. Creativity is a vital part of my life; I cannot be alive when it has a pall cast over it 24/7.
Indeed. And what's worse they all appear to have the Space X channel name. They look legit the first time you see them unless you treat youtube the same way you do when reading an email, ie looking for phish. And what's worse is that those channels are recommended by the youtube algorithm!!!
The insult at the end was the most telling. It was all from his point of view: “YOU ARE EMBARRASSING ME.” That’s not building a team, so no wonder people were not motivated to get their jobs done.
Wait, they only started reviewong employee data ONE MONTH ago?? Thats some serious management incompetence.

What's with this weaselly language, too... "At least 250 employees" also means "No more than 250 employees". If it was more, they would have just said the bigger number to prove their point.

Which means the other 650 employees they fired did not have productivity problems, and they're just trying to blame their workers to avoid admitting to management problems.
What makes Postgres unfit for that use? It doesn't have large licensing fees like SQL Server, and Postgres (just like MySQL) can run on a single node and handle small amounts of data just fine.
You blew right past "It’s self-reinforcing and resilient to small changes". The two underlying problems here are zoning policy and macroeconomic policy (ZIRP), both only changeable through politics. Directly helping other individuals doesn't stop the overall trickle-up economy from doing its thing of skimming wealth upwards. Yes, you personally can alleviate some other individuals' suffering by not turning the screws as hard, and I agree that you should where you can. But it's foolish to think that the systematic problem could be solved by everyone just choosing to go against the gradient.

Also I presume when you say "negative cash flow" you are leaving out the bit about your equity increasing due to mortgage payments and bubble inflation. So you can get off your performative high horse as well - you aren't describing a charity project, but rather an illiquid savings account.
There is a pretty good movie about a consultant whose is hired by companies to fire people. Including a scene where an employee is fired over a Zoom like thing, but the consultant is actually in the adjacent room (they are testing this system).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_in_the_Air_(2009_film)

Remote fire scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIexe6aa14w
When this happened to me, we knew ahead of time in general, and waited for individual meetings, and it all worked out. As it is, there's still miscommunication and rumours while all the now-locked-out people meet with HR and return computers and such.
> Also, even though they may have had read access, not many knew it existed. But it wasn't super hard to find (I stumbled across it basically).

We didn't have read access until Nick Sharp and his team took over GitHub permissions and gave everyone access. Wonderful security work.

> Oh and then there the whole metrics collection debacle, where the controller basically phoned home about the topology of every network that it managed. Even if you opted out. Opting out just meant they fuzzed your ID so any given record couldn't be linked back to PII. Which may or may not be legal, IANAL.

Nick Sharp was at the core of this too! He built the 'trace' system to collect all of these metrics and had all of these ideas about how to secretly collect the data in ways that would be hard for people to detect.

He pretended to be a principled person who stood for security and privacy, but whenever he saw an opportunity for political gain he abandoned all principles. He was the only person I knew at the company who was enthusiastic about collecting all of that data.
Not really stealing though, is it?

If the work wasn't there, or they found a way to 'game' the system, then that is on management. I'm sure all of us goof off at some point during the day/week - it just seems that these people were able to do it a LOT.

But yea, if you aren't doing the work assigned to you, then you can't expect to keep being paid - but stealing it is not.
I'd ask "why" in the other direction. The benefit MS derives from Windows at this point is $0 per year. What still has a ton of value in 2021 is Windows compatibility, and they don't need the distraction of maintaining a full OS for that. Maybe it's easier to maintain compatibility by maintaining their own OS. There's clearly a benefit to giving it up though.
If an employee is selling their time to answer customer inquiries and is not, in fact, answering available customer inquiries, what else would you call it?
This is such a stereotype of a kind of over-analytical type that it's hilarious. There are so many poor assumptions and overcaution.

"If we put an easter egg in, it would be impossible to sneak in" - It isn't about being completely undetected for the people looking at source code, it's for the people who want to see a funny print output.

"If we put an easter egg in, more people will want to put more in, or make the original more elaborate" - complete speculation, handled if true by the word "no".

"I bet you all think me writing this means I'm hiding something" - projecting much?

"If we would allow some features to get added like that, where would we draw the line? What other functionality and code do we merge into curl without properly disclosing and documenting it?" - Uh, the line is the definition you put in the top of the article: "An unexpected or undocumented feature in a piece of computer software, included as a joke or a bonus." This excludes malicious or harmful software.

"We frequently ship bugs and features that go wrong." Yeah, it seems you have more important work to do if that statement is accepted as a given. And when the heck does a bug look like an easter egg?
HN is basically a perpetual ner-snipe to me, yet I keep coming back year after year. Let-downs aren't sufficient to break the habit of coming somewhere.
Finding myself in a similar situation with last years fires, I have had great luck with the WINIX air filters sold at costco. I bought 2 on sale for $100/ea. They are 5 staged with HEPA and charcoal filters, have a built-in air quality monitor of unknown quality (I should open one up one of these days), and they have an ok app that allows you to check air quality and adjust their settings. Each unit includes 2 years of filters, and they look to be about $30/year/unit to replace after that.
Surely trying to ping the HAM portion of 44/8 from the Internet is an inherently flawed concept?

Part of the provisions for use (e.g. in the UK) was that only HAM traffic (not third party) can be carried over the airways. So if it was possible to ping / traceroute the 44/8 net from the Internet, the echo requests would be third party traffic.

Hence why most of the radio use has been completely separated from the Internet use of this block, essentially disconnected VRFs. Some countries may allow for minor volumes of third party traffic, and rules may have been related since I was active on packet radio.

So the reservation of the 44 net always struck me as more a case of enabling a multi-homed HAM operated machine to be connected to both the Internet and the radio nets, and picking which to connect to based upon that simple address block, but it should not be forwarding traffic between the two. One can tunnel radio traffic through the Internet, but not vice-versa.
Wow this guy comes off as a jerk that I would not want to work for.

"Last time I did this I cried. This time I hope to be stronger".

This is not about you - the CEO who has taken no direct responsibility except for empty words.

The first half of this video seems like "I know you are losing your job and that's a sacrifice I have to make."
Just fyi, in Romania the wage is a worker’s right, so they can’t ask their money back no matter what.
This is a management failure through and through. Whoever is running customer success and support is at least more responsible for that kind of a situation if the accusations about productivity are true.

Its simply not possible for people to hide with that level of systematic underperformance if they have the tools to measure it and the goals are clear and transparent. If you take span of control into account, this means at least 3-4 layers of management werent monitoring performance. At all.
> ... I am very excited to see this sort of "codification" work become a legitimate academic enterprise. ... I am a big fan or the sort of thinking ... that we need fewer "write an move on" works (e.g. academic papers), and more long-term living documents (e.g. wikis, but not just).

You might find the Metamath databases to be very interesting (full disclosure: I participate). In particular, the "Metamath Proof Explorer" (MPE) database uses conventional classical logic + ZFC and proves all sorts of things. It is constantly updated as a collection, and every change is verified by multiple independently-implemented verifiers:
http://us.metamath.org/mpeuni/mmset.html

Metamath doesn't embed any particular logic or other axioms, so you can choose the axioms you wish. There are other Metamath databases, as shown here at http://us.metamath.org/index.html , such as the Intuitionistic Logic Explorer (it uses intuitionistic logic instead of classical logic) and the New Foundations Explorer (it constructs mathematics from scratch starting from Quine's NF set theory axioms).

Most people have decided to not follow Russell's Typed Set Theory, as his hierarchy of types seems complex to many. If you want to use a more Russell-type system, I think Quine's NF set theory is an elegant simplification of it. You can see more of its Metamath representation here: http://us.metamath.org/nfeuni/mmnf.html
> However, you cannot do virtual 8086 mode without switching back to 32-bit mode, so you cannot run real mode MS-DOS programs.

You can switch to 32-bit mode, then enter vm86, and then switch back to long mode once you are done. There was a kernel module flying around that would do this and make syscalls such as vm86plus work in amd64 Linux.

But yes, basically, it's a political more than technical choice to drop support for 16-bit programs on 64-bit Windows; same for >4GiB RAM support in 32-bit Windows.
And they had to hear the CEO say he cried the first time he did this, without knowing what it is about. Why is he talking about his feelings? Perhaps his assistants were fired too so there weren't anyone to check his speech? Crazy.
No personal experience other than a slightly different experience running production services (involving money!) on another box without ECC DRAM (to save money!) and experiencing random permission flags flips and actual balance/amount flips. Only a small handful over many years, but it does happen, and when it matters, it REALLY matters.

My advice is to always use ECC DRAM in production unless you're serving cat photos, porn, social media posts, or other societally useless applications. For anything that actually matters, please use ECC.
That's... Exactly what a SQLite database is - a file. This thread isn't about the number of unique devices that potentially use SQLite
This is how it happens normally in non-covid world. There is no reason you should fire everyone publicly by the CEO, likely someone the employee never interacts with. The person also needs to know the next steps, for instance if they'll get paid of for vacation days, how to sign up for Cobra (if in the US), etc. You can cut off access prior to notice. Ideally they would all be done within a short period.

I've been around when a firm did a mass layoff. It's unpleasant and of course there are rumors and of course people are offended, but this is the correct way to handle it.
The Dutch East India company had their own army. Does Amazon?
Indeed.

Just to be clear, the internal complaint preceding the firing is apparently documented, and I did not mean to imply any particular motive. On the contrary: I found the that an otherwise unconnected third party, Walmart no less, would sue over this very supportive of the claim.
I would also like to point out that there is no actual proof that there was the type of employee shenanigans he talks about.

He also says

"The 43-year-old CEO said that the “market has changed” and that the company had to lose weight in order to remain agile enough to adapt to the evolving housing market, which appears to be cooling after a pandemic-boosted boom."

So maybe the 'people stealing time' comment is just an excuse so he doesn't feel bad about cutting so many people?
They also have a habit of blowing all their money on instant lottery tickets.
Colorgorical is neat (http://vrl.cs.brown.edu/color). It combines previous work on judging categorical color palettes based on discriminability/aesthetics/etc and presets a generator to find new palettes with various constraints.
> 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.

Do you think the company just happened to be extremely unlucky and only hired dishonest employees?

If your company is at a stage where your support employees are only working 2 hours a day, and where a customer cannot get support for what they need in less that 10 days, it's an issue with the management and the organisation, unable to provide motivation to their employees, or the condition they need to work effectively, it's not bad luck with hiring.

And thinking that just firing those people is going to solve the issue is burying their head in the sand. Maybe the ones that didn't get fired will work a bit harder in the short term, driven by fear, but on the long term it can only get ever more demoralizing.
People talk about creating an appeals process like it's something Google could just snap their fingers and do, like the commenter in this thread who suggested they should just "hire 100000 moderators". The problem is, scaling a human system like this is extremely difficult and human appeals are notoriously weak against social engineering attacks. It's far from clear that a manual review process capable of handling billions of users and reliably producing the correct outcome is even possible at any kind of plausible cost.

Think about how much a court case in the US costs - orders of magnitude more than a company could possibly afford to spend on moderation. Does everybody really think it's possible to design a process that's orders of magnitude cheaper without also being orders of magnitude less accurate?
> 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’ve only replied to my thread and one other post. Hardly everywhere. And you’ve not hit a nerve nor am I being unduly negative. This is a discourse and in conversations it’s not unusual for people to take opposing stances.

What I do dislike is people taking conversations to a meta level and arguing about the argument rather than discussing the topic directly. I’m obviously happy to agree to disagree if an impasse has been reached but please don’t deflect the discussion with assumptions about one’s emotional well being
I have only ever heard that a small minority of people get headaches from PWM. Nonetheless, you should probably test one for a bit of time and if you are okay, it should not cause any trouble for you (the optical mechanisms of our eyes are not really affected by these small fluctuations, it is at most happens on a neural level)
Traditional waterfall model doesn't allow for iteration between the main steps, and this was followed historically, and caused absolutely massive delays and cost overruns in projects through the 70s, 80, and 90s. Popping iteration onto Waterfall model and still calling it Waterfall model is being disingenuous.
The company I used to work for, made us all drive into the office and then fired us all last November. It was just after a lockdown here in the UK
where did you go instead? i was halfway through uploading all my stuff to Better
Is there a link to this?
IMO- it's that it's not a job but a skill. And that skill is meant to do a job with it, not be a job itself.

Programming ability today is like a modern equivalent of literacy or numeracy, but it's being abstractly used by the illiterate and innumerate to accomplish a job they want done but can't do themselves.

Which is how we end up with products developed by people who don't eat their own dog food. It's not necessarily their fault, it's the nature of the beast.