skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What does this have to do with startups though? Well, high performance means fewer servers, fewer servers means less operational overhead. As a startup your runway burns up pretty fast if you start spending it on web servers that can only support a few hundred requests per second each.

This is the most interesting part for me. Not the specific numbers, but the general notion of "performance actually matters". There's impact on ROI, UX, complexity and sometimes it lets you do things that you wouldn't otherwise consider.

There was a post fairly recently on here, where they showed a deployment architecture of a small business or startup. It was a simple thing, with a couple of app servers, databases and load balancers. Something like that. The app servers were written in Python/Django I think. The essence was that "this is a simple architecture on relatively cheap VPS instances with minimal complexity and it handles a ton of traffic", I think the bill was a couple hundred or a month maybe 1/2k max. I liked it.

But even then I thought that there has to be some overhead that can be cut there. If your app server plus database performs well _enough_ you can run them on just one instance, you can cut several load balancers. All you need is a backup machine if you care about downtime, especially during deployments. That would roughly cost you maybe 5x less. Then you might actually be able to cut down the performance of the machine, another factor of 2. Now your bills are 10x less, you have fewer things to worry about, possibly less complex tools needed.

So let's say a single developer can save them 1k (EUR/$) monthly, that would be 5-10h work hours gross, or just say a day of billable work, every month that they get out of it. And this is not considering the gains from reducing the complexity and setting themselves up for finer grained improvements and other benefits that were not possible before.

I'm not considering the downsides and the estimates are shaky at best. But there might be something to this, even for fairly small teams and companies.
> There’s no recession as far as the eye can see. There’s a crypto recession.

Don't be the guy who replied to my comment, waiting for the results to tell you that it is a recession. [0] If you are preparing now, you're almost too late.

Only the paranoid survive.

> Let’s go back to building real tech.

Like the spyware laden software made by the likes of Meta, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon that they are building? No worse than crypto I'm afraid.

The free-software foundation are still waiting for you and others for 37 years to stop building non-free software riddled with surveillance and tracking. But neither that nor crypto is going to stop is it?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31441710
Though ironically the rate of young people dying in the US is considerably higher than most developed countries. I guess drugs, guns etc. https://www.prb.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/population-bu...
> Crypto is a zero sum game

How come? The same network effects that work for social networks work here, as more people and businesses use crypto, it's value proposition raises quadratically.
It appears to be local.
We are also experiencing record-levels of inflation due to Central Bank monetary policies, which have led to massive asset bubbles and wealth inequality due to Cantillon effect of said policies. So it's hard to think the status quo is working as intended. Cryptocurrencies are antithetical to centralized monetary policy not regulation.

Regulation can exist and probably will exist, there are some proposals currently on the table. There is currently no regulation because regulators are laggards, not because it's contrary in spirit to cryptocurrencies.

Fraud is not an intrinsic characteristic to cryptocurrencies, it's an intrinsic characteristic to human nature. Regulation simply provides tools to fight fraud, either by making it more difficult to execute or by establishing discouraging penalties.

That the alternative monetary policy proposed by cryptocurrencies is better than the status-quo is still to be seen.
> If you are affected, you will receive this notification in your personal email, because we made the decision to cut access to Coinbase systems for affected employees. I realize that removal of access will feel sudden and unexpected, and this is not the experience I wanted for you. Given the number of employees who have access to sensitive customer information, it was unfortunately the only practical choice, to ensure not even a single person made a rash decision that harmed the business or themselves.

Brutal. Not even the quintessential mass zoom call?
Pretty standard to not let terminated employees hang around. It feels cold but it’s just the way it has to be. Sone places will even do this when an employee submits a resignation on good terms. Just a way for the company to cover themselves.
I don't support Boris Johnson, I'm not a Tory, I don't care about the stupid parties, cake and beer by anyone and I'd like to know why you're claiming the opposite?

Please, I'd like to know why you felt the need to write a completely false comment.
IIUC, RSUs are printed out of thin air.

RSU pay - especially at higher levels - makes up >50% of total compensation.

If stock prices go up or down - you'll certainly make more or less money. But the effect on the company is minimal.

Revenue is what matters to be able to afford to pay the base salary and bonus.
very typical.
Curiosity is a decent indicator one of the many types of competence that you ought to be assessing: the ability to learn new skills and deal with problems that are outside of their current skill set. Which for most software jobs is rather key skill.
Hosting CP will get you raided. And even entities that normally don't cooperate with the police will suddenly get lenient if they see you host CP.
I don't write Golang but honestly that was one of the features that interested me the most. Automatic type compatibility. I get the criticism as you will depend on tooling to get some expected convenience. But if you are used to void *ptr anyway...

To be fair, most APIs need documentation and code is just plainly not enough. At least if we are talking about specialist interfaces that aren't just another web framework.
I listened to that, he even predicted the Luna crash in that interview. When that guy talks, it’s very clear he understands markets. Very different approach to Bryan Armstrong, who’s more of a Bitcoin “believer”. I think the blatant description of a ponzi scheme was a rare window into an insiders thoughts.
Not your keys, not your coins. Don't keep your assets on an exchange.
In our area you basically have to go through the same licensing process as regular foster parents. Glad to hear it's an easier process in other places :)
Of course: governments around the world flooded markets with stimulus cash and it all had to go somewhere. Now they are unwinding stimulus and it’s going away. Every reasonable observer has just been waiting for this to happen.
If we're talking Bitcoin:

- Early 2014 ($1,000 -> $300)

- Late 2018/Early 2018 ($19,500 -> $6,800)

- April 2021 ($63,000 -> $35,000)

- Nov 2021-Now ($67,000-> $22,000)
Yeah indeed. Coming from someone who had to work with physical labor before I started programming, software developers don't know how good they have it.

"The pay isn't great", "treated far too shabbily", "dealing with bugs and bad decisions", "inadequate processes" and so on, sucks when development is the only thing you've dealt with, but you have no idea how it is to actually have a blue collar job if you're actually complaining about those things.

I think cs137 and others like them should try to have a part-time job at McDonalds (or whatever that is not in front of a screen), because it will make you love your software engineering job again.
No, but if you leave the screen to read another message it stops (plus my brain can't process more speech if it's already listening, so I have to stop all speech-related tasks until your note is done).
What I look for in a hot sauces is, (1) pepper is first ingredient, and (2) only other ingredients are vinegar and salt. Sriracha does not qualify.
Sleepwalking Through Life in a Digital Haze
>compute is cheap. Go with what you know.

sorry for picking on your comment in this generic fashion but I am critical of these memes not your observations:

Compute Is Cheap(where Gustafson Bariss is true)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson%27s_law

Going with what you already know is fine for knocking out the cobwebs and getting into a space. But most generally certainly in my experience I've never done anything to completion I knew at the beginning.
Scotland's deficit is persistent. Between 2014-15 and 2019-20 it averaged 9.2%, compared to 3.2% for the UK as a whole. [1]

Infamously, the SNP's envisioned post-independence budget was based on their forecast for annual oil and gas revenues: £10bn. In reality they have averaged an order of magnitude less: £1bn.

Oil and gas are volatile commodities so there will be year-to-year fluctuations but the secular trend is clearly downwards. The best wells have run dry, and the UK is committed to net zero by 2050 and Scotland to net zero by 2045.

[1] https://www.economicsobservatory.com/what-might-the-public-f...
No, not even remotely. London is second only to New York for finance.
I have literally never heard an African perspective on this before your comment. Thank you for this, it's very enlightening!
I havent read the article yet but from my understanding the issue of cost of Saturn V wod have been mitigated by scaling up production.

I read a recebt biography about Von Braun and IIRC the entire project was designed to scale up, and all of that was hastily thrown away for the ineffective shuttle program.
Another examples of a popular modern confidence scams is the refund scammers. They pretend to be from Amazon, McAfee, Norton, Microsoft, etc., and tell you that a charge has been made, offering a refund. Or they claim hackers are on your computer. Then they install remote access software, and trick you into making bank transfers or buying gift cards.

Personally I think these con-artist scams are more widespread than typical pyramid schemes. But perhaps that's just selection bias on my part, because of the folk I know and the media I consume.
I don't think so. I assume that he asked people to leave because he wanted fewer people included in the layoff who actually care about the company.
This seems to be a perspective that's exclusively silicon valley (perhaps large parts of the US) based. Not at all true in Europe at the least. Not that it's a bad job by any stretch of the imagination, but even low six figures is really rare in the EU for Software Development.

Easiest is also highly subjective, if your job is making wordpress templates/sites then sure. If you're working on complexer systems then this statement is horseshit. I've done physical and service jobs that were both easier than the software development I do, only difference was that the physical job was also physically exhausting.
There's a cost, and it is often annoying and widely discussed, even joked about in highly federal countries. But there's benefits that are quite apparent I think.
Validate Your YAML
Technically ~$1.6M per employee: https://csimarket.com/stocks/GOOG-Revenue-per-Employee.html
I feel like the need to continuously learn new things is a feature of the profession, not a bug. It is certainly a difficult challenge, but I've always felt that the most important trait in a software developer is an eagerness to learn new things.

I think the overall premise of the article makes sense, but where I differ from the writer is in how I view the need for constant learning and self-development. The author writes,

> Like a fast, expensive car that quickly loses value as it's driven around town, the skills and human capital of software engineers fall apart without constant, expensive maintenance.

What the author is talking about, however, is not a material object with transient importance to one's life (i.e. a vehicle), it is your mind. Learning new things doesn't just mean you retain your relevance as a software developer, it also helps stave off cognitive decline. It keeps you sharp, relevant, mentally agile. That may not be the case in every job, but the field as a whole certainly has that attribute.
Once upon a time, the emperor had no clothes.
If you like these oddities, then check out The R Inferno [1]. It’s from 2011, but still holds up since the language hasn’t changed that much.

[1] https://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf
I think 'winter' implies a long period of dormancy. The 'AI winter' was like a decade long. These were normal corrections.
When I need to expose jupyter notebooks to non-technical users I put them on colab.research.google.com. It's a free, interactive, hosted Jupyter environment. It's not as slick as a dashboard, but it just requires an upload instead of maintaining a server.
Do you mean TARP? That was paid back. The government didn't really make a profit (the revenue generated in addition to the repayments was less than inflation) but there didn't really end up being any free money except in the short term. And that was the point, of course.
HR managers are rarely ever intelligent. The work they do doesn’t require it and intelligent people don’t want to do a job where they’ll be surrounded by lower intelligence people.
Isn't this practice pretty common in Finance? I've heard of people who when they resigned (or fired) immediately got their access revoked and were escorted out the door by security (or if they were lucky, swing by their desk to pick up their stuff).
Luck Surface Area: How to Get Lucky In Life
In which prior downturn did the valuation of Coinbase (and other unicorns) get nuked -90%?
Cognitive dissonance. PT Barnum. Charles Darwin.

> "It started just over a year ago. I noticed an ad that was endorsed by two well-known celebrities showing you could earn more money than you could earn in a bank," he said.
There’s a whole lot of working definitions provided by the 20th century that can be used as measuring sticks on the passage to the right. Signs include a breakdown or suppression of a free press, simplification of the political spectrum, identification of and processing of enemies of the state, weakening of the rules and protections of government and so on. A shift from the idea of equality of all (protection of minorities) towards the will of the majority.

There dan also be an anti-rational or anti-scientific aspect. And as an old history prof lectured, the political spectrum is not linear it’s a circle. The far ends turn out to be the same part of the circle. Power for the in group and problems for the rest. Read animal farm.
I understand it's a sensitive business for bad actors. My goal is to start a conversation on how I could reach them or what alternatives there exists.
Boom was about the money supply; bust is about rising interest rates to fight inflation.

COVID was the cause of the money supply, and now COVID is also the cause of ongoing supply shortages (in addition to money supply hangover), resulting in high inflation.
FTX is in deep with Tether. I expect they'll pull some tricks out of their collective hats to avoid a complete collapse.
>"have found ourselves with nothing short of a world-class engineering team"

I think this is what actually makes your development efforts go smoothly. Not a language choice.
Check out Workera [0]. It’s an upskilling tool that adapts to individual students targeting individual solutions.

You tell it what job you want. It has a skill library for that job. Then you take a test. The test tells you what the gaps are between what you currently know and what you need to know. Then it gives you a custom curriculum designed to fill those gaps.

This is what I would use in your position.

[0] https://workera.ai/for-individuals
It's called denial. Also the slow release of bad news is an attempt to stem the losses of employees leaving a sinking ship. Controlling the press narrative. Lots of reasons for it. And no, tech "journalism" doesn't work as it used to, so drip by drip of this bad news doesn't hurt any worse than ripping the bandaid off.
Does that say much? They're the biggest buyer because USDT is the biggest stablecoin.
It's like decimation, but harder
> Are you saying there is a corruption issue right now?

If you have followed Hungary's trajectory under Orban it is pretty obvious that there are corruption issues. Not that Hungary is the only country affected, it's just the most obvious
I wonder how many cryptoexchanges stop withdrawavals "for technical reasons".
At the time of the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, I remember there being warnings from the EU that rejoining would not be a simple matter of just applying for an independent Scotland.

I could try to find some links on that if you like, but the way I remember it is that the EU was against the idea of Scotland going it alone and EU officials actively worked to discourage any ideas that an independent Scottland would be received with open arms.

But of course, that was before Brexit and while the UK was still an EU member whose national interests were taken into consideration by other members (because EU). This is not the case now.

Still from memory -sorry for that- but when the last UK MEPs were making their parting speeches at the EU Parliament, one Scottish MEP finished his with an impassioned plea to the EU to not forget Scotland. Which I interpreted as a plea to make it easier for Scotland to join the EU if it ever gained independence from the UK.
Most of newly graduates of any subject don't know much about real world jobs. You are just one of many, but you care to ask about this on HN, that's something.

And a warm welcome to this imposter syndrome help group, we are always afraid of missing out on some tech. Accept it, everyone is missing out on most of the tech.

When I was studying CS in college, I always wondered why the classes don't teach us about the hot Windows programming thing. All we did were tiny console C programs. I realized that very late, CS classes are meant to let you know about the fundamentals. You probably won't use these skills directly at work, but you will have ideas about how the languages and systems work internally. That pays in the long run.

Just go explore and make mistakes, you will be alright.
Google made $18000000000 profit last year. It could pay employees out of cash revenue, not out of stock prices if it wanted.

I don't know about Google in particular but I think RSUs are generally issued in terms of an amount of stock, not a dollar amount. As the share price goes down then Google becomes less competitive against companies with a more stable stock price who also issue RSUs.
How is that a recession?
Google Maps has renamed a major Brooklyn avenue
It's strange that I was allowed to vote in the last one if it's none of my business.

> they want one.

Polls consistently show less than 50%. Perhaps the "they" you meant is the SNP?
Yeah, It is not exclusive to crypto is it? We've already seen that even Tesla and Netflix announced layoffs. So, there's that.
How does the language matter? I write software (mostly) in C for a living (the simple man's "embedded" as in "Linux on an ARM board", not the "bits on a micro controller" kind) and I made sure we use test-driven development with proper version control and CI.

We have been trying to use Rust for some new projects but cross-compiling is still much more hit-and-miss with Rust (i.e. third-party libraries) than it is with C. I imagine it would be worse for proper embedded projects.
Understading why attr_accessor in Ruby is faster than a regular method
Couldn't agree more, modern macOS is just kind of... annoying. I also don't feel like it really does much if anything better than e.g. Snow Leopard, while simultaneously performing a lot of mostly invisible magic behind the scenes that I wish had some feedback and gave some control over - like all the photo analysis stuff.
Pretty standard when layoffs occur. They happen and people are told to pack up and leave. System access is usually turned off while the announcement is being made to prevent disgruntled from harming the business.

Coinbase is probably still mostly remote, so it's about the same thing as shuffling everyone into a conference room and turning off access.
Interesting claim, any written proof to back it up?
Wish they'd use that AI to make it stop recording audio forever after I leave a meeting. If I have to restart your meeting software every time I'm done with a meeting, you have a problem.
Even if you make something like $20000 per year, you have it better than most in the world. People spend their body (the one we only have one of) doing way more intense (and vital for the world) labor than software engineers do, and earn much less.

If you think unreasonable deadlines are a big issue, then you're in for a rough awakening if you spend any time with the rest of the workforce that doesn't sit in front of a computer all day.
There is in fact a quite famous example of this, involving some kind of medical device. I blame Stanford/SV culture for that one.
Right before inflation takes off, “staples” stadium was renamed to “crypto.com” stadium - at once a comical metaphor and omen.
*England voted for Brexit by a narrow-ish majority. But Scotland voted against Brexit by a huge margin -- 62/38, or approximately 3:2.*

Brexit wasn't a case of each nation 'winning' so to speak. The 38% of the vote went to the total number of leave votes. Which contributed to the overall Leave vote.

Point being Scotland did make a significant contribution to the Leave vote.
As for solar panels-
17% (typical solar panel efficiency) x 1000 W/m2 (typical sun effect)= 170 W/m2.
To charge a 135 kW/h Rivian with 1 sqm panel you'll need 794 hours of light (it's not accurate, but gives a good estimate), so you'll need a lot of those to be effective.
This is very typical. He is talking about cutting now former employees access to email, source code repositories, internal systems. It is done all the time. It looks very harsh.
If they have guns issued to them, yet refuse use them even in an active shooter situation to protect the lives of innocent children being massacred, they probably don't need the guns for any situation. If police carrying all these unused guns around is any kind of liability (danger, theft) they should probably not be carrying them in the first place. (I'm okay with Police using them when the situation calls for it, but if they refuse to use them when the situation calls for it then they don't need them at all)
I've been using async Rust in production for years. The learning curve is a little higher than I'd like. But it works great and it does everything we need it to. For an open source example, see https://www.dbcrossbar.org/

Many problems with async Rust involve people trying to get overly clever with lifetimes and zero-copy code. And if it's not either of those, it's people getting overly clever with async traits. So keep it simple!

Some tips:

1. Long-running async tasks should own their data, not borrow it. This will save you 80% of the pain right there.

2. Don't be afraid to allocate futures on the heap, and use "Box<dyn Future<Output=T>>" to hide the implementation.

3. If you must use traits with async members, use "async_trait".

4. Remember that futures can be cancelled at any "await" point. You can ignore this 99% of the time, as long as you use destructors to perform cleanup.

I would only recommend async Rust if you actually need very high-performance async code. Regular threaded Rust still works great for most things, as do languages like TypeScript. But if you actually need what async Rust offers, it's totally workable.
I wrote that I voted for independence right at the top of the thread, did you miss that?