skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Apologising to people you’re letting go is condescending. Doing so publicly is asinine. Telling them what happens next is…awkward? There is no next, at least not in a mutual context. You laid them off.

This reads to me like: “Sorry we hired you in the first place, and now have to let you go. But (what happens next) we’ll give you 3 months of severance, which will hopefully soften the blow a bit.”
Always thought Meta would absolutely do something creepy like this. Just ditched my app for the web app - bonus feature: No more ads (if you have a safari adblocker installed)
> It's a bit shallow

I'd call it "honest" rather than shallow!

Cool project BTW
Isn't that a good thing, if they're illegal?
- Apache

- GCC/Clang

- Nginx

- Virt Manager

- OpenBSD at firewalls

- OpenSSH

Should I go on?
This article could do with a modern retrospective and update. Who refers to "expert systems" now?
Oh! I didn’t think about it like that, he might have actually saved his company from further layoffs at the expense of his own pride/credibility.
> I always wonder why the second nuclear bomb in particular isn't much more prevalent in the Zeitgeist as the atrocity that it was.

I think the simple answer is that before the scale of Hiroshima was really understood, everyone though of it as mostly just a more efficient way to perform the atrocity that they were already doing. On this point check out Wellersteins earlier text on the 67:th anniversary: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/08/06/hiroshima-at-67-th...
The problem with machine learning for game AI is how expensive it is computationally. Forget about using the GPU for it. Maybe if TPUs became more common.

I think it should be possible to make, not a good one, but certainly a much better one, with a combination of various classical game tree search techniques, it's just that AI doesn't seem to have been a huge priority for the developers. There are even mods for Civ 5 that drastically improve the vanilla AI just through tweaking various behaviours.
Are you hiring customer service agents or support engineers by any chance?
The phrase "Ponzi scheme" is misused so much it has become meaningless.

A Ponzi scheme is a very specific type of fraud. Ever-increasing immigration to sustain a >1 worker-to-retiree ratio is more like a pyramid scheme, but one that will take decades or maybe a century to really stop working.
Fedora has a vastly different feature set, despite being RHEL upstream.

For instance, btrfs is default in Fedora now. RHEL doesn't even ship it.
Not sure what you mean, since it is clearly explained that such a device is mathematically impossible. A naive way to it would be with a Michelson interferometer where the two beams are displaced exactly by (2n+1)*pi radians and thus interfere so that the target detector sees nothing. Most physics undergraduates do this experiment at least once during their lab courses. But again, if you account for everything, you'll find that the "missing" energy at the detector just went back to the source via the mirror.
This. Circles are just the set of all the infinite points from any point covering any degree around you having the same distance. That's why Pi it's infinite on decimals.

Ditto with sqrt(2), you need to "sharpen" the triangle made from half an square forever in order to get all the decimals.
I still don't understand why Moscow doesn't look like Dubai with all the resources Russians have.
What about OpenSubDiv by pixar?
https://graphics.pixar.com/opensubdiv/overview.html

What are better proprietary alternatives to Kubernetes, Nomad, Docker, Podman? Aren't the most widely adopted web servers and frameworks open source? I am only naming a few areas.
Looks like Factorio.

Oh no no no no no, I need to work ....
npm is a good example of the "buy vs build" idea, although npm modules are mostly free of course. Why write code when you can just call someone else's? But then you get problems like the left-pad fiasco
When the time span for results is long consistency is more important than intensity.

To keep myself going I don't push myself too hard. I manage my time and my productivity well. and I break down tasks into small little chunks and when I complete them I celebrate the win and take a break.

I gave myself occasional pep talks, and hype up my work to myself because it's enjoyable, and make extensive use of voice memos to talk about like where I'm up to in my project and sometimes to like reevaluate you know what's my original goal and what's my goal now. Basically I'll kind of keep a development log using voice memos and just like talk out my thoughts if I run into some issues or what I'm doing... I'm not going to be talking all the time but like I'll find it helpful as a way to sort of talk through some opportunity for improvement, some challenge.

But the most important thing I think is I always like build something I can use. like I'll try to build the simplest version, like the prototype --you could call it a minimum viable product, right?-- the thing that I want to build and I'll try to build that quickly so then I get like these big feedback loop where like I'm using the thing that I want to build but it's just a simple version of it.

So I try to get to the finished product--but not polished at all--as quickly as possible that's usually my first goal. Get to like some proof of concept prototype that I can actually use, that's the first goal in the project and then it's like a series of basically adding features and refining that so you go from like a coarse-grained lower resolution so to speak prototype to a finer grain higher resolution high Fidelity prototype of your original idea and at each stage you have something you can use that you can enjoy and then your enjoyment increases as you continue building stuff.

edit: Oh shit, I forgot, I also like to post my work, and partial work to Show HN, I find that can be rewarding for me as well. Even if no one looks at it, posting is sort of like another way to mark the moment, and the milestone, and to celebrate a win. One reason is because I'm saying, 'Here, I have something. It's kind of finished. Take a look at it. It's ready for that.' It's also a great, like um...it sort of focuses the thing's that need to get done, too.
>The buck stops with the CEO.

The people getting laid off work for the company, not for the CEO. The CEO is also an employee of the company.

>Apologising to people you’re letting go is condescending.

"I want to apologize to the people leaving today. We failed our commitment to you as a company."

How is that condescending?

>Messaging should focus on the people remaining. The CEO should speak to them and honestly acknowledge the mistakes they made that lead to a lay-off. Explain how they are over-correcting in response to those mistakes to safeguard the jobs of those who remain. Then get back to work.

Part of softening the blow to the people remaining is treating the people leaving with respect and dignity. How does it look to the remaining employees if you treat the people leaving like shit?
>I would never have bought it myself since it costs €249 (!)

I bought my Oasis 2 around for closet to 299 EUR (309.97 USD) when I was making 30k USD a year, was 100% worth it to me while I still had a fully functional kindle keyboard and kindle paperwhite 3. If you're a casual reader, that might seem expensive, but if you are chewing through 1-3 books a week like I do (heck I read 3 books last time I flew from Indianapolis to San Francisco and 2 more on the return flights), it becomes a much better price.

I've been using it for almost 5 years now which has me at a cost of 17 cents per day with thousands of hours of use (about 8 cents an hour if I had to guess).
yes, that's frustrating, but they would have to list both current and future prices or make some a list of changes instead of just updating the actual price when they go current
oh yes you can, so long as you don't equate _memorizing_ things with _knowing_ things.
A maximalist novel reminds me a bit of brutalist architecture. I'm the right place and time, there could be nothing more impressive and imposing, but you need to be pretty full of yourself to think that is worth putting your reader through something like that.

On that note, the ideas and the payoff had better be worth it. Otherwise, If you don't have the content to warrant it, you're abusing your reader. A maximalist novel is actually laziness in some ways (see the Mark Twain line about writing a long letter).

When I read the quotes from Mount Chicago, I'm rolling my eyes. They come across as trite, reheated leftovers, served in a Michelin star package. Likely these are cherry picked examples, but they are part of the author's published book. He needs to own them.

I will say, the article is worth reading, or at least skimming, for the Seinfeld quote at the end alone. It may have singlehandedly changed my mind about some aspects of modern comedy.
Ask HN: Uptick in Google and Outlook Calendar sync issues?
Hi HN, I'm curious if anybody else has noticed an uptick in calendar syncing issues, such as the ones I describe below.

Background: My organization uses Google Calendars, and I meet regularly with other organizations who use Outlook Calendars. This week alone I've had about 5 syncing issues, which is up from 0 syncing issues this year.

Syncing issues look like:

- People from Outlook Calendar organization showing up at meetings that don't exist on my calendar.
- People from Outlook Calendar organization not seeing meetings that exist on my calendar.

To be fair, I have been adjusting my calendar and changing meeting owners to my teammates the past two weeks, so perhaps my actions are causally related to the uptick in issues.

Any commiseration / thoughts / advice appreciated!
> a company specializing in optimizing LinkedIn posts, has been criticized after posting a crying selfie of himself on a LinkedIn post

And got press pickup from it. Everybody in the media (really, everybody on social media) should read Trust Me I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday. It talks about how companies plant negative media stories about themselves for publicity (from the pov of someone who has done it).
Care to share a link to the OpenTTD fork you mentioned?
> Or am I missing some greater economic concept?

It is a practical concept. If you think greed is a variable, then you will have to explain why McDonalds suddenly got greedy in 2022 and from 1940-2021 they've been charitably keeping prices low. Any why they aren't raising prices right now to the even higher numbers that we'll probably be seeing in a few years.

They just sell for the price that they think brings in the highest profit. That is the algorithm. Their motivations aren't a factor and the algorithm is has always been the same. They could be greedy or they could be not greedy and that doesn't change the situation.

> It seems unlikely that zero companies are riding the wave of inflation acceptance in the population.

It is possible that there are zero of such companies. The populace doesn't get to set prices - otherwise prices would be cost to manufacturer for everything. Since companies make a profit, it is clear that consumers "acceptance" doesn't influence the price.

People aren't accepting these price rises. They're saying all sorts of things about the companies doing them. Doesn't change the fact that the price has changed.

If greed or the acceptance of consumers were important then the situation would look different. Neither matter much.
Negative publicity is still publicity
Very relevant tool for this SOC2 compliant org. I have seen lot of general purpose automation tools pitch this but I think domain specific automation like this gives you much better value for money.
//Hiring and firing is not a one-man show. If it is, then you're micromanaging.

Have you heard of small businesses?

I agree with your point about it being insulting and making it about himself, but there's plenty of businesses out there where one person's decision making leads to lay offs, and that doesn't equate to micromanaging...
While i understand the rationale, ive come to question if "fighting fire with napalm" is such a good idea, from ethics perspective.
Is it not a duty to not fall prey to indulge in mass killing even if it may seem justified by the barbarity of the opposing side?
the reason you folks hate apartment is that you never seem to design them right. They can be spacious and nice to live in.

In ex soviet block countries apartments were surrounded by greenspace, courtyards, playgrounds, etc. you are not reliant on your garden
Most rural people have no problem with industrial development unless it's highly polluting (and by "highly" I mean "orders of magnitude above and beyond what it takes to make people here hand wring").

Declining support for renewable energy seems to be a result of team politics.
That is really both hilarious and depressing.
I'm aware, wasn't able to make it work the last time. The support is still experimental.
I don't see how setting your compensation to $0 freaks everyone out. Steve Jobs set his pay to $0. A top level executive who has pay is communicating that they would like to argue that they're technically an employee and thus should be paid for services rendered regardless of company performance. Setting your pay to $0 says that you wish to yolk your fortunes to the company. That is an act of confidence.

More importantly, this is a public corporation and finances are disclosed to some extent that outside parties may consider the profile of the company.
I can only find mentions about Amazon's "Send to Kindle" feature doing internal .epub to AZW coversion and I really don't consider that as proper support for the format.
This doesn't close the tab though.
It's a bit of a contentious issue.
> Yes, of course it was a show of strength but also to prevent more US casualties. It just so happened the result of nuking would also mean less japanese casualties as a coincidence. A long protracted campaign would have definetly lead to more casualties. Japan would have never surrendered and allowed an invasion of their land without basically every military aged male fighting to their death.

I explicitly do NOT subscribe to the fact that the bombing had any meaningful effect on whether and when Japan would surrender. That is the main point we should be arguing about.

You completely ignore any actual points I was making in instead make up stuff like "Japan would have never surrendered". No, they would and they did.

> “The vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria … changed their minds.”

Source: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-08-05/hiroshima-a...

Now, you might maybe argue that the atomic bombs helped a bit pushing for unconditional surrender and keeping the Soviets out but that would be a vastly different point.

As for the rest of you points, I don't get why you are trying to justify civilian causalities so much. Japan was not a democracy. It had no free press. The average Japanese person did not have much choice or influence. They were victims of the regime as well, regardless whether they were brainwashed to adore the emperor or not. Not to mention obviously there were Japanese people that were against the war, maybe not a relevant amount but it is silly to paint the Japanese people as an hive mind and imply collective guilt.

Yes, civilian casualties are a fact of war but please don't try to justify them or imply civilians would ever deserve it. War is simply horrible and there is no justification.

Yes, sometimes horrible things need to be done and yes nuclear threat can actually serve to keep peace but the atomic bombings of Japan have no justifications.
>Have you heard of small businesses?

I'm not referring to small businesses. The layoff letters we see and read about on the internet are all from companies.

I've yet to read a layoff letter from a small business during this layoff cycle.
What would be the benefit for Fedora, given that it seems like non-trivial effort?
So then earth still has to degrow even for the short duration before the carrying capacity of the solar system gets exhausted. The presence or absence of a growing economy elsewhere is irrelevant.

You ask why now? The answer is because we've already overshot the ability to do everything we do sustainably with the resources available. We need to get off the treadmill now and hope like hell technology and the available buffers are enough to limit the harm to 'merely' hundreds of millions dying.
That page has no real info on what the game is actually about. Lots of people here compare it to factorio. So how does it compare to factorio? Is it a factorio clone, is it better or different in some way?
Drop me a message. Email is in my profile. I’ll try to support you. And maybe you will support me since I am in similar situation.
Well, even after these changes I think the free offer is generous, and that GitLab as a whole is god-sent. I can't complain.
luckily web3 will save us
Webcage
How's the codebase? Clean? Worth a study?
> We failed our commitment to you as a company

This isn’t true! You didn’t commit to hiring them for life. If you wanted to, you could have contractually granted that. You didn’t. You hired them at will and are terminating them similarly. Lying to people is condescending.

The company has no place apologising. The CEO may, personally, though I think that should be limited to expressions of sympathy for what the laid off are going through.

Wrapping executive decisions in the veneer of the firm feels like deflection. Their peers didn’t make this call. You did, as CEO.
I was just speaking to a customer yesterday and they have the problem that you are solving. I have forwarded the link to your post.
"There's no such thing as bad publicity"
Anyone answering “no” to this is wrong. A mortgage payment includes insurance, various property taxes, principle, interest, and sometimes other items such as mortgage insurance.

Principle and interest are fixed for most people. Mortgage insurance, as an example, is fixed. Everything else is variable.

The vast majority of buyers will see huge changes (increases) to their property taxes and insurance over the lifetime of a mortgage.

There’s also opportunity cost from all the upfront and ongoing capital, and homeowners practically never include that in their monthly costs estimates. Opportunity cost grows over time, too. Not just from compounding growth, but from maintenance and repairs that you otherwise wouldn’t make.

TLDR owning a home isn’t a fixed cost, and it’s usually way more expensive and variable than people are admitting or calculating.
The key point here is that all our current machine interfaces are designed for humans to operate. Thus if you create a robot in human form, you don't need to change any of the interfaces.

Imagine a human form robot that was smart enough to drive a car - it could then drive any car.

The problem is that locomotion of a human form is non-trivial (unlike say a wheeled robot, or even welding the robot into the car itself, like our current self driving attempts). But we seem to be getting there, with Boston Dynamics and friends.
Hm, now I wonder. Would that actually make sense for them? They’d have the hardware costs upfront, but could then actually use the gas instead of just burning it. Or do they not have enough gas power plants to use all that excess gas? Anyone with background information and/or some napkin math? ;)
It sounds to me like you were in a bad fit for the role. Projects definitely have a life cycle. Prototype, build, maintain. And you typically have different types of people doing these different roles. You may not have enjoyed the role that you played - but some people really do enjoy each of those roles.
I mean... it was a time, when even the americans used concentration camps in US to lock up the japanese, and people didn't mind. The war lasted long enough, that the propaganda machine did it's job and noone (inside usa, and many other countries) really cared about 'a few' japanese lives, even if "a few" means tens of thousands... some even rooted for more.
Are you German? Tolino eReaders are basically just rebadged Kobos at this point with a different software stack for a few European countries.

I can get a Kobo Nia for $130 CAD (about €100), a base model Kindle is $120 CAD. They are very close in price and on the high end the Kobo is cheaper and offers more.
I was just looking for a replacement library for go to build documents for the Kindle. I have a little service that converts RSS feeds articles into content for ebook readers and currently for them I was converting to mobi. It's great to see that there's an "easy" way to switch to AZW.
I haven't played it but it looks heavily inspired by the Creeper World series:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/280220/Creeper_World_3_Ar...
> Steve Jobs set his pay to $0

Jobs was independently wealthy. That’s fine. (And tax efficient.)

If the CEO isn’t, paying themselves zero puts them in a financially precarious position. That isn’t great for decision making. If done so with the aim of reducing layoffs, it could suggest operations close to a red line. (One person shouldn’t have a material effect on the cash cushion unless the CEO was making off like a bandit, in which case they’re not the type to do this anyway.)

What the CEO could do is cut their pay to the median, to what they need to survive or to the lowest employee’s pay. This could be part of the overcorrection if the mistake made was high pay. But it’s unlikely to save anyone’s job, and shouldn’t be positioned that way.

> this is a public corporation

The LinkedIn consultancy the crying CEO leads isn’t public.
Google Pay is a very important application tailor made to the unique Indian banking system.

Very different to Wallet.
How about:

If the war in Ukraine continues, we can expect less food production and potential oil disruption to center Europe.

No need to comment on how to get to this outcome, or thoughts about who will make a concession leading to a big conversation away from the main point of what you were trying to say.

Keep the if statement about exactly matters, not a secondary effect/cause.
Got it. Yes, that’s fair.

I pictured a regaled tale of overcome personal hardship, the modern “stiff upper lip, kid.”

If “what’s next” is within a mutual context, it’s fine.
I guess classification via combination of article and comments shouldn't be too hard (at least in my imagination). I would like to subscribe to tag-based RSS feeds then, ideally.
The weirdest thing about this is not the post itself but the reactions of some people. I saw a lot of comments that argued not only that the post was authentic , brave and well made but that any criticism came from a place of bitterness, envy, hate, unhappiness, lack of empathy or all of the above. I get that different people will have different opinions about the post and I understand how some might view it as authentic, but I really don't understand the mechanism to completely dismiss all criticism because "it's bitter people".
Yes, it did have impact in fiction and also on the world stage, I already said that the main goal was to show strength and intimidate the Soviets. For this is served well.

Did it impact the Japanese military leadership, which obviously did not care much about civilian causality, in their decisions much? No.
GDPR enforcement is significantly lacking. There's basically zero ways this is compliant unless it's opt-in (but who in their right mind would opt-in?) but the regulators aren't interested in standing up to these nasty companies.
Agreed, "SHTF"/"EOTWAWKI" types too. Any good recent sci-fi recommendations? After spending 23 days without running water in July due to multiple well failures, I've lost interested in SHTF/EOTWAWKI and need to get back into sci-fi titles that I'm not listening to via Audible for the performers (Omega Force, Expeditionary Force, Undying Mercenaries, Bobiverse, etc).