skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The responses of the climate system are pretty well understood at this time, and nothing approaches 'existential', i.e. extinction-level - which I'd reserve for major asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes, and total nuclear war. Equating fossil-fueled global warming to such events is simply scientific exaggeration. It's a notch down the logarithmic scale of doom from them, is all I'm saying.

What fossil-fueled global warming entails is more like a constant, steady grind with the grind getting noticeable worse over successive time periods (perhaps about a decade, maybe a little less). Conditions that span extreme weather are getting more frequent (mostly due to more water vapor in the atmosphere), record-breaking droughts in some regions are on the rise, 500-yr floods now take place every 5 years, etc.

Fundamentally, however, none of this is going away - it takes 100 years at least for global climate to equilibrate to current forcing, and again, there are some feedback effects dumping ancient stores of carbon slowly into the atmosphere.

Practically, this means as much energy and money are going to have to be spent on adapting to new conditions as on eliminating fossil fuels from the energy mix.
> Last year, Twitter’s interest expense was about $50 million. With the new debt taken on in the deal, that will now balloon to about $1 billion a year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/technology/elon-musk-twit...
Well the CPI is only up 0.5% in total over the last three months.
1. Delayed Cash bonuses with similar vesting times to RSUs

2. Delayed Cash bonuses with vesting terms tied to some company metric or calculation derived from company metric

3. Not replacing it to cause attrition to reduce costs

4. Some sort of hypothetical share tracking unit that only has a value if the company goes public or is bought again
Unemployment is near all time lows. The number of employed people is near all time high, and many have quit the job market (due to Covid). We are quite far from the scenario you are describing.

Finding your dream job? Maybe not. Finding a job in this market? It should be cakes.
> These firing decisions are not irreversible! If you accidentally fire a 10x programmer, you can re-hire.

Ha! At a significant price premium, or that programmer is a moron.
Why would a criminal record be relevant at all?

Other than prior convictions for train robbery, I guess.
In order for it to be a social network, doesn’t it need to have users?
All Tesla employees (some who had worked there for 10+ years) who were laid off this year got 1 week severance. You think he's gonna let Twitter employees get anything of value out the door?
I suppose if you can afford this you can afford to travel on Amtrak time.
Right. I'll take your word for it. Then I'm not sure what to call what they do, but how does it help?
A large % of the $44B that Elon paid is likely in unvested RSUs. Firing people is a way for him to save money for sure.

You can probably find this number in the 10K or 8K
Sorry to hear that. No matter what it's always tough.

But I'll share that I've been on the other side - months and months of talk of layoffs, then 6 months later announcement that layoffs will be rolled out over 3 months. Then finally hearing almost a year after rumors started.

I'll say getting it over with has a certain appeal.
By jove, you may be on to something!
Yeah, this. I found Fastmail on HN and moved over all my domains and just use catch alls for them with a single mailbox. Works smoother than I could’ve ever imagined, including being able to reply from all my custom domains from my same inbox. Highly recommend.
Maybe if you are starting is good strategy to have consistency with weekly uploads? And later when you build a small audience, yes, you can apply your strategy of quality over quantity.
Don't worry, they've already revoked access. From further down the article:

> Twitter said its offices will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended in order "to help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data."
ha ha. No. They're the sneaky one that will have put in thousands of lines of whitespace and punctuation fixes which the software used to fire people will detect as "ultra active". They'll get a promotion and double bonus.
The verge article mentioned elsewhere in this discussion claims "His team of outside advisors has spent the last week determining which engineers to keep based on their contributions to Twitter’s codebase, according to employees involved in the discussion". Of course how well of a job they can do in a week is anyone's guess, but it sounds like there was a lot more internal and external knowledge involved than just Elon's gut feeling on who's important.
Copilot is clearly a derivative work. So is every other similar model. How is this even up for discussion?
I think they're saying that in the context of realistic workloads that would saturate the existing 1 Gbps connection, how often they would occur, what the net benefit in time would be...

2.5 Gbps would be nice to have though.
I said that at best it is impartial, and if anything, is more permissive to conservatives.

The fact that your "logic" is that extremists like KKK and other rightwing nut jobs are not allowed on twitter and thus have to create their own sites is proof of a double standard is absolutely insane.

You're so busy with your persecution fetish you cannot even see simple reason.
It's a strategy. SpaceX has a reputation for mediocre pay, but if you point that out you get a whole bunch of people telling you that it's okay because it's such a privilege to work there. He wants his employees to come from his fanbase, because they're cheaper.
He’s currently having people work 84 hour weeks so he can purge the ones who balk. You couldn’t make this stuff up, it’s too cliche.
Thank you, also response from employees: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/twitter-layof...

reporter's thread: https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15883356977855897...

>Employees in Twitter just got an email from their bosses saying layoffs are coming tomorrow.

>Those who are staying will get a note tomorrow in their work email. Those who are let go will get an email sent to their personal address.

>Slot machine-style layoffs.

>Some employees I'm hearing from at Twitter are desperate to get laid off and get severance. The work culture there is beyond toxic.

>Some are afraid to push back against Elon because they don't want to risk getting fired for cause — disagreeing with Elon — and losing severance.

…

>"At the end of this nightmare, I better get a cash prize," one told me.
There are no successful "pay for access" social media networks, and the argument that Twitter's dominance some how held App.net back ignores all the other social networks that succeeded despite being founded after Twitter.
Zstd's decoder is very very fast for what it does, what ideas do you have to improve it?

It's unlikely to beat lzo family on decompression speed, but that's a different class of compressor entirely. And probably there are still some more tricks zstd can learn from closed-source Oodle leviathan, but i don't think much more can be learned.
I wouldn't be surprised if Musk wanted to do that, but I'm not sure it would be that easy to identify people who are opposed to Musk's values in a few days any more than it would be to decide based on performance metrics.
No it's not. Clearly our standard of living keeps improving, so costs keep going up.

I could work 10 hours a week and easily afford a 1920's lifestyle. But I prefer 21st century healthcare.
Ah yes, the embarrassingly slow decoder that just happens to be on the Pareto frontier for decompression speed: http://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html
Severance. Otherwise yeah, I'd be out of there on Monday if I was unlucky enough to survive the layoffs tomorrow.
I'm all on this for actually helping physically do this (even for loose definitions of physical, like run a website haha, but I'd imagine someone on HN restoring a train carriage could manage a Wix/SquareSpace/etc site by themselves)... I've wanted to build a steam engine since I was a kid, I thought it would be amazing to design a stupidly modern steam engine and break the world records with it, and this, while this is not a steam engine, it is honestly the closest I'll probably get to any of that dream given how impractical it is ...
You seem to know what you’re talking about, so…

I’ve heard that occasionally (rarely) they need to put some “public” cars behind the private ones. And if that happens, you are not allowed to prevent the public passengers from walking through your private car to get between the public sections.

Is that the case?
I assume they are speaking about Elon Musk, who used 'Free Speech' as a reason for his wanting to reform Twitter. Specifically that they 'censor' people too much or 'censor' the wrong people. The person remarking about 'free speech' loudmouths is pointing out the irony that people like Elon who go on crusades of free speech advocacy do not practice it when it comes to things they don't like, don't agree with, or which have the potential to harm them in some way. This is because the article mentions that the writer made a joke at Elon's expense personally (handed him a card with a cartoon showing him breaking a twitter figurine in a shop) and then got possibly fired because of it.

That's my take on it.
I have defaulted to Ubuntu for familiarity reasons, but recently I got to learn

- the procedure for upgrading to a newer release of ubuntu it you run sed as root to fix your sources.list, then you do-release-upgrade, but it doesn't work because it has an undocumented dependency on pciutils

- at this point i should be used to this pciutils thing since ~all software has undocumented dependencies on autoconf, automake, autotools, libtool, cmake, ninja, rust, python2, python3, calling the binary called python in your path and expecting it to be a particular version that is 2 or 3 but some stuff needs 2 and other stuff needs 3, perl, npm but not the latest npm, clang but not the clang in the repositories, gcc, nvm, ruby, lua but not the latest lua, bazel, make, openssl, libressl, libcrypto, a different version of libc that will break almost all software on your machine when you install it, a bunch of optional obscurely named C header packages that install the headers into folders that the build won't search for header files and that turn out not to be optional if you want the thing to work at all, and a hundred different javascript build automation and test automation tools that exist mainly to call each other

- snap will just install broken package updates for you and is incapable of undoing this operation by design

- systemd-resolved will randomly just start taking 250+ms to return cached DNS entries so if you call connect() many times per second you need a much bigger threadpool than you may have expected (and this is maybe an architectural change to your software if your previous threadpool size for connect() offloding was 1 or if you were naively calling connect() on your thread where you do actual work)

- if you thought you knew how to set the open file limit for a user, systemd has rearranged your furniture and by the way this operation now requires you to reboot your computer

so i'm not sure ubuntu has been a great fit, but i'm also not switching to anything else
All of this is towards the goal of deprecating the NT-Kernel and work on it.

Today they "emulate" Linux on Windows (WSL2), tomorrow they will "emulate" Windows on Linux (i.e. all the Win32, etc APIs on Linux - think WINE++).

Rather than windows::nt or gnu::linux, the first "Linux on Desktop" will happen with windows::linux.

In 2015 I bet my friends this would happen in 2025. It might not happen exactly that year, but all signs point towards before 2030.
Yes, they are really two different hobbies, equally valid. On the equipment side, I think of it as being interested in the engineering of things. I guess you could say that the "using" side of the divide regards equipment merely as a means to an end.
> I would actually like to see Twitter's team and culture rebuilt regardless of who bought it.

There you go. I don't think having giant operational costs at a company and having a head count in the thousands and sitting there losing more money without maximizing revenue it sustainable for any business.

Perhaps Twitter itself was overdue a massive correction, hence the first step is drastic layoffs and cuts.
How do you expect them to continue, let alone get commercial contracts, when they are out of money? NASA gave them their first major contract and they didn't have a commercial contract until they got an AsiaSat three and a half years later, which came in at a paltry 5% of the NASA contract. How long do you think they could reasonably bleed money while operating on hopes and dreams without the massive NASA contract? The numbers just don't add up and Musk himself corroborated that fact. To the point I've been making all along, part of Musk's business plan has been to leverage govt contracts.

>Government takes risk just like commercial companies take risk.

Incorrect. Govt payloads are self-insured. This is essentially saying "We have such deep pockets that it doesn't matter if we lose the payload, it won't hurt us financially." I don't know many private organizations with that risk threshold. This is partly why the early govt contract is so important. It allows SpaceX to get enough experience while being funded by a customer that isn't risk-adverse. This buys them time to improve to a point where commercial payloads can be insured without being cost-prohibitive. Again to my original point, this means the govt shoulders a disproportionate amount of risk.

I guess when the CEO says "Yep, they saved us. Without that contract, we'd be done because we were out of money" and that isn't clear enough, you've transitioned to fanboy-dom. Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a hurdle.
It’s like HN discounts all his other successes and can’t believe he can attract high performing employees. He clearly solved much harder problems than short-form blog posting so it’s not a stretch to think he can flip Twitter back to an IPO quickly.
> saw that they are highly inefficient.

source?
Why does it look like just a start? What information do you have?
I didn't really understand yakaccount4's take on this. If they are concerned about optics, what can one do to not layoff? would they just let the company continue to perform mediocrely and continue to bloat its burn just for the sake of not laying off people?
Lex Luthor did, however, take forty cakes. That’s as many as four tens. And that's terrible.
> Amazon stock doesn’t seem like a good bet

read enough doomsday social media material and you'll be convinced you should lock your money into treasuries at 4% instead of equities all together (any stock, including index/mutual funds)
False. He can pump profits keeping earnings flat by slashing costs. See probably removing 1/3 the cost with this single move.
This constant hagiographic view of Musk and others like him is grotesque.
This feels very reminiscent of when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in an official CEO capacity. He laid off 3000 people in his first year as CEO and was ruthless with axing unnecessary projects and product lines. He also installed key NeXT employees into positions of influence. The rest is of course history. I'm curious to see how this plays out for Musk and Twitter.
Unconvinced. In the same room you wouldn't wear a head-set, would you? :-)
Also Mumble at 64kbps can sound really good. Anyways, didn't do/have that the time, so no comparison.
Aww, I remember the Fail Whale. I hope they still have it somewhere, would be a nice reminder of the old days to see it again.
The fee structure differs among their offerings, so that doesn't tell you relative popularity.
Twitter was also very bloated. Musk has an agenda, some of it is personal. I think from a business standpoint this was well overdue especially from some ex-twitter employees I've talked to.

It's also not the first time I have seen this type of layoff. I was a part of a few companies that got taken over by vulture capitalists and it's much the same. Everyone gets sorted into an arbitrary bucket based on metrics. Usually, these include commits, vacation taken, etc. Then the MBAs sort the list and fire the worst. Hostile takeovers are always, always bad for the employee. Twitter, however had other problems than a usual company. A dramatic lack of profitability, too many salaries to pay, etc. I'm not saying his methods are just but for Twitter to even have a chance at profit there needs to be some very, very dramatic changes.

If you were to believe the media Musk is literally destroying free speech (on a private platform?) and firing people for no reason. I doubt he would do this. He's a jerk, but he's not an idiot. It doesnt help twitter employees happen to be the most vocal, often whiniest, group of people so this is getting megaphoned to death in a way that wouldn't happen almost anywhere else.
> Even after the recent carnage there are still many 10-40x sales companies, which is pretty much unjustifiable with a 4.5% risk free rate

so you are saying from a valuation perspective, we have more room to fall?
Fidelity or Vanguard.
Cash is also shrinking. Loads of new investors existed thanks to the government stimulus payments. My memory is failing me but I read that after the first few stimulus checks, savings went up 33% for the average american household. (I honestly don't know what the 33% was about but it was a positive change). That's pretty much all wiped out as people lost money. I think that glut of investment was just a temporary thing
> first mover advantage in Online banking (paypal)

That's being generous. He's not a paypal founder. He started a different company, which merged a couple times into becoming part of paypal.
So its a privately owned and operated rail car, that lots of people can group together with and pay the total cost of by individually paying a smaller part of it, like some sort of ... publicly accessible private transportation ... I think you might be on to something!
You should see how impressive some of the luxury trains have gotten. Japan has a couple of them that are particularly luxurious. And while these aren't owned by individuals, they're indicative of what you could own.

https://www.luxurytrainclub.com/trains/seven-stars-kyushu/

https://www.jreast.co.jp/shiki-shima/en/
Unless you are born disabled, you’d better be born in a society that values hard work. At least until we reach self sustaining societies where no one needs to work, the dynamics of which are not worth speculation from our current standpoint in history.
That didn't really work out.
My California Ballot 2022
Reminds me of he typical corporate take-over locusts.

1. Take over.
2. Layoffs.
3. Profits go up short term.
4. Then you notice all of the folks missing. Productivity drops.
5. Revenue drops, followed by dropping profits.
6. Folks move on to the next take over.

Difference, crucially, here is that Musk actually owns the shop, so we'll see if it is different with Twitter.
How many people are actually involved in fixing Twitter's infrastucture? Must be in the hundreds. Maybe a thousand with their own data centers.
There’s technique, equipment and essence. You seem to favor the essence, the process and final output in a practical or esthetic sense. I am like you as well. But even that last part can suffer the same divide where an interminable theoretical discussion can be had around it. I think in the end we gravitate towards what we’re good at and what ticks our minds. Luckily there is a variety of minds and modes of thinking
This is a serious limitation. You used to be able to point up to 99 email addresses, from any domain you wanted, to your outlook.com account. It removes the value from this service.
Twitter spent more than a billion dollars on R&D in 2021, which more than eclipsed its net loss.
> He clearly solved much harder problems than short-form blog posting

Right but that isn't the problem here, Twitter already solved that. What they haven't been able to do is make a short-form blog posting service that's profitable. Everything Musk has announced so far suggests he doesn't really understand how to change that.
Purpose in life often comes with a price.
> I believe
There’s an underlying fact that the committee of people didn’t care about Twitter as a company right? That if you believe in your company and the welfare of your workers, and you believe Elon is a threat to them and your vision of whatever modern communication Twitter serves, then you wouldn’t sell it to him.

But they did right? As in the group lacks conviction.

There was not a single stipulation in that sale that said “please keep our people on for X amount of time”.

They took the cash and bounced.
I thought it was $8/month and thought that was way too low.
When's the court date? Docket number?
"All models are wrong. Some are useful"
-George E. P. Box
> ...the camera is the LEAST important part of photography.

Having used a view camera, which really is nothing more than a flexible box, this sentiment resonates with me. But, I can see how different types of camera support types of picture-taking that wouldn't be possible otherwise.
Financial Engineering.
A big loss for Twitter, Manu will definitely be fine.

Manu is exactly the kind of engineer Musk should want to retain. He's very product focused and a hard worker. Not surprised to hear that he was volunteering for the long hours and sleeping at the office. Of course he is very expressive but he's also extremely reasonable.

Looking forward to seeing where Manu ends up going next.
There are plenty of highly paid dev jobs in the US too, it’s just that the market isn’t river-of-lava-on-the-sun hot like it has been the last 10+ years.
If I were at 5-10 years experience, I'd probably have much better luck. That seems to be the sweet spot.
Iranian women must be armed with the best weaponry available. Support Iranian women by programing the next generation suicide drone in Rust today!
Varies by company. My company recently went from public to private and they mostly told everyone getting RSUs to pound sand. No adjustment to salary to compensate for the change.

I'd be out the door already except the day they announced that, my director called me and gave me an RSU equivalent that was even bigger. Apparently they don't want to lose me yet. We'll certainly lose some developers though, and I don't blame them. Eventually I'll be one of them.
This is extremely bad advice. Do not do this.
LISA made LISA obsolete
> First Windows+WSL becomes the ideal dev environment, then Linux apps run natively without WSL, and then... why run a Linux kernel?

I think it's more like, "Why run a NT Kernel?" or from an MS internal perspective, "Why fund development and testing of an NT Kernel? We already made it so all legacy Windows apps run natively on Linux anyways"
This wasn't a free feature right? It was something people were paying for with 365Whatver packages? Why would they get rid of it?

Article gives little/no insight.
Sounds great, but who pays for it? The purchase of Twitter was done via loans and now, interest rates are not zero. Musk will have to service considerable debt to keep Twitter alive.

If he can pull this off, he'll go down in history as one of the must successful business person of his generation. If he fails, he will still has Paypal, SpaceX and Tesla to brag about.