skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My experience -- having been near the top of organizations with standard politics -- is that one of the goals of every executive is to maximize headcount. For example, if I am managing 100 people, I am far better off than if I am managing 10 people, doing the exact same thing. I will be able to step into better, higher-paying roles if I have experience managing large headcount. My salary will be higher, and I'll have more status in my current organization too.

Most problems are better-solved by small teams, but that's usually not how incentives align.

Above some level in the corporate ladder, executives understand these games and play them completely cynically. It's easy to become a manager without this. You don't get to be in the C-suite at 10,000 person firm without playing these games near-optimally.

Note that this is not the only part of the corporate ladder game. Other parts may keep this (somewhat) in check, so you usually don't have completely pointless 5,000 person divisions your local supermarket branch.

They do less well for keeping this in check at monopoly-profit firms like Meta. In monopoly-driven firms, it's really easy to start politically-popular pointless units (I suspect, in this case, a skunkswork, forward-thinking division engaged in something with no real corporate value, so long as it aligns well with a buzzwordy-topic like AI/DEI/VR/etc.).
They do a lot!

Most employees aren’t technical. Lots of HR, Accountants, sales, recruiters, etc.

Maybe 1/2 of people are in tech-ish roles, across 5 major orgs, that’s maybe 8k per major org.

Maybe half of those are coding (not management, PMs, etc). Half of those are non-support/infra. Maybe half of those are doing development work just to deal with tech debt.

Take FB itself, that’s maybe 10 major products - so something like “News Feed” might have 100 eng headcount (10-20 teams) doing anything at all new on that product.

That feels like a reasonable number to me, but idk.
It's evidently clear now, his "correct decision from a business point of view" to increase investments during Covid was wrong as they resulted in these 11,000 people being let go. I think the same could be said for the increased investment in metaverse, which I imagine is predicated on the prior large growth of people moving online during Covid, which is now returning to the mean.

I think their share price has taken strong corrections due to these decisions. I think that's an incentive for a board to take action?

(I'm purposefully ignoring the ouroborus that is Zuck's control of voting shares that protects him here.)
This is the slow demise of Facebook, if their pivot to AR/VR/Metaverse fails to catch on things will go sideways fast.
he's taken a major hit to his personal wealth as a consequence of this bad decision, so I'd say the consequences are pretty real for him
You are right. And I tried to link to as many relevant previous articles in my article here. Still, I think it is good to keep sharing this. If only because writing a blog-post allows me to organize my thoughts on this ;)

WRT the twitter story: correct. But that conflates Rails with Ruby and it uses a case that is quite exceptional.

Ruby is only a part of why Rails is slow. Rails is mostly slow because of the heavy and poorly optimized reliance on the database (as I argue in the article) and because of it's immensly complicated layering and dataflow. A single DateTime from a database might pass through some thousands of classes and methods before being send off in a body of HTML. Ruby is a problem here, because tousands of times "something rather slow" makes it very slow. But the "thousands of layers" really is a problem in itself. Without rails it could easily be less than hundred and you'll still have a neat architecture and layering and stuff.

The other thing is that no-one except twitter (and maybe three, four other companies) are operating on that kind of scale. At such scale, entirely different metrics start to matter than what we usually encounter on a typical 2000 MAU SAAS product.
I read (an estimate?) somewhere that google has been doing this by not renewing contractors and cutting hiring
Sure but these use cases are rare outliers, not something Apple is expected to design their filesystems around.
Facebook owner Meta to lay off 11,000 staff: statement
Singapore Hunts for Global ‘Rainmakers’ with New Expat Visa
These numbers are just the start of the avalanche... There have been a lot of pie-in-the-sky initiatives, especially as the result of the massive cash infusions during Covid.

Now all that easy money is going away.

The current numbers don't mean much, but they're just the start.
I think many modern applications aren't attempting the "long running, hot reload" model - they use a more conventional approach.

One thing that Elixir does well is handling faults - the relevant chunk of code 'crashes', and then restarts. The restart process does the appropriate recovery of any state. This turns all fault handling into a single code path (the startup path).

This approach also fits with the stateless style - the application should already be designed to start up properly and set up its state from scratch. Yes, in practice you design your application differently for a stateless deploy model, but Elixir helps you a lot in this model just as it does in the other one.
How would Meta win in the cloud business though?
Too bad Rust doesn't have union types (aka adhoc / anonymous unions) yet.

Without them, using typed errors is very clumsy. Optimally, you would write the following code:

fn foo(r1: Result<i32, Error1>, r: Result<i32, Error2>) {
let i1 = r1?;
let i2 = r2?;
// ...
}

and Rust would infer the return type to be Result<String, Error1 | Error2>
without having to do any extra definitions or conversions.
Losing three quarters of his net worth?
Let me shed a tear for these massively overpaid engineers who will now have to make only measly 2-3x of the average wage
It would be truly horrible if someone in the "life's achievement" position of Zuckerberg would layoff with communication similar to what as a hostile takeover daredevil would do, and it would be truly pretentious if a hostile takeover daredevil like Musk would layoff with communication mimicking that of a "life's achievement" builder. Both are avoiding the worst options.
Probably same PR company or law firm
Google has also been blocking access to a lot (read: more than 1) of Yunohost selfhosted servers lately: https://forum.yunohost.org/t/google-flags-my-sites-as-danger...

My server hosted at home got flagged. After 2 weeks of submitting appeals every 3-4 days it was finally reviewed and the flag was removed.

How did we let megacorps have so much control over who can access our websites?!
I found Alien Isolation elicited this feeling in me too. I suppose Metroid copied many motifs from sci-fi movies over the years.
Indeed - having spoken to these reviewers as well they seem to have fairly minimal day-to-day involvement with the company themselves.
Y'all. It's not eng being laid off. Or, at least, only marginally.

This letter says mainly recruiting and biz depts.
I wanted a good and sturdy metal frame, so I bought it from Titan.
Corporations are like schools of fishes. They all swim in one direction until suddenly they swim in a different direction.

So rationally - no. Practically, in terms of social signalling - very probably.

Many c-suites will use this as an excuse to offer lower salaries. Even though the numbers are tiny in absolute terms, there will be chilling effect across tech in general, especially in the usual hot-spots - Bay Area, Seattle, maybe London, etc.

I'm not sure I'd expect a Tech Recession yet, but there are omens of a much wider recession which may well include tech.
LT ANNOUNCEMENT - ARIF PATEL PRESTON DUBAI - Congratulations to Arif Patel and EP Properties for Acquiring Blackburn Innovation Center and Fusion House at Evolution Park.
Using certificates for SSH authentication
You really think he penned this? This is a PR release made by a team of people that he put his name to.
Yawn. That's one of the most overused tropes in fiction. It'd be much more surprising and inventive to do a story where they do come together and work hard only to fail due to running up against the laws of physics. The audience might actually learn something from it and you could play out the stories of the characters as they grapple with their inability to save the Earth or delude themselves into thinking they still have a chance. If you want to send a message it would be more productive to harp on the fact that better astronomical programs may have spotted the danger sooner and allowed for other solutions.

I'd prefer a happier ending though with a bit more of a sci-fi spin. Narratives where everybody dies in the end were gimmicky to begin with and are just becoming tired and depressing now.
Ask HN: If you were in Musk's position, how would you improve Twitter instead?
Suppose you've bought Twitter for $44B; what would you do to make it better for its users while making sure it's profitable for sustainability?
Rational discussion, please.
Will the remaining staff use "Mark as safe" feature?
/s
Anonymous sum types are something I want for error handling as well. In practice though I'm not sure it would really make my life that much better.
If you look at his net worth, which is likely to be mostly on paper, it has suffered a lot. I know its a "cry me a river", "worlds smallest violin" type of thing but for someone at his level that is the material impact. I would imagine someone with empathy will feel horrible about having to do this to 11,000 people's livelihoods. I'm not implying Zuck has or doesn't have empathy, I don't know him. I'm just saying this likely has an impact. It might also have a business impact on future hiring, forecasting, etc. for the company as well. Maybe the pace of funding in the VR BigBet gets pulled back some? We'll know in a couple quarters.
Or you can: 1) Lower TTL before maintenance 2) change records 3) when all is good, increase TTL.
The question is asking about multiple apps coordinating.

Wouldn’t this require a central database and an API for querying/updating time spent in an app per ID? Where is that API?
Which is about how many people Google itself hired over the course of the Pandemic, for context.

So it's not the end of the world. It really is a pretty minor set back so far.
The beauty of a hobby is that nobody has the leverage to make you compromise, or perform when you don't want to.
If you think 85,000 if a lot (it is), Amazon employs a whopping 1.6m.

> In 2021, the American multinational e-commerce company, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, employed 1,608,000 full- and part-time employees.[1]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-...
They're still workers, don't be silly.
This is unexpected. Elixir should just pick whatever Erlang is on the path.

This may be a bit too much, but maybe try removing all Erlang and Elixir versions and just picking the latest for both?

If you are on WSL, then `asdf` or similar can do the trick.
Not OP, but this is fastest tutorial for getting dreambooth up and running in automatic1111 I’ve found:

https://youtu.be/_GmGnMO8aGs
Ownership is an interpretation of the blockchain and therefore still requires someone to interpret it. I'm not sure what you're thinking about domain ownership (I'm open if you can explain), but my sense is that contracts of ownership arent suitable for blockchains -- nor indeed, for any presently imaginable computable system.

Rights are fundamentally modal, ie., "what ifs". The exercise of a right changes depending on context, and that context includes how a given society inteprets its meaning at any given time. Hence lawyers, judges, etc.

Algorithms are fundamentally non-modal constructs, ie., "always if". And whilst "perhaps" (but probably not) reality can be described by an algorithm, it isnt any that is "always if" at the level of social phenomena.

Ie., maybe atoms are simply deterministic, but their aggregates (eg., people) are not. And so it is unlikey any finite computable representation of social life will ever, eg., account for "a change of taste in the law".

Blockchains are distributed immutable logs which impose massive computation costs on appending to them. They're a niche technology that, does actually, model money. That's about the best use-case as a model for money.

But they're terrible at implementing money. Beaten by a simple piece of paper at every turn.
He used pretty standard pieces of gear, (Kroger MS-20, DX7) the difference is the obsessive amount of time he spent making music, and what he managed to get out of that gear. Weird, detuned moans, crazy skittering beats, all kinds of odd filter modulation and crazy stuff, and it all works well together.

Then he bought himself a Mac and made the Richard D James album, that was 1996(!)
>Tip our wait staff for not spitting in our food?

I know people that worked in the industry and mention up-front they are good tippers to the servers ... just in case!
The Data-Informed Manifesto
Or they'll start their own companies. Not a bad time to do it.
Facebook-owner Meta to cut 13% of its workforce
> What definitely has changed is the ubiquity of “microagressions”.)

Sure. The term is "microaggression" is relatively newly popular. I'm probably also wrong in grouping Hofstadter's "pet peeve" as an example of "microaggression", rather than using a more encompassing term.

But bear in mind that it's being used in this linked-to essay to provoke a knee-jerk response to the term "microaggression", enhanced by using one of the mildest examples - "guy" - as the representative case.

It's so mild it's very hard for me to find any examples of people arguing that “guys” is a microaggression, in order see what those DEI instructors teach. One of the few (after looking at scores of Google and DDG hits) is https://www.clearpnt.com/3-key-trends-in-dei-training/ which says:

> When using scenarios, give examples that avoid words with negative connotations for specific groups, like “blind tests,” “powwow,” “and “guys.”

Thing is, "guys" when used poorly can have negative connotations. "Let the guys select what to do next" is likely read as gendered.

I'm accepting the author is correct in saying DEI instructors are making that argument.

But that acceptance also requires me to accept that the DEI trainers know what they are doing, until presented with evidence to the contrary.

For example, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-022-05203-0 gives these examples of microaggression: "highlighting gender by singling women out in a group of men (i.e., “Hey guys, and one gal”) or treating the women differently because of their gender (i.e., having an open office door policy for the women but not for the men)".

Those would surely be better examples in a DEI training course, yes?

> (Isn’t it funny that using “guys” in a gender-neutral way is a microagression and telling people not to use “guys” in a gender-neutral way is also a micro-agression?)

As an aside, this exchange has taught me that "aggression" has two g:s. And I still make that typo.

I don't think your description of 'is also a micro-aggression' fits the definition of 'microaggression.'

I just read the first 20 or so pages of Sue's "Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation" (2010) book at https://archive.org/details/microaggressions0000sued/page/24... and it characterizes microaggressions as "brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership".

Using “guys” in a gender-neutral way doesn't define a group membership.
It's a different discussion but I don't buy the "alternatives exists" argument. There are huge network effects. Some governments even make apps only for the duopoly. Banks also. Yes, sometimes you can use websites instead of apps, but it is not the same thing. Alternatives exist only in theory. Companies should not have absolute freedom if this means that the freedom of the consumer is restricted in any way.

"Alternatives exists" sounds a lot like this fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergo_decedo

The world isn't as simple as: there are companies and they can sell whatever they like, and there are consumers and they can buy whatever they like, because that would end very badly for the consumers.
So, loosen the connection? Isn't that what thousands of engineers are for? Didn't Amazon do this originally?

I'm not sure cloud is actually such a great thing for FB but if you're going to do it, that's an inevitable step, isn't it?
I suspect those are not employees and not counted in this at all.
Shopify announced staff layoffs in July 2022. The Shopify CEO expressed the same sentiment repeated later by Stripe and Facebook:

"...given what we saw, we placed another bet: We bet that the channel mix - the share of dollars that travel through ecommerce rather than physical retail - would permanently leap ahead by 5 or even 10 years."

"It’s now clear that bet didn’t pay off. What we see now is the mix reverting to roughly where pre-Covid data would have suggested it should be at this point."

https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team
Is it immediate or you still working notice?
There is junest that does all this nicely
This is just someone sharing their workflow. What makes you think this is an actual ad ?
Amazon’s infrastructure was also tightly integrated with its products. Despite the often repeated and very wrong myth that AWS was founded by Amazon selling its “excess capacity”, AWS was always created with a separate infrastructure that was purpose built to sell to other companies:

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...
What about the concept of a data center inside a data center? Given their infrastructure size and necessary geographical layout, it should be possible to have a number of IaaS racks stored inside their existing data center footprint.

If they have their own data centers (which I assume they do), this would make a lot of sense, kinda like a ghost kitchen — a virtual data center. That is, assuming they have the physical space to support something like this. It would be a way to diversify income with largely existing resources and vendor contracts.

Imagine even a slimmed down service like fly.io or Cloudflare workers running at FB data center scale.
See my edit, it works now thanks, I can now try dbg :)

(I do use asdf to install Elixir on MacOS and Raspberry though)
But those companies aren't looking to hire the 10,000+ developers that have been, or will be layed off in the coming year.
Speaking as a gold bug, while Web3 is bullshit - so are most other systems. Gold is absurd (shiny rocks are expensive? what are we, children?). The US dollar is absurd (we think this system is good, unlike every other fiat system that collapses due to irresponsible oversight? The US is already in print-like-crazy mode, the end is nigh). Every system of finance lurches on the verge of collapse at all times - there is a recession like clockwork every 10 years and a whole bunch of people go broke with similar regularity - turns out there are a lot of crooks.

So while web3 might be doomed, this crypto thing is not going to die a natural death. At this point, the evidence seems to favour a crypto-heavy future. It isn't inferior to gold in terms of having a niche. Much less likely to get confiscated too.
What did the process look like? Did you find out first from HR, from Zuck's memo, your manager, or was your laptop just remotely KO'd?
After a few years of seeing code build abominations, I am biased to believe that number may be plausible. Especially with automated testing frameworks dumping logs onto public areas of the web for the spiders to crawl.

I like data, but the hate in this place is unbelievable.

Have a great day, and happy computing my friend. =)
I deliberately startd my article with a few paragraphs showing that Ruby indeed is very slow.

> Let's be clear: ruby is slow. The garbage collector, JIT compiler, its highly dynamic nature, the ability to change the code runtime and so on, all add up to a sluggish language.

There's no argument there. The main point, however, is that in many cases (where Ruby is used) this hardly matters, because other stuff than Ruby is the bottleneck. The database being the most obvious culprit.
You would also be wrong.

Chemistry is very composable, if you are doing these experiments you are likely learning the theory and can quickly work out that variants exist, and enumerate those variants to find new things to test, expanding knowledge.

As for hazards: most of the hazards are very easy to detect or mitigate. Work at a small scale, wear PPE, etc.
Goodbye LinkedIn. A new era of hiring startups has arrived
What's new in C# 11: overview - https://pvs-studio.com/en/blog/posts/csharp/1002/
Hacker News London Meetup at Monzo (Nov 17, 2022)
For those who haven't seen this yet and live near, around or in London:

There's a meeting planned at Monzo for Hacker News readers to discuss science, tech, and business.

More info can be found on the Meetup page https://meetu.ps/e/Ltqdb/V6wJH/i

(I'm not an organiser, just know this is a great opportunity to meet a wide range of local experts and readers in-person)
But that wasn't the point, really?
It would make life a bit terser, but I’d rather have polymorphic variants. And maybe only anonymous enums over polymorphic variants.

That would make precise error handling on libraries quite a bit better.
Edit: The following is not investment advice. Please do your own research before investing in anything in this post, please!

Practically, right now? Yes. Theoretically, in the future? Who knows.

Personally, I have taken an interest in things like Consensus and Voting DApps on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. Solana in particular runs its DApps on Rust, and Ethereum can (potentially) too in the future once they create their new virtual machine.

So I think it is still too early to tell if Blockchain will become the revolution it is promised to be. I think some crypto (in ETH and SOL) can be kept as a diversification tool, but beyond that, I would not invest (for example) my whole net worth into anything Web3 currently.
No, nothing's changed. Spring still infects your whole codebase. Just look at the imports, or try to run your code via a different framework if you think I'm exaggerating.

Its proponents still make the same claims about it protecting you from coupling, not causing it.
Really? Amazon also has fulfillment centers, drivers, customer service representative and plenty of other “non blue badge” employees as does Apple (retail and customer support). The comparison is nowhere near being valid.
These anti-crypto articles by people who have made it their whole career to give anti-crypto talks are just as BS as the crypto scams. I've read many of the articles from her site, but I cannot take anyone seriously who can't give nuanced takes on an industry, be it social media, crypto, AI or whatever. Not everything is black and white, unless you are journalist that's hired to say it is.

I don't want to defend crypto because I also believe it's mostly scams, but saying that all of a ~$1T industry is a scam and absolutely useless just means that you're either ignorant or have political incentives.