skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I couldn't disagree with this article more. The main point is that tech, despite being generally over hiring and having a valuation bubble burst, is going through layoffs just because "everyone is doing it."

There are two, more obvious, reasons for layoffs.

1) The valuation bubble bursting is a big factor. Both high valuations and hiring decisions were made with a certain amount of growth in mind. Now that it's clear that the old level of growth is unrealistic going forward, valuations are coming down to reflect that, as is employee head count. Additionally, employees hired at the sky-high valuations are going to be disgruntled unless they're "made whole". Easier to just let most of them go and top-off the ones you want to keep.

2) There are two types of tech companies. The first is a company like Google, where their tech enables a step-function increase in human productivity. Google Search gave people a super power they never had before. This type of company is extremely valuable as they can capture the value of the productivity they unlock. The second type of tech company is something like WeWork. This type of tech company is essentially a digital version of something that existed previously. These companies can gain traction due to the convenience factor unlocked by the digital transformation, but there isn't much extra value to capture. When interest rates were 0, VCs and the market as a whole were valuing these companies the same as true tech companies. Now that investors are more discerning with their money, the valuations of such companies are popping. The valuations are lower because the true value of the company is low. If you have a low value company, you don't need thousands of employees all earning 6+ figures to run it.
Gas clothes dryers are probably the only other one that people have a strong preference for. And yes, I think that is the intention.
Hmm, economy not a factor at all as with the dot com crash in layoffs...??? Sounds a bit too academic and disconnected from the actual cause of the layoffs.
I work remotely, but unfortunately my SO is in-office with the commercial real-estate industry.

We looked at a small town in AZ (~40,000 people, iirc) that was beautiful and affordable, but unfortunately it didn't seem like she'd have many job opportunities in that area unless she's able to get a remote role or she wanted to drive to Phoenix or Flagstaff every day.
Typically it goes like this:

1. You found one case where complexity is essential.

2. That one case is not consistent with the rest of your app, and you were taught that inconsistency is bad.

3. Since you can't remove complexity from that case, for the sake of consistency you add complexity to all other cases.

Class-based views is a typical example. You found a place where CBVs are useful. Now some parts of your app use functions, some use classes, that's inconsistent. Edit your style guide to enforce CBV everywhere. Now a simple healthcheck endpoint that returns "OK" has to be a class.

As some folks used to say, you can write Java in any language.

The right approach, of course, is to say "I'd rather have inconsistency than complexity". The challenge is that perception of complexity is subjective, but inconsistency is objective. So the right approach eventually loses, and every organization turns into a bureaucratic hell.
I had taken Paxil for the past decade and stopped late last summer. It had some effects I enjoyed, but it also had so many bad side effects that frankly the doctor that prescribed it to me never even mentioned. Lower libido, lower testosterone, weight gain, sometimes making me more apt to make a rash choice etc. It was also literal hell to taper off of, and I don't say that lightly. Brain zaps, restless legs, insomnia, flu like symptoms, minor sexual disfunction etc. It took 2 months for RLS to go away with some help from some supplements like Ashwaganda and Magnesium. However now that I'm fully tapered, I still don't feel depressed, I've lost 10lbs and my testosterone and libido are starting to come back.

I like to think Paxil helped me in the past but I'm not entirely sure. My main problem is the lack of transparency upon it being prescribed. I don't think my instance is unusual.
If "Layoffs literally kill people, he said." then why are they just talking about the Tech Layoffs.

Interesting links to a report that has US Job cuts back to 1989:

https://omscgcinc.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/202...

https://www.challengergray.com/blog/the-challenger-report-jo...
Just speculating here, but I think Musk gutting Twitter staff was the catalyst. Layoffs were already happening, but Musk went to the extreme and it worked, at least from the outside looking in. A day after his initial layoffs is when Meta and Amazon both made the news for upcoming layoffs.
> as long as you don't rely on external dependencies too much. This happens in any ecosystem btw.

I can't think of many 'modern' projects in the web world that do not rely heavily on an often very large number of external dependencies.
I just don’t buy the argument of companies are doing it because other companies are doing it.

Overhiring issues + popped bubble valuations + tech recession = you’re doing layoffs because you’re greedy? Really? It doesn’t add up.
One in 58 Londoners revealed to be homeless, far higher than rest of UK
Oh yes this is the real issue... Do you really think they hired a bunch of C-teamers? Give it a break...
Looks great, but you should add an explanation about how it works. I’m hesitant to just run some command.
SDK：https://github.com/starfive-tech/VisionFive2

Docs: https://doc-en.rvspace.org/Doc_Center/visionfive_2.html
Where is the statistical problem if I may ask?
You can twist it however you want but we do have excess death that the very same "authorities" who provides the statistics do not know what causes it.

What is your explanation for why they publish data all over the world that indicates that people die at higher rates than expected but not due to COVID? Because that is what the data shows. Is the data just bad? Then its not willful misinterpretation but just bad data interpreted correctly.
Why do you think there'll be an AI winter? And in what form — stagnation of neural-network based technologies, a change in the overall paradigm of learning-from-data, or something else altogether?
> "Reuse serializers as little as possible" is the single best piece of advice when using DRF. The inline InputSerializer thing is brilliant.

Can you expand on this? What is the InputSerializer as opposed to custom rest serializers?
That's what I really miss to conclude if I should try it myself or not.
These things go in cycles. Remember all the layoffs during the tech bubble burst in the early 2000s? Then another round of layoffs around 2008. The another round around 2015. Now, here we are again in 2022. Boom and bust. Over and over and over again.
I don't think you can compare metrics of Linux servers against Windows Servers AND Desktops.

At least on Windows Desktops I'd say most of security incidents today are initiated by the end-user in front of that Desktop, which creates an entirely different attack-surface than a unattended server maintained by someone working almost always in the field of IT.
You should also check out NewPipe Sponsorblock.
Every single time we do this, it's held up by the rest of the world as evidence of the US being a bloodthirsty colonial power.

Another comment said "Haiti refuses to hold themselves to any standards" - I agree, knowing a lot of Haitian-Americans. _Those_ people are lovely, and their stories of what dealing with the government, cops, and local enterprise is horrible. Most do very well here and refuse to ever return. Haiti seems permanently fucked, some say it has to do with the history with France, some with the breakup of the farmland. I'm not sure, but I'm not sending my son to die for their corruption.
Yeah that's a really weird critique -- the linked article from November says they have sources telling them that Google was going to adjust their PIP so that 6% instead of 2% of people fall into the lowest category. Then in December, Google gave details of their new ranking system --- and 6% of employees will fall into the lowest ranking category (https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/22/google-tells-employees-highe...). I guess you could argue they didn't "announce layoffs" like the others, but when you start shuffling tens of thousands of employees into a PIP, is the result not the same?
That's 4,000 £s for a single burner.
This is just what large public companies do. The pattern at the last company I worked at (100k+ employees) was to perform layoffs and a hiring freeze every fall and winter after assuring everyone that there wouldn't be a layoff early in the year. Then they'd hire a bunch of people in the first couple of quarters. It is so obviously done to make financial numbers better for the end of the year.
TIL that NOTAM now stands for "Notice to Air Missions."

Back when I was flying it was "Notice to Airmen." Wondered when they would get around to fixing that. Guess they finally did.
Interestingly, open source has some change management processes that deal with orders of magnitude more people and pieces of software than you will find on a corporation, and mostly only imposes infrastructure policies when that's the development's goal.

It tends to fail less often than corporations too. And my impression is that it's more efficient for developer time.
I wish they fired me.
Nous vous apportons les meilleurs livres sur la gamification et les sujets de gamification. N'attendez plus, apprenez des experts de la gamification comment ils ont révolutionné leur business en utilisant les éléments subtils du jeu vidéo en entreprise ou en formation.
So you think it is okay for a single npm install to fork a process and continuously query the clipboard and without any sort of notice just upload it to some random server? Or, even just log every single keystroke you press? Hell, it can even take screenshots of everything.

Afaik macOS doesn’t allow clipboard access in that naive way and you do get access in wayland, it is just not this “uncontrolled”.
This is coming from a "Stanford scholar", yikes.

What explains why so many companies are laying large numbers of their workforce off? The answer is simple: copycat behavior, according to Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business

Since the answer is so simple I stopped reading the article. Obviously companies should not care about the their stock dropping massively in the last year, rates going up and consumer spending reducing. The layoffs is just copycat behavior.
/s

Man, this guy must have predicted 50 of the last 2 recessions.

Edit: This is such a bad take I would expect to read it on r/investing in a most downvoted comment. A "scholar" should know rarely things are black and white. There isn't a simple to answer to literally anything in macroeconomics, or just in life in general really.
The contexts are boundaries, places where you use process machinery and might call other subsystems, or services, but they’re not the application’s public API. You might want to check Bruce Tate’s book “ Designing Elixir Systems with OTP”.
The Author/Poster's blog is included in Planet Lisp [1].

[1] http://planet.lisp.org/
"social contagion" is not the cause of tech layoffs. The cause is depressed valuations, and investors focusing investments away from tech (impacting private and public companies alike).

When more cash is readily available, companies spend more freely. When it's less available, companies tighten spending. The "social contagion" here is a basic understanding of finance.
Can you give an example of a compiler bug you've run into? I feel like they are very rare for most use cases, these days.
My hunch is that the author of the article wouldn't like these shortcuts either :)
Ask HN: Is there a life out of closures?
> I would imagine no gang in Haiti wants to (or is even capable of) a ground war with the US Army, so the "intervention" would be 90% aid and 10% a show of power.

The mechanics and operations of a ground war against a civillian population are terrible.

"surely the US will dominate because we have tanks and missiles and nuclear bombs!"

The net situation seems to me to be that you're fighting in civillian-dense areas against a group which is difficult to distinguish from civillians meaning your operations and people are absurdly constrained while theirs are very open and free.

Every mistake you make (and you're going to make mistakes) compounds to make people hate the invaders more (regardless of how altruistic the mission may be) and pushes more people to their side.

Every loss you incur on your side erodes your political support back home and hardens your troops against the population (those bastards killed kenny).

It's an incredibly vicious cycle which seems unwinnable.

Did we forget the lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan so soon?
This is double-great advice. It's completely obvious once mentioned but not something that may have occurred of the top of ones head. Thank-you for posting.
That these taxes are changed does not change the fact that they, and others, existed (for many decades) and exist and will continue to be imposed. The electricity market is not a "free market", it is a controlled market and as such it would not be "meddling with the free market" to change the control to remove some of the negative effects of such. The marginal pricing mechanism is a prime example of something in need of change.
The difference is much more pronounced at lower resolutions. 4K60 is not handled efficiently by any hardware.
Yes but if you are management and you have been wanting to make changes and cut the fat, it was previously difficult to do layoffs without extensive negative coverage. Now you can do it and fly under the radar so it may be opportunistic in nature.
Not sure how you got that from what they wrote. They said their psychologist suspected ADHD based on their symptoms and then prescribed medication for it.
So everything is totally fine? I guess things in SF must be better than Seattle.
Oh that makes sense. I use an iron comal so didn't think about clay ones (nor the direct-burner method since I only do that when I am too lazy to wait for the comal (which I usually call plancha) to heat up).
Companies were having a hard time hiring and keeping talent. Many got retention bonuses.

Something had to be done.

One year later, the situation is the opposite: employees are “lucky” to have a job.

The economy is working well. For the people who run it.
The C is of course a pirate's favorite language. It might end up with "water" and "land" types in the standard some day. So `bool iswater()` and `bool island()` functions might be needed! You might need to check if the island structure you got is really land, so `island(&possible_island)` would obviously help and not cause any confusion to readers of the code.
>We can't really just disable it willy-nilly.

Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.
I did a joint major in math and computer science for undergrad so I missed out on a lot of subjects like computer architecture, operating systems, and compilers.

This looks like the perfect depth for me to get up to speed at a relaxed pace over a few months: simpler than a textbook but more robust and instructive than blog posts, Wikipedia etc.

A few cents:

- not sure if it's already nestled in some chapters, but cryptography is the most important missing topic imo

- if there ends up being a print copy I would happily purchase it

- the name makes it hard to find: a google search for "computer science book" doesn't have a first page result
Crons are fine for running Django commands that are just talking to the same services as your web views (databases, cache, email services etc). It should be fine to let them run in their dedicated VM/containers, using Ansible etc to keep the crontab configurations in the repo.

Celerybeat has the advantage of better visibility e.g. you can configure them in the Django admin and check when they are running. If you are not using Celery though and your needs are simple, it's easier to just use plain crons.
> I'd say the right answer is that you shouldn't evaluate it with any certainty, just file it away as something that might be true.

I suppose that’s fair. Although this is in some ways already the default position.
Also most chains make it policy that staff can’t intervene. There was a viral story some years back where a woman working loss-prevention at Best Buy prevented a thief from getting out of the store with stolen goods only to be fired. There was a more recent video where nearly the whole sales floor at a Best Buy banded together to stop snatch-and-grab thieves. The Internet loved it, but it was expected they’d all eventually get fired as well.
Could anybody clarify for me the purpose of the NOP opcode that the article refers to? I would think that something like a "do nothing" instruction would want to be optimized away as much as possible, but maybe there's some hidden facet of the instruction protocol I'm not familiar with that necessitates it?
You're not allowed to have a share DB with microservice architecture. Every microservice is completely self contained...

The architecture of my organization was created by ardent microservice advocates, that took the definition of a microservice and treated it like a bible. Based on the conversations I had here, there are still people that treat microservices as sacrosanct.

The more I work with microservices, the more I'm convinced that microservice first architecture is garbage.

The copying of the data is the solution to data access latency.
But he's replying to an article that says "don't use microservices, use independently deployable modules". Your comment has more depth than the article itself.
Sounds like lack of knowledge and experience to start glueing random stuff to make things over complicated.
I wrote a library for creating basic HTTP-RPC servers in Go
Of course it's not complete. Everyone here understands that, except the person making these ludicrous "points".
Closures are not a required functionality in a language. I'm experimenting a homemade language, lambdatalk, http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/ , in which lambdas don't create closures but accept partial application. For instance this is how the set [cons, car, cdr] could be defined in SCHEME:

(def cons (lambda (x y) (lambda (m) (m x y))))
(def car (lambda (z) (z (lambda (x y) x))))
(def cdr (lambda (z) (z (lambda (x y) y))))

(car (cons 12 34)) -> 12
(cdr (cons 12 34)) -> 34

and in lambdatalk:

{def cons {lambda {:x :y :m} {:m :x :y}}}
{def car {lambda {:z} {:z {lambda {:x :y} :x}}}}
{def cdr {lambda {:z} {:z {lambda {:x :y} :y}}}}

{car {cons 12 34}} -> 12
{cdr {cons 12 34}} -> 34

In SCHEME the outer lambda saves x and y in a closure the inner lambda can access given m. In lambdatalk the lambda saves :x and :y and returns a new lambda waiting for :m. So, even if closure (and lexical scope) are usefull functionalities, there are not a necessity. Without any free variables, out of any lexical scope, functions are true black boxes without any side effect, in a total independance, following a true functional paradigm. Don't you think so?
Good point. It opens a SSH tunnel from Pinggy server to your localhost, such that the pinggy server can connect to only the port of your localhost that you specify in the command. The ssh port forwarding command is a standard one and your ssh client ensures that the access is restricted to the port you are specifically exposing.

In other words, you are trusting your own system and your ssh client installation for security, which is more trustworthy than a random executable app downloaded from the internet.

We will include an explanation in the next version of our landing page. Appreciate your feedback!
Apple Business Connect
Not sure I buy this thesis of layoffs just as imitation behavior. There's been a pretty incredible increase in headcount at many tech companies over the last three years.

Facebook in 2019 had 44k employees, 71k in 2022. Google went from 118k to 160k over the same timespan, and I don't really see for what reason. If anything I'd say the agressive hiring was the herd behavior, the layoffs seem more like a justified course correction. Tech companies are always crazy paranoid about slurping up talent, I don't think they're too keen on paying severance for people they just hired.
It's looks amazing, congratulations!

I'd love to see the source code. Assuming this is not OSS, I wonder what's a good example of a code base, ideally one that is hackable and could be used for educational purposes?
Jevon's paradox of data and AI. The more efficiently data is used, the more demand their is for data.
I might be really naive and I don’t know a lot about finance. But the fed has said unemployment is too high and their goal it to raise it by 1 percent. Does it just work like that scene in Fifth Element where some important person in the government calls some CEO and says “hey, please do a round of lay offs?”
but the end of the year for all of these companies was October, the end of the fiscal year. Yet companies are still doing it as we head into Q2 of 2023.
This is dope as heck. I used to contribute to the common lisp SDL2 bindings. Great to see a polished game on Steam written in Common Lisp!

Recently saw one in Haskell too. And there have been several in Javascript over the years.

Did you find you had to manually manage the GC? Did you take advantage of CLOS?
Google Search gave people a super power they never had before.

There were lots of search engines before Google. By many metrics they were better than what Google is today. They certainly showed fewer ads.
TBH, his definition of "module" brings it awfully close to microservice.
IMO the folks at the All In podcast nailed this - at work so I don't have time to find the exact clip but basically their synopsis went like this:

When money was cheap to borrow, borrowing against stock and increasing headcount was seen as a metric that could pump stock price. Hence, hire as much as possible (especially engineers since they drive the most value at many of these huge tech orgs). Problem is, money is no longer cheap to borrow and real revenue is king now - having excess headcount that isn't resulting in clear value (something these companies are exceedingly good at measuring) means layoffs to reach the prior equilibrium of "real revenue" generated per engineer.
When did this guy actually worked in the tech industry again?
For folks who work in virtual worlds (AKA computing), outdoor work is an ideal way to recharge your batteries. Not only is the physical exercise a win, but strong sunlight lifts your mood, even when it's cloudy (and especially if you have Seasonal Affective Disorder). It helps me, anyway. The more physical the work (shoveling snow, splitting logs), the better.
What’s the fastest way to grok this paper with an undergraduate-level understanding of deep learning? What is the go-to resource for reinforcement learning today? The field is quickly changing.
A lot of this occurred in 2008 as well. Many of those jobs simply never came back, even after the economy recovered.
SMB signing is only on by default for servers. I've done quite a few pentests where that's been leveraged to dump the SAM hashes of workstations that happen to have the Domain admin stored.
There are a lot of laws and regulations about electrical installations.

In many regions, doing it legally requires lots of courses and certificates. When you have invested all the time and money into getting said certificates, which is sometimes multiple years full time, you typically want to become a full time electrician to pay back the time+money investment.

That means that 'I just do electrics on the side' is becoming a thing of the past - at least in places with strict certification requirements.