skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> with seeming negligible external-facing impact on the core product.

Twitter is said to have lost $2.5 Billion/year in advertiser money, largely because Twitter's sales teams have not been returning emails from worried Advertisers. That's a pretty huge impact on Twitter's #1 revenue stream (estimated to be $5 Billion in 2021).

Twitter's core product is advertisements. Without sales staff to keep the advertisers, they're clearly losing a ton of money.

Advertising was always degenerating. I know that over the past year, I've been seeing more and more pornographic material in Twitter, and I'm pretty sure advertisers don't like that kind of stuff. But instead of having teams working out those kinks (pun intended), those teams have been simply fired.

So advertisers know that there's no hope for these issues to be fixed anymore, and are now leaving the platform. There's simply not enough developers left to change Twitter or combat the rise of unsavory material.

---------

There's been many a blogpost about "Airline advertiser didn't want to have its ads appear next to Airline disasters". (Ex: Southwest's shutdowns cause thousands of flight cancellations, it will be talked about on Twitter... does Southwest want its advertisements being shown next to that??).

These are the kinds of things that Twitter's teams worked to prevent. You know, mundane issues but require _constant_ coding to identify as news events cause a rapid change to the online discussion. And its fair: there's no reason why Southwest's advertisements should be shown in a negative light... or for Southwest to be paying for that kind of negative publicity.
Using employees as a profit buffer. Just another shitty way corporations work.

Somebody got a bonus for making this suggestion at Microsoft.
Yes, but it’s probably not a landline in the way most people think. Almost all those services use voip backends now with only the last mile being copper.
So republican politicians?
I used to do meetup and there were some groups i really enjoyed, and I did find some friends that i began spending time with outside the group. Aside from that, it seems like a lot of social activities marketed as being "for men" are based on exercising with other men and drinking alcohol with other men, which really limits people who aren't aware of less marketed activities.

I personally found a lot of enjoyment in swing and ballroom dance bc the level of exercise is less strenuous, there's more variety of people to talk to, there's generally no alcohol, and they typically have a structured intro time for beginners before an event.
We are starting to see this kind of work already, e.g. https://code-as-policies.github.io
Just a clarification: I did not create this, just sharing it ;-)
I added an edit to round down. Again, I used $250k as a loaded cost - benefits, stock options, IRA matching, etc. Someone on $125k year might still 'cost' an extra $40k, and ... the $250k was possibly on the high side - round down to... $200k, and the argument is now... $2b/year instead of $3b. And yeah, many of these folks may have a harder time finding an equivalent paying engagement (perhaps you'll have to move? hard on people with families, etc).
I work hard for myself not some employment ideal.
In the next few decades the biggest contributors to the issues you mentioned are going to be the billions of people in Africa and Asia who are rapidly developing themselves out of poverty. What do you think we should do about that?
Short 30s video showing it off: https://twitter.com/i/status/1615024724521746437
And by many accounts Oracle makes the fastest database yet everyone still uses Postgres.

Also our experience with truffleruby is death by a thousand subtle differences. It might be 97% compatible but chasing down that 3% undocumented behavior difference on every minor version update for every gem got exhausting fast. Everyone uses and tests against cruby.
Isn't it obvious? They don't need to fire those people.
Sure, this is an advantage that Typescript has, but it doesn't explain Ruby's lagging progress compared to Python and PHP.

Some of that can probably pinned on the greater dynamism of Ruby, making all manner of static analysis quite challenging.

But from what I've seen, it seems like the main reason is indifference or even mild hostility from the language maintainers. It looks a lot like they saw Sorbet taking off and slapped together a competing spec (without any associated tooling) that would ensure all type information stays outside of the `.rb` file.

It seems like the only impact it has had is to dissuade people who would like some static types from adopting it, in favor of this vaporware. Contrast this with Python's embrace gradual extension of mypy type hints.

I'd love to be proven wrong, that there are thriving projects building atop RBS. I'd still _prefer_ a system that allowed me to type a function signature so that anyone inspecting it could immediately know its shape, but at least the shadow types would be _something_.
Bloat is real, but there's another labor market dynamic in play here.

There was a huge run-up in corporate employee compensation in the tech sector over the last few years. (Some called it a "shortage," remember. Some of it is genuine growth in the sector, some of it was definitely "labor hoarding" by large companies that could afford to carry excess staff in a tight market as a hedge against being unable to fill critical roles - or to deny talent to competitors.)

While I would be surprised to learn of explicit collusion to suppress wages (unlike the _In re: High-Tech Employee Antitrust Litigation_ case,) collusion is not needed. The more tech employers lay people off, the more incentive there is for the next large tech employer to announce a layoff, and that's discoverable without collusion. In the aggregate, the benefit to flooding the market to reduce employee bargaining power offsets potential loss of critical talent, because it drives down the cost of acquiring new talent.

The "war for talent" quickly turns to the "war on talent."
The phrase "hard time teasing out" typically implies that the author doesn't know what to think amidst several options.
Thank you for proving my entire point.
Apple offers $970 in trade-in value for $52,199 Mac Pro
Just last week MSFT nixed the accrual PTO benefit employees enjoyed and opted for the rouse of 'unlimited' PTO. Effectively, ending a liability/cash outlay they would pay when folks quit, or get fired. I hope those who were affected today receive severance that makes up for them losing this benefit.

-James
> 50% of the ones who survived that were dead by 30

Not really, most people who survived childhood would easily live to 60/70
Income classification is defined by World Bank, not extrapolating from wikipedia. For 2022 WB adjusted high income to 12,695 from 12,535. PRC current gdp per capita is 12,556, and with released 2022 GDP of 3% (worst in a while), current per capita is 12,932 (read: high income). Unless World Bank readjust high income above that figure later this year, PRC is already high income.

https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/new-world-bank-country-...
> Normally, hiring 11,000 people you "didn't need" would be a warning sign that management was incompetent

Not really, Big Tech was in an 'arms' race the last decade where they felt if they did not hire people the competition would and they would be worse off in the long run. They all did this. Hence why everyone is trimming the fat as soon as the bubble showed an inkling of popping.

Everyone over hired, over paid, and didn't innovate with it enough to make up for the spending.

There are tons of people at these companies that can be let go.
I actually track things in my life. I have an inventory.yml that contains a list of all things in possession. I keep the value or price, a description, and the date when it came into possession. Sometimes also a reference to the manual and the invoice.

I like that because it makes me aware of how much stuff I own and what I really need (because it shows you items you would have forgotten).
Why should the US allow the CCP to have free rein over user's data when the CCP bans US Tech companies from operating in China for the same reason?
You make it sound as if alcohol was the only thing ever found in bottles.
Sometimes you can have an employee that just lacks motivation, and keeping them around while hoping to motivate them one day is cheaper/easier than finding a new hire, when hiring is super competitive.

MS may have less time/patience for these people right now.
> What's wrong with firing people during other economic conditions?

Layoffs have a huge psychological impact on the people who didn't get cut. If you do layoffs at a time when the economy is booming and jobs are easy to find, you risk losing your best performers who don't want to be at a company that fires friends of theirs.

It's easier to fire people when jobs are scarce and people are already spooked and disinclined to try to switch jobs.
I've continued to use twitter daily since the Elon takeover. If I wasn't in the loop about that I wouldn't have noticed anything.

I think early on I heard there was a 2FA outage? That was resolved fairly quickly.

The only issue is dumb changes, like the "no linking to other platforms" rule that was announced and then rolled back within the day, or adding view counts that add no value. But none of that is technical issues.
Sonic Pi is really neat, especially the work that has been done using Erlang in the playback scheduler.
Fortunately, I think "reality" in this context doesn't have the same meaning as "the physical universe".

I think the important goal is for as many people as possible to feel like the AI isn't being too biased against them, while still not crippling the AI too much.

I will leave the exact mathematical formula for that measure (along with the methods for gathering that input) for debate among researchers who know more about that than I do.
Call me ignorant but Twitter seems no different from what it was a year ago. There has been way more media attention and pearl clutching since Elon's takeover, but that hasn't translated to noticeable a difference in terms of usability and product.
Firing IC's at large corporations usually involves some sort of a individual coaching/PIP plan. This takes time for managers and HR to write and implement, takes N weeks of observation, and creates nervousness in coworkers who think they might be next.

Much easier to do a Thanos-style snap and get rid of X% all at once, with no pre-warning or reasons required besides "challenging economic conditions".
> reinforce the perception that Republicans have nothing but contempt for the American worker

Blue-collar workers without the option of working remote may perceive working for home differently than we do. Not saying it's close to correct. Just that the politics of this bill make sense.
I bought a Mudita Pure. I don't use it. I just wanted to support the creation of a dumb phone that aligned with my principles. Unfortunately for me, having a smart phone is essentially a requirement for both my work and my family. I am unwilling to give up either of these and therefore the smartphone is present.

In general, I agree with many commenters here. Separate devices with dedicated purposes tend to do a better job, and smartphones are designed to be both useful and addictive. As a result, I view the smartphone as a very dangerous tool. It can be used to great effectiveness, and it can become a blight on society.

When I was a child, I dreamed of a computer roughly the size of beeper that had no screen. Instead, I thought people would have a headset similar to Apple's wired earbuds with a microphone and we'd compute via voice with an internet connection to fetch data. Sadly, we're here 30 years later and there's still no sign of such a future. Amazon tried, Apple is trying, Google is trying, and no one is winning in that space. Apparently, it's both hard and unwanted. Today, I think my idea was naive, because such a device would likely play a minute thirty of ads before giving you the result of your query, and I would end up tossing the thing out the window of a moving car.
There is value in members of Congress spending a significant amount of time in their districts, among their constituents.

I'm not suggesting that they're all using that time effectively, but there exists a rational reason why they shouldn't work normal office hours in DC.
One of the worst parts of this bullshit is watching the shitty print media, who are just as toxic, jump on the bandwagon.
This is a ridiculous article. ChatGPT is not intelligence, it's just a language model. Just because it knows how to produce a statistically plausible response to textual input does not mean that the response is factually accurate. You can't "interview" ChatGPT and it cannot make an "explicit admission" because ChatGPT does not hold any beliefs, self awareness, or even a single thought, it only has weights and biases that correspond to the structure of the English language.
They're likely still up there.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Microsoft+vs+Apple+vs+G...

They're not the best best, but $919k/employee/year is impressive. Google is at $1.5M/employee. Apple is $2.4M/employee and Netflix is $2.7M/employee.

(and to the dead comment reply claiming $10M/employee for Musk companies)

Tesla: $158,613 https://csimarket.com/stocks/TSLA-Income-per-Employee.html

SpaceX: $210,526 https://www.zippia.com/space-exploration-technologies-career... (though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX would put it even lower)

Starlink: (I can't find any reliable 'how many employees'; crunchbase has it at "1-10")
At this stage companies forcing people work onsite are the ones that going extinct in the next decade. Hiring from global talent pool is a much better option. Of course the government just like with anything else goes for the worst option. Always, every single time.
> MSFT currently have $100b cash on hand.

Fwiw, unless cash on hand already accounts for it (I don't think it does), then $70B of that is tied up in the Activision acquisition. Thus we really only have $30B cash on hand, which in a higher than previous interest rate environment is probably not great (though afaict Apple has $48B). Likewise, our cash on hand has been drastically dwindling the last few years, making the $30B total seem a bit more precarious.

I have suspicions that the Activision acquisition is a huge part of the hiring freeze at Microsoft and the source of a lot of budget concerns and constraints. It's pretty frustrating watching all the freezes seemingly because of this one acquisition (as an employee without any inside knowledge about this).
Just because someone is paid for 40hrs doesn't mean they are actually doing 40hrs of work. We are both posting on HN during a weekday after all
It means more profit, even as the world undergoes "challenging times".

The execs must be doing a great job to have accomplished this. Let's give them some sort of bonus or promotion, when the time is right.
You are also forgetting these people arent sitting on their asses! On average they are at least making the company that much in revenue no? Being unable to deploy them to good use is truly a leadership incompetence!
I used to use Common Music[1], a Scheme music composition environment and loved it... but it seems the project died years ago.

I'd love to find another lightweight Scheme-based music programming language without any graphical dependencies.

[1] - https://ccrma.stanford.edu/courses/220b-winter-2006/cm/doc/c...
That's ... a pretty inflammatory and dismissive point of view.

There's lots of evidence going back to egyptian times supporting the science behind this. Unfortunately most people only see the surface level sound bites thrown out in the media and make up their mind based on that - or what their own religion has pushed forward.

I suspect that fifty years from now we will have built on all the existing knowledge (including historical) and have a more refined understanding put together.
Is that as cut and dry? Me living in a suburb is only "far away" if I have to commute somewhere far away daily.

But if I barely drive ever, and work entirely remote, is it so bad to live in a suburb? Genuinely wondering.
Well we are not discussing 2005 version of Ruby. Why limit C++ to that particular time?
an unceremonious end to Twitter's fraught relationship with developers, in spite of which some amazing companies sprouted.
Developing technology to improve audio quality would be useless, but improving the vinyl manufacturing process to reduce cost and increase capacity would be worthwhile, as it could expand adoption.
I think he's suggesting that they want to do periodic layoffs regardless but that there may be a more negative perception of doing so in isolation rather than the current situation of multiple other big tech companies doing it.
Interesting comparison. What part of TikTok giving data on US persons to a government that uses digital surveillance to intern political enemies and undesirable ethnicities resembles a panic rooted in a religiously motivated paranoia?

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/14/tech/tiktok-china-data/index....
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tiktok-employees-improperly-acc...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/15/documents...
I think the overall spirit of your argument is true, but I think you define brilliance too narrowly with saying it primarily applies to mathematicians.
Python have a 99% compatible jit implementation called PyPy and nobody much know about it. It was production ready since 5 years ago but ignored by mainstream. It is 400% faster than vanilla python on average and Guido and MS is working on for a few percent gain instead of promoting it or eventually making it default.
PyPy.org
Reality Winner is probably a better example since she is a US citizen.

How about ransomware gangs bricking hospital IT infrastructure? Seems like that is a much more common occurrence than the types of examples you are referring to. Hence the appropriate prior - absent evidence to the contrary - is that someone is doing heinous shit.
Like others say, his only source is ChatGPT...
Purportedly there's a human on the other end telling him the companies dirty secrets. And, you know, writing assembly code to solve differential calculus, planning road trips, writing meal plans, etc...
IMO, cheap capital meant companies could take "dumb" risks. Now that interest rates are going up, they need more plausible returns on investment.
Interesting. I thought "idiopathic" was the only medical term for "I don't know why."
I love the concept. I created and ran a PXE/netbooted full OS on ramdisk[1] for my old companies servers for years. We were in the high performance computing and storage space. Stateless machines have so many advantages over stateful.

That said, solving a trusted boot problem was not something I could tackle alone. I didn't have a sense for how much/little I could trust the machine/bios/firmware. None of the tooling I considered (hashing firmware/boot data/etc.) seemed secure without a whole additional infrastructure.

I'm thrilled to see this implemented though.

[1] modern version here: https://github.com/joelandman/nyble
We don’t do it expecting love in return - we get a paycheck every two weeks
May have to upgrade my MBP.

I have a Mac Mini M1 driving a 4k screen on my desk-facing wall. Exactly zero complaints! These M-series chips are really great.

I will probably replace the Mini with an M2 Ultra Studio, if one comes out soon, but I can't say I really need it.

(I highly recommend getting screens off desks and onto walls. Large 4K TVs are cheap. Less clutter, frees up desk space, easy to see & read from anywhere in the room, makes giving demos easy, and -< big bonus for me >- I don't need reading glasses to see it!)
Im not sure I follow your thought process. Are you suggesting these employees would make Microsoft more profit YoY than laying them off when they are deemed as a cost center vs profit center?
I thought Ars was better that that. Srug, oh well, time to write them off too.
What sort of system exists for these monster layoffs that they can just (relatively) quickly patch the hole left by removing 11,000 people? I can't comprehend what that looks like logistically.
Proof positive of the effects of authoritarian policies are often seen after the implementation. See: COPPA, Patriot Act, and various COVID policies.
Magnus Carlsen loses against Anish Giri
There is no source. It is nonsense.
What? When was oracle free or opensource?
I had seen someplace else that there's... $107b as of last quarter, but it was down 17% from year before same quarter, so yeah, it's draining some. But are they really putting $70b down in cash for Activision?
I would think the figure of public companies gone bankrupt to be much much higher over that long of a time frame.
What I took from it – and I think they might be on to something – is that it's opportunistic firing.

Firing people at this scale would have been pretty expensive just a few month back, PR wise. Right now, a lot less so. So you might be tempted to think of the current climate as a good opportunity to shed some fat, to the point where you go into it with the idea of hiring back right away and being able to do so at better conditions. The market has relaxed.

Compare it to a few month back, where switching jobs (= firing your employer) was a great way to automagically increase your pay. It works both ways.
Is this a war on talent, or just free market dynamics?
If I understand correctly Ubisoft even put the games I got refunded in their portal including progress for me conditional on me making an account. All other progress is lost. The Xbox days of caring about perfectly finishing games are long behind me.

I did think about the money and Google angle up front. I saw no reason Google could get away with no refunds under Dutch law. That might have been optimistic, but in the end might also have driven them to refunds. Same risk is in my eBook or audiobook collection.
Best explanation of Regex that I have ever seen
Vs Raptor Lake or Ryzen?
I've played with using it to interopt some python data science code with some C++ code efficiently without writing the project in Cython or using a tool like Pybind11. It worked pretty well in my test scenario, but I'm not sure how great of an idea that truly is.

Is the capn'n proto use case similar to something like ZeroMQ or NNG? I'm still not fully sure.
Corporate Americas' bloat has been the butt of many jokes for decades. Big tech is just as guilty. They still do want to keep high performers, which is usually why its not just a layoff announced, but a "re-organization", aka lets move all the high graded employees to other orgs and fire the lower graded ones
Android has had a "Find my device" feature forever, but it was only a personal thing where you tracked your own devices. Just last month, though, a Google Play Services update quietly turned Find My Device into a network that works more like Tile or Find My.

Does this coincidentally feed into the advertising network? And this is all available to law enforcement agencies just for the asking right?
A Package-Based Approach to Platform Building
I assume they mean by default, employees do not have access to the KMS key necessary to decrypt the sensitive data. (They mention using an individual KMS key per customer)

I suspect there must be a handful of SREs who, who could access it if they really wanted to - though that access would still be logged in cloudtrail.
I'm a Light Phone user, but I really like the look of your quietude script. It seems like a really flexible option.
I feel like this is a bit over-stated, but Taiwan does project a great deal of naval power into the surrounding waters.

Also, though this article reads a bit like HoI4 analysis. I think you need to more carefully consider all of the nations agency and motivation rather than consider them victory points to be won or lost.