skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there's a good reason for people moving to Rust, aside from the merits of each language, the tooling for using packages is just so much better in Rust.
I don’t have proof so you probably will dismiss me but I was saying privately back in March 2020 that we’d go back to normal in 18-24 months. This is just based on historical pandemics so it’s not like you have to be some kind of genius.
Ask HN: Why are big tech companies having mass layoffs?
Amazon, Google and Microsoft are clipping 10,000+ people each from their roster. Can someone explain why is this happening?
In the UK and I assume much of Europe, the registered keeper of the car gets the ticket, they have to identifty the driver. If they refuse to identify the driver then they get a separate punishment which is about the same as the speeding ticket.
But at the same time the ServiceCo's employees also understand that this is a two tiered system with them at the bottom.
> My dude, if you are among the lucky few who survive the initial filter of starvation, disease and mass violence following a nuclear conflict I wish you the best leading your band of raiders across the Great Plains or Central Valley feasting on the scraps of civilization and eventually dying of dysentery, typhus, scarlet fever or simple exposure.

That sounds like a fantasy over-"informed" by fiction. Might just as well be, that after that initial filter, most people just end up living in a village and farming like it's 1700.
They're taking me for a fool in that they say BS with a straight face, pretending that either they couldn't have foreseen or that I couldn't. If they'd phrase all this as "we surged in a hiring race to the bottom, with the intention of scaling back" that'd be the plain truth and no faked stupidity would be required.

Also it's beaten down that the purpose of companies is to make profits. Perhaps in some specific legal context or interpretation it might be, but the purpose of a company is mostly to do whatever the people in charge of it want it to do. A ton of companies' purpose is to principally do other things than just money. People running Apple and making phones like to make money & design beautiful consumer devices. People making rockets like mostly to go to space and hope they can also make some money. People running machine shops like to make moneys and they like to cut metal. People running industrial machinery like to make money and building CNC machines. People making cars like to make money and making cars. People running biotech companies like to advance life sciences and make money. And so on.
The implied lie that this is just an unfortunate and unforeseeable circumstance. The unwillingness to be transparent about it. That's the lie, and it's not speculation if I'm observing their own words.

I think your framing of this as a predictable cycle is deceptive. This isn't about regular crashes. This is about a temporary pandemic-driven situation. Yes, employees hired in the rush could have seen this coming. But it's unfair to assume 100% of them did. I don't think it's unfair to think it would be shockingly foolish for the entire tech leadership class to not have seen it coming.

All I'm saying is: Own it.

I'm not saying it was evil. I would probably have made similar decisions.

But I would have been more transparent about it. I would have hired people on contracts with the explicit understanding that this was surge hiring. That way no one would be surprised when the contracts weren't renewed. That would have been honest.
At-will employment being something specific to the US and not the world that exists outside of it...we don't all share the same view on employment (and employment rights for that matter) that the US does.
please - layoff with fat severance does not give them a license to spread misinformation
Is this meant to be an analogy for software production?

It seems like the crux is here:

You aren’t sure which ones you need or are obligated to continue

This is essentially saying leaders/managers don't know how to prioritize. What much of tech is doing right now is prioritizing by cutting back on the programs that aren't particularly successful. It's the same thing done in manufacturing.
I love the pipe operator in Elixir!
From my experience (as a team lead who had to do that a few times unfortunately):

First, each department is usually allocated a number of employees they should layoff (based on high management priority).

Then, each department has to decide how to allocate it internally (cut-off teams entirely, or layoff a number of employees per team).

Then it goes to mid level management and lower management which has to choose specific employees (based on a number of criterias but usually based on performance).
That was only for a few months
> The difference is that current Google is full of non-tech non-sales people who fight with eachother to reorganize tech people who are trying to build things.

Is this true? If so, how can a historically disruptive and innovtive tech company like Google make that kind of blatant mistake?
Because amongst similarly qualified candidates we are THEN allowed to differentiate. It's the same reason you may pursue extracurricular and then put them on your college resume. Differentiation.

Where's your crocodile tears for Vietnamese kid from south central (where the Vietnamese in America are on the lower end of the economic scale) who is admitted to Harvard instead of a Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or Indian kid from a well to do family? Lets segment Asian Americans and see how you feel.

When opportunity is equally earned, we can then look to representation. Your argument is just an attempt to claim all spoils.
I don’t really care if they’ll be fine for “months”. Months is not a lot of stability! Especially if you have dependents who need healthcare, or have a visa that requires you to find employment immediately or risk expulsion! Or just went into debt because everyone bought a new house with the low rates recently!

It shouldn’t be an individual family’s responsibility to plan for its massively growing, massively productive, massively profitable employer to treat them like a wrapper to be used and tossed in the trash when done.

It’s evil to treat being depended upon to provide a means of food, housing, healthcare, and continued residency as something that can just be shut off without warning, to no fault of the dependents.
Yeah, this is getting a bit fearpornish. Shunt it off to somewhere else at this point.
Reverse engineering the MacBook clamshell mode
Personally it's just being married to someone who's covid-cautious, has a busy job, along with having kids. It's difficult if not impossible to have a social life when all your efforts are dedicated towards work, chores and the kids (and your spouse won't budge on things that would simplify these pressures) There is no real party time, just responsibility and the occasional escape when the grandmothers can watch the little ones.
Spouse and I are mid thirties. We're both a smidge on the introvert side, but have a very healthy social circle. We love to host and generally are the household that brings people out. Others seldom do and when it happens, it's somewhat lackluster. If no one steps up to be host, relationships fall to the wayside and people increasingly feel like you do currently. Be the proactive one because these are few and far between in friend groups. It needs those few who organize and keep things moving; and keep getting people off their couches to get out and have fun. No one gets (too) drunk, no ones belligerent, no one stays to the early morning hours anymore, no one sleeps over, and everyone is just looking for an easy, good time. It's great.

Caveat: we're fortunate and have an open concept house that makes any party very easy to manage. I've noticed that a crammed home full of walls everywhere is a big social turn off. People often come to be stimulated by the atmosphere. Winter can be a slog, but it may be best to do it in a backyard if that's the case.

A hard thing to overcome is removing the fear of inviting people you've lost touch with over the years. This isn't to say where relationships ended poorly, but rather ones where time or a busy life eroded what once was. I saw a friend a couple weeks ago that I haven't seen for 4 years because I reached out and invited him to a poker night party and it was great to catch up. Our last text was in 2018 at that point.

My parents are mid sixties and despite myself feeling fulfilled socially, I don't hold a torch to them. They have huge gatherings constantly and always on the go. Always been that way, even through covid (to my known disapproval...). The parties I saw as a kid were eye opening. My parents own some land and at the end of the night when a lot of people left, they would have large bonfires that were still 3 circular rows deep of lawn chairs. So much chatter. Hearing about their life is exhausting in a positive way. I hope I carry that forward into my later years.

I think work events are definitely in dire need to start up again. I miss them, but they're slowly making a comeback. Cherish your personal friends though, and don't be discouraged to keep arranging things. Friend groups need those types
One thing I observed moving cities recently, and realized has been true for much of my life: there's a pretty small number of people who actually organize things. As the density of your social network naturally decreases, you may have lost a few eigenvector-central social network nodes.

Think back to those work parties: were they really spontaneous, or did "Janice in Accounting" always seem to step up? For me, there was one guy who always ran the happy hours; when he left, the happy hours' frequency dropped noticeably.

The aging, COVID, kids, busy-ness, general "Bowling Alone" etc factors all do make things harder too (reduce social density, increase difficulty of scheduling, etc.). But that's just friction; it can be overcome.

The best thing I did was become the shameless type of person who actively tries to create/join/combine social circles. It pretty quickly put me in touch with other people who do the same, and my social circle grew naturally after that.
The existence of a synthetic key contradicts the idea that we're modeling the "world". Of course, this is a debate that’s been around forever, and I understand the advantages of synthetic keys, but I've found that the intuitive elegance of a natural key will often flow into the business logic, untangling nests of code dedicated to id look-ups, id-matching, filtering, mapping, and the general slicing and dicing and shaping of data. Queries that once referenced obscure ids now point directly to fields which intuitively make sense: yes, if I want to update the user_apps table, I know or can reasonably infer pk(user_id, app_id), and I know those values and I have them right here in my pocket, don't need to look them up, and they mean something very tangible and real and I don’t have to say “…WHERE id = ‘…’”

Of course, nothing is ever perfect and natural keys have their issues, especially when migrating data, but there’s something about them that’s always “clicked” with how I reason about software systems.
> whatever it is, you need to _learn_ it.

The problem in my experience is you invest time learning build system A, then a year later build system B comes out, and not only do you need to relearn a bunch of stuff again, often build system B does some of the stuff of system A but not all of it, plus it does new stuff that you've never encountered before. Then this cycle repeats, endlessly, and every new team you join has adopted the newest build system.

Granted some ecosystems are worse than others here. in the JavaScript world it went something like: make/grunt/bower, gulp/webpack, esbuild, parcel, vite, rollup, and on and on it goes.

Even in the conservative Java ecosystem we've been through maven, ant, groovy/gradle...

Most of these tools offer incremental improvements for a huge learning cost. It's a nightmare.
https://archive.is/x2O65
Yes it is. OP is pointing out that wasn't always the case - Google became an ads company, they didn't start as one.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/18/i-dar...

> Studies have shown that tipping is not an effective incentive for performance in servers. It also creates an environment in which people of color, young people, old people, women, and foreigners tend to get worse service than white males. In a tip-based system, nonwhite servers make less than their white peers for equal work. Consider also the power imbalance between tippers, who are typically male, and servers, 70 percent of whom are female, and consider that the restaurant industry generates five times the average number of sexual harassment claims per worker. And that in many instances employers have allegedly misused tip credits, which let owners pay servers less than minimum wage if tipping makes up the difference.
My guess, a little bit of everything. Recent performance, cost, location, team/project...

In my huge company, we've seen all sort of cases. Very recent employees (which weren't even evaluated yet), "low performers" (but I think it's a misnomer, some "low performers" are productive employees who recently didn't meet some arbitrary expectations). Some entire teams were fired, in some instances they tried to reassign some high performers within these teams.

Also managers weren't consulted, and everything was kept secret.

Edit: some countries have additional legal constraints too and the process may be more transparent than in the US.
What they are describing sounds to me like customer support communications. Customer support orgs will notify customers of changes, alerts on outages, account issues and quite a bit of more sensitive communications that are most commonly either sent via a web portal or through email. Web portals can be hacked and email ... well email is not secure unless all of their customers know how to use GPG which is easy now with Thunderbird but training the world on that would be a monumental task. In my last place about half of the customers used PGP with all their API integrations.

If they are B2B I would suggest GPG via Thunderbird assuming they have IMAPS access to their mail servers. Something like Matrix might also work but they would have to train all their customers how to use it and that might also be a road block and they would still need to implement MFA/2FA to avoid the same account take-overs that affect web portals.
Different states have varying legal requirements, though many tech companies anchor to California because it often sets the floor. So if you solve for California, you're likely solving for most of your workforce. In general, yes, at major tech companies there is severance, payout of any accrued paid time off, and sometimes there's additional payment to cover COBRA payments for 1+ month(s), as well as resources for finding a new job. Some companies will also extend termination dates to help an employee snag an additional month of health coverage. For folks on H1B there is almost always additional legal representation support as well.

I think large tech companies do an exceptional job supporting employees. But of course, for the person affected, still scary nevertheless. My heart goes out for those people.
This page states it was introduced with 1.7, which was released a long time ago (maybe 2 years?) and it's still in prototype stage since. I have never used it since then, and given how bad the less popular parts of PyTorch tend to be, I'd be reluctant to even trying. Quickly checking I see some active development going on there still, however. I guess mostly to get stuff on Android
Well, to play devil's advocate, that's 10x in the context of finding product-market fit. And that really matters, whether "good" engineers want to believe it or not too. It's just that the kind of person who does that is also likely to be burned out, and have nothing else going for them in life, so they tend to become an asshole – leading to your assessment of things.

I've seen 10x folks in the other 3 categories be total assholes too.

I think the "debate" around 10x folks is a bit silly, and by hard-earned experience, I've learned to question the motivations of the folks who deny that such engineers exist. There is a whole other sort of politics going on, and, it doesn't address the core problem.

My experience of 10x folks is more like: can you live with them, will they be a boost to the team overall, or will they use their 10x to bring down folks around them (consciously or subconsciously) so that they can appear to be more like 20x, or something petty like that.

Some 10x folks use their 10x to put everyone else at a disadvantage, by forcing people to play their very specific sort of game (happens especially with strong specialists who are also decent generalists, i.e. T-shaped people).

There are others who use their 10x to resist any changes, typically out of some seen-it-all cynicism (happens with the crowd who are really good at some codebase, or who are leaders of their lab, etc.). The damage caused is difficult to dislodge because it's based on context as much as skill, and learning the business context can take years, which most talented people won't have patience for – if the 10x even allows them to exist.

Every sort of 10x has some dark pattern (alluding back to your experience), and for that reason, I think it's important for "good" people to not let whatever 10x they have get to their head, and to find other things in life that offers them non-attachment and perspective. It isn't necessarily a strong-people-be-assholes problem as much as a human nature problem. Left unchecked, 10x becomes self-defeating at a team or org level, and will make the 10x person miserable too (even if they don't know it).
Double parking is a legal term for a specific traffic violation.

People who use it to refer to parking across two bays in a parking lot are using it wrong.

It’s like saying ‘well people in my region use the word “speeding” both to refer to going over the speed limit, and for going through a red light’.

People in your region have heard a term and misunderstood it.

Laws commonly include exceptions like;

> Vehicles used ordinarily for transportation of merchandise may double park for the purpose of, but only while engaged in, the expeditious loading or unloading

- that doesn’t mean delivery vehicles can park across two bays in a parking lot.
I'm 45 and went to a lot of parties in my 20s and never actually enjoyed any of them. It was really just to meet people (specifically women). Since getting married and having kids, I just don't need it anymore and have zero desire to attend one.
The classic error.
When my wife and I were living in Brussels, Belgium but I was working for a Dutch consulting company in Veldhoven, Netherlands, on one occasion I got caught by a speed trap outside of Antwerp.

The Antwerp police had to send the ticket to the Netherlands, because that's where the car was registered. Which took some time to go through the political process.

But the car was a lease, so the police had to re-send the ticket to the company I was working for. Which took some more time.

Then the company pointed out that I lived in Brussels, so the police had to re-send the ticket again. Which took even more time.

I finally got the ticket more than a year after the event, and I went down to the local police station to find out what I had to do.

The local Brussels police took the ticket and looked it up in their systems, and finally told me that the ticket was expired and had not been sent to me in time (there is apparently a one year grace period), and so I didn't need to do anything at all.
They should have stuck with the F# proposal. The hack proposal just takes one more giant step toward turning JS into Perl.

Hack proposal

value |> foo(%) for unary function calls,
value |> foo(1, %) for n-ary function calls,
value |> %.foo() for method calls,
value |> % + 1 for arithmetic,
value |> [%, 0] for array literals,
value |> {foo: %} for object literals,
value |> `${%}` for template literals,
value |> new Foo(%) for constructing objects,
value |> await % for awaiting promises,
value |> (yield %) for yielding generator values,
value |> import(%) for calling function-like keywords,

F# proposal

value |> x=> x.foo() for method calls,
value |> x=> x + 1 for arithmetic,
value |> x=> [x, 0] for array literals,
value |> x=> ({foo: x}) for object literals,
value |> x=> `${x}` for template literals,
value |> x=> new Foo(x) for constructing objects,
value |> x=> import(x) for calling function-like keywords,

F# proposal would make `await` and `yield` into special syntax cases or not allowed.

I'd rather do await/yield the old fashioned way (or slightly complicate the already complex JS syntax rules) than add the weird extra syntax. Arrow functions are elegant and already well-known and well-understood.
California and New York law states that you have to include salary ranges in job posts, from my understanding, so it might be worth checking their job board to see if they list them there.
One thing I've done is using the customer name codepoints of every character + object ID formatted as base-36.

So with a customer email of 'martin@arp242.net' and an object ID of 52 you end up with 1563 + 52 = 1615, or 18v in base-36. You can add a "base number" to make it a but larger, e.g. 50,000 so it becomes "13tr".

I'm sure people can figure this scheme out with enough effort; it's certainly not cryptographically secure, but it's "hidden enough" for many purposes, not much longer than numeric IDs (shorter in many cases), doesn't require any special DB-fu, and is reversible if you know the customer (which you usually do).
Yup - they're the people ACTUALLY selling your data (and often for pennies)
I just don't see it... but I could totally be wrong.

I think the focus will be on highly specialized models before anything with the breadth to intentionally fail a Turing test would be created.

That said, what happens when it does fail? Gets binned? Perhaps I lack imagination, lol.
Unauthorized access is dealt with by implementing correct authorization procedures, not by obfuscating IDs, which valid ones can still be discovered through brute force or other means.

In your example those simple, sequential IDs should have no impact on security.
For now -- but possibly not in 2024. I would go higher. At least 24 GB if you're buying an M2 Pro.
Of course the punishment should be considered on absolute scale, based on typical (or perhaps even lowest status) people in the society, because it is ultimately administered by the society! Otherwise justice would lose any semblance of fairness.
In my experience you will get as many different reactions to your interactions as humans you interact with with a very wide range, some of which I would consider "not conscious" if not obviously coming from a living breathing human body.

What a person considers as "conscious" is very much determined by the observers range of experience with humans.
I don't see how syntactic sugar makes any sense for javascript. Breaking compatibility is so severe because every browser needs to catch up, yet it doesn't actually enable anything that couldn't be done before.
The issue is that it doesn’t have to be malicious to cause harm. That’s the point of the paper clip optimizer thought experiment. It’s not about motivation as much as just what it happens to have learned to do.
It's a consequence of that saying .. you know "it's impossible to get a man to believe something if their own well being requires them to believe the opposite"

I think it's also just plain un-critical thinking, and ego. "The stats show one thing but I think that clearly cannot be true so I'm going to ignore them"
"Sucks that you got let go, but I don't like reading about these things so let's throw your misery and sorrow into an incinerator so I don't have to see it"
To give credit where it's due. I came across the proposal through this video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1FvtIJ6ecE by Theo the CEO of Ping.gg.
I'm pretty sure this'd be a welcome addition to the language but to be honest, the syntax looks shit.