skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
yes m'lords please enlighten us; GoT is too fresh to re-watch, hopefully this thread will have enough cloak and daggers trivia to keep me warm till next series come
Uh, if by get rid of the low performers you mean get rid of a lot of people, some of which happen to be low performers...
It's a two sided street: Google is super profitable and could easily support their workforce through an economic downturn. But they feel their shareholders are more important than their employees. And so the employees, whose loyalty is demanded in good times, receive none of that loyalty in return in bad times.

Also, pretty weird to see 'careers.google.com' up and running and apparently hiring for all kinds of roles while at the same time letting go of all these people.
>- Demand just went down, all over the interwebs, since people miss doing things in real life.

More like people have less disposable income for frivolities now due to the rising CoL (especially in the EU) than during the pandemic when CoL was the same and everyone was stuck at home looking for ways to spend their extra covid money.

How companies thought the pandemic boom would last is beyond me.
Anything we know about the makeup of this or other recent layoffs? Any professions overly represented in the layoffs compared to the firing org’s distribution?
I did not really meant that. I meant that fascism adjacent content shows up in your recommendations somewhere around your gaming videos or whatever. You are open to it, click on it. You know nothing about discussed history so you just swallow it and move from there.

In the initial situation, you did not cared, one way or the other. But now, all you know is what this says and you believe it, because your mind was open.
I'd argue these aren't mutually exclusive.

The email/comms might be okay, but this is still their fault and will ruin people's lives. Most (if not all) companies are shit and don't give a shit about you. We're just a necessary cost.
The analysis also seems to show it veers to one side of the liberterian/authoritarian spectrum. Excellent.

"Reality has a well-known liberal bias"
-Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents' Dinner 2006
For some reason I mostly consume Twitch/Youtube over podcasts these days - I stopped with podcasts when I stopped driving 40 minutes to work. (I kinda miss that...)
I remember how back in MS DOS days polymorphic viruses first appeared, in an attempt to avoid detection by antivirus software (useful and essential back then).

Now the tables have turned, and legitimate software has to become somehow polymorphic to thwart attacks by malware.
More on UX

Better Design https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9kZXNpZ25iZXR0ZXI...

Finding our Way https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9maW5kaW5nb3Vyd2F...
60 days is the US minimum for a large company doing a layoff (WARN Act). Some states have stricter standards, which is why Amazon had to pay a minimum of 90 days severance in NY state.
Keep a very good eye on your local elections and get technically competent people (and hopefully the ones that are not for sale by lobbyists) into the seats of power. The best bit: it's free. I'm pretty happy with the way the GDPR so far has worked out and as far as I'm concerned they're welcome to ratchet up the pressure a notch, or even two.
I've actually found it quite an active/engaging experience to take in some normal code-presenting videos/screencasts as audio-only (i.e. earphones in, phone in pocket), because you build up in your minds eye the code they're talking about.
Doesn't seem like a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3542681/how-many-jobs-...
> he major economies are posting record or near-record levels of employment;

When you're paid peanuts compared to the real cost of living those "near-record levels of employment" don't matter that much anymore.
The UK doesn't require a master's degree before doing a PhD - at least it didn't back in the 1980s/1990s....
Earlier in 2022 Google introduced this GRAD performance review system. In my opinion said system turns employment into a rat's race but I digress. One of the goals of that system was to eliminate about 10000 people which falls just in line with this reduction.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/11/21/alphabet-s...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/11/21/alphabet-s...
You're assuming a level of rationality on the part of the person being blackmailed which blackmailers will do everything to avoid. Look at the reports of people getting caught giving away secrets for and it's often shockingly little given the stakes. Remember the main issue with harsh punishments as a deterrent: people generally don't assume they'll be caught.
> simply don't replace those that leave.

You need to have control over which roles / projects you're gonna downsize.
> ...on a fast-moving project.

Very interesting.

Multiple times I've been on teams with spray and pray type developers who commit more frequently. Begetting more chaos and rework, of course. But great for apparent "velocity".

Whereas I tend to work slow and deliberate. Doing old timey stuff like unit tests and verifying my code works before committing. Which then puts the onus of resolving merge conflicts onto me. Which then delays my commits. Which means more even more merge conflicts.

A vicious cycle.

It'd be cool if better tooling, such as jamsync, helped mitigate the penalty for doing good work.
Agreed, I don’t think it is productive to have conspiratorial mindset where there is a group of insiders who have access to a key piece of information and then engage in Kremlinology to decipher their macroeconomic views.

To be sure, Google will have some interesting and proprietary data, but the signal to noise ratio will still be tiny.
Is there any analysis explaining how the new interest rates regime is affecting the number of employees in tech?

I think the impact on VC is probably more direct, but, given what is happening all over FAANGs, I would imagine there could be some causal relation there, too?
Solid-State Cooling
Wow! I worked at Google circa 2015 and there was an internal web page showing how many employees there were. My recollection is that there were about 50k full-time employees and 50k TVCs then. Even then, it felt crazy how large and incohesive the organisation was. I wonder what it's like now.
> where traditional school-based education becomes irrelevant, all-at-once

This is actually studied subject.
Everyone needs general knowledge base before they even realise why they study at all. The whole point of university is to shape your thinking model.

Even your movie experience will be downgraded. If you don't know Western fairytales, you will find Shrek movie unfunny.
Not the execs, the shareholders. They were seeing this and in turn that increased the pressure on executives to rationalize staffing.
You Can Now Control a Wheelchair with Your Brain Waves Alone
In very large companies, to keep it confidential and SILENT large layoffs are usually known only to about 10 people. The CEO, a board member, 3 lawyers, 1 finance, and usually 4 HR executives. It's really not about who...it's about percentages and what the new budget numbers have to look like. Then it's off to filter by say salaries and reduce count of number of employees impacted.
here's my list: https://www.swyx.io/fave-podcasts#tech

and i've done annual updates you can find at the top of the post
"I think 10x developers, like world-class athletes, musicians, and authors, absolutely do exist. You’re just not going to find them with a coding test." well there you go. exactly.
So, if the big companies hire 40-50k new employees each over the past 2 years, and then fire 10-20k, leaving a net 30-40k employee gain for the past 2 years... that means recession?

People have no context for these layoffs. This is not a "recession layoff". This has nothing in common with 2009, which I suppose many of you are too young to remember.

In 2009, we lost a million jobs to layoffs in one month. You'd turn on the news and see 200k jobs disappear in front of your face, so you'd turn it off.

The big tech companies laying off 1/5 of the pandemic boom hires is not a recession to me.

Alphabet staff:

2018 98771

2019 118899

2020 135301

2021 156500

2022 186779

2023 174000?*
including the modern iteration?
PMFault: We were satisfied after successfully destroying two CPUs
I think the problem with full self driving is that its written from an egotistical viewpoint.

What i mean by that is that when i am driving, i have to take into account the people around me, their vehicle capabilities and more.

For instance you are not going to overtake the car to your right, if you see in your side mirror that there is a junior in a blackened out beamer pulling up in high speed. You will prepare. The AI just sees another car on the right and expects it to behave "normally"

Its either that, or they all communicate intent over wireless tech to each other.
> you can't make a quiet videocall in public.

I find video calls annoying when out in public because a) I don't want to be looking at my screen if I'm moving about and b) I probably don't want to hold my phone still enough to be worth anyone looking at me while out

But... as long as you use earphones not speakerphone, there's no need for it to be any louder than just a regular phone call? I guess maybe you meant that most people wouldn't bother using headphones at all... but tbh I see more people using speaker for voice calls than video calls, nearly every video call I see someone doing on public does involve headphones/earphones.
You could use that argument to dismiss about 99% of the stories that are submitted to HN. It’s fine if that’s what you want, but HN doesn’t claim to have only the biggest, most important news items at any given moment. It is just for reading interesting stuff that may or may not be tech related and may or may not be recent.

In the case of Gemini this is one of the latest big dominos to fall in the crypto industry, and since there are a few other entities linked to it one way or another it could signal a new set of bankruptcies are coming, if not a collapse in crypto altogether.
Thank you :) that meant a lot. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and a lovely rest of your January.
> It means he will pay severance

Personally?
Sounds like the same kind of look I get when I eat one of the aforementioned "classic" plant-based patties or other veggie-stuff around people who know I eat meat.
Somehow they assume that only vegetarians would eat that.
3, these decisions are made by the financial institutions and even the biggest tech companies are beholden to big money.

Seems like Big Money wants a recession.
> a South London lad who became rich virtually by accident

I think I'll read this, considering others' praise, but I find it funny that the abstract introduces the "expert" at getting rich as someone who did it by accident: doesn't that imply that he didn't know how to do it?
I don't think this is really in good faith, what is meant by 10x programmers is exactly that they are 10x more productive in grinding jira tickets, not that some people know more and are wokring on harder problems, etc.
Wow.
Finally someone put an end to the discussions on organ donations. What were we thinking giving the dead a say in such matters...
/s
This is a blunder, of course.

But the serious docs are there: https://www.freepascal.org/docs.html (And I haven't forgotten Pascal since 1980s anyway...)
The wiki starts with:

> What is Ultibo?

> Ultibo core is a full featured environment for embedded or bare metal (without an operating system) development on Raspberry Pi (all models except Pico). It is not an operating system itself but provides many of the same services as an OS such as memory management, threading, networking and file systems.

https://ultibo.org/wiki/Main_Page#What_is_Ultibo.3F
Commandline Heroes

https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes
Not really. There’s three factors:

- Everyone overhired during the pandemic.

- Interest rates are impacting the business at all levels.

- Wall St demands sacrifice to the volcano gods. Microsoft and Amazon did layoffs, so must google.
Show HN: Free appointment booking plugin for WordPress
> If there's an over supply of overqualified postdocs, maybe they could help train new PhDs?

Why? That would merely increase the number of unemployed postdocs. There are already too many people with a PhD, not too few.
2.5 admins
Mind boggling. I wrote my Masters thesis in one week. Mind you, it's computer science (I did some work on distributed systems and contributed to the Kubernetes container orchestrator), the professors don't stress that much on the writing as long as you did a valuable work. However, I also saw that as a waste of time, so I was just trying to get rid of it asap and write whatever. It's shocking when I hear people procrastinating for years for such a useless thing.
Recessions often are self-fulfilling prophecies.

Everyone expects a recession, companies and individuals starts saving and being more frugal, which leads to an actual recession.
Maybe because their pay should remain "low". At the very least according to their conception of "low".
HN is a fickle beast - sometimes jokes are well-received and upvoted, sometimes they’re misunderstood and downvoted, and sometimes they’re understood and downvoted out of spite. It’s hard to read the room sometimes, especially in a text-only medium where despite commenting and interacting a lot, many of us don’t actually really know each other
The tool seems great: It offers a very convenient way to parameterize tests.

But the tool is not strictly about property-based testing, right?

The only difference seems to be what kind of `assert`ions you make. And this is not touched by the tool.

Or am I missing something?
But what exactly podcasts from the list do you consume?
ChatGPT Generated Manowar Song
Life advice from a book about raising dogs
C/F musk and his stupidity at twitter. Lawsuits in progress.
There's an upvote feature on HN exactly for burying stories that are irrelevant. If enough people have voted this to the front page, it simply means that enough people find it relevant. If it's not relevant to you, you can just ignore it.
And the GOOG stock is 3.4% up before open. It seems this was a bit unexpected.
True, but it's an entertaining listen which is something that can't be said for a lot of the more technical and complex podcasts. The engagement he gets has enough technical that you can jot something down and research it but the overwhelming takeaway on WHY such and such failure or vuln was a problem is more important IMO.
My mom struggles with FaceTime apps, and a FaceTime appliance would solve those issues for her.
I rigged up a homemade remote controllable thermostat thing years ago, with the single killer app: I don't know exactly when I'm coming back after 1-2 weeks at the parent's, and I'd like to turn on the air conditioning or turn up the heat, as applicable, before getting into the car to drive back.
> Does a company need to have an excuse to let people go? Is there a right to stay employed?

When you work for a small to medium company yeah, I expect something like responsibility and a little more than "just contractual obligations" (from both sides, both the employer and the employee).

But it when it comes to behemoths like Alphabet things change completely, it's all about the money and the contract.
This article explains Malware with all the examples and the security practices to avoid them.
One way of building an SVG icon library for your project
> Why should I put the time in to test and develop an application that benefits users of Google's calendar when they won't even lift a finger for me?

Well, why are you? They treat you like that because you let them.
You don't even need a temporary file; opening the file directly in sudoedit then passing /dev/fd/N to the spawned edit process after dropping privileges would work (a-la capabilities). But sudoedit being implemented in terms of sudo makes it hard.

edit: apparently things are more complex and sudoedit already runs the command unprivileged; the attack is in filename expansion in sudoedit itself.
He said responsibility, not consequences. I am still not sure what people expect CEOs to do in these situations to "punish" themselves. Google is not going bankrupt, they are still wildly profitable, they overhired and are adjusting headcount by a few percent.

It sucks for the people affected, I don't want to downplay that. But I'm genuinely curious what is supposed to happen to the leader in these situations.
Security screening criteria doesn’t get updated often.

It wasn’t that long ago that marijuana was an illegal drug in every state. And as a schedule 1 drug marijuana gets lumped in with crack and PCP.

I have no doubt updating security clearance requirements is a massive bureaucratic mess nobody is interested in doing.

So the requirements remain, but everyone just “massages” the answers to fit current norms.
A New Way to Look at Networking (2006) [video]
For instance, Mathematica is great, we can actually use and see the domain language (which is symbols, subscripts, Greek letters) while coding mathematical formulas instead of weirdly translating everything into English.

I for one would love to see us evolving past ASCII
Bare metal Java exists, because Java-oriented CPUs were and are a thing.

Have you realized that every smart card you have, like a bank card, or a SIM card in your phone, runs Java code inside, using such a Java-optimized CPU? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Card
In the UK they only have 20 roles for hiring and it's been that way for months prior. Not development jobs by the way, that's all jobs.

I've also heard other companies paused hiring (Amazon?) and basically stopped interviewing yet their websites advertise plenty of roles. I wouldn't consider them reliable. You could say it's almost as if they want people to think there are opportunities to aim for at such companies...

What you'll have to see is for the next round of "top" CS graduates how it is.
I used to do species population spot-check counts of the aeration basin floc thru a crappy optical scope back in the day at the municipal wastewater plant. I loved finding the tardigrades occasionally and watched them for ages.
My cousins use it in their family and love the product. It’s funny though that my aunt saw it at an Amazon store in the Mall, went to Apple Store to see if they had one, then went back and bought like 9 portals.

It boggles the mind that there isn’t a FaceTime video unit!
That's a lot of podcasts. You must have one hell of a commute.

But seriously, how do you find time to listen to all of these?
> You can easily verify the integrity of the object files that are used in the random relinking - they are included in the binary distribution, and are necessary to perform the relinking.

I don't understand the full logic here. Yes I can authenticate the object files. But how would you discern, after a possible intrusion, an "sshd" binary that is indeed a random combination of these objects, from a trojaned "sshd" binary?
I need to see these "I take full responsibility" people actually punished. At the very least, this sentence needs to be removed from their mouths.

Alphabet had 116 billion USD "cash on hand" at the end of September 2022. Even if the full cost of each of those 12K employees is 500K per year, that's "only" 6 billion dollars to keep those "great" people that they "love" working with around.

Net income for that quarter was almost 14 billion dollars, and net income for "that year" was almost 67 billion dollars.

Things are in decline, sure, but clearly this is a company that can actually afford to keep "great" people that they "love" working with employed, so "affecting Googlers lives" doesn't have to "weight heavily" on anyone.

Sorry, but these antics require revolution. Not a friendly chat with the brand imagery wizards. Not a "well just use DuckDuckGo".

It's rare to encounter a whole "class" of people more desperately deserving barbarians at the gates of their tower.
> Does a company need to have an excuse to let people go? Is there a right to stay employed?

Generally in developed countries, yes.
> It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups

cockups?

> As usual, he says nothing more what the consequences for him are.

...and that's why I don't think those are cockups.
>I rank the odds of you getting hurt by these specific discrimination practices aimed at you low, so stop mentioning them!

No. Humans are not equal in aptitude. Neither are human groups. Either account for it, or don't, but be consistent.
I've had good success with using auto-incrementing BIGINTs as internal IDs and creating an additional BYTEA field as external IDs. Foreign keys would be based on the internal IDs, anything user-facing would use external IDs. I think it's a good compromise as it keeps foreign key size small and still allows hiding internal structure from users.
Really? Where are you located in the UK? In London I have noticed a definite reduction in recruiter reach outs in comparison to 2022 (and even then it was mainly finance companies)
You could say the same about any exploration.

It's expensive and difficult to sail to Greenland / North America / Pitcairn / Antarctica. And, once you get there, it's expensive and difficult to establish a colony. And, if you find anything of value, it's expensive and difficult to return it home.

Then you have all the domestic issues. Perhaps take a listen to "Whitey on the Moon" to understand why some people felt that there were better ways to spend money.

For All Mankind (up to the point I've seen) mostly glosses over the money issue. It is a charming fantasy.
>I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession.

Wait, are you telling me that I picked a wrong time to quick my job and work on side projects, again?
At the beginning of my career I worked in a team of 6 developers. Everyone except me was at least a competent developer. One of us did literally 80% of work. Company was paid by head so it didn't care about productivity of others and our client (HP) was happy.

Hence I know that incredibly productive developers exist, but they are also rare since he was the only one that really qualified in more than 20 years of my career.

Because they are rare I don't care how to test for them as it is very unlikely I'll cross path with any when searching for new team members (not sexy enough work) and just try to focus on finding competent reliable people.
Oh, this is new to me. Which developed countries have the right to stay employed?
This was a reference to energy system subsidies, not financial. Diesel for combines or natural gas for fertilizer.
But that's just probability no?

Given that a 16 or 90 year old behind the wheel is statistically more likely to have an accident than a 40 year old...Why wouldn't any sufficiently sophisticated self-driving algorithm be able to make the same statistical data-based conclusion/reaction?

Not going to happen tomorrow but in 20 years? 30 years?

Could see a by then geriatric Musk offering it as an extra add-on "bad driver stereotype" package.
This is sort of unrelated, but that reminds me that one of my biggest issues with learning C++ was how I was expected to deal with libraries (particularly on Linux, where conventions will even differ between distros) and building the project. Most guides or what have you sort of teach you how to compile a file or two, but you quickly run into issues that are difficult to solve for a complete beginner without a direct source of feedback.
Donate 90% (or everything above $2M, whichever amount is higher) of their wealth to the people dismissed, and never take on a leadership position again.

No, I'm not joking.
They could quit or... not get any income until everybody that leaves gets a new job.