skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amazon, Shopify, Wayfair, Google, Meta: all of these companies make money because e-commerce exists. The higher the proportion of all sales taking place on e-commerce, the more valuable the companies are. For Google and Meta, it's the advertising portion, but it's still impactful.

If we track online sales as a proportion of all sales over the last 20 years, there's a pretty stable trend of increase. Then COVID hit, lockdowns, and we saw a 5-6 year jump ahead. Big question: How much of this is temporary, and how much is permanent? Maybe people discover that grocery delivery is way better than going to the store and never stop.

Imagine if you bet against it being permanent, and you were wrong? Your company just lost out on a massive opportunity- a CEO that does that would be worried for their job. And if you bet for it being all permanent and are wrong, well, you just have to lay off a few people.

They all bet that this was a permanent 5-year jump-ahead. They were wrong, there was no jump-ahead. Now there's a looming recession. Everyone has too much headcount. And for publicly traded companies, there are shareholders who will demand that something be done to prove you're not going to bankrupt the company.

To minimize the PR hit, everyone quietly announces their layoffs just after someone bigger than them does, so that they aren't the headline in the news tomorrow.
I do wonder about using this same analysis to look at various funds' real returns (hedge and otherwise), in addition to the major indices in the study. I'd be curious to look at variance, downside risk during downturns, etc.
Non ex transverso sed deorsum.

In the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/09/us/where-the-... (https://archive.ph/rwD7G)

(How did a.s.h and a.s.r become associated, actually?)
Amazon could start a 'jobs bank'!

The Jobs Bank was set up by mutual agreement between U.S. automakers and the United Auto Workers union to protect workers from layoffs. Begun in the mid-1980s, the program is being tapped by thousands of workers. Many of those receiving checks do community service work or take courses. Others sit around, watching movies or doing crossword puzzles -- all while making $26 an hour or more.

The Big Three automakers agreed to the system to protect union workers from outsourcing and technology. But with Ford and General Motors losing money in North America -- and contract negotiations due in 2007 -- the future of the unique program is uncertain.

https://www.npr.org/2006/02/02/5185887/idled-auto-workers-ta...
Ask HN: What are the biggest challenges facing the tech industry today?
Someone above posted a link showing that 29 of the 30 most watched shows ever in the US are Super Bowls. Would you say they have the best writing?
You do for member access, e.g.

let firstName =
person
|> fun x -> x.FirstName
|> trim

Some languages allow:

let firstName =
person
|> .FirstName
|> trim

But you're right, expression-orientation and currying make this much more natural.
Well, no one is forcing people to post this on HN either.

If people posted well written articles backed by solid journalism and presented statistics and analysis about the cause of the majority of these lays offs then it would be interesting to read and intellectual, IMO it would fit in better with the "theme" of HN. I don't think these articles have a place on the "Hacker news", maybe in the financial review?

Honestly, what's the motive for posting these things one after the other? Is it to help signal some type of financial meltdown, so we feel sympathetic and know "company x" is bad, I just don't really understand why it's interesting to read about or relevant to this community.

Wayfair, like many of these firms, aggressively added staff during the pandemic to expand its warehouse operations and customer-service teams. It had 16,681 full-time equivalent employees as of the end of 2021, up from 12,100 at the end of 2018. Its customer-service staff roughly doubled over that period to about 4,900 people, according to company filings.

So it's pretty clear to see what happened here, a furniture company hired like crazy to meet the surge in demand for WFH furniture and now, demand has slowed and doesn't really need so many people, is that a surprise ?

I feel people must enjoy upvoting these titles because it's a bit dramatic, else there is nothing else interesting to read in that article.
Vox Media lays off 7% of staff
Interesting how your list focuses on worker-owned cooperatives. I had mostly thought about customer-owned cooperatives up until this point. Most of my exposure is with customer-owned ones, perhaps due to living in an agricultural area (grain elevator co-ops, fuel co-ops, rural electric co-ops, rural broadband co-ops). And working for one!

I think that a worker-owned cooperative is not really in line with what I would consider to be the traditional cooperative spirit.

Customer-owned has a clear mission to deliver value to its owners. That value would be to provide various services essentially at cost. Workers are paid market rate to get the work done. Profits are given back to the owners (customers).

Worker-owned also has the mission to deliver value to the owners. The workers are going to value making as much money as possible, though being careful to not go past the point where they would find themselves without a job. So this type of co-op will be trying to extract maximum value out of the customer. This is a significantly different proposition. This type of co-op seems more like a company with an ESOP.

I could see either type choosing to sell out. I guess either the workers or customers would think they have better places to invest the capital. So I guess co-ops too have up and down lifecycles like a standard company. As the co-op becomes ineffective or no longer needed, the capital invested in it would be re-deployed.
On one level I agree with you that mingling work relationships with friendships is often fraught with issues of things bleeding over in a negative way. But let's be real, to do so takes much more effort, and especially for people who have kids, they don't really have much time to socialize with other adults than at work. Or some people they're exhausted after a day of work so if they want to have fun, easier to just talk to someone at work.
That makes about as much sense to me as putting CEOs on the board of unions.
if they already deactivated their badges, they also probably lost access to their emails.
Make one. For me it is the triple click magnifier. My lord I've saved myself from buying a lot of stuff because I can read the fine print. Also, the triple tapping on the back of the phone feature is cool af
I mean if you look at the total number of employees by year, all these companies have still added massively to their headcounts in the last 3-4 years. It is not sustainable to continue adding 20-50k employees per year to your payroll.
Wasn't it Virginia that was also hauling people off to jail for doing anything in excess of 20 mph over the limit?
Maybe but likely not. Lots of devs overseas who work for these tech giants have also been cut. The 12k cuts is global.
They must by law, but what will likely happen is that if you complain, they'll do it the once and then fire you, since by their metrics you are performing poorly by not getting enough tips to even cover minimum wage.
I am still hoping that decorators might not pan out :fingers-crossed:
You have to show they actually benefit the members as a whole. Union laws in the US are extremely strong, and anti union sentiment is largely a hangover from the 70s, where features of unions limited our manufacturing sectors ability to compete internationally with catastrophic consequences for the Rust Belt.
Almost all of my containers have environment variables I don't wish to provide to random websites.
I've certainly seen 1/10x Programmers.
Not everyone has work email outside of work. Not everyone starts work before going to work.
and kudos also belong to the people whove been heavily championing and bikeshedding the proposal on behalf of the rest of us for the last 8 years - which i just discovered is really nicely documented in the repo: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pipeline-operator/blob/main...

there's usually a ton of nuance behind the syntax considerations and i usually find that the people on tc39 care way more than i do about the things i never think about until its too late. peeking into their discussions is often very enlightening... and a reminder of how hard it is to do language design by committee and at scale.
Has that ever not been the case? Every single "Tell HN" starts out unsubstantiated - getting to the front page is what usually substantiates them.
This incident shows the breakdown of a civil process. The law was being broken. The law did nothing. NOTHING!

If I were on the jury, I would nullify any guilt against this person. He had no other option in the face of an APATHETIC and INEFFECTIVE government.
> Leaving hazy judgement calls up to the police for enforcement, at least in the US, has not fared particularly well for non-white people. See, for example, the history of enforcement of "jaywalking", a "crime" which was recently decriminalized in California for precisely that reason

You will notice that this wasn't solved by setting up enforcement cameras on every street that ticket all jaywalkers equally.
Down 25%?

Mercedes Benz Group AG https://g.co/kgs/Qm7LK4
> If you go from Google or similarly large company to a small startup, there's a radically different reality and workstyle required.

This assumes they were always at G or other big co
And now we take the standard Chinese propaganist route of re-directing the argument away from Asia and to the middle east whenever a complicated issue of Asian geopolitics with regards to the US happens. It's become a good benchmark for when someone is arguing in bad faith when they start reciting CCP talking points with near identical wording every time certain subjects come up.

Also, China will repeat the same missteps of the US in the middle east as soon as their first major interruption of fossil fuels happens. China is not immune.
From other comments, I believe they were limited to regulated telecommunications, not just any telecom, and limited to the US and Canada (they didn't divest Bell Canada until sometime after 1956). They partipated (which included a lot of enabling r&d at bell labs, etc) in submarine cables and satellite communications to connect with other telephone operators abroad, but they didn't run telephone operations outside the country (and Canada). And they certainly would not have had a payphone outside the country.

Of course, maybe the space component would be considered in the united states for regulatory reasons, etc, in which case it's fine. Or maybe the FCC claims to regulate the space end despite lack of jurisdiction, that'd be fine too.
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Please try to avoid snarky or dismissive comments, and ensure that what you’re writing makes a point and contributes to the conversation.
America Hit Its Debt Limit, Setting Up Bitter Fiscal Fight
>TypeScript isn't another language though. It is the latest official ECMAScript plus type annotations. Only some very, very few, rare, old stuff like enums really is different code. 99% of TypeScript is just "remove the types to get ECMAScript".

That's another language. Javascript doesn't have type annotations - even the suggested addition of type annotation syntax to JS[0] doesn't actually do anything because it can't and still be Javascript. Javascript doesn't have enums. Javascript doesn't have interfaces. That 1% (although it's probably more than that) matters. If it can't run, unaltered, in a Javascript interpreter it isn't Javascript.

[0]https://github.com/tc39/proposal-type-annotations
Not true.

It's one atom per molecule, changing the friction.

> those who touched the surfaces could differentiate them based on chemical differences, including the substitution of one atom within each silane molecule for another, because of subtle changes in friction
Around '08 or '09 is when IMO it became visible from the outside that Google's culture had shifted radically.

I've read comments before claiming that when Google acquired DoubleClick, Google became more DoubleClick than the other way around. Basically, that the Google we liked was destroyed by that acquisition, and something new emerged. That certainly squares with the timeline.
> FWIW one place I've lived that seems to care little about age in the party scene is Madrid.

Perhaps this applies to much of Spain - my aunt in her 70s still hits the town with her girlfriends on many a night on Spain's Costa del Sol.
Life happens, especially past age 30, maybe even less than that. If you’re single and don’t plan to have kids AND have a network of similar people - parties are still pretty common, even if they are slightly less ambitious.
No, there was a book called "Self help" by Samuel Smiles a few years prior. But self help has been around forever dating back to ancient Egypt.
Everyone saying this sounds exhausting which it do3s, but it also sounds like a ton of fun. Having youre house just be an open hang for a weekend sounds sweet
Though, note that both Android and Google Maps were acquisitions. Someone needed the vision to acquire those companies, for sure, but their initial incarnations aren't great examples of Google innovation.
> and each cycle on an RPi at 900Mhz is 1.1ns

Its not the CPU's clock that matters here.

https://codeandlife.com/2012/07/03/benchmarking-raspberry-pi...

With 14MHz best-case from the Rasp. Pi, its clear that the GPIO clocks are simply at a slower rate than the CPU.

Also, with C, you can achieve the highest possible GPIO rate on the Rasp. Pi. No need to go into an alternative OS.
That some orgs overhired is not in question. What is _insane_ to me is that everyone being let go seems to be an engineer, while the DEI teams remain untouched. That section of the office sure seems to have a lot of free time, between shaming the rest of the company.

Shows the power hierarchy I suppose. Wild world.
The article claims 30% are top rated and only 25% are "junk", with others being in-between. So this headline is misleading.
> They are not very standing out, all big german companys have that model?

Its pretty much mandatory for many big German companies
How does gcc -MD help at all in tracking which .cpp files to link in?

> Of course, the other alternative is to simply #include _every_ file in your project into a single source file, then compile that.

Yeah, no... recompiling the entire project whenever any file is touched is way too slow for any non-trivial project.
Yeah there is a lot of overlap between overused anime imagery, and hackers. It's certainly strange.
So, can a autist, with a deficient noise filter see it?
Yeah, I don’t want to say there’s a line in the sand because nothing happens instantly or completely at a large organization but I’d say most of their successes were started before the ad culture became deeply entrained.

Chromecast is definitely good but it was years after Apple and Roku, and feeds data to the ad impression system so I’m not sure how much it defined the market rather than very successfully competing in it.

Google’s educational efforts are actually super interesting to consider: they had some initial success but seem to have lost their way. My wife is a teacher so we hear people talking about this: most of the districts around us have switched to Office 365 and almost all of the people who’ve mentioned that have been happy because it’s a better product without so many of the never-fixed warts they hit with G-Suite. That feels eerily similar to what I see with GCP where you really get the impression that incremental improvements aren’t favored by whatever incentives their management sets.
> I don't think any other languages have really solved this problem either but it is still an annoying problem.

As you say, this is not a problem with an ideal solution to draw upon. (languages are unavoidably different). From that perspective, I don't see any of these approaches as problems.

If your project is mostly Rust with a little something else sprinkled in, use build.rs ("horrible" is an exaggeration IMO, it's merely not ideal, again, because there exists no ideal).

If your project is mostly something-else with a little Rust sprinkled in, invoke `cargo build` from your build system, and again this is a perfectly adequate solution to a problem with no ideal solutions.

If your project is extra-special, invoke rustc directly, and that's a deliberately supported use case. Hell, I use rustc directly sometimes just because I can.

The bottom line is, Rust provides a best-in-class opinionated build system that is overwhelmingly used by the Rust ecosystem, with best-effort escape hatches for integrating into other projects. To say that Rust cannot "stand the idea that you might want to mix languages", as alleged by the person I originally replied to, is factually incorrect.
>Carbon offsets and credits and the policy and technology and market pricing soup is going to be an absolute shit show before it can hope to get past that point,

The problem with carbon offsets and carbon credits is that they try to incentivize moving off of carbon, but we don't have a way to actually replace carbon - so it becomes this little marketing and accounting trick.
Thank you for your feedback. I will increase the thing.
Do you have any idea on what the Chromecast revenue stream was? I couldn't find it after a cursory look. I'm wondering if it's lumped into one of the "other" categories.

I think part of the distinction is how "success" is being defined. A product may be innovative and market defining, yet still not contribute much to the bottom line. It's still cool to work on, but these companies are still trying to make money at the end of the day. I assume their moonshot ideas still have the explicit long-term goal of being profitable.
This article was late to the game therefore headline is garbage. Amazon laid off 18k ppl in the most clusterfuck way. They had an article leaked about the wave 1 in November that impacted some 8k to 11k and then this weds the total was brought up to 18k. The emails from the article were sent to Amazon employees on weds the 18th after Amazon employees spent all of the holidays and January stressed wondering "am I going to be laid off?"

No new layoffs, but the 18k is the collective total and it's being spread out so long because of Amazon leadership incompetence and world wide labor laws differing.
They are just people like you
Maybe it's just that I'm just old and been doing JavaScript for 20+ years, but I HATE IT.
Exactly, and this bonus is less than $8k USD. Most FAANG bonuses are 3-5x that, and yearly.
Not directly related to Unions... but look at salaries for SDEs in Europe compared to the US. You can almost 2x-3x a salary for the same job. A large factor is that European companies don't take risks. At least, compared to the US.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...

In fact, almost any innovative/high-skilled job pays a fraction compared to the US. It is much harder to innovate in Europe.
We introverts will make great residents of Mars. People always talk about how impossible it’ll be for humans to live there in relative isolation. Those people are obviously normals, and they always assume the others like us don’t count. I’d do just fine with myself or a small number of close partners for the rest of my life. Further, a lot of folks on the spectrum wouldn’t do _just_ fine, they would do better.. A planet for the neurodiverse seems like a great thing.
Because it is more expensive to borrow money. Think of it like this, if it costs 1% to borrow money and you can use it to generate a 4% return with a less than efficient operation, the equation makes sense. However when that money is now 4% to borrow, you are forced to increase the efficiency of the operation or shut it down completely.
Well, people make plenty of money while the fitness is being reduced. The costs are spread widely, but the benefits felt narrowly.

The protected industry doesn't always vanish, sometimes it re-invents itself. The US semiconductor industry was protected in the 1980s: https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c8717/c8717.pdf
incidentally if anyone wants to go in on a bamboo farm in thailand that just buries biochar in a ditch lmk
> I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here

When an incident occurs in prod and it affects the livelihood of 12.000 people (or more if you include family), you'd expect at the very least a post-mortem. I've never seen a company produce one after that.

What was the root cause? crazy hiring, massive wage war

Could the current situation be anticipated? hell yeah, out of a pandemic, war raging in Europe, petrol production going down, supply chain problems all over the world, resulting in inflation going massively up... Don't need an MBA to anticipate the economy was par for a correction.

what could you have done to prevent this? realize it was too good to be true. Don't enter the rat race, be cautious about hiring. Focus business.

what steps will you take in the future to prevent this from happening again? "I take responsibility" is a beautiful thing to say but it's completely empty if you don't take the consequences as well, and don't learn anything in the process. I bet you that if/when we recover from this dip, the same hiring practices as before will re-submerge so that resiliency doesn't move and we see the same move in another 5/10y. So I guess the answer to this question is "none, loyalty goes only one way and trust me when I tell you that no-one is safe"
const isRandNumOdd = Math.round(Math.random() * 100) |> % % 2 |> Boolean;

Excruciatingly contrived, but does this sort of arithmetic work in the Hack syntax? I'm genuinely curious, couldn't find any mention of modulo (or remainder) in the proposal.
I literally LOLed. You describe an interview process which attempts to compensate for your inability to quickly assess a person's talent/fit and try to play it off as if you're doing a favor for talented people you are interviewing. Then you had the gaul to be smug about it by implying I wasn't in the "smarter" category. I'm so happy to be at a place in my career where I don't have to tolerate being spoken to like that anymore.
Doing a little bit of digging into the Gauche manual would have led you to a listing of the various utility libraries that it offers: http://practical-scheme.net/gauche/man/gauche-refe/Library-m... As you can see it is pretty extensive, and could likely handle most of the needs you mentioned in your comment. I would call this pretty “practical”.
Yes. Just because it's been normalized doesn't mean it ought to be that way.
Good list. My 2c about number 5.

We can agree that someone's character trait may irritate you because it goes against your values or beliefs.

But the irritation can reach maximum intensity if it comes to be a trait:

- you dislike about yourself AND have not accepted [0]

- you've had a "bad experience" with. For example, your abusive mother has said trait

__

[0] I think part of why the hate is so intense in this case is that you're forever with yourself; you can't escape; the trait is always there, in plain sight.
The poem that inspired the best 47 minutes in the history of television [0], which will be studied in high schools 500 years from now like Shakespeare is today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Breaking_Bad)
> In response to woke pressures, the U.S. military was properly to be envisioned more as a social-justice institution

I’m sorry but I cannot take seriously an article related to military history that uses meaningless words such as woke un-ironically.