skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been mostly unemployed since the dot com implosion of 2000–2001.

I made a small packet of dot com cash that helped me in the early years. Not retirement level money, but enough to supplement cash from infrequent consulting gigs. And enough with my spouse’s income to qualify to invest in startups either directly or via venture capital funds.

I’ve applied to hundreds of companies across the industry since 2002. Multiple roles from low level programmers to mid–level managers and executives. I had been the CTO of a fairly large company in the 1990s. None of my experience mattered. There will be hiring managers from FAANG jumping in here saying “no, no, no, we absolutely look at your experience” and I’m here to tell you with one anecdotal data point that they don’t.

So I’ve withdrawn entirely from the industry. Happy to sit back and watch companies repeatedly make the mistakes that I made and learned from in the 1990s.

In turn I’ve been building and profiting from my own businesses over the past decade. Investors reject them as “lifestyle” businesses because they only earn a few million US$ in profits every year. But that’s plenty for myself.

I have no investors to answer to, few employees to cater to, and it’s a lot easier than constantly trying to play catch up with whatever the rules are for either getting employed in tech (you’re not all FAANG companies, stop interviewing like you are) or invested in by venture capital (expecting every company to have unicorn returns is how you get Theranos and FTX).

Between the businesses I own and the investments we’ve made we’ll do fine as we slide into our 50s and 60s.

Build a small business. Get it going. Hire a kid to do some of the work. Grow some more. Hire another kid. Keep iterating until your “work” is checking in on people, then hire someone to replace you as the manager of the business and start another one.

Constantly killing ourselves to hit the big payday in tech is like spending every last dime on lottery tickets in the hope that you’ll get that one big payday. It’s a lot healthier and saner to just spend the money on yourself or invest it in your own business. It’s probably not going to be a gajillion dollar payout, but it’s going to be more satisfying.
> sitting and breathing seems harder?

The stillness, I think. With adhd, that's my challenge anyway. The mind does not shut off, and 5 minutes can feel like forever. Even thinking about it makes me squirm. But I took a yoga class once that did breathwork, and with guidance, I found the ability to focus my entire attention on my breath; the action and the feeling of it.
There's sourcehut, though it's quite a paradigm shift from github.
Yes, sure. Sorry my comment was not that serious regarding loss of data.
Now that I think about it something still has to happen regarding ordering / displacement of icons or something. Maybe it will be added to the folder but will not be shown.
What a stupid world...

In the near future, just like Adobe telling users they need to pay a subscription to use Pantone colors, Google will say "It looks like you're trying to change volume. Please subscribe to the $2/month license fee to Sonos to do so."...
Maybe all the talk about the death of crypto just reflects where we are in the cycle.

The mood feels similar to late 2018 when most people weren't paying attention at all, and the few who were paying attention were just disgusted by the whole thing.

When the conventional wisdom is that everything from art to sports to real estate will be imminently cryptoized, you know it's frothy, and near the top of the cycle.

When the conventional wisdom is revulsion and disgust then maybe we're another six to eight months away from not thinking about it at all, which is probably the bottom of the cycle.
Yep, they totally should hire 150k people and pay each of them $500k.
While I don't know the definitive answer for that, I imagine it's for the same reason the earth's poles never became their own country or sovereign, self-governing entities.

But if the moon ever become independent, it would, by definition, enforce rights and rules itself.
> I love this point: "The tech industry layoffs are basically an instance of social contagion, in which companies imitate what others are doing."

Is there any evidence at all of this though? There appears to be a lot of copycat articles and comments on social calling the layoffs copycat behavior, which is a bit ironic.

Meanwhile, everyone of these companies laying people off is worth considerably less than a year ago and what was supposed to be a quick ending to the conflict in Ukraine has turned into a precursor for a larger sale war that may last for years, no doubt having a significant impact on economic growth.
The WinZip 7 and Sexy Brittney Spears ones really take me back!
Strategies that favor employees are more humane, more ethical, and more likely to pay off in the long run.

All the investors have in this is money—and the investors who have enough money in it to actually influence decisions have so absurdly much anyway that the amount they would stand to lose based on this strategy or that one is very unlikely to materially affect their lifestyle.

The employees have their whole livelihoods invested in the company, so any decision that is made without regard for their interests and needs is necessarily a heartless and inhumane one.

We should be making decisions based on how they affect humans, not based on how they affect money.
> Having seen both, I'm much more likely to leave /after/ a layoff than after a 10% paycut.

Would you also stay when you get a pay cut, with the only reason being that the company wants to maintain a net margin above 30%? Because that is somewhat happening right now.

Personally: I wouldn't.
Startup Lawyer recommendation (Not top 10)
For my last company, I used Orrick.

Starting a new company now and I see no need to pay 15K for incorporation - even if it's deferred. I may never raise money and even if I did, I wont want to pay someone 15K for a job that's probably 1K.

I'm looking for a lawyer who's decent, will use standard docs (perhaps the ones from my last company that Orrick registered), do some other paperwork and do it for a reasonable price.

Any advice or law firm recommendations to get this done quickly and cheaply?

I'm also ok giving my older docs to an accountant and have them do the work for me. Is that ok or stupid?

Anything YC does here to help (and no YC companies can use it)?
No. At least not with the Stable Diffusion 1.5 checkpoint used in the colab notebook. It seems to only have a very vague idea of what a Klingon bird of prey is. The best I could get in ~30 images was [1], and that's with slight prompt tweaks and a negative prompt to discourage falcons and eagles.

1: https://i.imgur.com/gDj2Kn4.png
Is earth Montezuma or Spain in that comparison?
I know my french bank offers a service like this, it is an extra though.
I wouldn't say all the tech layoffs are a social contagion. But amongst tech companies with extremely healthy balance sheets and income numbers, definitely more social than economic phenomenon.
> However, they do know that the stasis bubble containing Alice will eventually open up and pop Alice back into the current time.

In the first book, IIRC, they did not know that, and in fact believed the spheres would last forever.

The spheres were used like nukes, in a very indiscriminate way. Whole armies were sphered in a short time.

Many years after, when the first sphere popped, they realized a new way of time travel just opened.
Well it’s science fiction not a model for the Rule of Law, so there’s some hand waving to get back to the story at hand. To prove a murder without a body today you need a lot of corroborating evidence. Bodies make everything easier.

He only goes as far as he does because his protagonist in the second book is a detective (and a victim).
Ugh stop it HN, I can only handle so much nostalgia!
FYI, in Japan there's a sunset of websites that are meant for a Japanese only audience and the pages are still designed in 'ol faithful web 1.0 designs.
> a typical Eastern European would be much more racist and macho a that a westerner

How do you know that ? I think that what you say is racist and it's oposite, as they

> don't have a history of colonisation and slavery

to see others as resources, to justify it and use that if convinient, or enough of them to make such opinions - but see just other people.

Edit: Ok, what you say is just self-attribution (" would be ").
Alphabet could've reduced compensation per employee by as much as 50% at any point in its history and still would've had no problem hiring the same number of people. But it didn't, because success in software is extremely sensitive to quality of talent.

The best analogy I've come up with is that hiring software engineers is like hiring a bunch of book authors and asking them to write a NY Times bestseller. While your competitors are also trying to do the same.

If anything, I'd argue tech compensation isn't high enough. Software has unprecedented reach and (as a corollary) a winner-takes-all flavor. A team of a few hundred tech workers could build a business that brings the company in the order of a billion dollars in annual recurring revenue, justifying their own salary by several orders of magnitude. No other profession can do that. An accountant, plumber or lawyer can never create business value that is 1000x their own salary.
I am not a female in the Japanese job market, but I do have first hand accounts from them.

Are you a woman in the Japanese job market?
NVIDIA did across the board cuts instead of layoffs in 2009 IIRC.
I once heard a professor say that common sense is knowing when to make an exception. I wonder if this goes against the grain of machine learning systems which seeks to optimize the opposite of the exception.
Ad free results is not always the best experience for everybody, or at least not in todays context. I remember hearing a commentator on a podcast (I forget if they worked for goog or not) who pointed out that so much of online activity is economic so that ads (pay for placement) is a powerful relevance indicator.

I think the example they gave was if someone searches for “Taylor swift tickets” then they are more likely to be interested in the paid results from someone who wants to sell tickets than in the million forum posts discussing tickets (even tho they have the same keyword match). And their data proves this. Maybe there are ways to be “smart enough” to avoid this indicator, but a lot of “relevance” is a guess on user intention so seems like a damned if you do damned if you don’t.
This is absolutely sensible and also impossible for the patchwork of systems that an individual has to navigate. These systems would have to talk to eachother, and they don’t.

That’s why I’m in favor of a straight cash subsidy through the negative income tax.
Below comment on another layoff related thread is relevant here too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480652

The professor recommends across the board pay cuts as an alternative to layoffs.

> One thing that Lincoln Electric, which is a famous manufacturer of arc welding equipment, did well is instead of laying off 10% of their workforce, they had everybody take a 10% wage cut except for senior management, which took a larger cut. So instead of giving 100% of the pain to 10% of the people, they give 100% of the people 10% of the pain.

Curious if there is research here on how this impacts the company? Seems like it would also increase stress and encourage top performers to seek new opportunities.

He also recommends hiring during a recession:

> He actually hired during the 2000 recession and saw it as an opportunity to gain ground on the competition and gain market share when everybody was cutting jobs and stopped innovating.

I suppose this works when it works, and then fails completely when it doesn’t. In essence, this increases the risk profile on the company which seems problematic too. Would be curious if there are studies that show the outcomes of these strategies.

Perhaps there are no “good” strategies- just those that favor employees or those that favor investors.
From someone who is really appreciating last 10 years of movie and TV productions, heartfelt thank you for calling out nostalgia baiters.
Alas, probably not.

A great example here is the NUMMI plant. In brief, Totota was kicking the collective asses of US carmakers. The techniques were not a trade secret; indeed, Toyota was happy to teach anybody. As part of that, they did a joint venture with GM called NUMMI, so they could show how they implemented core principles like "respect for people" and "continuous improvement". And it worked! Using the same building and most of the same people, it went from being one of the worst GM plants to one of the best.

Did GM learn anything? Hell no. Because GM executives valued other things more than productivity and quality and worker happiness.

For the curious, this American Life did a great radio story about it: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015
> Not sure how much crawling you'll feel though

The article mentioned "Some may feel a tickling sensation.."

I think this is one of those I would have to "lean in" to and watch them crawl around. Like anything with needles, I have to watch them draw blood or give the shots, otherwise its so much worse
it's 2023, use cloud
I've heard meditation described as "motionless ju-jitsu with yourself". In the absence of any obstacle, the only opponent is you, but by definition you are equal in strength to yourself. So meditation can devolve into a heated evenly-matched contest of wills, which is extremely draining.
Most of the complaints seem to be related to controlling volume on grouped devices. How did Sonos get a patent like that? We've had lights on dimmer switches controlling groups of devices forever.

Is it one of those "simple existing idea with technology" patents?
Oh I see what you're saying. It's not actually downloading but there is a bug where it's not using the cache properly. will fix
That's why you set all of your drive roots as excluded folders
If my skip-level took a bigger paycut than me to ensure that my team keeps their jobs, then I will take the pay cut also. If my skip-level lays off a non-bottom-performing co-worker and then claims "full responsibility" I'm getting the fuck out of there.
I think this pattern is how perplexity.ai is probably citing sources, ie. it gets the relevant text from webpages in the prompt then asks GPT to answer the question

In general this kind of prompt context is probably the more 'advanced' way of using LLMs, eg. not "who is Steven Spielberg" but "here are my notes from an interview, can you arrange them into an outline". I suppose it can be useful in B2B apps ("what are the top sales calls I have to make today based on my CRM activity log")

But the current GPT prompt size limit of a few thousand words is really constraining for this type of use
the quote in the editorialized HN headline is nowhere to be found in the twitter thread.
See also: “Naked Came the Stranger” and “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”. Works that were intentionally, provocatively bad, yet successful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Came_the_Stranger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_the_Valley_of_the_Dolls
We're more divided than ever, and those ~10 people in the larger legislative chamber of the US Federal government will metaphorically kick and scream and whinge as they try to hold the entire country hostage... and the other ~210 who happen to claim to be in the same political party will let them out of a desire to keep some illusion of control they don't have, rather than compromise at all and work for the benefit of everyone.
- Dear padawan, here is your powerful elegant lightsaber. Yes, it can cut the vegetables you eat on a daily basis. You can even cut your hands easily with it. That's why I'll teach you the art of forecasting most probable outcomes of your next moves when you are using it.

- Thank you Master, finally I see the light and understand the the fork or chopsticks dilemma is a fallacy. Millions of jedi knights can't be wrong after all.
Symptoms in young adults following Covid-19 lockdowns in Denmark
> 1000%. Multiplayer in UE5 (especially the documentation) feels like it's bad on purpose. Nevermind the actually crappy net code - Just try writing your own online services provider...

Intriguing. Makes even more sense that Frost Giant Studios (who are using UE5 for their upcoming RTS) have written their own networking code (with rollback!), and thrown away other big parts of the engine.
If your fs already supports snapshots/versioning it might be convenient, but it doesn't solve the actual hard part which generally comes after changes have been merged upstream.

If we're only concerned with local changes I'd rather introduce beginners to `reset`, experts will already be doing something similar dependent on circumstance.

git reset --hard

git tag BEFORE
git reset --hard BEFORE

git reset --hard ORIG_HEAD

git reflog
git reset --hard HEAD@{<N>}
There were some interesting observations on r/law, particularly this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/10h9vju/supreme_court_...

From there:

>The issue has been muddied by sites like reddit who have been keen to play up outlandish possibilities of individual users or volunteer moderators becoming liable, which has never been a likely outcome of this case. The bigger and more realistic threat to a site like reddit is the possibility that actions taken by tools like automoderators, slur filters, or recommendation algorithms (e.g., sorting by "hot") might become legally analogous to editorial decisions.

>Because those tools are sometimes set up by moderators and influenced by user actions (e.g. voting/reporting), there are sort of fringe or edge-case scenarios where the lines could potential blur between algorithmic policies and user/moderator actions. But we as users don't really need to worry too much about every conceivable edge-case legal theory, because a site like reddit would presumably be incentivized to remove or disable any tools that could create such a liability, to protect Reddit's own self-interest.

>The algorithms that keep people clicking/viewing/refreshing the site are critical to the business interests of sites like Reddit and Youtube. It's really important for reddit's bottom line to have broad latitude to gamify user engagement by showing more of what will keep people on reddit longer and more-frequently. That's a less flattering PR angle than playing up the possibility that reddit users or mods could get in legal trouble.

>It's not so much that there is no possible way that any ramification of this case could ever put a user or a mod of a site like reddit in any jeopardy in any conceivable scenario...It's more like, sites like Reddit have a lot to lose if their algorithmic recommendations should become legally analogous to editorial decisions.
if they also run cloud, they are then responsible for 2 versions of the same softwares and the self-hosted versions make far less money. Also, when you google for confluence vulnerabilites, you'll see that every single story is about a customer with a self-hosted version. So self-hosted is also more insecure for most customer.
In the US layoffs are a method of getting rid of people who are normally untouchable because they fall into the EEOC protected classifications. As long as the group laid off is statistically diverse you can let them go without getting into individual situations - Bob’s performance was acceptable but we had to let go of X people in every division for economic reasons. Whereas otherwise Bob might sue saying poor reviews or a dismissal was actually discrimination when Bob was just a lackluster employee who happened to fall under one of the EEOC categories.

The last time I was involved in a layoff they gave everyone leaving a thirty-plus page document which broke down the group by every conceivable metric to prove that the layoff didn’t target any particular demographic more then others.
Not, despite the title, about TikTok in particular.
Your pointless exercise with wordplay is just a typical religious weaseling. I intentionally mentioned the age and you took the bait exactly like I expected, which shows. You dare to assume your "mature" reading is somehow more mature than Sir Isaac Newton's, and even to 10yo me it would be clear (even if you ignore the fact, that days are literally used in Genesis, which is the whole point I made and you continue proving by continuing to claim otherwise), that some random dude is more capable correctly comprehending Old Testament than Newton is laughable.
My Indian Bank, HDFC offers this since 2008, virtual cards with custom amount, one time use. On creation, the amount equal to limit gets set aside. If merchant charges less than max limit, the excess comes back.

Thier at-time debit cards were good only for domestic transactions, but this virtual was good for international, & used to come up as Visa Prepaid. I used it for registering domains & amazon international shopping.
It's a great write-up Simon
Laid-off Silicon Valley workers are panic-selling their startup shares
Can you clarify? What you propose sounds to me like a huge disincentive to work.

If you’re receiving $1234/month (typical disability payment from a few years ago), that works out to $14808 annually. Under your scheme, you’d have to find (and work) a job paying $14809/year just to see an increase of $1 in your real income. In effect, you’d be working for a full year and being paid a net of $1.
I'm having a difficult time rationalizing this with how the original rollback netcode, GGPO, was developed for games that didn't even have online play at all like ST. Did those old games just have uniquely reasonable windup animations?

I mean, I'm sure at the same time you end up with things like the meme Shiki Nanaya win screen[1] but a bad connection is a bad connection will ultimately be a bad connection no matter how you slice it.

[1] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/287/289/67e...
How does this gel with:

1. The widespread meme that Google and other likeminded tech giants snatch up talent for the sake of denying competitors that talent, rather than for developing their own businesses.

2. Google’s seeming inability for the last decade or so to launch new products that stick around, as well as questionable decisions with existing products- with their chat messenger strategy being the intersection of both failings.

Maybe the previous post only applies to SWE and not PMs.
>> For every deliverable GW of of solar you have have a GW of backup
> That is utterly silly. Think

Here's a concept: How about we have a conversation without insults?

Explain this to me then:

Let's say you have a 1 MW array in, say, Los Angeles. Let's assume not a cloud in the sky most of the year. Not true. Let's go there anyway.

We then get pounded with rains and have black clouds and dark skies for a couple of months (pretty much the kind of thing that happened in December/January).

Power output goes down from one million Watts peak to 75000 Watts peak for days and days.

How much backup --in any form, any technology-- would you propose to have in order to ensure the town, homes, people, hospitals, traffic lights, etc. relying on this 1 MW of power does not go dark during those two months.

Pick any technology. I don't care what it is. What I want from you is: We need x Watts of power as backup to survive this period. Power, not energy. There's a huge difference.

Since you think my statement is silly, I am assuming you think you can supply this town with a lot less than the 1 MW they lost during this blackout. How?
Tech probably hired without regard to true business requirements as well. Makes sense they layoff in similar fashion. When you are talking this many number of positions, can they really connect each position with profit/revenue/cost
It's odd that Brooks describes "neuro-symbolic" as a "new term". It has been around for a couple of decades.
Actually Google got a patent for the concept of Pagerank, number US9165040B1.