skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all a freshly graduated engineer will never be signing off on a bridge used by millions of people a years.

More importantly designing a bridge using a century old design, well understood materials, and sticking to all the well known, well documented and legally mandated best practices we have accumulated over the years is an entirely different skill than trying to come up with a novel and better way of designing or building a bridge and then conclusively proving that it is still at least as safe as the old way of building a bridge.
That's what people who own company do, not the ones that get yearly bonus based on short term performance
> Warning: This post is long, depressing and rambling. I've written it for my own benefit.

Post then proceeds to rocket to the top of HN almost immediately
Same. I think it just lacks wide-eyed optimism.
I foresee a latex like language that can compile to iheartla
Lack of decent UX for cookie management.
I was also going to post your 3). https://postgres.fm is great, and I feel like every episode I learn something new or find something to look into more in detail.
> hierarchical anarchy

I have a vague idea what you're trying to describe but this phrase is completely self-contradictory.

Anarchy is the absence of hierarchies. I think you're using "anarchy" in its pejorative sense, roughly meaning "chaos" or "law of the jungle" but using it like this in a discussion about social structures is confusing at best.
For anybody else who has no idea what this is about, a news article with context (that followed from the tweet here):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-64343377

And wrt the tweeter:

"Genesis is also embroiled in a high-profile dispute with Gemini, owned by the former Olympic rowers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, over the fate of $900m in assets that Gemini customers deposited with the lender."
"during covid for seemingly no reasons"

During covid the demand for online services went way up, media consumption, remote work and study. They had to try to increase their share of it and now they scale back.
> but a box full of relays and PLC controller cost a whole lot less than the all-in employer cost of an extra employee.

Why would you need an extra employee just to turn on/off the lights? I think janitors or teachers always did that as part of the job before smart switches came around, no need to hire some "light manager".
That one's not funny, the really funny one is the "Are you a communist/polyamorous degenerate" section.
It's best to split 2022 in two. The first half was quite different from the latter.

I saw it in practice as I left Google at the end of 2021 and job hunted on and off through the year. The pace of hiring everywhere significantly dropped mid-2022.
The repeated mentions of AI comes across as him being completely tone deaf. Does he not realize that people fear AI will cause jobs to be lost? Talking about AI and layoffs at the same time is going to earn him some heat for quite a while.
Just a theory but in a downturn I could see a lot of companies increasing their ad spend as they lose existing customers and find they need to work harder to acquire new ones.

Obviously this doesn’t apply to advertising which is just gratuitous brand building.
Iterating "the" space race would risk losing future stages (as all previous stages had been "lost"), so cynicism, if not game theory, predicts declaring victory and going home* at the first opportunity.

I am told that at mid-90s NASA (or at least JPL?) one might see (not-so-)motivational posters saying "25 years: what were your dreams then, of now?"

* cf note that only the "spam in a can" went home; unmanned missions by both sides continued well after Apollo. cf Fast Cheap and Out of Control

Also note that the man who famously said "we choose to go to the Moon" got cancelled well before anyone ever got there.
(His soviet counterpart was also cancelled, after which Roscosmos —up until NASA first started— stopped flying female cosmonauts)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g25G1M4EXrQ
Same here, though in the Danish version. But mine has some mentions of embarrasing nights out in the past that I'd like removed, and doesn't include stuff generated in other countries.
> diversity programs...

Not even remotely comparable to the other things you listed. People such as yourself seemingly can't stop talking about it though, despite it having no effect on your life.
Check this out: https://www.shelly.cloud/en-hu/products/product-overview/she...

It's inexpensive and easy to install. The most important feature is its REST API, so you can control it any way you like if you don't like the official app.
> Another question I would have is: will they stop hiring for 2023-2024?

Almost certainly not. Maybe the first few months, fewer will get hired.

> Couldn't they offer these people an alternative role internally?

They almost certainly will try to do that with the top performers. But I suppose it doesn't make much sense doing this to retain below average performers (even if their average may be a bit high), given their salary levels and the current market.

Moving someone from one type of product to something completely else may require almost as much training as the training of a new hire. Better to hire someone new in a few months, at a lower salary and possibly someone with more potential.

Also, most ex-googlers will probably have an easy time finding other work (especially engineers), so even they may be better off in the end.

Now, I do wonder what kind of roles are seeing the biggest slashes, especially outside of tech. (Ie, sales, marketing, key account, domain experts, content moderation, HR related). If any of those are cut disproportionally, it may indicate a change in direction.
> It seems like all of the FAANGs have made severe strategic cockups when it comes to hiring lately.

My understanding is it is simply firing season because markets will not punish companies for layoffs right now.

Being in the job market right now myself it’ll be interesting to see how competitive things get.
> Firstly, attrition, simply don't replace those that leave

Nobody is retiring - why would you, you get a fat pay cheque and once you get out of the meat grinder Jr levels life is pretty good. Oh and if they fire you rather than you retiring, they have to pay you another stack of cash and keep those options that vest in a few years.

"Seeing people posting about being laid off after 30 years of employment at Microsoft is a great example of corporate loyalty." - is this just a clean out of the expensive old folks after the hiring spree of late? Is it last in first out or first in first out? These are much more interesting discussions.
My brain somehow skipped that sentence. I would be relatively certain all the affected people were already feeling quite free to do what needs to be done in their individual cases.

This is such a weird Friday.
Sure, if you think it’d help. Here’s the message I sent that got me the new job. The context is that they were pushing back a little bit during salary negotiation and asking for a resume, so I channeled my Jewish ancestors and went into full salesman mode:

“ https://battle.shawwn.com/Shawn%20Presser's%20Resume.pdf was the resume I used for Groq. I planned to update it after finishing out the year. In terms of my ML work, here's some highlights of my work prior to Groq:

- A Newsweek article about various GPT work I did https://www.newsweek.com/openai-text-generator-gpt-2-video-g...

- I was the first to demonstrate that GPT-2 could play chess https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/10/gpt2_chess/

- ... which DeepMind referenced: https://twitter.com/theshawwn/status/1226916484938530819

- GPT-2 music https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame...

- Invented swarm training https://www.docdroid.net/faDq8Bu/swarm-training-v01a.pdf

- Built books3, the largest component of The Pile, a training dataset for language models (later used to train GPT-J): https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00027

- Started the first ML discord server, grew the community to >2k members (Eleuther was formed there)

- Reverse engineered BigGAN’s model over the course of ~6mo to locate a bug in their open source implementation https://github.com/google/compare_gan/issues/54

ML research makes me happy, so I’ll be doing it for the foreseeable future. @StabilityAI expressed interest in bringing me on to help fix problems with their diffusion training. I’d prefer to work with you, but if it’s not possible to increase the equity or salary offer, I understand. Are you sure you can’t bump it?”

They bumped it. Anyway, I hope that was helpful. I don’t know how relevant my recession experiences are compared to, say, someone in webdev. But if you’re a talented dev and someone’s lowballing you, be sure to at least try to negotiate. Don’t let the recession fears prevent you from turning down an initial offer.

That said, I recognize that there are loads of people in a position where they’d be thankful to have any work at all. And I imagine I’ll be in that position soon enough — 35 is getting too close to 55 for comfort.
Arguably you need a bit of fetishization to get started with them though.
I don't know what you mean by "in scope" but modules do allow multiple versions to exist in the same process in different layers. That's what module's entire layer mechanism is about (internally, it uses class-loader isolation), and Layrry configures module layers (that's where it gets its name). It's in one of the first examples: https://github.com/moditect/layrry

So modules absolutely do support that by design, but again, for that to work well you need to really know what that duplicated library does (same goes for Rust or any language), and it's not a recommended practice in general because it can fail in really horrible ways if you're unaware of some implicit assumptions in the library.
A friend of mine who is in "serious" AI research keeps telling me not to get too excited about Google's AI stuff, as they do release a lot of papers, but these are essentially worthless and non-reproduceable as they hide raw data. He suspects half of them or more are completely made up, as they do not align well with what else happens in the field.

I can't verify that, but whenever the "AI" behind my Google Home gets a bit more stupid (happens once a week nowadays, with it 'forgetting' even the few things that worked before), I am inclined to agree.
Hasn't it sort of always been that way though? Social standing is a huge force multiplier in almost every human endeavor.
Google Ads, their most significant revenue stream, are entirely AI base, and speaking as an advertiser, it's only made it more crap. It's "ai" algorithms are designed to maximise value extraction from advertisers, rather than value creation for advertisers.

There has been a systematic trend over the last 10 years to remove the controls advertisers have over their placements and spend and move towards a black box we are supposed to trust.
Love more hopelessness coming at me.
The myth of the myth of the 10x programmer (2020)
I think more emphasis should be put on something I only realised recently, which hampered me a lot wrt adopting property testing, and which I still have a hard time with: property tests are not parametrised tests, it’s ok if they can only check some properties of the computation (e.g. post-conditions), that is still valuable.

For the longest time I was convinced I should have “perfect” oracles (unit test style) because that’s what simple examples usually show off, but outside of trivial examples it’s really only possible for limited cases unless you have a complete and perfect oracle (usually an existing known-good implementation).
I'm getting a 502 backend error. Looks to me like the site's currently loved to death, cause boy did I get excited at the title lol

Setting a reminder to check it out in a couple days when things settle down, ya ravenous mob...
I guess we do need the verb 'pwn' after all :D
For those of you missing this, I'm assuming this is a reference to the song "Another Day in Paradise" by Phil Collins (who was the front-man in the band Genesis).
This is good management now, but poor management before now. To paraphrase "Manager Tools": Layoffs are the consequence of management's failing to accurately judge market conditions.
Oxide and Friends covers a pretty good range of topics from hardware, software, business, company values.

https://feeds.transistor.fm/oxide-and-friends
Like this, but with your company laptop instead of the fish tank

https://youtu.be/sQDggdQ-eUo?t=22
Yes! Hard approach to take for a perfectionist but it’s the only way that works for me too. GitHub receipts for latest project show a lot of regressions. Embarrassing. But better than nothing, and finally got the MVP done. It was your approach that made it possible.
> I went back and forth on whether to post this, since it feels like I’m an outlier and maybe not relevant.

To anyone wondering whether to share your personal experience, please do; comments like this one are my favourites.
Always back up the key/QR code before importing it into any app in case that device blows up.
Yours is far less useful as all cars are rendered roughly the same size and side by side. Its utility and its UX is tangibly inferior to the submitted site.
Over-hiring and then firing in big rounds once a decade can sometimes be better... It can be a good way to get the low performers out without fostering a culture of 'must make the metrics look good or I'll be fired'.
Happens also at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Nederlands ;)
That's interesting, i keep getting annoyed by the wild inaccuracies and downright silly mistakes whenever I find a YouTube creator that produces videos on a topic I've got decent working experience in.

I.e. rxjs code like this
behaviorSubject.pipe(mergeMap() => of(behaviorSubject.getValue())

With podcasts, you usually get people that actually do the things they're taking about for a living as they're often not primary content creators
This. People talk about the job market as if it were a monolithic entity, but there is so much nuance by types and by regions that it is hard to make concise statements
Prolly the need for recognition because if you hack from public wifi with tails tor mullvad, brand new laptop with specific hardware and so on I don't see how you can get caught up
They've had all sorts of chances to expand that business, but have repeatedly shut down popular projects to the point where people hesitate before adopting new Google tools because they might get shut down with little warning.
I wonder if there is a gap in the audio market for low-level podcasts aimed at building technical "muscle memory".

Example: repeated syntax step-throughs in a rote/kata style, like foreign language courses.

I've never seen anything like that and have often wondered if it could work without the visual accompaniment.
Matter is in many ways a meta-standard. The transport layer may well be remain as Zigbee or Zwave, but by having at least the controllers supporting Matter you get interoperability between different protocols, rather than having to go all in on a specific one.
Accidental tech podcast - atm.fm
Management goes beyond C-suite. Upper management makes predictions of their needs, their productivity, what they achieve and don't all the time, it's literally a job req. My org has consistently less than 2 percent error in predictions while growing.

Other orgs however grossly miscalculated the performance of their products and their capacity to deliver, by being wasteful and overambitious.
There are dozens to hundreds of candidates for every postdoc position

Are you at a University people will recognise the name of (perhaps even internationally)? I have a friend at a small department at a smaller university and his department sometimes struggles to even get 2 or 3 actually qualified candidates to their postdoc applications.
What Pascal compiler did Apple use to build all that?

Looks like Turbo/Borland Pascal but I'm not sure that it existed in that time or/and was ported to 6502.
The clock is ticking for Google.

The quality of their products is consistently on a downward trajectory. Somehow, both search and maps have become worse. Spam that would have previously been easily filtered now gets through my Gmail.

Meanwhile ChatGPT runs circles around Google for any serious query.
If you believe much has changed, I would encourage you to look to the Mideast. Millions of dead bodies and countless destroyed governments are testament to the fact that opposing Western interests is like to be met with the bombs wrapped in slogans of freedom, human rights, and democracy.

Of course the Mideast is largely unable to speak for itself because their culture, religion, and language leave them culturally isolated from the West. In many ways our treatment of the Mideast today, and their situation, is directly analogous to how we treated China in the past and the situation they were in. So I would argue what has changed has not been our behavior, but China's ability to defend itself.
Ask HN: How are big-company layoffs planned and executed?
For anyone on the other side of the table (CEO, HR, Operations folks), how have you planned big-company layoffs before and how do you keep it silent before it happens?

For example, in the 12000 person Google layoff today, how did they get a list of 12000 people to layoff? Is it all done at the very top level, or are decisions about who/what to keep delegated to some certain level?
> What is the moral or legal base for attacking these companies? Honest question.

If an employee leaves Google, Google loses 1/140k = 0.0007% of its workforce, a negligible amount. If Google fires an employee, employee typically loses 100% of their income, which is non-negligible.

So, Google firing 12k employees means that twelve thousand people will lose 100% of their income, for the sake of... shareholder interests?

Many people see this situation as morally not-okay.
> "The ecosystem has proven much more resilient against major players going bankrupt than the traditional financial system. Nobody has been bailed out by a government as far as I know."

That's because crypto, unlike the traditional financial system, doesn't interact at all with the real world of companies, cash flows, employees, their mortgages, etc.

There's no need for the government to step in to save a bunch of crypto traders who got into trouble for inventing tokens that leverage tokens that represent tokens, and so on.

This also explains why the crypto system looks resilient at this point. Retail crypto investors have mostly taken their losses and gone home. The remaining players can manipulate the market to make it look like what they want; it's a shadow play with very little real money left.

Even Peter Thiel sold all his Bitcoin in March 2022 while at the same time making conference appearances where he claimed its price is going to increase by 100x:

https://www.ft.com/content/0a1d5597-7145-4035-987b-ff033bba3...
A few years ago, I built an exact replica of a Saas product I saw online and priced it 1/3 theirs. The actual founder went mad and started a smear campaign. Lucky for him, Workload at my regular job picked up and I abandoned the project, but this highlighted the weak moats of most of these products.

and this is the main reason most companies overhire. It's so that engineers are less inclined to go home and build their own competitor.
I read this as the customer was rude to the Usher (perhaps due to his station?), and the Usher was rude, but the owner basically told the employee he had to put up with the insult because the customer is entitled to because they paid, and may also bring future business. I think there's a line in the sand (which will vary person to person) where inappropriate unprovoked rude behaviour should not be tolerated by customers. That's all. My line is around unprovoked verbal abuse, where I'll give the customer a serve to protect the employee. Obviously if it's a common theme around a particular employee, perhaps they are the issue !!
Have enjoyed the All-In pod for macro tech/biz/culture/etc https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/all-in-with-chamath-ja...
What autism has to do with that?
> it can be always replaced with composition, which Rust already supports

Strictly speaking, open recursion (a notorious footgun in implementation inheritance, and arguably the underlying cause of the "fragile base class" problem) cannot be implemented via composition as-is. You need a complex "tie-the-knot" construction, typing "self" as an existential type defined in terms of itself, to enforce an indirection through the object's vtable in all calls to overridable methods. (AIUI, Rust does not have existential types that are general enough to allow this, albeit that might happen at some point as part of overall improvements to the type system.)
The fewer jobs are available, the more desperate recruiters become to earn their commissions.
Khan Academy. Not a book per-se, but have worked through the courses over the past few years, I'm confident that my college and university results would be about 2 or 3 grades higher we I to retake them.

https://www.khanacademy.org/
1. Make it work
2. Make it understandable
3. Make it performant (if too slow).
There's a lot that goes into showing ads, prebidding, making sure there's no nsfw content, etc.

Even if they implemented it correctly you wouldn't really trust a 3rd party to show your ads and risk strikes on your account.
Also, IIRC, when actual layoffs happen, in Germany they actually need to look at tenure and family status of fired people (e.g. fire people without families first).
Software Unscripted https://twitter.com/sw_unscripted is good. I don't know whether it's well known or not. Possibly a hidden gem.

Already mentioned, but Signals & Threads https://signalsandthreads.com is a very notable one. Probably the best episode hit-rate of any development-related podcast I've listened to.

Core Intuition https://coreint.org Apple-platform focused. Hosts have endearing personalities.

The Changelog https://changelog.com/podcast Good interviewers and wide-ranging episode topics (some get deleted - I won't subject myself to Kubernetes-related blather!)
They don't even have to raise prices. Keeping a generation locked into Google products could turn them into the Microsoft of the next generation of office workers.
I think it will be interesting to see how the layoffs are structured; e.g. how much if from specific product areas vs how much is perhaps performance based [not that we'll ever know that] and how much is SWE vs SRE vs non-eng, etc.
Broadly, yes.

The issue appears to be a little more complicated though. There is no clear reason to do any of it beyond 'signalling' to the market that executives are trying to rein in cost in anticipation of what now appears to be almost inevitable recession ( partially because of signalling just like the one from Google ). It is a vicious cycle.

I am not upset, but I am not yet personally affected. I also have been saying for a while that low rate encourages unhealthy habits ( including in VC realm ).

I guess my beef is that the entire layoff is.. not really necessary?