skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder how much major tech companies are taking into account "revenge" when doing their firing. For example, if I was a GCP Solutions Architect and got laid off, my skills would be well suited to jumping to a customer who is using GCP - but would I be inclined to support this activity, giving the employer who fired me more revenue? Depends on the availability of roles of course, but I would certainly be giving strong consideration to ways to screw them over in return, for example by advocating for another cloud and quietly, tactically airing some dirty laundry.
In Germany, and possibly many other EU countries, there is a mandatory notice period plus a social plan.

The longer you are with the company, the longer notice period, starting from 4 weeks and can get up to 6 months.

You also cannot fire a parent of a newborn if you keep the single 20-something in the same position.
Not every junior becomes senior in the same company. They are already the top of the cream.
[reference needed]
Comments like these tell me how ingrained capitalism is on people's minds now. We seem to forget that without the people that make up the company, it simply does not exist.

Companies are imaginary entities chasing profits for its owners. There's nothing sacred about it and they shouldn't EVER be more important than people.

I don't understand how we can lose sight of that.
People really don’t seem to understand that the fact employment is at will and people are not unionized is the reason why tech salaries are so high to begin with

The concept of being a lifer is very rare. Not many people expect to stay at one company forever, many not even more than a few years at most.
> It’s an easy time to fire a bunch of people..

Totally agree. This is just cutting in places they’ve probably wanted to cut for a while. They’ll hire back in a year or two as things ramp up, and on projects they consider important.
1) There is no downvote for stories AFAIK.

2) I refuse to downvote anything except comments that include "I'm going to get downvoted for this...". The signal is too noisy to figure out what a downvote means.

If I do not like something, I write a comment.
100% Signals an Threads. Super technical extremely well presented.

Some more fluffy ones:
Hard fork. Pivot. All in.
If you've ever wondered, this is not about immediate money concerns.

In 2021 Google made $257 billion aka $257 000 000 000. And a profit of $76 bn aka $78 000 000 000.

It had 187 000 employees.

That works out to $1.3 million income per employee. And a net profit of $406 000 per employee.

They don't need to lay off anyone. They just want to.

I've seen smaller companies where they first shift employees around, offer everyone a choice, etc. People are only really laid off is things don't work out over many months or even years.
We have friends from an ethnic community who have a large extended family scattered all over the east coast and California. They literally have an all day Zoom meeting that about a dozen people are in at any given time. It’s kinda nuts but also really cool.
That is still a selection process… it’s just that the success profile is different. Even in Ivy league you can’t really say the ”smartest” ones are the most successful. Selection selects ”something”, and I don’t really know what to be honest.
I suppose if someone found a technique in the wild that defeats regular ASLR (even if only sometimes), they could then test that same technique against fine-grained ASLR and evaluate if the FG ASLR was more effective at preventing exploitation.
Programming for Kids: Scratch vs. Code.org
That’s basically evolution vs design. Design allows you to be stuck in planning mode forever. It’s noble even, because you want to do it right.
Punished for what? This is all going to plan. Big tech gambled that the pandemic would create huge opportunities and it hasn’t totally panned out. They always planned to lay people off in that situation.
DeepMind has occasionally made to the popular press - but not like ChatGPT. Coverage was more like that of IBM’s Watson and Deep Blue back in the day.
In the 90s I worked in software development company. We constantly struggled with not having enough people for all the work we were getting so there was overtime involved. On plus side it paid good bonuses to employees on minus side it resulted with people being overstressed. So at one point I asked the owner/CEO why the fuck are we doing this? He said something like "when the other companies fire people because of downturns we don't".
I guess it depends on what they were hired for. If they were on a team for a project that is no longer viable, should they be kept on and given busywork?
I think this touches the base of the disagreement about their existence: the unspoken definition being used.

When I hear 10x programmer I definitely don't think "that they are 10x more productive in grinding jira tickets."

I think there are programmers who can build something that would take ten or more other developers to replicate.

And that's "easy" since some people can win by choosing the right game to compete in.
Probably not - Apple laid off internal recruiter contrators in August 2022 as part of a plan to reduce hiring which was already much lower than the other big tech companies. For example in 2020 and 2021, Alphabet increased their workforce by 13% and 15%. Meta increased their workforce by 30% and 22%. Apple on the other hand only increased by 7% and 4% in those same years.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/18/apple-had-slower-headcount-g...
The Human Development index is kind of okay, if you don't want to go down the more qualitative path. https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks
Sometimes they need to negotiate with unions or government agencies.

They could still notify employees, it would be the nice thing to do.

"You'll be laid off once we get approval from the relevant groups".

Of course, that disrupts productivity for these target employees for 1-2-3 months, so they won't do it.

I wonder if the hit to productivity to <<everyone>> is worth it.
I've noticed the same thing with YouTube notifications.

It feels like Google wants to recruit/queue my attention as a resource for their client's ads instead of just notifying me when a new video from someone I follow is available.
Right but in “regular finance” you generally have a regulator who will slap you around if you advertise a product which promises 10% per year guaranteed. There are unregulated (or less regulated) things like hedge funds, but at that point you’re clearly in a fairly small market that most people cannot or do not participate in.

So what is niche, risky behaviour in traditional finance, seems to be the norm in the Wild West that is crypto.
The company made the hires to the presumed benefit for the company. The company will pay.
Pascal is totally fine for bare metal programming. (Modula-2 would be better, but anyway.)

Early versions of macOS [1] were written in Pascal.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pascal_(programming_l...
GP is not unhappy about topics appearing on hn that he knows little about, it's specifically about using Twitter for something like that.

Conventional media would usually come with a short introduction for those completely new to the topic. The kind that tends to lead to considerable hilarity in those who don't need it. More traditional publications sometimes even seem to aim that short introduction at a knowledge level so low that it could only make sense to future generations finding a centuries old document or to some time traveler who skipped the last decades.

Hn, with its original source policy, will tend to avoid those without even trying. Even if I think that guideline is more about avoiding derivative journalistism than about avoiding journalism. At some point going deeper to some original source becomes a trade-off and Twitter links make that conveniently graspable.
it is worth writing not only beautiful code, but also unique. You can use the https://apprefactoring.com/ service
Lago (YC S21), open source usage based billing, is hiring a cloud engineer
> They don't need to fire anyone. They just want to.

Why would they want to?
If they make so much money, why fire a few people for a massive amount of bad PR?
So seem to know the reasoning. Enlighten us please.
Google struck oil 20 years ago and money has been flowing in faster than they can spend it ever since. Some of that money let them drill more holes, and about 15 years ago some struck oil again.

Because it's worked in the past and they can afford it, they've continued drilling countless holes. For example, their many incompatible messaging systems [1].

Some of the holes seem to have been drilled without any regard as to whether finding oil in that location is even possible.

Presumably they hope to cut down on go-nowhere drilling, while still doing some drilling, in the areas where an oil strike is most likely.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...
> unless you think working with a MS-DOS computer would be advisable today

MS-DOS doesn't even have a networking stack by default, so it's air gapped out of the box. That in case you're worried about security.

Other than that, if you can control some relays from an esp32 with 4k ram, why wouldn't you be able to do it from an 8088 box with 64?
Honestly that's a poor blog post.

Randomly concludes "the best time-based ID seems to be xid" without saying why or comparing to others e.g. ksuid, UUIDv7 etc ("xid" is only mentioned twice in the entire blog, first in the above statement and second a link to the reference implementation). Equally unfortunate that they picked "xid" as their supposed "best" because Postgres has an internal identifier that is also called "xid" and is very much NOT to be used as a primary key !

Downplays the many issues with "serial", including somehow thinking the word might "might" has a place next to the words "not want to expose them to the world though" .... you DON'T, full stop. Exposing predictable identifiers to the world is never a good thing.

I'm not really sure what that blog post is supposed to be achieving really. I didn't learn anything.
Pretty uninformative post. Goes from count(*) to some uuids, but fails to see the bigger picture.

Depending on the data, but assuming most data isn't big data:

- Use integers internally, maybe suffixed by a shard-id to prevent collision, but keep order.

- Use (random) external ids to access from the outside.

Note that certain uuids will still leak some information: time between records, number of machines, etc.
What does it really mean to take responsibility, then?
> it has never been updated throughout its history

As Wikipedia points out, "The doctorates in the higher faculties were quite different from the current PhD degree in that they were awarded for advanced scholarship, not original research. No dissertation or original work was required, only lengthy residency requirements and examinations." and "The doctorate of philosophy developed in Germany as the terminal teacher's credential."

The modern system, with its focus on research training, is derived from Prussian educational reforms in the early 1800s, which then spread around the world.
Good intro article. I'd always heard that serial ints aren't guaranteed to be ordered but never knew why (because they are generated non-transactionally..so if an INSERT transaction rolls back the id that would have been used is effectively consumed/skipped).

What I see a lot in practice is a bigint numeric id for internal use (better for joins, FKs) and also a textual token for public use, perhaps with a typed prefix indicate the type of record it's identifying (U-AS234FDS for User, etc)
A programmer checking and OKing the message only tells you they didn't think it's bad enough to expend effort correcting it.

ChatGPT can't correctly guess what the author's intent was, because that information is not contained in the code (exception: if the code includes a comment explaining the intent).
I think it’s means “there are coders out there who are consistently 10x more impactful than the average coder,” and this could be the result of simply speed or through other methods — finding better solutions etc.
I recommend you three books, because as academic I expect you to like thinking:

1. The now habit. Understand what anxiety and procrastination is. Where does your anxiety comes from? You probably are comparing yourself with what you should be doing, or with what you should have done in the perfect world. There is no perfect world.

You were the "planner", the strategist, but someone else did the dirty job, the boring stuff. A good planner will usually become a terrible action man, because it requires a completely different mindset.

Action or execution requires totally different strategies from managing-planning. First, it requires no planning, no time spent planning and deciding because it has already been decided.

People that are good strategists usually are people that love to think all the time, hence it becomes natural to them. Now, if they need to execute something that has been decided(even by themselves!!) they continue expending time and effort looking for a better solution, for a better plan and the law of diminishing returns kicks in. As planners they could spend 100% on it, be specialists, but now it is a terrible strategy.

You need to be able to be two personas in one. From a person that only cares about planning and making decisions to someone who only cares about what is in front of his or her until the work is done.

2. Atomic Habits. Use proven strategies that work. Do not care about results, only care about good habits, because they produce results automatically.

3. The book of no. If you have problems, you state them clearly. We don't need another PhD, we don't care. Do you care about what you are doing? Nobody forces do to do it, you do it because you want it or else you just don't do that.
I agree.

Which is worse: never getting hired by google, or getting hired, working for a few years making a great or even outsized salary and then getting laid off after getting great experience? - or never having had the opportunity to in the first place?

An awful lot of people would prefer the first scenario and will come out ahead.
>But now, all you need is mains power and a smartphone,

And a server owned by Jesus McJesusFace in WhereTheHellistan propped up by shitnickles funds.

Just no. A simple physical switch works every single damn time without external dependencies. Perfection is simplicity, not complexity.
I’ll probably write in more detail this coming week, but Genesis was the largest prime broker in crypto. It provided liquidity, credit, and important financial infrastructure to other members of the DGC group, including they Greyscale Bitcoin Trust. This made it one of the most systemically important institutions in crypto.

If you do not care about crypto, obviously, not terribly relevant. If one does, the degree of rot and malfeasance in systemically important institutions, and the many billions of dollars lost, and the likelihood that not mere fecklessness but actual crimes underlie many of the losses, are fairly important. (FTX was a large scale misappropriation of customer funds. Genesis, among many other crypto lenders, is currently under investigation for unregistered securities offerings, essentially on the theory that they sold a product which masqueraded as a bank deposit but was actually a structured product which blew up in a fairly predictable way. We have laws which prohibit doing that.)
Cooler Master plans an open-source MasterPlus+ update to support 3rd-party APIs
Humans slaughtering each other. Shocking.

Next they’ll tell us water is wet.
Linux Unplugged was recommended on HN a while ago so I gave it a try but found the signal to noise ratio very low. I felt it was 30% content on topic and 70% noise about meetups, crypto...
If they have cleared out Google's 6-7-8 rounds of interviews.. they can always be trained to move to/start into new projects no?
Small microring array performs large complex-valued matrix-vector multiplication
Crypto failing because of covid response? That's a new one..
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How to Teach Kids Coding (resources)
You cannot go back to the old Wikipedia design without an account
My experience is that you can find developers who are 10x as productive as their peers, but rarely at the same company. That is, the average engineer at company A is 10x as productive as the average at company B.

I don’t have data on it—it could be hiring or compensation—but I suspect it’s simply systems of work that spend more time focusing on the right problems, in the right way, without slowing down the work.
Its not bad PR when the narrative has already been set. This is a very opportunistic move at cost reduction that would have been scrutinized heavily under regular circumstances.
I suppose it also depends on whether evading detection was something the AI was designed for or an emergent behaviour of some other property (which seems spookier)
My opinion. Always if in any way possible pick a semantic key. There is usually something defining the thing you are working on. If there isnt work on your normalisation.

Main benefits to this:
Avoids accidental duplication (happens so much). Avoids additional round trips to fetch the id to make a mutation.

Of course if you work on something where you don’t know what it is yet (actually humans are a good example for that) uuid or int might make sense but I hear so many times picking non semantic as a default.
1. The cost saving is much (much) faster with layoffs

2. You don't lose (or get rid of, for that matter) the same people when you do layoffs vs organic attrition

On (2), I don't only mean "good" vs "not good" people, but also distribution per department.
Some of these are Nvidia issues. HDR and TB networking are valid, I forgot about HDR since my monitor is so bad at it that it was a must turn off feature that actively ruins the experience rather than enhance it.

For image based installs, it is possible to customize distro installers. Cubic is a tool to do so for Ubuntu/Debian based distros for example. And with NixOS or Guix you can do some pretty crazy stuff which don't have any compliment in the Windows world.
I agree, this is the way to do it. Anything originating from the outside is bound to change, being email address, social security numbers, ...

The post also completely ignores foreign keys.

It is an absolute advantage to size and speed to have foreign keys to be int4/int8 and not an email address or UUID.
I agree they need to stop with the rhetoric... but I am sure we are not going to agree with why or what the end result of that change be

The statement should read "We saw the "day in the life" video, we know you were not doing enough work so now we are reducing head count because clearly you have too much free time"
I do agree with you that those companies should have prepared for the hike but I also remember Powell saying “inflation is transitory” :p
You need to jiggle just your head :)

Had two places where i was regularly going out get stingy with the toilet light timer. One fixed it after I (and probably a lot of other people) complained. The other was still too short last time i've been there.
I would be surprised if they let go Senior Staff/Principal engineers.
Seems like some other CEOs may have recently departed over layoff disagreements with the board. I wonder if this is a sign of upcoming Netflix layoffs.
This is similar advice on how to get wealthy as to what you would find in Poor Richard’s Almanack or more recently Poor Charlie’s Almanack.

Most of these major takeaways are grounded in the core idea of knowledge is power and patience is a virtue. But because it is said by someone with less integrity and known for larger hoaxes than say Benjamin Franklin or Charlie Munger, you may have a harder time believing it.
I sometimes submit articles like this that I don't understand in the hope that someone who does will follow up with tl;dr that explains it in terms I can grasp.
"operating system" is not super well defined term, and the distinction is definitely bit blurry when it comes to unikernels like this.

To me maybe useful distinction is if the thing is able to function by itself, so is it a system by itself, or does it need additional pieces to become a whole system. Going by this categorization for example Linux is not an operating system by itself because you also need userland to function.

That being said, wikipedia does categorize unikernels as "library operating systems" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system#Library

But if we accept that unikernels are operating systems, then the obvious question is what set services push something from library/framework to operating system. Is a disk/file-system driver an operating system? Its not like DOS did provide much more than that afterall.
Because Google employees are really really expensive, and this won't generate a massive amount of bad PR because everyone is doing it. It's the ideal time to sack of employees you don't want.
Turing test is a red herring. What property does it test? Humanity? Do we really believe only a human is worth attention? Not really, we are fascinated by animals and even machines. Or are only humans worth being scared of? Clearly not, gray goo is a frightening concept, even though it's in no way human.

Or is it "consciousness"? But a baby doesn't pass the Turing test. Assuming that babies are even "conscious", whatever that means.

We have pretty amazing "AI" already, but applying a Turing test to see if it's intelligent makes as much sense as judging a human by the ability to multiply matrices.
The machine learning models are noteworthy for what they already are.
i work remote, no commute haha. i just play these in the background while i work (example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvd9JFFRI5Y). also i skip pretty aggressively if i dont like a guest or topic. you should skim podcasts like you skim HN titles and tweets.
He said "I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here"

You can argue about the semantics of "responsibility" means, but i think in context he's basically saying "my bad". Nothing more nothing less.

If you look at the dictionary definition https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/responsible this way of using it is consistent. "being the cause or explanation" is one of the definitions. Sure there are other meanings to the word, but this is the one that makes the most sense in context even if you wish he meant the other one.