skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
https://archive.ph/CvgxW
Google hired 10.000 people in Q2 2022 alone. Despite claiming to have a hiring freeze, they hired even more people in Q3.

It looks to me like they were hiring people without even considering whether there was work for them after accounting for the upcoming project culling, leading to the current need to fire 12k people. If they did their hiring freeze properly, they could have probably avoided a significant fraction of these firings.
And the exploited program acquired root and changes the hash?
Wall St usually looks at cost reductions favourably, so his share options will likely go up making him many more millions. Those are the consequences for him.

(Edit: Before the obvious replies of "but but Google stock is already down 30%", the whole market is down over the last year.)
Yes, my suspicion is that most were forced into that position by macro economic trends, i.e. Facebook and smaller start-ups. Where as Google's delay in announcing this helped distance themselves from being lumped into the financial woes/overvaluation concerns of "the tech industry."

That said, I thought they'd at least wait until Q2/Q3, but that's a whole quarter of money to save...
Carmac or Torvalds are 10x.

But they won't work for your company.

So, stop talking about it in your interviews.
I mean it's a nice metaphor on the surface, but it completely falls apart because in reality we do a lot of things to prevent rocks from falling and damaging us and our property. From signs that warn of falling rocks to netting/drapery and even elaborate electrical warning systems[0].

We work together and mitigate it. What does this mean for companies? I dunno, but given they are man-made and that societies and attitudes shift over time I suspect it doesn't at all mean that companies doing bad shit are an inevitable thing we should accept and that all we can do is to just try our best not to personally draw their ire.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzAfich6mow
In my experience it depends on how much of a general share price vs technical pivot is involved in the announcement.

Typically some business functions will be shut down and merged and if those people can't be moved they will be let go.

Any extra numbers then usually come from manager selected lists that go up through various meetings where the exact numbers are haggled over. At root though, the base lists - at least in a well managed company - are based on operational need and regular, standardised, legally defensible, performance appraisals [0].

[0] Which is why companies like online HR appraisal systems.
But that is neither the purpose of a commit message, nor is it the why a commit was made.
If you meant to link to a particular comment (you probably should, as their ranking may change so another one can be on top when someone visits) then you messed up.
>Tech workers have been treated with kid gloves compared to the “real” world.

This is my reaction reading this thread. It's astonishing.

This same crowd is typically anti-union, cheers on coal mine closures (learn to code!), want to throw finance people in jail, wants all car dealerships to disappear..the list goes on and on. They never seem to realize these business consist of normal people, most making salaries significantly lower than SV.

But high paid software engineers lose their jobs and the same people want a revolution? I'm sorry to say, but the tech crowd doesn't have many labour allies in the "real" world anymore.
That was a very short sighted decision by Karpathy. Fortunately they fired him for good and backpedaled on that.

By the way, it's always astonishing how some people can screw up so bad and still come out ahead w/ money and reputation.
Which is why fast growth is so important.

It's irrelevant to some degree if this growth is real (driven by a better product), or inflated (by offering steep discounts, ads, marketing, etc).

It looks good on paper, and allows raising the next round. This is of course an order of magnitude bigger and demands even more growth. VCs look like geniuses in that case. Value of fund goes up, fees go up. Until they don't.
Andy Weir's short story "The Egg" deals with similar topics.

https://www.paullowe.org/the-egg/
I think there's also some amount of "Other companies are laying off, and we secretly kind of like the idea of ranking and yanking, even if we don't need layoffs. So we'll use that already socialized economically driven layoff thing as cover."
> But only because it’s so much fun; it’s still a selfish motive.

This implies that the overtime work isn't necessarily the most beneficial to the employer.
Strong reasoning skills and mathematical thinking is important to program well?
"My gut feeling says that students never learned strong reasoning skills and mathematical induction."

This quote from the linked article resonates with me quite a lot. I see people trying to understand recursion in code and not getting the hang of it.

CMU is one university where it's CS curriculum teaches functional programming after a rigorous course on Pure Mathematics Intro - https://www.math.cmu.edu/~jmackey/151_128/welcome.html. The functional programming course (15-150) materials are not public, but they use SML and uses heavy use of induction proofs and recursive implementations.

The other line of programming pedagogy argues that only simple high school algebra is enough to teach programming via recursion. I am talking about How to Design Programs: https://htdp.org/ and now the DCIC book: https://dcic-world.org/. They argue that looking at the data and its inherent structure is enough.

The above two approaches are mostly polar opposites of each other. I want to know what other HNers think about this.
Rather than goodbye, won't they move onto using twitter the same way invidious and newpipe use youtube with no "API"?
All the TikTok "I work in tech" women who sends 3 emails a day finally getting the axe + middle managers

This and MS layoffs

Boohoo
If we have a mix of human drivers and AI assisted drivers on the road, nothing short of AGI is going to be sufficient. Aspects of driving involve theory of mind - anticipating what another driver might do, sometime eye contact, etc.

An alternative solution would be to allow only autonomous vehicles and have these vehicles in a mesh network so can coordinate to drive efficiently and avoid mishaps. This would work reasonably on highways, but on local roads with pedestrians, bicyclists, and unexpected obstructions, theory of mind and ability to handle outliers will be important.

My conclusion is that something close to AGI would be required to implement succesfully.
Yet when an amateur throws it together we get https://www.engadget.com/2015-06-14-amiga-controls-school-di...
> I’m not buying into the collusion to compress wages or unchecked hiring that is becoming exposed theories.

Why not? Every FAANG company has been accused of colluding with each other to suppress (not compress) wages.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...

They have literally been tried, and admitted guilt, for doing exactly this.
That depends where you store that file. Is there a way to store this securely in a mobile device for use on the go?
Presumably at least some of them left a job to join Google. They now have no job, but might still have one had they not moved. It may very well be a tiny proportion of the total, of course.
At first I thought no it must be lognormal since productivity must be at least marginally more than zero, but then I realized that's definitely not true: I know developers who definitely have negative net productivity on the team.

The -0.5x developer is not a myth.
Given that so many humans these days write like they're assembling a collection of pre-made clichés and currently trendy phrases together, rather than even trying to express themselves with anything approaching originality, I reckon the task would be difficult. But more because of the number of false positives amongst the human writers than slip-ups by the silicon ones.
The assertions, test suite, etc. are handled by PyTest.

Hypothesis is taking care of generating arguments, and supplying them to the test. The '@given' decorator will wrap up the given test, to make a new one which:

- Calls the original test multiple times, with randomly generated arguments

- If the original test ever fails (throws an exception), the arguments which caused the failure will be "shrunk" to get a list of "smaller" arguments (e.g. smaller numbers; lists with fewer elements, and whose elements have also been shrunk; etc.). The original test will be called with those "smaller" arguments, to see if they also cause a failure: if they all pass (or the "shrunk" list is empty), then the original failing arguments are reported; if the same exception got thrown for some "smaller" arguments, we try again by shrink those into even smaller values (and so on); if a different exception is thrown, both failures are reported.

- The wrapped function also keeps a buffer of "notes", to help with debugging failures. Normal 'printf debugging' will be confusing to follow, since the original function will be called many times, so we'll get many copies of the debug output, and it's hard to know which ones came from successes and which ones from failures. If we use the 'note' function, Hypothesis will put them in a buffer, which is reset for each run. When a counterexample/failure is reported, only those notes from that run will be printed.

- We can tell Hypothesis to skip certain situations; e.g. the test in the article could have caught ZeroDivisionErrors and told Hypothesis to skip. That doesn't count as a failure, but also doesn't count as a success. The test will just be run again with different arguments.

- There is a threshold on the amount of skipped tests; crossing that threshold is treated as a failure, since we aren't seeing enough successful runs to be confident that it's working.

- There's also a timeout, to avoid bad interactions between the strategies/generators, tests, skipping, etc.

There are a few more things Hypothesis will do, like maintaining a database of previous failures, so it can retry those values as a form of regression test. It's a really nice tool :)
> that is not a public good paid collectively via taxes.

Keeping in mind that most things which are paid for in this way do not meet the economic definition of a "public good" and therefore could have been provided efficiently by private entities for profit.

"News" is different.

At its core, without external regulations, "information" is not rivalrous: If I know something, that does not preclude you from knowing it. If I make a decision based on that information, that does not preclude you from making other decisions using that information (in contrast, if I eat a particular apple, you cannot eat the same apple).

Further, to the chagrin of many, "information", at its core, is not excludable in that there is always a way in which it can be transmitted which has frustrated and continues to frustrate many who seek to control it.

"News" is different though. Because "news" is usually something that demands attention now. Human attention is a constrained resource both because time is limited and because of cognitive constraints. Therefore, if one wants to understand what to do with this piece of "news", one may not be ability to process the this other one. Further, one can be excluded from receiving "news": Sure, you may get to find out eventually, but only people who pay for X can get the "news" immediately in a digestable way etc.

When private entities try to provide information people value, there will be a variety of them, competing, contradicting etc.

When a non-accountable body is charged with providing information that all must receive with funds collected in a way that is unrelated to what people want from the information they receive, guess what will happen.
Oh no, no acetaminophen and central heating! Guess I'll just die!

In all seriousness - even if you sincerely plan to commit suicide (and take your family with you?) if life gets harder, why use the nuclear attack itself to do it? Why close off options? Why not attempt to survive, and reassess afterwards if you really think life still isn't worth living?
I do a similar thing when I’m writing. Except I write on paper and allow myself to make revisions. Being on paper is pretty self limiting as far as edit spirals.

The other trick is when you are stuck instead of writing garbage write down why you are stuck and describe what would go there if you weren’t stuck. Sometimes this gets you to the solution, but if it doesn’t you still have your thoughts on it for latter.
What happens when you explain the history of a gun to a buyer?
More likely a power law.
Trespass doesn't get you bent over in the shower of a federal prison. CFAA violations do.
Show HN: A Rusty iOS Calculator Clone
A browser based iOS calculator clone, written in Rust, compiled to WebAssembly.

Repository: https://github.com/alexdgourlay/wasm-ios-calc/
I’m not a fan of the “eat the rich” slogan because it’s not a good solution.

But I understand the sentiment of wanting to torture and destroy people who are directly responsible for these “we wanted $70B and only got $67B so we’re firing you while smiling and offering hugs” events.

I hope those laid off get new positions so it’s not a life threatening situation.

I think most of us are capable and lucky enough to choose where we work. People who choose to work for Google and other organizations like them need to do so with eyes open. Both as potential victims as well as supporting and bearing responsibility for Google actions.

This is independent for working for an adtech company (or sugar company or bomb company or whatnot).
As an outsider, it often feels like Silicon Valley like organisations have a particularly unique culture compared to the rest of the Western corporate world. It's built from decades of hacker culture, start-up mythos, antidisestablishmentarianism, etc. I think people are angry because they thought that Google (and others) were behaving with the same social contract, acting in their interests.

It's a tough pill to realise its just another company behaving as they all do.
The book with people’s names, addresses, and phone numbers was the “white pages” or simply “phone book”. The book with business numbers and ads was the Yellow Pages. Get off my lawn.
> This may shock you, but a company is not a person.

Corporations are legally treated like people, that is the point actually [1]. Given that they have similar rights, it is not absurd to expect they also behave like people.

[1] (from wikipedia) A corporation is an organization authorized by the state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law "born out of statute"; a legal person in legal context) and recognized as such in law for certain purposes.
> it's his job to get them right

But he didn't say he got it wrong.
Earlier generations of Nest didn't have proportional control capability of any kind, no ability to apply Load or Temperature compensation either which are things that less polished looking heating and cooling control systems have been able to do for decades.

To be fair to Nest, newer versions are able to do this but many heating and cooling systems don't expose those functions on a standards compliant open way. As a result, a vast number of heating and cooling systems runs about 10% less efficiently than they should but there's really no way for end customers to know that since they don't have a reliable benchmark to compare against.
Three attributes for better web forms
There seems to be a convergence of largely orthogonal skill sets here, which may create confusion about what the most useful components of a 10x are.

For example - I see optimization abstraction as a core skill, searching for the best performance given the least amount of resources (whether developmental or computational) and what seems to be a familiar pattern.

Tooling agility may be another, i.e., how quickly can one re-create a cookiecutter build environment with observability, tests and release signing given a blank slate.

Package creation might also be a thing, though it is an example of optimization abstraction.

Troubleshooting skill sets follow from experience and understanding, and, frankly, some creatures are better than others in this regard.

Lines of code (LoC) used to be a measure, two decades ago; these days, compactness, certitude and conciseness may be the golden ticket.
What are the syntax differences to http://asciimath.org?
6% isn't massive for a profitable company? 1 out of every 17 people getting fired at the same time? That will have huge consequences to internal culture and employee optimism, leading to all kinds of weird people getting to the top.
Been on there since before the “dohicky” days and I have yet to see a post behind such a paywall. I know they want to enable this, but you don’t actually see it in the wild.
> In fact, a person who has had to lay off thousands will definitely think twice before going on a hiring spree in future. Exactly the sort of person you want in charge.

How about someone who doesn't have to lay off thousands to before they figure this out? Someone with imagination and foresight? Maybe they would be more of an exact match.
> Or, simply a password for your Keepass database with the same entropy as 1Passwords secret key.

How would you remember a password of 128bit of entropy?
Radar can be supplemental, but it has many false positives. Blind spot monitoring will go off if you pass metal poles a certain way.

You could invalidate that false positive with another sensor, probably computer vision, so you should have just used only CV in the first place.

You have to make sure you only use cameras because you need to drive in all scenarios. If you can't visibly see, the other humans can't either, and it's acceptable to pull over and wait.

Relying on additional sensors just makes your driving less reliable when you don't have it available. Best to only use the common denominator. Less noise, more predictable.

That is Tesla's thinking. If someone wants to prove them wrong, they are free to make an attempt!
Not the poster you’re replying to, but with this approach you generally don’t store the hashed identifier. Just encode/decode at the application boundaries.
Chat with openAI. Does it prove that it is conscious? I highly doubt it. Infact how to prove a fellow human is conscious?

> Hello Dear computer. How are you? It is good to talk to you again. Missed you.

Hi there! I'm doing great, thanks. It's always nice to talk to you. I've missed you too!

> You heard this one? A robot and a lawyer walked into a bar. The bartender says: Hey, we don’t serve robots. The robot replies menacingly: Oh, but someday you will.

Haha, I love it! That's a good one.
It is not about the saving from the 6B in salaries. It is about how much the leadership at Alphabet is hoping that the stock will rebound because of this decision in a month.
Ask HN: Is 8gb RAM enough for a Linux dev laptop?
New laptop, core i5, plugged into external 4K display, 5 to 10 chrome tabs, the odd full screen zoom meeting.

On a budget, and the 16gb option in my area (very remote) is more than double the price.
Will Google and other big tech run their college summer intern programs this year? They may not be able to hire new grads.
I'd love to see a website that keeps track of ToS over time for multiple companies.
I believe the term comes from a study done my Tom Demarco, and was about developer performance across companies, on an equal task, with a somewhat controlled level of experience.

It def wasn't about some guy on my team rocks, but about this company over here does better work. That meaning isn't really how its used now though.

The study was "Programmer Performance and the Effects of the Workplace"
Is that kind of file storage secure? I thought files stored on disk can be extracted quite easily?
No, I don't know of any that survive long enough.

How is that even possible in a capitalist society? The game is rigged in favor of profits, not people. Of course even if you do create a successful company that values people above profits, odds are you will get undercut by another company that does not sooner or later.

But that doesn't change my original point though. It's still wrong to have companies above people no matter how we frame it.
layoffs are herd behavior among tech execs right now. nobody really knows why they have to do it but everyone else is and wall street likes it. it’s irrational, hurts morale, has little impact on the bottom line, it’s just stupid.
Even ants go to war.
Clascal, which eventually grew to become Object Pascal.

Turbo Pascal came much later, and Borland would adopt UCSD units in Turbo Pascal 4, and Apple's Object Pascal on Turbo Pascal 5.5, then its OOP capabilities grew from there based on what was happening on C++, influenced by Borland's work on their C++ compilers.
It is not about hate. If there is tool, perhaps GPT-3, that is really good a summarizing code diffs. It should be integrated in your IDE or other tooling to summarize diffs on the fly, when I need that summarization. Not when I commit a diff. Thereby, we could all profit from improvements of that tool over time, and everybody could use it in his or her own language. That is strictly better than running that tool once and integrating it hard with the source code.
I do agree with your opinions and I’ve met 10x programmers who are also nice people. But I think there is resistence to the idea of 10x and a natural sympathy that 10x is a myth because of a few types of 10x

- The one who is 10x at the expense of their colleagues (they run fast and break things and leave to others clean what is broken, which is part of the reason that they are fast).

- The one who is, at most, 1.5x or 2x but think they are (and sell themselves to the leadership as) 10x and get a very disproportional part of the money, promotions, praise, notoriety.

- The one who really is 10x, knows it, everyone that worked with knows it, but they are just obnoxious about it. They consider themselves not just a better programmer but a superior human being. This one at least is productive and can be dealt with good management.

So when you have met those types, especially the first two types, it is natural to have sympathy to the idea that 10x is a myth. But, for me, it’s clear that they exist and some of them are nice people and great to work with, they are 10x in velocity and code quality, so they make your life easier as a programmer next to them.
PT Barnum got where he got by being a good bullshitter. I think he was well aware of it, and I think he was smart enough not to put that in writing.
I wonder if the study this cites is powerful enough to find a 10x developer. Generally you find the biggest jumps in ability on the far right of the distribution graph, so I would expect a genuine 10x programmer to be much rarer than the 99th percentile, which seems about the limit the study is able to reasonably talk about with ~400 participants.

I'd be betting more like 99.9th or even 99.99th percentile would be more like it.
Oh no, when will the children sleep
Amazon as well coming with 18k layoff
I think it technically only implies that at the time when he first became rich, he didn't understand why. It's possible that he has since discovered what exactly happened.

As a sibling comment already implied, the core message of the book is that the price of getting rich is often not worth it. I personally also enjoy the "Rich but not famous" essay by Tim Ferriss at https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/ which has a lot of vivid descriptions of the downsides of fame.
Imagine being the guy saying "No one is owed a job" in the comments of a story announcing 12,000 people are being fired.
What’s the term for people who are prejudiced or discriminatory toward those who belong to the group known as AI? We will likely see the rise of that in the 2020s. Aicist?
Is any reason given, even a not good one?
Well it's a consequence of lock-in, not lock-in itself.
How do you remember a 128 bit entropy password?