skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm surprised people aren't connecting all these layoffs with their root cause: the increasing cost of capital. Naturally, projects that were economically profitable only at a very low cost of capital could turn unprofitable at a higher cost of capital, destroying value instead of creating value. Shifting resources away from such projects is the logical thing to do, but if you end up with a surplus of resources, the only other possibility is to trim those resources. Discussions about how much cash Google has on hand are completely irrelevant in my view.
What are you talking about? This works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization

The carbon without hydrogen produced CO, and it is burned to produce CO2, and that is used to actually heat the mixture.
It must be heart wrenching to build a business on top of an external API and have API access revoked without prior knowledge. I hope we can have a meaningful Twitter alternative. This situation sounds to me like some anti-competitive BS that cannot just happen.
Imagine you had a factory. During the boom years you hire extra engineers to improve the factory. These engineers busy themselves adding new production lines and creating more complex manufacturing processes to support products. 2 years later you sack the engineers.

You are left with more complex product and extra assembly lines. You aren’t sure which ones you need or are obligated to continue - so you run them all.
The biggest reason is that there's value in owning the user experience. Before streaming video took over, cable providers tried to put TiVo out of business by offering their own (crappier) DVR products and gating TiVo and DIY products like MythTV behind a flaky, poorly-supported product called CableCARD.

If you own the user experience, you can push users into _your_ most profitable offerings. And it works shockingly well.
Unionization is the correct response here. The incentives of company leaders simply don't account for workers' desire to not lose their jobs. The only way to change this is for workers to change said incentives--by organizing. Of course, easy for me to say as a freelancer. I'm definitely not trying to say unionizing tech would be easy. But it certainly is simple, at least conceptually.
I'm aware of those. The symbols I used are also semantic, for the special case of 2-row tall braces.
These are people making 3, 5, 10 times the median household income on their own. People with in-demand skills, with good resumes, and access to a remote pool of positions.

With even the slightest bit of foresight or financial planning, they'll be fine for months or longer.
> You don't get to redefine "violence" into anything you don't like

How is the term "financial violence" any worse about that than, e.g., "structural violence"?
Of course that is not how it works. The actual process depends on the company and how many levels of management are notified in advance. Usually it is some combination of bottom-up stack ranking and rolling down the quota to the individual teams. The process is - by design - very opaque, and there are so many variables to it that at the end it may seem like a random process to someone who is not privy to the decision process of the decision makers (and there may be anywhere from ten to few thousand decision makers in this process).
Twitter: We are going to ban 3rd party apps because of a long standing rule.

(tomorrow)

Twitter: Oh hey, we have a minor update to our TOS.
If - in the event of a cyber attack - you are concerned with the run-time of your visual display tool for tracing back the source of the attack, then this article is for you.
Not the person you replied to, but I have had some issues with this in the past. Though it is more with how it was done than the approach itself.

In this project I do not believe the IDs were always encrypted when being sent to the user. So we sometimes had to guess whether we received an encrypted ID vs a regular integer ID because it is possible for the encryption algo that was used to return a sequence of numbers.
Back when I was in school Google was the company that had an aura where it's reserved for geniuses and next to impossible to get into.

That was a number of years ago, I can't help but notice this perception changed among the people I know. I don't think it was entirely because I graduated and start having experience (disclaimer: did not work for Google).
The best parties I ever went to were when I was in my early teens and my parents were in their late 40s. Massive bonfires, kids running all over playing hide and seek on 20 acres, adults and older teens with impromptu softball games, elaborate plays written to commemorate the party (not necessarily well written, but included wacky stunts!). Parents sneaking off to smoke weed and getting a little weird. The weather just right. Really all the parties I’ve been to as an adult have been a disappointment in comparison.

So I’m saying you still have time for some real good times. But yes, “post” covid my social life has dried up a bit too. Haven’t lost friends, but see them less, and all the not really friends that would just shoot me a text if they were at a bar in the neighborhood have stopped doing that. Just lost the habit I suppose.
While I sympathize with those who were laid off, being laid off doesn't give you license to pass off wild speculation as fact in a post like this.
Sometimes you have dependencies with actual value add that you really don't want to replicate. No, I'm totally not writing a yaml parser, thank you very much. I can probably write a good yaml parser, possibly even better than some 3rd party stuff, but yaml parsing is simply not our business.

And yaml parsing is probably on the simpler side of things. We need to run torch models, we do need libtorch. We are not rewriting libtorch, that would be silly.
Assuming you didn't write too many zeroes on your W-4, you shouldn't have 100% withholding.

AFAICT, this $0 paycheck thing comes from a single reddit post described in this article: https://www.newsweek.com/waitress-who-comes-home-0-paycheck-...

TL;DR: the restaurant calculates a much higher number for cash tip income than actually received and withholds the meager wage income to cover the taxes.

The server kept the actual cash tips, which should be most of their income, although they might have an unexpected tax bill. The restaurant can't report the wrong amount for tips and has to report what the employee reports to them, so this is likely illegal.

It's not uncommon to have a low paycheck since taxes for tip and wage income are withheld only from wages. If you make $20/hour total and your tax rate is 20%, wages will generally cover your taxes if they are at least 20% of your income or $4/hour.

Usually this works the other way, where servers under-report cash tips and get a little tax-free income.
Pretty much. It costs them nothing to keep pecking. The odds of a user actually leaving YouTube for good are pretty minimal.
The problem is not the build system, it's projects that are seemingly enjoying complexity.
Another walled garden closing up holes in the fence. I understand the reasoning from an advertise-driven business perspective, but it won't help Twitter in the long run. Many of their power users providing engaging content will seek out other venues to interact with their audience on their own terms.

I already see many of them having a great time in the Fediverse and new apps and tools are popping up like mushrooms, providing a much more compelling and diverse ecosystem. Give it a few years and I predict many more have grown sceptical towards platforms that eventually change for the worse, and has sought out more open systems.
I see your ted link and i raise you my favorite one about creativity and procrastination https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_mas...

I for one appreciated reading this post and as you can see below there are a lot of well off people who have had similar experiences.
That has a chance of returning employees with very low IDs. So that'd be fun.
I came across the article the other day and the clickbait outrage headline really should be adjusted.

I’m not a fan of a lot of moves OpenAI has made but the headline would have you believe OpenAI was basically slave laboring people to train their model, when in fact the article points out openAI contractually paid them $12.50 per hour, and the shady company SAMA that they are no longer working with is the real culprit here.

This combined with the fact that OpenAI told them not to obtain c4 classifications and they miscommunicated internally leading them to obtaining those classifications makes it look even worse for SAMA here.

Regardless the whole situation is crummy, I just wish journalism would stop with the outrage fuel, they depend on the fact that most people only read the headline
Git is a blockchain in the same manner that a smoke detector (which utilises radioactive isotopes) is the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima. Except git (2005) -and Perforce (1995), which it was designed to replace - also happen to predate Bitcoin (2009) and Hashcash (2002).
> Also the new CEO is not a software engineer

I looked up Sundar's background before joining Google out of curiosity and it looks like his educational background is in "metallurgical engineering" (IIT Kharagpur), materials science (Stanford), and MBA (UPenn). And stints at Applied Materials and McKinsey.
I see your ted link and i raise you my favorite one about creativity and procrastination https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_urban_inside_the_mind_of_a_mas...

I appreciated the post.
Can someone shed some light how this works in the US? What are the conditions for termination there? Do you get X months severance?
> No way they are laying off superstars.

Shrug. Superstars cost more. Besides, companies don't love superstars do they? They want replaceable commodities.
No. Let's not turn everything into a sugarcoated fantasy world because reality could hurt someone's feeling.
Crypto outside of bitcoin is just wishful thinking and FOMO. If this AI interest can keep at least some people out of NFT and crypto scams, that’s a win
There is a separate article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_syntax
They are slowly popping. The two major ones are probably CMU's MHCI and University of Washington's HCI+D. I don't know about Washington, but CMU also has a PhD program in HCI.
Came here to say this myself, for F’s sake.
No, eliminating the photon count filter would just make your vision look noisy/staticky in dark conditions.

Most of the effects of LSD (patterns etc) are actually pretty well understood. It's probably caused by a stable geometric pattern generated by a reaction-diffusion process in your visual cortex. https://plus.maths.org/content/uncoiling-spiral-maths-and-ha...

Related to your question (although minus drugs) - I very recently figured out how to "turn off" shot noise suppression in my visual processing. I woke up a few months ago and was struggling to understand something I was looking at in the room (it was a low-contrast scene with confusing shadows) and something clicked, and all of a sudden I could see the shot noise from my eyes. Very bizarre! I can now detect it just by paying close attention in moderately dim conditions.
>To try to say homeless people are commit financial violence by not having homes is something that I'm not going to entertain.

I'm not saying that. I am saying that because the guy would refuse to leave and would physically block people from coming into the store.

I don't think you actually read any of the CBS article I linked given the insane assumptions you are immediately making that this person who you have never met is instantly in the wrong, with some of those assumptions being very obviously shown wrong in the article.

And on what grounds would you sue the police? That they aren't doing enough? Police do not legally have an obligation to protect anyone, or do anything for that matter. Also good luck suing the police when you have no money because you literally cannot get someone who is caring away customers to leave.
It's not how it works everywhere. In fact it's likely not how it works anywhere at all.

No competent business operator works this way. It's very much about improving a financial metric (say, sales efficiency) and understanding either where low performers are or which teams are supporting initiatives that may suddenly be deprioritized.

But more importantly than any of this, I'm sorry to hear people have lost their jobs. Better days are ahead.
The cash out is selling the shares and realising the capital gain?

For these types of business, there’s always someone next in line to buy, hoping for the same performance.
We Need Type Information, Not Stable ABI
Show HN: Phantom Dicom Anonymization
Hello everyone! I'm a medical doctor working at the intersection of machine learning and medicine.

I made a WIP DICOM anonymization tool in Python for my ML workflow. Unlike other anonymization modules, Phantom is whitelist-based, so anything not specified in the configuration file gets automatically purged from the metadata.

Phantom also partially supports getting rid of burned annotations in dynamic imaging modalities such as echocardiograms by masking any static pixels.

Looking forward to your feedback and tips!
For an external 4k screen on Linux, full screen Google Meet or Zoom calls might load your CPU heavily (and trigger annoying CPU fans). It helps if you've got Iris Xe graphics.

8GB can work, but don't expect to do much with Docker or VMs on it. In general, 16GB is the baseline, and I am always in favour of more RAM rather than more CPU.
I meant Belfast specifically, and across Ulster more generally (Derry and Donegal would be hotspots), but I know there's good and multi-national craic in at least Cork and Galway as well. Might be less in the Pale but I don't really know; I just take my not knowing to mean it must not be there as strongly or otherwise I'd hear about it.

Re: the students, that's true but there are also plenty of students from other parts of the world (Britain, China, India, and France especially) and it's been my experience that they tend to focus more on their studies than having the craic, and that they return home immediately after their studies, whereas I see more and more of the aforementioned either settling down in Ireland or taking a romantic partner away with them if they do return home.

This is all anecdotal of course and I know this is HN where data is king, but sure it's good to spin a yarn for the sake of it sometimes as well.

I live in the Netherlands myself these days and I always find it striking when I go to bars or cafes that all of the tables are filled with people who all look like each other, same ages and social backgrounds etc., even gender, and that the people from one table rarely mix with another -- this is just about the polar opposite of what I grew up expecting a drinking establishment to look like.
Coder Radio. A weekly talk show taking a pragmatic look at the art and business of Software Development and the world of technology. Chris Fisher, Michael Dominick, Wes Payne. https://coder.show/
Chicken is also a very practical scheme with a large well-maintained collection of libraries (and easy FFI).
>I'm willing to believe that cows spend most of their lives consuming grass (I started this comment chain) but would also like to see a more compelling source than your anecdotes.

Pretty much any industry site will openly provide an overview of the process:

https://www.pabeef.org/raising-beef/beef-lifecycle

“Calves are weaned from their mother’s milk at about 6 to 10 months of age when they weigh between 450 and 700 pounds. These calves continue to graze on grass pastures. About 1/3 of the female calves will stay on the farm to continue to grow and to become new mother cows the following year… After weaning and/or during the stocker and backgrounder phase, cattle may be sold at livestock auction market… Mature cattle are often moved to feedyards (also called feedlots). Here cattle typically spend four to six months [editorial comment, these are “factory farms”] … Once cattle reach market weight (typically 1,200 to 1,400 pounds at 18 to 22 months of age), they are sent to a packing plant“

>If they do spend most of their time consuming grass, I wonder if they are carbon-neutral for that period, or if that requires constant migration to fertilize new lands which might not occur.

As far as this goes, I personally have no idea. I think it’s a bit of a moot point, however, because the feedlots are an integral part of the process at this point and that’s where a ton of emissions happen (not to mention bio waste aka manure/runoff). Additionally the amount of rangeland cows take up is absolutely massive. Other commenters will say that there’s “no other use” for that land, as if every inch of land needs to be used for farming purposes. We need wild areas too.
As it happens in at least some jurisdictions invoice numbers have to be sequential by law.
But by hiring all these people a few years ago, didn't Amazon (and other large tech companies) give these people some valuable experience, beside a quite decent salary?

I personally would prefer to be hired by a big tech company and then laid off, having received the salary, severance pay, and experience, than to never set my foot there.

The in-between time sucks, of course.
Do you attribute that to his lack of EECS background like the poster above you? Also, is Pinchai a typo or a play on words with "penny-pincher"?
I wish I would have thought of this when I got one in Florida 10 years or so ago.
Ask HN: Are recreation.gov camping reservations botted?
I recently found out about renting fire watchtowers through recereation.gov. They use a 6 month rolling reservation window, so on 1/20 reservations are released for 7/20. After diligently trying to get a reservation every morning at 8am MST when they're released, I've realized they are 100% booked before I can even load the page.

Is there anything I can do to identify or beat automated scripts? My only thought is that some web pages are broken, so perhaps I can call those locations since they won't be reserved.

Here is a list of links to all the reservations available: https://www.firelookout.org/lookout-rentals.html
I like this. I created a GitHub issue: https://github.com/iheartla/iheartla/issues/138
Ask HN: Do you still engineer your SQL databases?
I have the the sense that the somewhat mathematical treatment of databases in relational form is decreasing in favor of the less structured NoSQL databases. I am not an expert in databases, but this feels like a hype that will be reversed some time in the near future.

What experience do you have in the topic?
I agree with you, but companies exist in an evolutionary environment where—broad strokes—anyone who doesn’t do this gets out-competed. You can have 99 companies that behave well, but just one that doesn’t can drive them all out of business if it’s willing to do what they won’t. The solution is not to chew them out, but to pass policy and vote with your wallet.
This guy!

Imagine thinking “diversity programs” are a significant cost center, as if their spend were comparable to real estate or employee compensation
What bets would those have been? It’s not always straightforward to bet on economic trends, especially on the short side.
It is about funding the organization that is a lobby group dedicated to pinning wages down. That is literally the issue.
It would be cool if we could have a dedicated section of hacker news or something for these announcements? Like, who cares?

What about a weekly "Who's firing" thread instead ?

Edit: I'm actually sorry for people who've lost their jobs and are negatively impacted by this, but HN is going to get pretty lame if it's just page after page of layoff announcements for the entire recession period.
"Dodge Ram" hasn't been a thing since 2010, when they spit Ram out to be a separate brand. However the site does have a 2010-2019 (a.k.a 4th generation Ram) listed under the Dodge brand, which is technically fair, because the initial units of the 4th generation were Dodge branded.

However to add the 5th generation they would really need to split it out as a sperate brand to be correct, and if they do so, they should duplicate the 4th generation into the new brand.
They'll settle for commodities, but they want results. "Superstars" are great, because they'll get you results. You don't want to rely on having someone do the work of a whole team, but you certainly won't fire them, even if they cost three times as much as one of the ten people they replace.
What you’re seeing is actually a remnant of pre-startup culture. In late 20th century corporate America, there was no social media, but it was 100% expected that someone serious about their career would passionately describe how they’re working at the best company ever and they’re so lucky to have a chance to be there. If anything, the innovation of tech culture is the idea that being mercenary is even an option for getting ahead in your career.
This is such a bean-counter MBA perspective. It’s tech, if you want real growth, you need moonshot ideas. If you want to just become a GE style dependable divided stock, then fine, but your shareholders aren’t going to triple their wealth again.
> I don't know when things started to go wrong, but the work eventually began to stagnate. Tasks were taking longer than anticipated. I began dreading team meetings because I had to address that things weren't getting done. As we approached the end of the semester, students needed time to study for finals, which meant even less work getting done. The project turned from something that I woke up excited to work on, to something I hated even thinking about. I avoided the topic as much as I could when talking to my professor.

This is the turning point. Before this point, there was progress and enthusiasm. After, stagnation and revulsion. Something happened. The author knows it, but can't elaborate.

Some have offered advice on the writing aspect ("vomit draft"). Writing doesn't appear to be this author's problem - it's working on the project itself. The author "hates" even thinking about it. No research progress means nothing to write about. Writing more effectively won't solve the problem because the problem isn't writing.

The problem is motivation. The author started with a project that was going to be awesome. Then little things started to go wrong and didn't get fixed. Those little things snowballed into big things. The disappointment and shock of watching an awesome project with buy-in from authority figures and lavish resources reverse so decisively has undermined the author's ability to move the project forward.

I'm speculating, but these things tend to follow a similar pattern.

I'd recommend that the author try to understand the turning point. What actually happened? What was the first indication that something was not right with the project? What did the author do about it? What pattern of behavior can the author pick out in responses to unexpected problems?
> I've worked with folks that have 20 years of experience that look at a makefile and say "Ugh what is this complicated mess, can you do it in cmake or bazel or something"

This is so true, it happened to me more than once.

A couple of projects ago, we had a complicated build process (7-8 manual build steps that depend on files generated from each other before) for an embedded system.
I wrote a little makefile deleting all those 7-8 shell scripts and i was asked to re do it in cmake.. I was like wtf.. each clearly defined step in makefile would turn into multiple unreadable function calls in cmake.. why would anyone want to do that..

Not that Makefiles are perfect, but sometimes, the right tool for the job isn't the shiniest. Make does a job of being "good enough" for a lot of little tasks.
Man... HN is full of doomscrolling today with all the layoff articles.
The second shop was definitely outsourced. The first was probably a mix of both. Regardless it shouldn't have happened.