skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The relevant bit(s) would be "It shall be unlawful for any person [...] who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 802)) [...] to ship or transport in interstate or foreign commerce, or possess in or affecting commerce, any firearm or ammunition; or to receive any firearm or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce."

So a prosecutor would need to prove that I was "an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance" at the time that I received a firearm or ammunition that has crossed my state's borders (which would presumably be nearly all the firearms and ammunition I own, but still). There's also the parallel prohibition on the seller's end (and another one involving the actual background check questions), with the same present-tense language of "is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance".

> If third party hearsay is good enough for a warrant why wouldn't video evidence of you at the gun store and the pot shop?

A warrant != a conviction. The video evidence of me at both stores would not establish that I was "an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance" at the time that I took possession of the firearm.

Now, if there was video evidence of me smoking a phat blunt right outside the gun store before walking in and walking back out with a firearm, then yeah, that'd be a slam dunk case (assuming the prosecutor could convince a jury that it was indeed cannabis I was smoking). Likewise, if I was actually tested for cannabis in my system and the tests indicated that it was indeed in my system at the time I took possession of the firearm, then that would similarly be a slam dunk case.

(I guess even in the latter case I could maybe argue "yeah, I was an unlawful user, but I quit before buying the gun", but that defense is pretty weak if it's still in my system; I reckon it'd be stronger if I was sober for an actually-significant amount of time.)

Barring those? I ain't a lawyer, either, but my personal understanding is that the present-tense wording leaves a loophole big enough to drive a truck through it. Obviously the safest bet is to not rely on that being the case, but it's pretty easy to answer "No" to "Are you an illegal user of or addicted to any controlled substance?" without it being a felonious lie.
No, all companies underhire or overhire, sometimes both in different departments. There are companies where firing 20% would not result in any efficiency loss, and ones where hiring another 20% would result in 100% efficiency gain.
There are plenty of places that pay below market rate and think Leetcode hard is the last word in interviewing engineers.
Agree with that. The wording is very human and focus on the bad parts of it. I hate the term "let people go".
One hypothesis is that the big tech companies are just better at sensing what the market is doing and reacting accordingly as quickly as they can, while companies from other industries are sleeping at the wheel. If that's true, we can expect those other companies to eventually follow with the layoffs.
Hear hear re: not letting work consume your life. Seeing someone else say that was very refreshing. It’s so true that when you’re gone, the company hardly notices. Being let go with no severance and zero days notice was the last straw for me to ever put my soul into a soulless company again.

Luckily there are cool ones out there worth putting yourself into. I managed to find one. Weirdly I now seem to enjoy staying up till crazy o’clock hacking away or doing stuff over the weekend. But only because it’s so much fun; it’s still a selfish motive. Lots of devs really believe that they have a duty to the company or whatever, which is a huge mistake —- one I made too many times.
> I’m becoming more and more convinced that they’re preparing for a global recession.

I think it’s more like “we are trimming some of the aggressive hiring we did during COVID now that current revenues tell us that the online economy paradigm shift was not as large as we thought it may have been (but we were prepared for)”.

Many/most of these tech giants cuts still leave staffing levels at 2019 numbers or higher.
Your mileage may vary with this one. Companies sometimes get so much inbound email to careers@ourco that they stop opening any of it (while leaving that as the contact us link on their website). A recruiter is then someone whose email might be read by someone at the company.
Awk reads quite javascripty. JavaScript's function syntax was copied from awk.
Yes exactly.

I'm not sure if it is nation wide (U.S.) but there is also the Vial of Life program. It is a vial with a small document containing all the pertinent info. Place document in vial, place vial in the freezer of the refrigerator. It usually comes with a magnet that is placed on the door of the fridge.

The pertinent info:

Name

Age and date of birth

medical history (high blood pressure, diabetic, etc)

list of medications

list of allergies

In a true emergency where you call an ambulance this is really all you need.
Is this possible in the US? In many European countries you couldn't do that unless one of the companies employs you "unofficially" (thus breaking labor and tax laws).
Do you know the subject line of the follow up email (for those laid off)?
I know but in general when you admit something like that, people also do expect like some preventive actions for the future.

All I can say is that companies for so long despised people changing jobs frequently as a lack of loyalty, etc. These major layoffs don't do anything else than confirm one thing: companies don't give a damn s** about you, if you happen to be in the wrong team or role or location.

Look at that: https://careers.google.com/

They still mention 100+ jobs for many locations. Couldn't they ask these laid off people to find anything in there? These are people you spent so much time hiring, on boarding, ... and they even became "trustworthy" in a sense, they built relationships within a company. Now you'll hire new people, etc. And the history repeats itself.

Honestly, sometimes it's much better to work for smaller companies, at least you can have an argument with your boss, be pissed at someone. Here, you're just a number, bam, fired. But don't worry, we give you a severance package (for God's sake, at least that). This way of doing business should be outdated. I know in other fields it's much worse, but hell, these are companies setting the high bar in terms of "culture" etc, if they behave like that, what can you expect?

It's much harder to retain people, it can take months. But then don't come with "we're a people company BS".
Netflix CEO Steps Down
Ask HN: What e2e encrypted service I can use for custom notifications?
Currently i use Telegram to get custom notifications like my server error logs, bank credits/debits, new software updates etc. Sometime this includes sensitive info.

So please suggest me an e2e service that got API, mobile app and works on desktop browser.

Thank you.
Crypto and Your Neighbor
No. Hiring like crazy when interest rates are low and cutting back when they are not is proper management.

The economy correctly drives company behavior, and that's not a CEO's fault.
> You finish your college, you're officially an (eg.) engineer now, you can build a bridge, millions of people will use every year, and it's ok

As an engineer just out of the school, you wont be the one responsible for building a bridge millions of people will use every year. It takes more years to get there.
This article isn't even evidence of that.

I've been waiting patiently for Bitcoin to collapse after watching what I assumed was the all time high in 2018. We've nearly dropped back to that now, still persistently above that price. I think I've made a profit in Monero.

In a jaw dropping set of peg defences, Tether still exists. You can buy and sell it for about $1 USD. 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.

I suspect the crypto market is less volatile than has historically been the case.

It might happen, but so far there are no signs that the crypto market is going to collapse. If anything, it looks quite healthy to me. I wish traditional stock markets were allowed to fall like this without the authorities stepping in to prop things up. Genesis going bankrupt is a non event until a good reason is found to believe otherwise.
Hey, maybe try running a GitGuardian [1] scan on all those repositories to look for hardcoded secrets. GitGuardian can also test in some cases if the secrets are valid or not, meaning you have to revoke and rotate them asap. I hope this helps.

[1] https://www.gitguardian.com/monitor-internal-repositories-fo...

Disclaimer: I work for GitGuardian.
When "smart" switches turn dumb and you can't turn them off manually because they think to be smarter than you.

On a more serious note, when designing a system it's very important to consider the failure modes of such system, and having lights that can't be turned off manually on case of failure isn't a good fail mode. I would call this a bad design.
Usually EU countries have quite strict rules for layoffs, it's not like US at-will law. In NL mass layoffs like this have to be approved by the unemployment agency, you have to fire people LIFO and you get 1/3rd of your monthly salary for every year you've worked there. The approval is quite difficult to get so usually a higher severance is offered to leave voluntarily.
I work for a company about twice as big as Google. Getting permission to hire anyone is very difficult, and everyone is always 100% busy just to meet customer deadlines(which we often don't).

I guess Google and other FAANG-type companies must work in a different way that I can't comprehend if they can just randomly decide to fire 10% of their workforce.

If 10% of the people on my project were fired, our customers would sue us for not delivering on the contracts we signed.
I suspect they're talking about circumvention of technical DRM measures.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
I remember stopping at this gas station a few years ago and using the restroom.

I walk an and it's completely dark. I start looking for the switch and the light turns on automatically after a few seconds. I guess it's motion based.

I start to pee (this is a toilet, not a pissoir) and I guess I'm very still or what, the light turns off and it's of course pitch dark because I've closed and locked the door. So now I'm trying to jiggle left and right to turn on the light, but still keep my aim fixed in the bowl. Try doing that and you'll see how hard it is.

The light turns back on eventually. Complete disaster if you ask me.
That would be the logical approach if their only objective were reducing headcount. In reality, it's both that AND they're trying to get the wage spiral under control. As terrible as it sounds, layoffs send the "stop asking for more money, you should be thankful to even have a job" signal to the workforce.
A timid half-step. If you’ve ever visited Google (even before the pandemic) the offices are empty (everyone is “working from the bus”) and only a small minority of employees are involved in revenue products

FANG have been stockpiling very skilled people and letting them atrophy, it’s the biggest tragedy in Silicon Valley and for the US economy generally
The lighting and sockets should be on separate circuits.
The rules were changed some time ago; also buying an annuity hasn't been worth it for a while.
I actually find ChatGPT quite poor at this because it doesn't understand story structures. It will do a "slice of life" thing, but it's not very interesting.

I actually trained the davinci engine on some Aesop summaries, and managed to get something uhhh... different.

sample:

The Princess and the Cat

A Princess was given a tiny Cat by her godmother as a gift. The Cat was very special and could talk. One day, the Cat warned the Princess of an impending danger. But the Princess laughed at it and said: "You are only a silly cat, how can you know about such things?" Sure enough, the danger came true and the Princess realized that she should have listened to her pet.

Moral: Don't underestimate anyone; you never know what they might be capable of achieving

It's not perfect, but they're not meant to replace human writers yet.
Really nice ! I was looking into implementing tracing for a few projects I'm being onboarded on, and it seems to solve the "ask the devs nicely to implement OpenTelemetry are at least merge my commits" part.

My "gut instinct" would be to export that to Jaeger, but I'm open to suggestions as to better alternatives. We're on GCP so it might be an opportunity to try Google Cloud Trace as well.
> However, after the 10+12K layoffs by the giants, and constant news about smaller layoffs by smaller companies (in the 100s per announcement), I think the situation becomes at once clearer and bleaker.

The major economies are posting record or near-record levels of employment; layoffs in one section of one sector are not a particularly good signal for recession one way or another.
Yep, browsers should have per-domain cookie jars that get wiped when the all tabs/windows using that domain are closed.. and then a button not to wipe them on those few domains that you actually need them (to stay logged in).

But this is what you get when you have politicians dealing with technology.
Feels like a passing of the generational torch as elsewhere in the thread there’s large arguments about pronouns while younger people who are way past that are out here getting into wide open Jenkins servers for active airlines lol
The employees who can leave on their own are often the "better" ones.
Are we about to enter a new era of ultra-profitable tech companies?

While companies like GOOG and MSFT have had ridiculously healthy margins compared to traditional industries for some time now, it's also been clear in recent years that these companies have become very loose with spending. Take GOOG for example, they spend so much unnecessary money on fancy offices, free lunches, diversity programs, highly speculative investments, stock based comp, etc.

But perhaps more importantly what happens when all the unprofitable tech companies with 80% gross margins decide to operate profitably? A lot of companies are so wasteful in tech today that they're actually choosing not to operate profitably so they can grow faster. We've seen Uber basically do a u-turn on this stance, but many other companies are following suite.

The media seems to think these cuts are a sign that tech companies are struggling and other industries like energy will now take the lead, but surely being able to drop 10-50% of your workforce with almost no consequences is a sign of strength not weakness?

I guess this whole time the most profitable companies in the world apparently weren't even trying that hard to be profitable.
I’ve been disappointed with podcasts over the past couple of years. I tend to listen to YouTube videos now.
The "traditional CS degree" was never the only route to software engineering. That claim is just not true, a self learning developers, the ones who went to entirely different field or the ones who dropped out were and are ridiculously common. By "different field" I mean both people who studied physics/math similar fields and psychology/sociology further away fields.

And even now, people who came from bootcamps are rare compared to the above.
What if most companies have no long term vision and just follow the trend, like when they all hired hundred/thousands of employees during covid for seemingly no reasons
Google had 156,500 full-time employees in 2021, an increase of nearly 16% year-over-year as compared to the 135,301 full-time employees in 2020. Google's pace of hiring was also torrid in the second quarter of 2022 as the company added 10,000 new employees to its 163,906 workforce - that is only through to July 2022.

These "Layoffs" are awful for individuals, but they are simply a sign that they went on a hiring spree in 2022 - plenty here were talking about the massive pay increases on offer all over the valley with demand off the charts.

So really it isnt sign of pending apocalypse etc.
Usually it'd be the grandma getting the card, then, no?
The SAAS Podcast

Ukraine: the Latest

Startups for the Rest of Us

You're Wrong About

Built to Sell Radio

Disrupting Japan

Advent of Computing

Darknet Diaries

The Art of Product Podcast

Signals and Threads

Practical Founders Podcast

I Dream of Cameras
You think executives had to watch TikTok videos to know what's going on in their companies? I mean they allowed this to happen. It's not the fault of the employees. And of course these videos don't show reality, they cut out the boring parts (the desk work).
In Germany any lawyer (or the work council) will block you from getting fired (because Google has no legal reason to fire you). What they do here in Germany is to negotiate to mutually void your contract by you accepting a financial package.

So in theory you are right, in practice however, most companies (especially the ones like Google) have to buy you out of your contract.
> Many/most of these tech giants cuts still leave staffing levels at 2019 numbers or higher

Many/most of these tech giants cuts still leave staffing levels at 2021/2022 numbers or higher.
Employees will (fairly reasonably, IMO) expect a same dollar-value RSU grant in the upcoming grant cycle. That will result in Google having to grant additional RSUs in an upcoming round. (The currency to Google for past grants is the number of shares/RSUs, which doesn't change as the stock goes up or down, but new grants are cheaper to Google in terms of dilution if the stock keeps going up.)
So that explains how Google knows that when I'm searching for X, it can give me results for slightly related Y instead. Sometimes it works, often it feels almost hostile.
Significantly better than the tone-deaf email Satya sent Microsoft employees, which continues to cause undue anxiety for employees who have no clue if or when they'll be laid off over the next 90 days.
Put more simply: Effort doesn't guarantee reward, but all rewards come as a consequence of effort.
Indeed. They have to (eventually) let you in, but they don't have to put your car back together after they tear it apart.
Google has been over-hiring for years. While there are definitely projects that felt understaffed, there are just as many where you'd join a team and look around and really have no idea what you should be doing with yourself because all the work seemed spoken for.

Honestly, 90-ish% of Google's revenue comes from ads. Almost every other product area there is just a financial loss unless it's supporting search&ads. They keep making "bets" to try to diversify the revenue stream, but it never works. Hence why I don't think this will be the last round of layoffs.

It will be interesting to see how this shakes out and what parts of the org and what roles this affected.

(Worked there for 10 years, so find this all... sad and interesting)
Do you dislike Quora or why should it be "disrupted"? Are you a spammer?
Writing Burnout
I’m with you, though with a fraction less pessimism.

I’m not buying into the collusion to compress wages or unchecked hiring that is becoming exposed theories. These a companies with globe spanning businesses the touch much of the world every single day (I’d put Stripe in this bucket too). They’ve got much greater and earlier visibility into the state of the broader economy long before governments do. Why don’t we assume they’re a leading indicator of things to come? Why do these moves apparently only make sense when everyone else has finally come to the same conclusion?

The silver linings for me so far has been that a) for many of the bigger companies the reduction is only bringing them back to their pre-pandemic levels of still very huge companies and b) the open lists of laid off people some of these companies have produced at first glance seem to skew very heavy towards recruiters/HR and marketing. Which makes sense if you’re not expecting much growth over the next year.
Shout out to Unruly Software! Love these guys.

Australian dev duo. Casual conversations around web dev, mostly the experiences of the hosts over the last month or so.
Informative but relaxed.

10/10 parasocial relationship
C*Os only have one incentive and that's their compensation package
in netherlands, for example, they (Goog) has to negotiate w/ the local-employee-backed Works Council. If they didn't bother setting one up, like Meta NL failed to, it will take about 3 months to do that. Then another 1-2 months for negotiations w/ the council. Then if they come to an agreement (they don't have to) w/ the redundancies and severance the affected can _then_ be notified.

for example, technically the meta layoffs back in November have not even happened here in NL and the affected won't even know until at least March-April!!
Stoic Personality Disorder
Does anyone know an actually-happened example case where a fine-grained ASLR (like the OpenBSD relink one) successfully mitigates or significantly hinders an exploit, and the usual ASLR doesn't?

I'm curious because years ago the academic strongly pushes the FG ASLR story, then OpenBSD did kernel relinking, but I haven't heard any industry story on how effective this is.
I think that your best employees are the people who are most likely to leave a company of their own accord, and so if you rely on attrition to reduce headcount you will also reduce the average quality of your workers.
A lot of these companies are building stuff now which might deliver revenue in X years, so by firing people now they're effectively borrowing money from the future; they cut costs now and revenue later. They're more sacrificing future growth than ability to deliver on current contracts, in general.
Smart equipment is fine as long as the "smart" part is just synchronization built on top. I have ZigBee and Zwave (yes both for now unfortunately) switches and dimmers, these work completely fine manually in absense of home assistant.

I do also use some smart bulbs (also ZigBee/Zwave) and when paired with a smart switch, they can work in absense of the controller still, allowing you to still control the lights as long as the radios in both devices can reach eachother.

To me this is the common-sense answer. The design works in absense of any central controllers and definitely does not (ever) depend on any internet services, and yet you can still do anything you'd normally do (including integration into something like Google Home if you really want. Though, I don't care about "voice assistants" or anything, so it's not really that useful to me.)
Without doubt Darknet Diaries, it should be a mandatory listen for anyone touching computers. It is a crash course on building secure systems by learning from the failures of others.

I highly recommend starting from episode #1 because they are almost all great and episodes often reference past topics.

https://darknetdiaries.com
I agree with others here pointing that firing people isn't necessary a sign of having mismanaged the company.

However, i think a good gesture as a CEO when acknowledging your company is going through rough times would be things like postponing your bonus, or diminishing your payroll. That would be classy.

Note that the same could be said for politicians in charge. You want people in the country to make sacrifice and endure tough reforms ? Ok, start with your own payroll and various benefits. Lead through example.

Unfortunately greed is going too strong those days.
Wasn’t there a whole scene in Silicon Valley with Gavin Belson that basically mocks this kind of language?