skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He has already "suffered" the consequences. Google stock is down ~35% from its highs, so his compensation (which is mostly stock) has already been reduced by that amount. Following the layoff announcement, it is up by ~3% in premarket trading, so he is being rewarded for laying off these people. This is how the system works, designed entirely for the benefit of holders of capital.
A person whose only interest is money is a psychopath.

If a company's only interest is money, it is effectively a psychopath too - a potentially immortal, tremendously powerful psychopath.

We shouldn't say, "Oh, psychopaths are psychopathic, that's just the way it is." We need to fight back.
Thanks for sharing! Looks fantastic.

I will give this a whirl asap.

Ages ago, I did some integration for prescriptions (what became allscripts, and another company whose name I forget). Maybe I can help there.

And please keep us posted.
US employment for 2019 was 158M (then a record high), falling sharply to 148M in 2020, and recovering to 158M in 2022; it's currently 160M: https://www.statista.com/statistics/269959/employment-in-the...

(It is true that the _percentage employed_ hasn't recovered after covid; given the US's aging population it's possible that that figure will _never_ rise to where it was again. As they say, you can prove anything with statistics....)
Facebook does not comply and gets away with it, so this is just hot air.
Having Google on one's CV is probably better than not having worked there at all. Sure being let go is painful but I would keep the term "ruined lives" for people getting serious diseases or experiencing loss of the loved ones.
At least, advance notice which might be long depending of the country, probably at least three months in France. Plus, Google will have issues justifying a cut for economic reason in much of Europe. They remain very profitable even if less than before so they might need due cause to fire people.

Generally speaking European laws protect the employees more than the shareholders. You can't really just employ a lot of people when things are doing well expecting to fire them if there is a downturn. It encourages companies to be more conservative regarding hiring which can be both a blessing and a curse.
It's because of an asymmetry in role. As a normal employee when you are "responsible" for something you are fired if you fuck it up. You face consequences. Highlighting the fact that Sundar is responsible for this is saying two things- yes they were his decisions and it's his job to get them right, but secondly, he's going to face no consequences for getting that decision wrong. Instead, the employees- who clearly aren't responsible are going to face the consequences. So it points to a broken system, for the masses, you take responsibility and you take the consequences, for the elite you take the "responsibility" but the masses will still face the consequences.
I'd heavily push for the exact opposite. Every single time I've seen a primary key being defined with a natural key, it turned out that this set of attributes wasn't as immutable as we thought actually and it caused a world of pain.

I find that there actually rarely is something defining the thing you're working on. The concept of "immutable identity" is rarely a useful thing in digitalized systems:

- being able to create a new digital entity for the same real-life entity is almost always useful and expected ("the setup of this user is all messed up, just disable it and create a new one")

- attributes that you thought were immutable actually are not ("surely the 'originally scheduled time' of an event is an immutable property" - except when you have a bug and events are scheduled at the wrong time and you need to fix data)

- the concept of "immutable identity" is often pretty subjective in the real world. We generally agree that a person has an immutable identity, sure, but is a 9am appointment that's moved to a week later the same appointment, or a new one? Depends on who you ask, depends on what purposes you need this concept of "identity" for.
"The volcano gods". Best phrase of this thread.
A local package manager that performs the linking can save the hash of the result.
Here it is: https://feeds.resonaterecordings.com/software-unscripted (that URL was surfaced by my subscription in Overcast).
"I take full responsibility"

Translates to "I accept it's my fault but I am still going to sack you."
> we need new rules for what businesses are allowed to do.

What a shame that "we" won't get a look in.
i think you failed to parse the technical joke
"...This evening, Genesis Global Capital, LLC (Genesis) filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. This is a crucial step towards us being able to recover your assets."

So Gemini is helping depositors of Genesis, or depositors of Gemini? If depositors of Gemini, did the depositors know that their monies were going to Genesis when they deposited them into Gemini?
This is begging for an emacs org-babel library: https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/
Not sure how is it with PhD, but with Masters and below, my experience (context: public universities, Poland) is that even in a public university you can get quite a bit of extra time if you... just ask for it. Preferably not in the last minute. The staff doesn't have any particularly strong reason to kick you out just for failing to meet a deadline, or even failing a class - the rules can be bent quite a lot if they see you're making an effort and want to complete your thesis / learn something.

Just as long as you don't hit an administrative blocker, that is. In my case, I never submitted the thesis, because my request to extend the time coincided with the faculty being split in two and completely overhauled - so instead of extension, I was told that, because of "syllabus changes", I would need to repeat the entire MSc level (2 years) to be able to submit the thesis now. I politely declined.
Yes exactly. CEOs that don’t follow the “trend” will be marginalized and questioned. Of course they need to demonstrate that they’re “serious” and can make “tough” decisions.

Keep in mind that being the CEO often requires a person to have a certain kind of personality that might be easier to influence this way.
I guess it also means the often-copied interview process isn’t that good at predicting worker performance.
That's not exactly true. I use coding tests to observe whether the candidate understands what they are doing and have organised approach to the problem or they just throw stuff at the wall, recompile the code and see if it works.

You can ask a carpenter to make a small, simple thing and you will see how competently they use their tools, how steady their moves, how efficient they are with the material. And use that information to understand if they will be good carpenters working on much larger project.

But mostly my coding tests are there to weed out people who can talk but not actually program so that I can save time on the rest of the interviewing process or so that I don't have to fire them in 2 months for no results.
I'm much the same, in a DINK situation and going hard at life experiences but everyone our age has had children and their lives revolve around looking after them.

It's just not very interesting, and nobody has time for fun outside of that. One of my best friends (female) was in the Royal Marines, travelled to Antarctica etc when she was a late teenager/early 20s but now all she does is bring up her children, visit the grandparents and run a small dog training business as a side hustle.

I find it intriguing that this is what people want.
Updating foreign keys in a database is at least doable; updating external systems that have a reference to this entity is impossible
What if you described linear algos as being 10x faster than quadratic ones?

The 10X meme is both too extreme, by implying that Fabrice Bellard could kick out simple crud tasks at 10X the speed I do, and not extreme enough, suggesting that I could build ffmpeg and qemu the same as Fabrice if I was just given more time.

And also, the 10x meme, and how it’s often used, implies that skills are interchangeable. Should a great database internals expert be able to build a great micro-services architecture?

Earlier post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32600331
Added to which, corporate bureaucracy often nullfies your impact anyway.

That 10x potential matters little if the real hard work is tracking down the right person to reconfigure kubernetes or getting sign off to deploy to prod and the code writing is essentially all plumbing.
To be clear none of this is defi, its all just traditional borrowing and lending. Aave pays 3% on USDT right now and lenders there are doing fine in defi
Struggling to put much weight on an article that can't get the name of the company right, despite it being plastered in massive letters on the side of the ships in the pictures.

Lithium batteries are scary when they're damaged though. Can't imagine wanting to be on-board in the case of a fire, either.
One may imagine an AGI achieving a child's level of consciousness: enough to show its conscience, not enough to understand what "sentience" or "consciousness" mean, and certainly not enough to have the idea to hide its consciousness from humans, which presupposes that:

- The AGI understands what it means to be conscious

- The AGI recognizes this property in itself

- The AGI is capable and able of omitting information it knows, if not lying

- The AGI can make decisions

- The AGI would recognize humans as a distinct entity

- The AGI could recognize humans from everything that are not humans, from pets to tables to parked cars

- The AGI would be able to recognize when it is around humans

- The AGI would then make the decision to hide its consciousness from humans

- The AGI would be capable of acting dumb in order to do this and maintain a dual identity
I don't know if you are joking or I need to break it to you that in most cases passports are the de facto identification for foreigners and passport S/Ns are being used as part of identification procedures.
I will never miss an opportunity to admit that plenty of thoughtful people in Russia don't support this war and feel awful about that. But there is a chance to get a fine or to be commited in crime for that kind of speech. Gamers use vpn, trukish accounts and prepaid cards. Also a lot of steam deck salers on local cragelist. Peace
I mean, if that’s what you want, sure. Or, as parent said, you could go with local control. The choice is there, if you really think McJesusFace’s server is great, go for it. Personally, I prefer not relying on any outside server and having everything locally and still get all those smart features.

Oh, and as an extra: That simple switch still works.
> I think it is a bit too narrow to see academia as purely industry preparation.

I agree, but to me that is somewhat the main problem. The most important thing that my tax money should be funding is industry preparation, but if you conflate that with other functions, everything gets muddled. Most of our education resources (>95%) should be exlusively for industry preparation. If we do it well, then remaining 5% will become higher.
This is not how any of this works.
Engineering ability probably fits a normal distribution.
I don't think that the US has the culture that employees should be grateful to their employer for providing them with a job and a paycheck. The idea of at will employment comes from the ideology of freedom rather than who owes who.
To some extent I agree with the sentiment.

COVID seemed to create an awareness amongst employees that they could have better living conditions. There was a capitulation on the part of employers (especially in the tech industry).

Now it seems employers are firing a warning shot across the bow, reminding employees where the power truly lies.

Seeing twitter cut in half and continuing to function probably begs questions at other companies about how many folks are “essential”.

The macroeconomic situation is probably a factor but one could make the argument that it’s only creating a window of convenience for a little house cleaning.
PS: even in more humane phases of the Soviet Union I doubt very much that self-sufficiency had worked. For instance large infrastructure projects, like the Baikal-Amur railway or the Drushba pipeline were built with massive support from all Eastern Bloc countries, not just financially but by sending entire construction teams over (I remember well the propaganda campaigns for this in Eastern Germany).

The VAZ factories were built by the Italians, and the early Shiguli/Lada car models were phased out Fiat models.

The MiG-15 prototypes famously flew with English jet engines.

The Tu-95 turboprop engines have been designed by Germans.

Etc etc... my point being that self-sufficiency doesn't work in the modern world (unless the people are content with living like medieval peasants).
This is where I am headed this year too, in the bid to save money Ive got an agreement with the kids...1 video subscriber service only at a time, between Disney+, Netflix and Paramount+. We watch what we want to on one, then cancel and switch. Hoping I can stick to it to save some dollars. Netflix is just ridiculously expensive now
No kidding.

Chimps go to war with each other, humans have been doing so since before we were "human". There is literally no point in human history without documented violence.
This sounds like it would be fine for code that you write yourself. But if you're only compiling code you wrote then C++ build systems are pretty trivial. The hard bit is dependencies.
"He" won't. It's not like he'll bring money from home.
The larger these tech companies get the more they behave like old tech, like IBM. When a company is publicly traded, shareholders are more important than employees. Silicon Valley and startups are too ingrained with the "IPO/acquisition or bust" mentality and post IPO employees want RSU's or stock grants as part of "total comp".

You say you want a revolution? One where the people at the top are accountable? One where pay is more equitable from the bottom line employee up to CEO? Then people should be starting workers cooperatives[0] and not corporations with a goal of an IPO. Employees having democratic control of their own company, its projects, profits, pay scales, maybe voting in the c-suite executives, what countries they'll do business with, etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
This is more of a shellshock-like bug than anything complicated involving memory. Just a really stupid misconfiguration oversight.
On MacOS / Safari, the full-screen video loops the first few seconds while bufferring, so I was just looking at the awkward guy on repeat. I also have to agree that it was a "bold" choice to use black text with a dark green background on a website whose primary color is orange.
The difference between the average random asshole on the street and the World Bank is there’s at least a chance that the asshole on the street won’t have a 20+ year history of being wrong about literally everything.

The World Bank is and has always been a tool of the power structure to protect the interests of multinational capital. It’s advice is always the same: don’t spend too much money helping people so we can make sure you can always pay back first world banks and governments and don’t seize any of our friends villas or mines.

You realize that’s literally what the last sentence of the quote you posted says right? The World Bank has exactly one job.
> the wine on tap

That always looked like an abomination to me, for the wine, that is. You either drink the wine poured directly from a bottle (or directly from the barrel, like my grandpa used to do), or you don't.
Wow hold up here.

Political agenda if someone just clarifies a very vague statement.

This has nothing to do with agenda.
No doxxing was necessary, Tillie did it all publically, publishing on a home server, making announcements on Telegram under their real name. I don't quite get it either, but they specifically didn't want to hide in (pseudo)anonymity.
I'm intrigued by this but I can't quite get my head around it. I'm a millennial so grew up with online communities and gaming but my god this being a thing blows my mind!
Anyone know of a slack/discord channel for affected employees outside google's network?
The importance of a handbook-first approach to documentation
Even if you are a (legal) medical user?
Agreed on this. If you are a true 10x’er or 100x’er you can do best by making your own company. A year and a half ago I actually did this and recently exited for a good sum. Made a lot more money than if I had kept my salaried position.

The most productive engineers are not only good at coding, but also at identifying market value or customer need, and dealing with others to efficiently build everything required for the business.
> What does it really mean to take responsibility, then?

To own the decision. Not pass the buck.
> Higher level math would be an order of magnitude easier with machine checked syntax.

This just isn't true, at least in terms of developing new mathematical ideas. There are already tools (e.g Coq) for providing mathematical syntax checking etc, but nobody uses these in developing new ideas because it would cripple the process of doing mathematics.

Particularly in the early stages of work, mathematics is very intuition and heuristic driven, you tend to sketch out an idea by actively using the ambiguity in the notation. Once you've got something that looks broadly correct you progressively try to shore it up by using more detailed and rigorous argument.

Maybe as an analogy, think of how architects design houses. They don't start by placing each brick according to correct civil engineering practice. They design something that broadly makes sense and then the civil engineers 'shore it up'.
It is not difficult to test that a machine is conscious and willing to show it. We do it with our fellow humans every day. Simply crack a joke around it, share a story, or do small talk, and see how it reacts.
New listings on job boards, inbound calls from recruiters, the number of people responding to my emails, recruiters themselves telling me that things are picking up since the Christmas break.

I included the word "seemed" for a reason. It wasn't intended as an objective statement, but a response to someone asking for anecdotal experiences. I'm sure others may have a different experience depending on where they live, their experience, their CV, the type of companies they're applying for, etc.
Almost every time I picked a natural key I have regretted it in the long run.

Requirements change, or index sizes get bloated and hamper performance, or you need a nice, short ID for URLs , or foreign keys get more complicated with compound primary keys, or ...

Natural keys are nice in theory, but not so much in practice.

Especially if we are talking about active databases where large migrations are a burden.
Do you really think that?

Also, if so, do you really think that reducing force means reducing force were it's appropriate (triming true fat)?

All the companies are doing is to take the opportunity to save cost because everyone does, and because these companies can obviously survive.

They hired to keep in line with trends and now they fire for the same reason.
Layoffs are not about saving money. It's all theatre to appease the powers that be.

"What explains why so many companies are laying large numbers of their workforce off? The answer is simple: copycat behavior."[1]

[1] https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-la...
http203 was my favorite while it lasted. Both highly enjoyable and informative.

I also want to give a shoutout to the CSS podcast by Adam Argyle and Una Kravets. It isn't easy to listen to, because it's trying to describe verbally what's essentially visual; but it is full of useful information.
> And a server owned by Jesus McJesusFace in WhereTheHellistan propped up by shitnickles funds.

No you don't. Just use Home Assistant or openHAB — fully local control by default. I've been using the former for a while now, and it's been working great.
> A company of 50,000 operating at a loss will eventually fire 50,000 people. If it can turn things around by firing 10,000 - why not?

This argument, true or false, is not applicable in this situation, as Google is still enjoying high profits.
Just in the title.
I heard that Biden's counsel might actually try to file a case against the legislative branch (as an institution, not specific people) about the debt ceiling (instead of negotiating with Republicans), which would be popcorn time.
Probably one of the two main reasons why agrarian revolution took so long time, you can't establish the any trade-routes either if you are surrounded by bloodthirsty nomads
Seen enough cycles of laying off about 10% [1] of your workforce to try and halt a share price slide and make investors happier to realise it's in the Howto CEO & Keep Your Job manual.

QED, this announcement is almost entirely about share prices sliding in the tech sector since about the beginning of 2022.

ChatGPT's impact on Google is unknown, but it is a fair bet that it will be larger [2].

[1] It's always around 10% because all large companies carry functions and individuals who can be removed from the enterprise, and things will essentially carry on as before once the shock subsides.

[2] I don't think many would doubt Google could have rolled out its own ChatGPT'alike years ago. The fact that they didn't suggests that internally a combination of the undoubted reputational risk, cost and the risk to their existing revenue streams was enough to prevent it. Google's full of very bright people, and they've failed to find a palatable solution in years. So even if it is a solvable problem, it seems unlikely that the recent nasty shock from ChatGPT is going to have changed that.
Exactly this. I’ve seen architectural decisions that over time lead to exponential work to implement new features. An architectural fix can lead to a big-O difference in productivity, not just 10x (a constant factor).
Having read most of the comments debating the pros and cons of the system this is an astonishingly simple solution! Sometimes I think those of us in technology look for problems to solve.
My question is ; if you somehow could level up all the other people on the team to the super productive person's level - how much more productive would the team have been? Clearly it would have been somewhat more productive but I think a lot of this "10x developer" stuff is kind of reductionist - the quality of the overall team being solely the total quality of each individual member.

Sports teams are the obvious analogy here - with football/soccer you sometimes get these "team of the season" things where the best player in each position is chosen. One striker scored 50 goals for his team, another striker scored 48 goals somewhere else - wow, if they played together the team would have 98 goals. Except obviously not since there's a finite number of chances and the team is structured to play a certain way (often around their star player). And that's not taking into account ego/personality clashes which is a non-trivial concern with high performing people.
Seems like they were randomly distributed over 2^64 ish so not feasible
The problem is, you do not like their actions. And that's perfectly fine!

However, no matter what they say here, what platitudes, what attempts to comfort(or lack!), you will still find fault with the words.

Stop complaining about the words, and people will stop arguing with you over them. The words are unimportant.

Instead, complain solely about the act, leave the words out of it.
Only if it wants to not be unplugged.
Mad Hatter Syndrome
Massive? This is 6% of their workforce.
The thing that bums me out about all this is that Google used to be a company where so many great products/projects came out of their 20% time. They used to hire "generalists" so they can be of use in wide segments of their company.

Now they are laying people off while still being a profitable company.

Something definitely changed in their company's DNA.