skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
UK HMRC wants to eliminate non-PAYE employment and has been trying to do so since around 2003. This has proved difficult for them since contractors/consultants are often not just working as contractors to try and reduce tax, some of them are, y’know, trying to build a business and gain freedom from the 9-5. The most successful strategy for HMRC has been to fine employers for employing people as indy consultants who would otherwise be classed as on the payroll/PAYE types. These umbrella companies/3rd companies insulate the employer from some of the “risks” invented by HMRC to them.
Great blog. You made good points and I'm sure many of us feel the same way.
Medium doesn't allow you to keep people who like your work invested.
We haven’t spent a penny on marketing
> But nuclear has a terrible problem: it's not really economical.

Against what honest option? If fossil fuel plants had to charge to cover the deaths from pollution they'd be blistering expensive.

It could just as easily be said that nuclear power is the only source we can truly afford.

> The business model of nuclear is just broken in modern times.

Right, because it's not really a business. Power is infrastructure.
It's a common story.

A product is great. The company providing the product raises lots of money.

Investors want a return on their investment and the founders want a big payday. So the company starts adding lots of features to increase sign-ups, conversions, and revenue.

But these features often poison the user experience. Even as numbers go up in the near-term, the product withers and dies as users eventually defect.

Companies with a moat can get away with this, like Reddit and YouTube, at least for a while. Medium had no real moat, so users left.
It is ridiculously far fetched. It was extremely expensive asset and provided a source of leverage.

This is why the US publicly hated on the pipeline.
It got stuffed full of low quality content, much of which felt like assignments from developer boot-camp students... and then the paywall arrived.

So paying (or registering) for access to view content which was likely to be fluff wasn't attractive.

There was definitely some valuable content on Medium, but it was lost in a sea of noise.
I can't speak to Meta, but Saleforce and Amazon probably needed to hire during the pandemic to keep on with demand.

Amazon saw a massive spike in their ecommerce business due to lockdowns so they had to hire to ensure they had the labour to deal with all the extra orders and deliveries. And even with this extra hiring I remember my deliveries being delayed often in 2020.

Saleforce is a weird software company because my understanding is a lot of their staff are there to help clients with integrations, manage accounts and to upsell. Again, assuming Salesforce saw a spike in demand during the pandemic they probably needed more employees because of the nature of their business.

My guess is that Apple also had to ramp up manufacturing significantly during the pandemic to meet demand, but obviously they don't employee people directly to do their manufacturing which probably gave them more flexibility when it came to meeting pandemic demand without increasing head count.

For the most part I don't understand why people act like tech companies were hiring recklessly during the pandemic. Are people forgetting how much demand was pulled forward by stimulus and lockdowns? These companies were forced to hire or lose market share. That's really the only two options they had.

Personally I'd be blaming politicians and the Fed for creating an impossible economic environment to operate in. If you were a company in 2020 your demand was either skyrocketing from lockdowns or at zero because you were forced to close your business. There was no in-between. Tech employees as initial beneficiaries of lockdowns are only now seeing the impact of job losses, but these were happening on mass elsewhere in the economy while lockdowns were in place.
Not sure what HN has against wordpress, but it's still the GOAT in terms of blogging platforms. It's

1) Easy to setup

2) Incredibly SEO friendly

3) Most importantly: you own your content.

Yes - it's not as technically advanced as engineers would like - but let's be real - it's a blog - not a venture funded startup.

Buy your own domain. Own your content. Then, just write. If you need help, you can even get it set up for you for free → https://startablog.com/free-blog
I think the biggest difference between the military and industry is that the civilian side of the government enforces laws on industry but does not enforce laws on the military. I know many people who would love to not have to deal with their company's waste disposal processes, but the consequences are quite severe (e.g. the fines are huge so you would be fired if you were found out).
Maybe I'm an outlier but the more high end beer/alcohol I buy, the more sub-premium beer I buy as well. That is buying more sub-premium means I've gotten richer.

I'll have a nice mezcal with a shitty bud light or whatever afterwards. If I don't have a high end drink then that's when I'll have something middle of the road like a local affordable craft or something and since it's affordable I don't need to buy a sub-premium beer to finish off the night.

Could it be people have just discovered better alcohol and are drinking that for the taste and then the budget stuff for the buzz? The masses may have discovered it's kind of an optimal strategy.
Studies have repeatedly born out just how much more efficient at people moving mass transit is. Even ICE buses have a far smaller environmental footprint than EV cars while being more effective at moving people per square foot of infrastructure consumed.
I agree with you, but the younger generations are going to be the "leaders" of the world and they love short form content. Everything points towards short form content being the biggest thing while long form content and text content becomes niche.
I can still use my bank's "app" (read: web site) and stream videos on my desktop, which has an entirely unlocked bootloader.
Reading the article, I thought Clark's actions were completely unjustified, etc.

But it really seems he did quit because of a protracted dispute with local fire and air quality district personnel that was escalated to the EPA. The threat of massive fines was looming bigger and bigger, and the letter he writes just exudes desperation that he didn't feel he could reach compliance.
It's not "don't trust out performance evaluations". The point of perf evals is rarely to fire people, it's primary use is to manage expectations of promotion.

> This is assuming that layoffs affect the correct group of people

Layoffs often don't target the right group of people when it comes to perf. There's error in human judgement abound. But it's 100% accurate when it comes to which business units are bringing in revenue, or costing a lot.

> why couldn't those people be informed earlier and been given a choice to find a different position or to improve their performance

Human attention is a scarce resource. Executives will tolerate inefficiency during up markets because it's more valuable to try to capture growth vs become efficient. When there's no growth to be had, then they turn their attention towards cutting costs.

> it seems more likely that layoffs in these cases are less about cutting low performers and more about getting rid of people the company is mismanaging, or people that the company is overpaying

The larger a company gets, the more these are effectively the same thing. Money in, value out. Too much money, too little value, you're just changing two sides of a ratio.
It was a symptom of the bubble economy, particularly in e-commerce and online services, that materialized during the pandemic and was egged on by a series of mistakes made by the Fed.

Demand looked like it was growing massively with no end in sight, valuations were insane, and money was easy to get.

A lot of companies didn't stop to think that maybe it was all just a bubble. So they hired to avoid missing out.

Basic things like running a sustainable business with a sane balance sheet were not scrutinized by investors. Now they are, and in the layoff emails to employees we see CEOs talking about how that is important, as if they suddenly realized it for the first time.

To be fair, some of those companies probably did make a lot more money than they would have if they hadn't taken advantage of the situation -- and they probably would have been punished by their shareholders if they didn't.
>I regret that Hersh's reporting relied on anonymous officials.

Nobody much wanted to talk on the record about My Lai or Abu Ghraib when it happened either.
how is destroying an entire dam easier than making an armed incursion into a nuclear power plant to steal radioactive waste? Just in terms of metric tons of ammunition needed

not to mention, maybe the place you want to attack doesn't have a dam?
My experience with the backlog is somewhat different than the authors.

Mostly my experience is QA opens bugs and engineering opens tickets for tech debt, refactoring, performance improvements, reliability improvements, etc..

The PM opens new feature tickets, prioritizes those, and pushes the bugs & tech debt tickets to the backlog until their back is absolutely against the wall.

Every so often a VP or someone will come in and call PM to the carpet and engineering gets to do a "quality release" where bugs are fixed and tech debt is cleaned up. But then things will regress again to PM just making sure new features are ticked off at the expense of other tasks that languish in the backlog.
Until someone else can corroborate Hersh's story, or Hersh provides hard evidence, this is whole thing is a nothing burger.
Breeder reactor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
Not an expert but from what I read development stopped mainly due to uranium supply being sufficient making expensive further research not worth it.
But on the security part using liquid sodium certainly contributed :).
I mean, not quite. My performance at the same level went from high performer to low performer. So I was doing the role very well for a while, even getting good reviews for filling the role above mine (intermediate dev filling tech lead role). Performance gradually atrophied following my disenchantment and mistreatment.
>Spraying them with Roundup is how you cultivate them.

Roundup is a herbicide. It kills normal plants. Monsanto sells seeds that were genetically modified to resist it. It doesn't make any sense to spray it on natural plants.
This Pill Treats Constipation by Vibrating Its Way Through Your Body
Wrong, condescension is a social tool to discourage an unwanted behavior. Accepting the negative behavior encourages others to do the same thing.
100%. That was the worst mistake Medium made.
No one here hates WordPress because people use it for blogging. We hate it because other people use it as a complex, insecure, messy, un-versioned CMS that some of us had to inherit.

It's perfect for blogging. It's a disaster for everything else people do with it.
Again, this analysis is exactly backwards. The reason they axe flailing projects quickly is that they know they need to find a small number of promising new revenue streams to focus on. What HN wants them to do - commit to small projects indefinitely - would be exactly the lack of focus and urgency being criticized!

I think what people are saying is something like "Google needs to focus on a small number of new successful large revenue sources". Which, yes, of course! But they don't know what those are, and none of the backseat drivers do either.
I'm not saying OHC aren't better, they certainly are (in most respects). Just saying that I wouldn't consider pushrods a showstopper either.

(As an aside, when aviation engines started going with 4V designs in the 30'ies, it wasn't only about breathing, but better cooling of the valves was an equally big motivation.)
I don't think so...

The general populace will use the crippled AIs presented by mainstream corporations and governments.

Anyone who cares about their information will use un-crippled AIs operating without guardrails, which are always available to monitor what they read and hear, and comment on it.

Sort of like when my relatives call me to analyze a potential Phishing email -- I don't do anything difficult; view the raw mail; check the DKIM signing and SPF validity, look at the full URLs of originating servers vs. the claimed From: and the document contents' claimed source, verify all transited MTAs, check the contents for malicious looking payloads, etc.

Any half-decently trained LLM can do all of this, instantly and trivially, and lay out the evidence in an understandable fashion for a non-technical user.

Imagine that, but amplified by an LLM trained to recognize and categorize arguments in a variety of technical fields. Not to tell you what to believe -- but to categorize the claims by its heritage vs. the main groupings of theories in that field, and then give a set of links to highly rated "for" and "against" arguments.

I don't need some LLM trained by a partisan, with guard-rails set up by some corporation's legal and HR departments. I don't think most people will stand for that, when we have laptops that can already run reasonably capable LLMs w/ training on focussed datasets!
Is there a problem with thievery of apples, oranges, asparagus and beetroots? I don't have the numbers but I would bet money that most store thievery is cigarettes, alcohol, maybe sodas, and small electronics, pills at CVS, etc.

So no, I don't think theft is the major factor.
> One of the proper, necessary functions of any investment market is to take money away from people who do the wrong things with it.

Why is that?
And the people doing the wrong things are often cheered on by obvious scammers (e.g., crypto/blockchain) and the very suspicious (e.g., WSB making an echo chamber party that embraced behaving stupidly/irrationally, and could also be directed to manipulate the market).
Extremely far-fetched, you'd have to convince me that the Russian government and military are full of total morons.

Building a pipeline is not cheap, not in money or time or bureaucratic effort. It's easier to just stop supplying the gas if you want to make an obvious threat.
No, one of the core company metric for investors is profit per FTE so that is not true that investors want more headcount.

Having more FTE makes your company more trustworthy so in B2B market having more FTEs makes it easier to sign on more customers from F500. If you have 10 employees good luck having F500 company taking you as a serious business.

Having more headcount is also making company more trustworthy for banks to get loans.

So making it easier to get customers and making it easier to get loans for future growth is also coincidentally more worth for investors - but profit per FTE is still important and if you can make loads of money with 10 employees and the same amount of money with 100 - I would invest in the first one.
afaik all modern designs for nuclear power are aimed at being small so they can be installed underground, which would make them much safer during these events.

e.g. Here's a company that was licensed to build SMR (small modular reactors) last month that is designed to be underground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuScale_Power
Russia has already demonstrated they will blow up their own pipelines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Russia%E2%80%93Georgia_en...

You keep using strong words like "utter stupidity" and "insane" without being aware of recent Russian history...
Self-promotion spam aside, all of those points are stronger arguments for static site genetation like with Jekyll or Hugo. There, the site is faster and you don't have to pay much hosting fees if any.
The sticks take some calibration to work properly. I enjoy the small deadzones compares to stock.
Ah, yeah. I thought I saw some "60s" and so forth on one of the graphs, but I may have read it wrong in the moment.
There is no "best practice". It depends on context. OOP is good for some things and not that much for others. Same goes for your list of "best" practices. Dismissing a paradigm in totality because some Joe Shmoe of today has declared it non cosher looks rather more like a religious statement than a practical choice.
4 years is a long time, so you should have some explanation, but there is really only one way to find out! No one has asked about why I took 8 months off yet.
So, like everything, that’s not the whole truth. Apple was much more restrained, but that’s because it’s always been restrained. I commented this before here, but not all tech companies substantially changed behavior wrt hiring…

We forget that many of these companies have been doubling every few years already. Google and meta were startups in the 2000s, apple and Microsoft are 20+y older.

Basically, most of these tech companies have been hiring at a constant rate for years, and also experiencing constant attrition. Once the economy soured, and then hiring freezes started, attrition rates had crashed, and the employee count wasn't as affected by freeze as desired. The layoffs have been roughly a reset towards the headcount before the freeze for many companies.

While the whole article is paywalled, I'll quote an excerpt from ben Thompson:

> The popular narrative right now about these layoffs is that tech companies dramatically over-hired during the pandemic, but while that seems to have happened with Amazon — and for arguably very good reasons given the way that e-commerce shot up during lockdowns in particular — the reality is that the rest of the tech companies largely increased at the same rate they always had. Sure, the number of employees they added was large, but that was a function of keeping the same hiring rate off of an ever increasing base.

> In short, no one was giving up a job at one of the big five tech companies this year as fear spread about a broad-based slowdown in hiring... These companies, though, adjusted more slowly to the slower rate of attrition, which means they accidentally increased their headcount... the relatively limited size of the layoffs to date actually reflects that: these companies are not returning to their pre-pandemic levels of employees, but rather to where they would be had they kept up roughly the same rates of hiring this year that they have over the last ten

[0] https://stratechery.com/2023/tech-layoffs-big-techs-hiring-r...
Oh wow, so they're still chipping away at it.

I wonder if they'll roll it out on the iphone first or start with ipads and possibly the apple watch if they can get the power draw lower. That might be a good way to increase the battery life of those devices, lowering the gap between regular and low power mode.
So a cap on patent revenues, with ensuing expiration
The short answer is that the founder is an introverted guy who sort of weathervanes around when it comes to his vision for the product, he had enough prior success to get lots of funding for his project, and there was no one with enough authority to say "no" to his shifting ideas or replace him with a more effective boss.

You see this pattern a lot with successful people. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a brilliant guy, but his later books are unreadable because he won't consent to have an editor. Your favorite band takes five years to release a follow-up to their breakthrough album. Pundits get a sinecure at a major news outlet on the strength of their insightful thinking and then start producing drivel.

Ev Williams had the misfortune of being given a limitless budget and the freedom to realize his vision. Medium with three developers and a half million dollar budget might have been unstoppable.
Your hot spoon is in fact radioactive, emitting thermal radiation. Thermal radiation doesn't make things it hits radioactive. Neither does your microwave oven or even gamma radiation. Radioactivity can be induced in things by neutron radiation, but not EM radiation. It is safe to eat food which has been irradiated with gamma radiation, and chances are you have many times before (it is fairly common for dried spices and herbs to be irradiated for preservation purposes.)
But you can have cash transactions, the rest is convenience. You can not have that with crypto.
Yes, I was specifically referring to the US (since the article was about Seattle). I've lived in Europe / Asia and it's very different of course.
Where did you move to? Self hosting?
Is Academia Really Disintegrating?
It'll be interesting to see how everything develops but Japan has an absurd amount of offshore wind potential. Their country is set up perfectly to take advantage of it given their major cities are all up and down the coast, they're also ~100 miles from mainland Korea which has plenty of wind and solar potential as well.

There are geopolitical concerns to relying on your neighbors for energy transmission, but it's hard to think of any technical or financial reasons that would stop it. Given current learning rates and cost trends, utility solar will likely be under $0.01/kwh in just about every place on earth. Certainly within 15 years, likely within 10. When new-build nuclear is above $0.10/kwh and takes a decade to build, the delta buys you a ton of storage.
As an add on to that - if nuclear energy did start becoming mass produced in the developed world where some modicum of safety/regulation around waste can be assumed, once all of the necessary reactors are built out to supply first world energy needs, at best, those same private developers/contractors will start lobbying efforts in more questionable parts of the world to build these things. Then it be framed as an equity issue - why is the first world preventing the rest of the world from catching up - even though its actually just a plain "it's not safe to build it in a country in the middle of a civil war".

The more likely scenario I would envision is that - under the guise of business "joint venture partnerships in next generation energy" - the technological know how and access to a steady stream of the requisite raw materials to build weapons will leak to more questionable parts of the world.
Tech companies, I agree, because their management would be fairly IT-litterate. But outside of tech companies certainly.
US citizen gets jail time for smuggling controlled tech to Iran
The push for growth killed everything good about it.
> they can run in reverse and cool your home, and are much more efficient at that than traditional ACs.

I'd love to see a source on that. There is very little technological difference between an air conditioner and a heat pump aside from refrigerant reversing valves that allow changing which end is the condenser and which the evaporator.
Have you heard of Abu Ghraib?

Most of his award winning journalism has relied upon anonymous sources.

This is how it has always worked.
I was going to say this too. iPhone 10 still supports the latest iOS.
interesting. i wish there was a social blogging platform that had interesting posts to learn about things, and a way to compensate writers without ruining the whole experience.
Google Is Losing Control
There is also 'atanua':

https://github.com/jarikomppa/atanua .
While interesting, the author appears to be nitpicking. It does not really refute Hersh's story, because these minor inconsistencies appear in any news article, including the NYT.

It is irrelevant whether Hersh gets all details right, the important thing is whether his source is correct on the big picture or not.

It seems to me that the veracity of Hersh's claims cannot be decided by textual analysis, but rather by another investigative reporter who would travel for months to Florida, Norway, etc. and try to dig into the story. But who will finance that? Who would dare that?