skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A layoff doesn’t mean you over-hired for the market conditions which were present when the hiring happened.

And under-hiring today because your crystal ball says market conditions will deteriorate in the future is also not always the best course of action.

The myriad causes which lead Intel to this point exist at many levels from individual, corporate, competitive, and macroeconomic.

It’s overly reductive to assume a layoff is due to some mistake, that a layoff is due to over-hiring, or that a layoff’s root cause is the executives who mapped out a past hiring plan.

For starters, the hiring plan will be based on revenue projections which will be based on technical market analysis overlaid with a technical roadmap. This is a distributed effort and major analysis at the level of a corporation like Intel spread across potentially dozens of business units. The hiring plan could easily have been “perfect” based on faulty product roadmaps / product performance projections or any number of other factors.
I haven't heard of the new client, I'll happily eat my words if they manage to fix any of the things that I've been grousing about for years.
The article mentions "Auth services, obviously". I'm curious, because to me it seems like people have mostly used open source things they include in their apps.
On topic though, this doesn't make "It could be fake," a reasonable defense. Sure, the surface area will get larger, but we have that problem across all digital media at this moment. Deepfakes are no longer unique.

The courts will have to deal with it one way or another, and right now expert witnesses is the tool they have, and the tool defendants will need to use.
This isn't 20% companywide, it's 20% within one group. Fabs are unaffected.

https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2023/05/08/intel-p...
Steam is not shitty yet, but they are resting on their laurels.

The main issue is that Steam takes a much bigger cut than Epic (30% vs 12%). Of course Epic will inevitably enshittify themselves once they take market share away from Steam.

The Steam client just gets stuff incoherently bolted on top of old codebase, and the UI became eclectic.

GoG client library can seamlessly integrate with Epic client. It used to work well with Steam too, but now integration with Steam has become clunky and buggy. I'm not entirely sure whose fault is that, but I suspect Steam started defending their moat.
It would be amusing but I've never been told to wait until the next sprint when contacting customer support.
I’m getting tired of the “X lays off employees after <insert proxy for company making money>” headlines. A company making money does not correlate to them needing employees.

A contrived example: Company Y employs 1000 people. They make $1B off of their last project, Medium Project, and next week they’re going to finish Big Project. Half of their company is working on Big Project right now, and none of their other teams would benefit from more workers. What should Company Y do after Big Project is complete?

Company Y could pay their employees to sit around, but why would they? If they don’t have anything coming down the pipe, they should save their money.

A lot of companies, especially tech companies, since they are highly dependent on growth, had staff on projects that weren’t expected to be profitable for a long time. When the Fed raised interest rates, the discount rate of those investments increased, making them less valuable today. We see layoffs as a result, since projects that were previously valuable no longer are. It has nothing to do with “the company made X dollars this year”. Even if you made 10x your annual income (this is a gigantic overexaggeration to these companies’ results) in a year, would you use it to justify spending on something you didn’t need? What if you strongly suspected a recession was coming?

The businesses laying people off are are making rational decisions, and people are outraged at them. Why not instead be outraged at the Federal Reserve for manipulating interest rates? Why not be mad at the government for mandating lockdowns during COVID that fueled the massive inflation that caused the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates? Instead, people are pointing fingers at the companies for fulfilling their role: to make money; and next time a similar situation comes around, the groups that actually caused the layoffs will get off scot-free…again.
>> It's not obligatory to have achievements unlike on the PlayStation

While it is indeed mandatory for your game to have achievements on Playstation, the TRCs don't specify anything about the quanity nor quality of those achivements. If you want you can launch the game with a single achievement for starting the game and it would still be approved.
I de-emphasize lists of languages and technologies but there's a reason to put them there, and that's for searching and indexing. When I'm looking at a resume I want to see concise and accurate descriptions of accomplishments at the beginning, but I don't think it's a detriment if somewhere there is a list of technologies.

Just make sure that everything on your resume is justified and you're able to answer questions about it. Don't put SQL if you can't answer interview questions about it.
Yikes! $300. Okay...I guess I'll wait until Christmas.
The further up the ladder you go, the less this is true.

I tell people about a senior plateau - after this point, the growth gets smaller. Everything is just another framework, just another language, just another pattern. At this point, unless you are a spectacularly proficient programmer, there's a limit to how much further you are going to improve.

Further, as organizations grow larger, there are more implications to every extra feature. That is, all of the easy stuff is done and the hard stuff means a change in multiple parts of the system, introducing fragility and cross-team coordination.

In some cases, the effort in coordination outweighs the effort in code. And that's what I need a senior developer to do - can they understand multiple systems, work with multiple teams, or do they need engineering managers to figure it all out and give it to them bite-sized?

And that is the impact that engineering leaders look for - someone who can code faster than everyone else just means there's a giant bottleneck everywhere around them.
Show HN: Cptn.io – open-source integration platform
Hi, I am Krishna Thota. I am building an open source integration and data platform(https://cptn.io). The product is MIT licensed and the repo is at https://github.com/cptn-io/el-cptn.

I have started on my startup journey an year ago and launched a monitoring platform called DevRaven. Unfortunately the product did not takeoff as expected. That story is for another day.

But during the course of building the product, I have built several integrations leveraging MQs and Cloud Functions. While building and deploying Cloud Functions for happy paths is easy, I had to monitor logs for failures, build retry mechanisms or manually process failed events, keep instances running to prevent cold start timeouts. It can also get expensive with charges for MQs, server time for running cloud functions etc and costs can be unpredictable.

I thought of building a platform where I can build integrations quickly, have the ability to look at incoming/outgoing events, look at logs, retry any failed events etc. And finally, predictable costs for running the infrastructure. cptn.io provides all these capabilities and more. You can build pipelines to integrate with any cloud services, send data from your backend to data warehouses, listen to web hook events etc. The platform can be integrated into any stack by sending events to HTTP end points.

Instead of trying to build a business first or launch an open source product under restrictive licenses, the platform will be available under MIT license so any user or customer can use it. There is no ee folder or complex dual licensing and I am also committing to releasing SSO under MIT. The plan is to offer a managed service in the cloud at a later time, accept sponsors for prioritizing features for enterprise customers and charge for enterprise support.

It should take less than 5 minutes to get the platform running on your machine. Welcome any feedback, feature requests, PRs and bug reports.
So... it's a scam where they put iron from the electrodes into the water, then show you the discoloration?
Yes, as an abstract hypothesis it would need to be proven each time. A historian could write a long article giving extensive evidence about how well it applies in each case. That’s how you’d do it if you wanted to be taken seriously, and you might run into complications like each service evolving somewhat differently if you pay attention to the details. Real history is complicated.

But most people won’t want to bother with that. We will often just call something names if it seems right to us. That’s how words (and in particular, insults) normally work.

So, another way to look at this is that Cory Doctorow came up with a middlebrow justification for calling things shit, and people liked it enough to ask him to write more about it. The justification isn’t necessary though. You could just call it shit, and it’s pretty much equivalent. (Although it leaves out the generic anti-capitalist ideology.)
Intel planning new wave of layoffs, reports say
Thanks for doing the digging! It seems like whenever a static is dug into there are often a few asterisks necessary. "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" as they say. I wonder why Triple-A wouldn't use the 16.8% figure, which bounded would be 4.97%, other than negligence.

the Keynote in [b] is definitely an interesting read though it's a bit unfortunate more statistics regarding holding sizes aren't shared.

The perspective expressed of crypto as (reading between the lines) a tool of foreign governments to dollarize EMs is an interesting one. I would be curious if the average person would rather have the individual option of being able to hold other currencies risk and all or if they would prefer to collectively have restrictions for the health of their banking infrastructure as a whole, and how much interest there was in crypto as a means to hold dollars or something else other than rupees, or hoping for extremely high returns in order to then convert back to rupees.

"This could be actual dollarization if stablecoins linked to the US Dollar become widely used, and there is good reason to believe that that they would be popular if permitted."

"Most cryptocurrencies are owned by businesses of AEs; therefore, better adoption of cryptocurrencies would add to their growth and employment. Significantly, it might be of advantage to the AEs if cryptocurrencies replace emerging market (EM) currencies as that would give AEs a better strategic control on the EMEs."

"With one or more private currencies being allowed, there would be parallel currency system(s) in the country. Thus, increased acceptance of cryptocurrencies would result in effective ‘Dollarization’ of our economy."

"They threaten the financial sovereignty of a country and make it susceptible to strategic manipulation by private corporates creating these currencies or Governments that control them."

"Almost all cryptocurrencies are priced in terms of Dollars (or potentially any of the freely convertible currencies). Wider adoption would actually result in wider use of these currencies. So cryptocurrencies are not a threat to convertible currencies as they are to the Rupee, which is not an international currency." (I believe the Rupee has since started to be used for international settlements[1])

[1]https://www.isas.nus.edu.sg/papers/indias-foreign-trade-poli...
Agree, except the bit about MBAs. After all, some of the worst scandals in the last two decades where driven and caused by pure-blood engineers.
This filter may seem unfair, but I have found several short stints on a CV to be a strong signal that they may be short lived with us, too.
Is LinkedIn often used as a resume? LinkedIn to me is a social media platform. At least in the software companies I've worked for, and applied to, I've only ever seen actual resumes around.
> So maybe it's not a much better system.

It is for everyone except shareholders.
> society and the economy like never before. This process carries enormous risks and opportunities, which are currently basically... ignored (well, the risk side)

What risks are you talking about here?
The updated Big Picture mode is great. I'm able to do practically all my Steam-related interactions with just a controller, without needing to get my keyboard/mouse.
One thing to know if you're a coffee snob is which cafes near you have an RO filter. The ones that do make much better espresso. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29427961-water-for-coffe... is the definitive guide apparently.
Compensation is not really about the exact amount at this level - they earn the kiss-my-ass money already. Amounts kind of lose their meaning over a certain level. Is there a real difference between pulling 150M and 250M?

The only thing is that the compensation shouldn't be lower than last year, unless you decide personally to lower it.
Appreciated, and I'm not immune to the payment situation for Creators and for Youtube itself; my claim isn't that the content should be free or that the Ads are inherently evil, it's about the Youtube app/platform in general.

As a user of a piece of software, it's very difficult to even use the darn thing :) Finding new channels is really tough even when logged in and letting the algorithm work for awhile. So for me it fails to bring me new stuff to check out, it fails as an application in terms of usability and features, and for the few channels I am willing to follow, I'm a lot more comfortable just contributing on Patreon.

That basically leaves Youtube with the server costs, and yeah, that's not something to scoff at and it's not something I expect Alphabet to pony up for.

But for me, the terms and conditions for all that isn't worth paying a subscription to Youtube for; the app barely keeps feature parity with contemporary apps, Youtube itself is pretty poor at getting me new stuff to watch, etc. I'd really rather just go back to smaller, multiple platforms and iTunes like purchasing.
Google's moats, George Hinton, Mojo and reading minds
The CIA is not supposed to be looking inward unless it's directly related to a foreign intelligence mission, and open collaboration with law enforcement would make it almost impossible to enforce that principle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act

This principle has been softened and defanged quite a bit since 9/11.
Mangle uses seminaive evaluation which is a standard, not very fancy but incremental way of computing fixpoint.
I believe Datafun uses the same but there it requires more thinking since it interacts with other language features. I need to reread the paper.
There are really many low level ways to optimize incremental fixpoint computation in practice since the key step involves a look up whether a fact has already been computed. However, having evaluation access the FactStore through an interface means a developer can hook up various implementations and that flexibility can matter more than the last bit of performance.
I never said I don't think sensor fusion is possible. My only argument has always been "adding more sensors does not mean you will have a better self-driving car". Richer data does not mean better data. It does not mean more actionable data either. All it means is that you have more data points. I absolutely agree that this can be a good thing, and probably is in the case of self-driving.

But maybe it's not. Maybe the additional flops required for sensor fusion would be more useful if given over to the planning part of the problem. After all, you don't have infinite cycles. This is what I mean when I say it has not been proven at scale. The edge cases matter (arguably they are all that really matter), and "solutions with more sensors work better at object detection in artificial benchmarks" is not nearly as convincing to me as it seems to be to you. Again, object detection does not exist in a vacuum, and a solution that generally behaves better in a very constrained environment might actually behave worse when you throw all the edge cases at it and add on prediction and planning.
Perhaps also consider that you (the human) are using 2-dimensional visual processing to help you solve the problem by collating your work. You also almost certainly work /backwards/ from right to left. The problem is simplified by scratch space and the human sensorium... (It would be interesting to see how multimodal models handle the problem, actually, given a picture of the addition problem.)

The problem given to the LLM is more like:

1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 + 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 1 = ?

Try writing the answer entirely from left-to-right without losing your place... It'll be error prone for humans, to say the least. It's why we invented our particular by-hand addition algorithms in the first place: these algorithms are co-adapted to the human sensorium.

Luckily, we can ask any LLM worth its salt to write the single line of python code needed to solve the problem and it'll do just fine...

edit: Thinking about this more - and trying to explicitly check the intermediate steps - I'm guessing that the LLM is getting lost in the inputs. The attention mechanism is going to need to find the correct pair of digits at each step, and combine them with some info about the carry variable. I'm guessing this is hard to do - there's a positional embedding used to attach some location info to each token, but in a long run of homogenous text, I would guess that it's hard to find a particular digit and end up with some off-by-one errors in the lookup. (and this is very similar to how we would expect humans to fail at the single-line version of the problem.)
I read your comment very clearly, and you're speaking in absolutes like "nothing else matters", "only ever cut back on things like product", "no-one tries to start a new mayonnaise company". And these absolutes simply aren't true.

And sure nobody starts a mayo company but Hellman's is absolutely competing in the same product category with relatively newer entrants such as e.g. Amazon Brand, or Whole Foods 365 brand, on top of other long-existing competitors. My example was directly addressing your topic -- perhaps you're the one who needs to read what I said again. Because according to you, it's inexplicable that McD's is improving their Big Mac by adding sauce.

But just because you don't seem to be understanding my point, let me try one more time with another one of your examples:

> If MCD remove sesame seeds from their bun, there is not going to be a new entrant with more seeds.

Popeye's was winning the chicken sandwich wars, so McDonald's launched their McCrispy. Shake Shack was popularizing better-tasting burgers, so McDonald's switched from frozen to fresh made-to-order quarter pounders. Competition is alive and well.

If McDonald's removed sesame seeds from all their buns tomorrow, it would be national news and they would absolutely lose sales as people switched to Burger King which would probably launch a national advertising campaign about how they've still got sesame seeds unlike a certain cheapskate competitor that seems to have forgotten what makes a burger complete.

A lot of our popular consumer products and foods have reached a kind of "steady state" because they're what people like at the right price point and there isn't much innovation to be had on a yearly basis. There isn't a tastier version of Coca-Cola left to be made. But you're interpreting this as "no competition at the margin" which is completely false. The steady state is maintained because of competition. The moment a company cuts quality to deliver something consumers don't want, the competition will eat them alive (remember New Coke?).

And believe me, I've worked at major corporations, not that it matters though. Please don't throw around insults like someone sitting in their bedroom, it's not for HN. But perhaps you have more of an internal corporate view and are missing the broader economic fundamentals here because of that?
Half-Life 4? Preferably non-VR so.
People can have sincere beliefs and disagree about the best course of action. Hinton has publicly said he's in favor of stopping, but doesn't think China would. I personally disagree, I think that coordinating a stop would be easier than he thinks. But I don't doubt his sincerity. He also believes that if we can solve alignment, AI would be a massive boon for humanity, which is why it's a bit of a quandary.
> Delivering [the maximum possible return on investment] is also the responsibility of the board as enshrined by law.

This is utterly and completely false.

If you don't believe me, here's what Justice Alito (known for his conservative/libertarian bent on the court) had to say in the Hobby Lobby opinion: "Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.
Mercedes is running cross-plane cranks in their V6 engines because V6s are cross-plane out of necessity. That applies to all engines with cylinder counts which are not exponents of 2.
You should see Linus Torvalds' bar. If you think I'm asking hardball questions, you're in for a treat.
When his site went 404, I thought he'd died.

Glad to be wrong.
> If you buy into the idea that a corporation is there for its shareholders

It's not an idea, it's a literal legal duty.
If the executives are "just human" then they should be paid like humans along with everyone else. They shouldn't have their cake and eat it too. If you get paid orders of magnitude more than everyone else, you should take on orders of magnitude more risk (including going to prison when the company breaks the law).
You're exactly right; all I mean to say is, consider that exact point through the lens of how we cull our own weak, and the perceived necessity of it.
What makes you believe AI is "disruptive to existing corporations and systems of power"?