skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of boards want to lay people off to increase profits, but they're afraid that if they do it, the company will seem like it's failing, causing high performing employees to leave and perhaps even customers to get worried.

But once there seems to be a moment where others are laying off, they can ostensibly claim to be doing a layoff because of broad economic conditions rather than because their company is mismanaged. This means that once a layoff wave gets going, it snowballs memetically.

Of course, if it becomes big enough, it can snowball due to non-memetic reasons (laid off employees have less money, spend less, and cause economic contraction). An example would be BigCo lays off 10,000 people, which ends their Slack subscriptions, which causes Slack to lose money, which causes Slack to lay off people, which reduces their employees' spending on yoga classes, which causes yoga studios to layoff, etc.
Recycling currently seems to codify externalities by making governments and citizens legally responsible for the pollution and waste that companies generate and encourage.

But return laws can be problematic as well, as in electronics where a company's business incentives are usually for the cheapest (and often least beneficial/most harmful) disposal.
As much as I hate to say it, that's probably the rational strategy. There's no saving Windows from a glacially paced decline.
Seems like it currently supports only CUDA and ROCm. Are there plans to support any other GPU vendors, such as Intel?

The example also seems a little bit high on 'magic'. Chapel is told to execute on GPU, yet it somehow decides "this loop is order-dependent so it should run on the CPU anyway"? It's not a bad approach necessarily, but I don't think you can get any such implicit serialization when directly programming CUDA C++ or similar. (I think Futhark, another language for high-level parallel computing, also doesn't suffer from this kind of thing, thanks to being purely functional.)
Some bosses don’t love firing people and give people too much of a chance. We hired someone and I told the boss to fire him the first day, he was that bad. He didn’t, time dragged on and he never improved, he only got worse in new and spectacular ways. By the time it reached a breaking point it had been well over a year and they had to do a ton of paper work, track performance, give him a PIP… so many hoops. I think he ended up working for us for 3 years. We even caught him red handed lying to skip out on work, and his lie to HR to cover it up involved him using company equipment to run a side business during work hours (somehow they didn’t see that as a red flag). This was I the US, where when I was hired I was told flat out they could fire me with no notice and no reason. The company was always worried about lawsuits around firing people, so they liked to have all their ducks in a row.

It seems like it could be easy to make it through 6 months unless the company takes it really seriously.
You are free to create your own asymmetrically powerful business entity to rebalance the odds, if you find them unfair.
high interest rates increase cost to service debt
The term "socially constructed" is well-understood by many, including myself. Your use of "fabricated concepts" is not clear, however. Care to define it?
I’m not an EV owner but plan to be one on my next purchase.

The EV renting experience is bad. I got one though Avis, I believe a Kia Niro. I was told that I’d be charged if I brought it back under 80%. It was at 81%. Ok fine, I’m driving less than 50 miles and returning it. I’ll find a charger, since my AirBNB didn’t have charger.

We tried to use the on board map to find a charging station. It took us two tries to find on that was actually public, which was at a fire station. It took over an hour to go from 70% to 85%.

I never had range anxiety about the car itself, but trying to return it full enough was anxiety inducing, even though it wasn’t that big a fee.

I feel my experience would have been really improved if 1) they made the fee be a sliding amount based on how close you returned it to where you checked out and 2) there was an onboard L1 charger you could use with a normal plug.
That only applies to the median, not the average. Every time I see this quote I can't help but think that. Funny tho
> But they don't want employees in Bangalore. They want indentured servants and poverty wages.

Google has a ton of employees in Bangalore that passed the same interviews and are paid way more than typical offshore devs, this just isn't true. Google gets the best people in India who wants to stay there, those are good enough to develop software without much help.
Check out Trixi: https://trixi-framework.github.io/Trixi.jl/stable/tutorials/...

It solves hyperbolic PDEs like the Euler equations, is differentiable with forward-mode AD, and MPI parallelized.
It is irritating when people who have no idea what they’re talking about make judgmental comments like “interesting what wall st rewards”. This guy has no clue what wall st rewards. He clearly does not understand the current situation. He clearly does not follow it in depth.

If you’re going to excuse this guy making an obnoxious unfounded moral high ground claim, grant me the same courtesy for telling others not to preach about things they don’t know.

If you ever find yourself writing something like “I don’t know much about X.” Then don’t conclude your statement with an assertion about X. Go learn about X or ask questions or shut up. Your opinion contributed negative value when it’s knowingly predicated on incomplete information.
> These things you mention are honestly more examples of fabricated concepts. Are you a religious person by chance?

If you are trying to insult me, you should stop that behavior.
This is awesome!

I'd love to boot this up and see how it runs on a Quest headset
A1. Most wells are duds. I would say I've had about a 1 in 7 success rate with them. When one does hit, the payout has been understated in the contracts. I've started hiring independent land men to help pick the investments. Make sure you find one that is certified.

As for wind, you normally buy into them differently. You don't buy shares, you buy into a partnership. This is the first problem with them. They're taxed multiple times, a franchise tax, state income tax, and federal income tax, then you're taxed. But before even that, you have to buy or lease the land, pay for the electrical lines, ..., then you have transmission costs, ... If it's leased, then the landowner is getting a huge chunk. The lawsuits are ridiculous. They also over sell a project, and give these guys finders fees, and every other kind of fee you can think of for bringing in investors. It is a racket. The turbine itself won't produce enough wholesale electricity to pay for its self for years. That means everyone down the food chain is waiting to get paid.

A2. Electricity prices are reflected on the costs of the plants or farms generating the power. The market ultimately determines this price on the other side. You'll have to consult with an economist to understand how that all works. I don't know if I even know how it works.

Alternative energy has been sold to make a few people rich. You have the guys that believe the sky is falling (REMEMBER: Greenland was Green) and are perpetuating a lot of this. We have pollution problems, not climate problems. This needs to be put back into perspective. Save the rainforest, protect it, but don't tell people solar is going to stop pollution, and save the rainforest. Stop cutting down the rainforest to put up wind turbines.

A well can be capped and cleaned up. Once solar farms have stopped making money, which you will see soon, you will have a horizon of wind turbines falling apart and creating a bigger problem than a well. Energy isn't free. There is no such thing as carbon-neutral energy production.
I think we're DRAMATICALLY closer than we were 10 years ago, especially given Android has become such a common development target for games.
Government, healthcare & construction from the last report: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
Clearly not enough, otherwise they'd do something about it.
Expanded Universe. Now known as "Legends", iirc, and declared non-canon superseded by the execrable sequel trilogy.
I think at least some of this is expectation setting. I'd been saving my prompts from the beginning. In some cases I saved the results.

On the API: My prompts are getting 'harder' and expecting more. My old prompts still work just fine still.

On the website: Copy pasting the same old prompts still work... but the 'flavor' of the text that pops out definitely feels worse.

I haven't seen any actual data showing a degredation.
My impression is that the tech layoffs are entirely related to Covid overhiring, VC money drying up with high interest rates, greed and wanting to get share prices up, and finally removing useless departments like Elon did with twitter.

I am not seeing any similar layoffs in other industries, some may be slowing down but mine seems normal.
Vscode struggles with intellisense and vm round trips on my older cpu. Feels like a race between displaying the character I just typed and displaying suggestions. Sometimes.
Oracle is what popped into my mind.
The Fed doesn't compel, greed compels and the Fed just gives the greedy the signposts they want.
There are well-developed branches of ethics that are uncoupled from any religious assumptions. Including systems of ethics that reject various forms of moral relativism.
> with higher expected returns, employers will offer larger pensions.

As you say, the carrot is held by the employer.
Listing: Cockroach and spider box.

But It Now or Best offer.
Let people run up their credit cards over Christmas first instead.
You obviously didn't read the original source: "Watchdog The Seventh Eye revealed that Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs spent almost $2 million on one propaganda campaign in 2017 – part of which was allocated to Act.IL."

And it links to an article at https://www.972mag.com/the-israeli-government-is-paying-for-... "Another large sum (from the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs), around NIS 2 million ($570,000), was budgeted for building the Act.il website and producing multi-media content for it."

You're strangely confident that act.il getting government funding is "simply false" when you're simply wrong.

So explain just how the post was misleading.
I really did — the culture is very much true to the public perception, as are the founders. Losing access to the campus during COVID was heartbreaking though. I moved on to a more technologically-focused role with higher compensation but I look back on the time fondly.
When hiring, I'm suspicious of qualified people with low income expectations, I don't think this is a winning strategy personally and I'd take this advice with a grain of salt.
I don’t know if the assertions are true in practice, because I’ve only worked in the US and not Europe, and have never held a tenured position or had a union, but the logic described seemed straightforward enough: if it’s difficult to fire an employee, then you must be more cautious in hiring, because you may be saddled with a poor employee for longer than you’d like. Likewise, empowering employees to take high stakes risks is suggested to be more dangerous if the employer loses the ability to easily let employees go if the employee’s poor judgement causes disaster. (Think sink or swim, give them enough rope to hang themselves — this doesn’t necessarily sound like a great employer.) Finally, offering high salaries is more risky if you can’t let those employees go if they fail to perform. As a counter-factual thought exercise that all seems plausible, we do like our at-will employment here, but no idea if it’s really that difficult to fire employees outside the US — he does make it sound like more of a long term marriage relationship where additional caution is warranted. That all aligns with the uninformed stereotype I have in my mind that the US is more pro business and Europe is more pro worker. While the proposition is internally consistent, I’m eager to hear if it’s sound.
I am genuinely not.
Great points on the direction! I'd love to hear the opinion of someone who started out in big tech and then transitioned to a startup.
Yeah, it's a well known expression, but it only makes literal sense in American English.
Google Domains was canceled even though it too was profitable. At some point if a line of business isn't making literally billions of dollars it might be on the chopping block to yield a leaner overall company.

And sometimes your numbers can look better if your profit margin goes up even if your absolute profit goes down. A daycare is never going to have the marginal profit margin of, say, selling more ads.
labor-dependent enterprises are being whispered unbelievably outrageous things from your regular biz consultants (Bain, pwc, ey, etc) about how much money that could save in labor via AI, so some may be cutting heads to fund their AI transformations? I'm not sure that's entirely it though. Many execs have been warning staff of corp austerity measures for a while to bring costs in line. It does boggle the mind though, as many of these same companies are all hitting record revenues (due to inflation).
Automation isn't as smooth as it sounds but it's nice to be able to control things from your phone.
As someone that’s generally pro Israel on most things, they are literally massacring men, women and children. They’re culling them like sheep. The response to freedom fighters mounting a resistance shouldn’t be genocide.
I don't understand why Cloudflare can't just be honest and say the reason she got laid off, instead of making up some garbage about her performance. That was her main complaint, and I side with her completely. She was not asking to keep her job, or asking unreasonable questions. If they just explained that it was because the company overhired, or because they needed to reduce costs to keep the company afloat, that would have been fine.

What matters here is trust. I'm glad she posted the video because it really sheds a light on awful corporate American Big Tech practices. Everyone who is considering working at Cloudflare or similar in the future will see how they treated her, and let that factor into their own decisions.

And I see some sexist comments about her being "emotional." If I were in the same position, I'd be pretty fucking pissed off too. I think she has every right to be angry, and these faceless corporate drones feeding her an empty list of platitudes make it worse.

Edit: my comment is in response to the Tiktok video, which isn't directly linked:
https://www.tiktok.com/@brittanypeachhh/video/73223013131344...
Lacking substance is one symptom, harassing users in various ways is another symptom. The common cause is prioritizing traffic/audience/influence over content. It's not like it's impossible to provide substance without popups. It's fine to have a newsletter, but the respectful thing is to let me choose and don't push it at me. This is obvious.. I'm not sure why you're so eager to defend the sad new normal as if this was unavoidable
If you read the layoff threads from the last 24 hours a few common reasons are theorized

- Investors pressuring for profits, cut costs (too many people hired during Covid, total salary bill too big to justify right now). One company does it, other companies may be pressured to drive up stock prices

- Money is expensive, <1% interest rates vs 5%+ now, investors can easily get 5%, so high growth (no profit) companies aren't attractive investment targets, price falls, see previous point

- Section 174 possibly, companies can't write off entire salaries for engineers as easily to offset revenue, corporate tax bill increases. It was apparently an unexpected (people didn't expect it to pass) tax bill from 2017 that came into effect in 2022(or 23, idk)

- The sudden increase in layoffs this week could be due to a backlog over past month+ as a layoff in January looks less bad vs a layoff in December (holidays)

- Companies following the lead of other companies (CEOs not thinking for themselves, just looking at what others are doing) -- I don't think this holds, previous points make more sense

Most companies never state real motive, besides (now considered meme responses on HN?) like "we/I take full responsibility", overly generic "we over hired", or "due to (macro)economic conditions". So as far as I've seen it's mainly people guessing at the reasons.
I have no credentials to provide an informed opinion, but in my industry of gamedev where layoffs are currently widespread and massive, the consensus seems to be that the past 3 years saw unprecedented hiring growth due to covid etc and it has caused an otherwise "normal" consolidation cycle to be way larger.
For me I think it rings true - I don't think some dark storm is coming it's just the tide going back out after a big spending spree.
I mean, in Bowie's case at least, probably loads and loads of cocaine.
Show HN: I built a 4000 watt solar array on top of my Tesla (AMA)
No matter how we try, half our salespeople keep performing worse than the median. It's intolerable.
I think a lot of obfuscation seen these days isn’t about security, but is a side effect of minifying code (which usually is worthwhile).
> If you don't take credit for it, it doesn't have any deterrent power.

The various deaths associated with Putin are a counter example here. Russia denies involvement but the method usually makes it pretty obvious. Rare poison, unlikely situation etc.
Her Linkedin says she's in Atlanta. Either way, I doubt she will get severance after that and if Cloudflare wants to make a point they could try to go after her for a violation of the companies NDA/confidentiality she signed when she was hired by recording that and sharing it on the net.
Yeah, that's something I've noticed. I've worked with a few people who were brilliant and really good at something, but that something wasn't writing software. Even the people who are frustratingly bad at their jobs have rarely made me think they're idiots. They're just not very good at the specific thing they're being paid to do.
I suspect there will be more non-targeted ads and more paywalls/less content. Or they will track us in some other way.
The layoffs are widespread. For example, Dominos just laid off 1,200 drivers.

However discussions about the economy's health become particularly politicaly charged during an election year. So any conversation about the state of the economy, whether it's perceived as good or bad, inevitably carries political implications in this context.

Edit: it is not Dominos it is Pizza Hut https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/pizza-hut-drivers-layoff...
My feeling is that the proximate cause is a correction of the outsized growth in 2020-21. The industry collectively overshot so far that they can’t just slow hiring but actually have to lay off.

In my bigcorp I observe a pivot toward a sustainable pace of growth and significantly tighter scrutiny on costs and efficiency despite working in a growing area of the business.
We've got an offline setup, using HA, HomeKit and zwave. Some of the best features for us:

- ability to turn on house heat when we're headed home from a trip, or turn on the AC for the pets if there's a heat wave when we are traveling.

- ability to turn on the tea kettle when driving back home from an errand. Needs prior setup of course, and a switched outlet that can handle high current.

- ability to align porch light schedules with sunset/sunrise. I never have to think about it.

The "don't want to get up, i'll just do it from my phone" thing is nice, though, especially if you are stuck under a cat.
If the FE/BE split is working well for you, then htmx isn't as compelling. It is more compelling when you have full-stack developers who can take ownership of entire features and shepherd them from start to finish, without needing to coordinate with another team to get the data/functionality they need.

Here is an example of a fairly sophisticated application that was written in react, then moved to htmx with good results:

https://htmx.org/essays/a-real-world-react-to-htmx-port/

As far as what you can achieve with htmx, I outline when hypermedia (the more general concept behind htmx) is a good choice or a bad choice here:

https://htmx.org/essays/when-to-use-hypermedia/

You can get an idea of the basic level of interactivity you can achieve with htmx by looking at the examples:

https://htmx.org/examples/

all of which compose well together. You can get more dynamic than that if you are willing to do client-side scripting (https://htmx.org/essays/hypermedia-friendly-scripting/)

another essay that might be of interest, regarding your APIs:

https://htmx.org/essays/splitting-your-apis/

and, if you want a complete introduction and overview of the hypermedia approach, we have a book available online for free:

https://hypermedia.systems
Not true, they let the ships give a clear signal if they're not associated with Israel.
> There's a whole rich universe of EU novels exploring a wide variety of stories.

So, unpopular opinion, but most franchise-based books are trash.

I've read a lot of Star Wars EU stuff! I've read a lot of universally-acclaimed Star Wars EU stuff!

It's... not great writing and not great science fiction.

Sure, it's great plot, but that's because we already know and love the setting and stories. And "more" is enjoyable.

But I feel like holding the EU as a paragon of Star Wars salvation is overvaluing it.

Most of it would turn out just as poorly as the movies did, for the same reasons.
That is more important than people's lives.
This is HN Helping.
Snake Game in 61 Bytes
The replies beneath you are likely wildly off base if the other end of the phone call was based in a two party consent state like California.

If both ends of the call were in Virginia or another one party consent state, the recording is probably fine.

But that also doesn't rule out the applicability of the cloudflare NDA.

(Not a lawyer)
Good on you, you're an early adopter of electric personal transport tech. We need people like you to tough it out until the R&D dollars yield something that's actually at feature parity with what already exists currently.
It's also possible to optimize for long term profitability.

> There were certain things about the business where it was obvious – speaking to people who had been on that journey for 25 years before I joined – that they were not likely to change in the future because they hadn’t changed in the previous 25 years. The first thing that struck me was an absolutely rock-solid commitment to gaining the trust of the customer, the employees, the suppliers and business partners. Almost every rule or method or procedure of the company was built around ensuring that.

https://inpractise.com/articles/aldi-culture-and-operations-...
> I'd be ecstatic running macOS on a thinkpad.

Weird, I have exactly the opposite view. I love the Mac laptop hardware (it's clearly the best in class, with by far the best battery life), but I don't like MacOS. I would much prefer to run Linux (with proper battery performance tuning) on a nice Macbook Pro.
I'm a millennial and I'm not naive enough to believe a company has my best interest at heart.

This is year 2 of rough layoffs in tech. anyone that didn't see January coming as layoff month is dumb.
> also shitpost a lot

The parent poster https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig is one of my favorite Twitter accounts. Every day he gives me renewed hope that, no matter how much I wish I had more time to devote to developer experience for people using the internal tools and APIs I design on the startup side of things... at least it'll be better than the DX and customer service provided by the biggest players providing infrastructure to our entire industry :)