skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.

> And he said:

> Your children are not your children.

> They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

> They come through you but not from you,

> And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

Kahlil Gibran, On Children

https://poets.org/poem/children-1
GUWNO JEBANE
To put salt in the wound, my understanding is the research on elective layoffs (ones that aren't forced by circumstances) indicates the outcomes are mixed at best, leaning negative.

So all this crap is just cargo-culting our current management paradigm, and/or execs cooperating to suppress wages and weaken labor, which had gotten a bit too uppity after Covid (that's one thing waves of layoffs like this do accomplish).
People are hired to deliver what's on product and/or engineering roadmaps. If the roadmaps are less ambitious, it becomes pretty easy to justify headcount reductions.

It's also less labor intensive to focus on a few core areas, making smaller incremental improvements than doing that PLUS launching big ambitious greenfield projects.

Also, remember how people used to say "Startup X is a bad idea because <established tech company> could just clone you in 6 months"? Well, those ideas are now back on the menu for entrepreneurs because bigger tech firms are now running too lean for quixotic defensive plays like that.
MS Teams was a large contributor as well to the downfall of Slack. It automates decently with the stuff most companies already have (AD, O365, and most importantly all that compliance bullshit), and nowadays it can even do landline telephony, providing enterprises with a way to reduce their exposure to Cisco crap on top of it.

In the end, Microsoft is IMHO once again abusing its stronghold on the market. Just the enterprise-compliance-integration stuff is more than enough to cause any medium or large company to move off of Slack or its competitors (e.g. Mattermost).
Static Website Hosting – Static.app
maybe antiquated, but seppuku is considered honorable
What are they moving to, though? I can't imagine that Teams is any better.
But are you not expected to work those 3 months? 4 months of pay without work is decent, but not amazing.
finger. Four11 (not a protocol but I have this dim recollection of being able to point ldap at it before Yahoo bought them).
LinkedIn sued for tracking user health data
This is a prompt I gave to o1-mini a while ago:
My instructions follow now. The scripts which I provided you work perfectly fine. I want you to perform a change though. The image_data.pkl and faiss_index.bin are two databases consisting of rows, one for each image, in the end, right? My problem is that there are many duplicates: images with different names but the same content. I want you to write a script which for each row, i.e. each image, opens the image in python and computes the average expected color and the average variation of color, for each of the colors red, green and blue, and over "random" over all the pixels. Make sure that this procedure is normalized with respect to the resolution. Then once this list of "defining features" is obtained, we can compute the pairwise difference. If two images have less than 1% variation in both expectation and variation, then we consider them to be identical. in this case, delete those rows/images, except for one of course, from the .pkl and the .bin I mentioned in the beginning. Write a log file at the end which lists the filenames of identical images.

It wrote the script, I ran it and it worked. I had it write another script which displays the found duplicate groups so I could see at a glance that the script had indeed worked. And for you this does not constitute any understanding? Yes it is assembling pieces of code or algorithmic procedures which it has memorized. But in this way it creates a script tailored to my wishes. The key is that it has to understand my intent.
> Simon Singh’s parallel.co.uk

Perhaps you mean https://parallel.org.uk/ ?

I'm curious what the age range is? My son is 8.
We should all be assured they will learn their lesson and do much better at the helm of the next company
Sure, but this is worthless information. Many processes of your body will be enhanced by carbohydrates and fiber. Not having fiber in your diet will greatly increase your risk of heart attack, stroke, various GI cancers, and diabetes.

For most of humanity, humans ate 100+ grams of fiber a day and had a diet almost entirely composed of carbohydrates. Access to farmed meats is a very new phenomenon. I think this is the part people are missing - they believe paleolithic humans ate mostly meat. They didn't. They ate mostly carbs. Also, the meats they did have had very little saturated fats because they were game meat, not farm meat.

A burger isn't really the same thing as a wild antelope.
I don't think the problem is with the tone, but rather with the messaging. All AI-related marketing has been along the lines of "let the computer think for you" rather than "use the computer to think better", infantilizing rather than empowering the user.

From the bicycle of the mind to the tricycle of the mind.
> Jokes aside, how do you end up having more than 500 excess people than what you need?

It's actually a pretty simple risk/reward equation.

The risk of understaffing a company is greater than the risk of overstaffing a company.

If you overstaff a company, the solution is quick and easy. If you understaff a company, the solution is extremely painful and takes a very long time to fix.

E.g. it takes 1 day to fire someone, but 9 months to hire/onboard someone. So to ensure the staffing isn't a bottleneck for growth, the obvious answer is to err on the side of overstaffing.

TLDR: You need to hire and onboard people before you actually need them. If hiring and onboarding someone takes 9 months, you need to guess how many resources you'll need a year from now, and hope that your estimation is accurate. (And obviously a lot of companies over-estimated how many people they would need, hence lay offs)
Yeah if there is no growth but a lot of earnings the stock should probably start to pay dividends no? Otherwise what is it doing with all that cash it is generating?
>understanding the output of knowledge workers is a famously difficult task

That's why large companies don't look at individual worker output (performance reviews are mostly performative and subjective) and just look at stock prices and profits.

If "line goes up", it means workers as a whole must be doing a good job , even if individually many might not be good at their jobs, but as long as line goes up, nobody cares to look too deep into the hows and whys.

If line stops going up, then they start laying them off more or less randomly or forcing RTO, or such things regardless of individual performance.
This is indeed a more logical clock, as it follows the natural cycle of activity. Equally, calendars that put the end of the year at the time after harvest ("autumn"), or at the start of agricultural work ("spring") are also more logical.

Positioning the beginning of a new day at noon, and a new year t a solstice, is just a technical convenience, because these are easy to detect with very simple astronomy tools.
By taking that pay cut, how many employees could Nintendo keep that would otherwise have been fired? 5? 20? Certainly not in the hundreds or thousands. This just seems like virtue signalling.

Edit: to expand on my point re virtue signalling: the article states the CEO took a salary cut, not total compensation (and it doesn’t elaborate on the value of the cut). Salary is a small fraction of CEO total compensation - the bulk of which is stock based, and even in the event that stock grants were also cut, the CEO surely already had significant stock. Cutting a relatively small component of compensation in order to boost the stock price which disproportionately adds to the CEO’s personal wealth seems like virtue signalling to me. If the CEO said “shareholders be damned, morale and culture are all that matters in the long run, no layoffs etc etc” that would seem more meaningful.
It did. Thought control (the advanced and fully formed secret governance of power among us) doesn’t allow this secret to be explored.

My comments and accounts keep getting banned for expressing these unfashionable ideas (even without the provocative bits.)

We are not alone in our own minds!
> I’m not sure if the author noticed, but the intent of the commercials is to be humorous.

The birthday one was in no way meant to be humorous.
It's like how in the US we lament how the government can't afford to take proper care of its citizens (you know, basic things like universal healthcare, education, etc.) while spending $750B a year on the military.

It's not the government can't afford, it's that we aren't willing to allocate. The US is an incredibly wealthy country after all. We can unlock even more wealth if there's political will to fix how we do urban planning.

Also, we have military commitments around the world that underpins the global order. Decades of underinvestment in our defense industrial base and unneeded military adventures had led us to be woefully underprepared for our current security environment.
Indicator, not proof. If you're an illegal spy (no diplomatic cover), paranoia isn't a maladaptive behavior. If you're overweight, going days without eating isn't necessarily a sign that you have swapped one bad relationship with food for another - it could just be a way to lose weight. Effective weight loss methods absolutely depend on reining in hunger. Fasting happens do that for some people.

If you weigh 40 kg as an adult and you don't eat for days, you probably have an eating disorder. If you weigh 140 kg as an adult and you don't eat for days, meh?
WP8 was compatible with Silverlight (ie. WP7) apps. The problem was splitting app model into half-abandoned Silverlight and new WinRT, and not providing WP8 upgrade to any WP7 phones.
Right, so accurate. If that makes you feel bad, you're always free to just... change your beliefs. You formed them. Unform them.
That's been the trend at many companies recently. Cut a middle layer and consolidate.
Comparison is the thief of joy. In the US, any amount is... infinity %? Undefined %? better than the legally required minimum of 0.
It has been even more than 500 excess employees. 300 were laid off in January 2021, and another 500 in April 2023. The percentages imply that headcount bounced around from 2800 down to 2500, up to 3100, down to 2500, up to 2600, and now down to 2100.

These same macroeconomic headwinds have existed for some time now, and the fundamentals of Dropbox’s core business commoditization haven’t changed for the better.
The same consequences that a person lower down the ranks would have.

For example, if I lead a team that fails, the team will be disbanded and I will be either fired or demoted. (obviously if there are external factors I/we might be reprieved )

If the CEO leads an aggressive strategy that doesn't playout, they rarely get fired and certainly don't get demoted.
This is literally every startup I've ever worked for. Grow before you need to, constantly expand your market. This is like 101 stuff
Set me right on whether caring is even possible
BRDF, BSSRDF.. all can simulate that and are part of the rendering equation (Kajiya) if you plug it in.
PR-speak is the same everywhere. The audience for this is Wall St, not the general public.
Ask HN: How's LangGraph for Prod?
I was pretty burned by langchain in the AI hype cycle of 2021, curious if anyone has been using either LC or LG in production more recently? FSM graph traversal is an interesting abstraction for an LLM runtime, but curious if anyone has been able to deliver real customer value with the engineering accoutrements (observably, logging, debugging, avoiding unnecessary abstractions) needed for Adult Development.
Yeah I'm not sure people with compensation well into the millions get to go "haha, sorry, still figuring this out!"

Cool, can we pay you intern wages then?

[EDIT] To make this a bit more substantive: I think this is a sign both that we need to stop with this whole professional-managerial-class horse-shit, promote people who know how to do the actual work of the business, and reduce exec wages because the job's simply not all that damn special and the comp shouldn't be so high that only godlike-perfect performance could possibly justify it, because in truth nobody's that good at it.

Step one of this would be reducing M&A activity (hellooooo antitrust enforcement) and reigning in the power of finance, since letting Wall Street suits put their HBS frat brothers in charge of everything is at the heart of why this stuff's how it is.
BOTW (and most Switch-era Nintendo titles with high marks) will go down as some of the most overrated games of all time. You'd think Nintendo fans have never played an open world game prior to BOTW with how they crow about it.
Dropbox Cuts 20% of Workforce
I suppose it is the following:
1. Maybe they didn't over-hire but instead the economic conditions changed.
2. Maybe instead of gradually letting go of people it is best to wait and then strike once and hard.
It's the first time I've seen an advertisement for Ubuntu. Are they getting ready to get new users dissatisfied by Apple's AI?
> It works, and is fun, but you must keep it VERY sharp

It's also immensely more relaxing than the alternative, extremely sustainable and a pretty good workout
It matters once you get used to something better. Our brains are really good at tuning out constant noise but once you start consciously recognizing things it’ll remain noticeable. If your vision slips you won’t constantly be walking around saying everything is fuzzy but after using glasses you’ll notice it every time you take them off. Low-res displays work like that for many people – back in the 90s, people were content with 800x600 27” monitors but now that would feel cramped and blocky because we’ve become accustomed to better quality.
I am assured of this.
Respectfully, both of our diets are totally fine, and I don't need your opinion to let me know that. Any biomarker you might like to use tells us that we're fine; our weight is the only number that is "outside the norm", and while sure it's a measure of overall health it's not the only one or even the best one.
Kind of crazy that Dropbox has 2600 employees no? What do they all do? Isn't Dropbox finished?

I guess there's a very small number maintaining the core Dropbox stuff and most of them are working on speculative projects to increase revenue (e.g. this Dash thing they mentioned)?
I don't really get why layoffs mean that the company was not managed correctly.

Let's say you believe you have an opportunity that will double the value of the company, with a 30% probability, or cost the company 10% of it's value. This means it has an expected value of +21%. This is pretty good, and exactly the sort of thing shareholders want from their management. So you increase headcount and pursue the opportunity.

In the 70% scenario when that doesn't work, you have to downsize. Failure is not just possible, it's probable. That doesn't mean that the CEO mismanaged...they may have, I don't know the Dropbox details. But in the scenario where they haven't mismanaged, what do you want? Do you want companies to never take these risks in the first place?
If you're interested in algorithmic music generation, you might want to try Glicol's web demo at:

https://glicol.org/demo#ambienthouse

It's a browser-based tool that lets you experiment with algorithmic composition and sound synthesis.
Staffing your business (or even team) with the right number of people to accomplish a job is a real challenge that the majority of managers don't engage with, instead simply trying to grow their little kingdom to the largest size they can, both for intrinsic power reasons, and also to foster greater jobs for themselves later on.

If I see a manager put "led a team of 40" on their resume, in the interview, I ask "did you need 40 people? Did you need more, did you need less, and how would you have found out?" and the number of times this completely catches them off guard is staggering. It's like... did you choose that number for a reason? Or was that just the most you could fit in your budget?

And sure many hands make light work, but there's an inflection point where the sheer weight of your organization becomes a liability, where getting anything done or changed requires the involvement of so many people that most just don't bother unless it's an emergency. That's how you get corporate rot, and that's how you get all the massive companies we rag on here about all the time who have been making like, 5 products since before most of us were born that everyone fucking hates but everyone uses because everyone else does.
Well sure, there's only really 2 questions that must be answered when evaluating abortion, yet they're almost never discussed. First is what defines a human life. Second is when is it acceptable to take a life.
anti-trust gets a lot harder when ownership can't even be determined
100%. Doesn’t even have to be zero growth - just growth less than investors want to see, as implied in the P/E ratio (since investors control the P).
Dropbox was where I first encountered the infantilization of the workplace, with animated emojis all over your biannual performance review. It was a shock, having come from a real company run by adults. Now everyone thinks this is normal, at least at companies that use Slack where 40% of the traffic is animated emojis.
Async has its uses, but there should also be a way to ensure that a Rust stack does not use async at all, like there is for unsafe. Most codebases could do without the added complexity. There will be better ways to do concurrency in the future (hehe)
You are completely incorrect. You're responding to a comment in which I link to a library which handles this correctly, how could you persist in asserting that they are incompatible paradigms? This is the kind of hacker news comment that really frustrates me, it's like you don't care if you are right or wrong.

Rust does not assume that state changes only when polled. Consider a channel primitive. When a message is put into a channel at the send end, the state of that channel changes; the task waiting to receive on that channel is awoken and finds the state already changed when it is polled. io-uring is really no different here.
After Era of Bloat, Veteran Video-Game Developers Are Going Smaller
Looks like they/them will be 'jobn't'. The "Go woke, go broke" saying turned out to be true. Here's for more to come till the market corrects itself.

Seriously, that game was so shit, nobody in their right mind would hire the people who worked on that game. If I worked there I wouldn't even put Concord in my resume, I'd rather say I was unemployed for that time than say I worked on Concord.
At least 62 killed in flooding in Spain
And when processing satellite data.. if you're not in agreement of the time, that one second error results in a ~7km geographical error for your typical polar orbit weather satellite.
At a minimum, don't say "I'm taking responsibility" when you aren't facing any consequences whatsoever. If an executive wants to talk like that, they best put skin in the game. Otherwise, shut up.
The problem is we live in a society now where everyone has a public platform to promote themselves (linkedin etc) and there are a lot of ruthlessly ambitious narcisists who put self promotion and resume building ahead of everything else.

So they muscle into a team lead or manager position and grow the team, because it looks good to post on linked in "hey I'm growing my team" and it doesn't matter if the team needs another person.

And who cares if the company is then stuck with surplus employees, not the person who hired them because they have moved on and up at another company.
This is a stack ranking layoff. They will fill the roles with new roles to teams they believe are more vital to achieving company goals. Pretty much every tech company has operated this way the last couple years. They’ve fired 10-20% and have replaced all those heads pretty much across the board.
By that logic, Mark Zuckerberg is a poor leader and should resign. I think most investors would disagree with that assessment.
Software is complicated. If you keep writing new functionality, maintaining it slows down your ability to write more new functionality. Eventually if you want to ship more new features and not wait an extraordinary amount of time to do so you need more people. This doesn't scale super well so your headcount grows non linearly.

Companies develop a lot of bespoke features used by a handful of their customers. It might not be obvious to the average person what all of those features are. Additionally just scaling software to continue running with more customers using the product is not a trivial task as well. Adding more servers or making servers beefier only works until it doesn't.
How Pollution Controls for Cargo Ships Made Global Warming Worse
> I’ve watched that little animation several times, and they tell a better story in a minute twenty-five than all of Apple’s AI commercials combined.

If I showed that video to someone who isn't steeped in decades of Linux, I suspect they'd ask me what an Ubuntu is. As compared to the "schlub writes an email" video, which was compelling, funny, and actually shows the product they're marketing.
> I don’t know if it’s rooted in jealousy over access the drug (either via insurance or having a provider willing to prescribe) or whether it’s because people see those who take it for weight loss as “cheating”.

No, it's because you can get the same result, plus other ancillary benefits, by simply stopping the behavior causing the issue.

Imagine smokers rambling they can't stop smoking because bad tobacco put addicting chemicals in their cigs. Just put that shit out already, right?
Same for food. Eating for survival =/= the american diet.

Processed food is bad, and everywhere. Ok. What are you going to do, take semaglutide and then eat the same shit, but a bit less? Or are you going to switch to healthier food? Then why don't you switch now and skip taking a medicine for the rest of your days?

GLP1 is a drug to heal the lack of willpower, not to heal the body.
> It's neither a solution nor a workaround, for the simple reason that it doesn't work either as a matter of law or in practice

What makes you so sure? Are you a lawyer?

I mean you said stuff like

> as you can be mailed an abortifacient, but you can't be mailed a wedding

Which sounds quite incorrect and absurd to me. Mailing, or even e-mailing, marriage licenses is trivially possible. Meanwhile, there are multiple lawsuits and laws trying to prevent the mailing of abortifacients and/or revoking FDA approvals for abortifacients.

I didn't really feel like rebutting the rest of your post, but it was filled with similar falsehoods and speculation presented as fact.

Zoom weddings were allowed during the pandemic. Plenty of states allow non-residents to marry already. What exactly makes it unworkable?

> I would very respectfully suggest that it's sometimes healthy to admit that a take was just bad. It's ok.

I'd love to. You just haven't been very convincing, sorry. Focus on being more informative and helpful, not argumentative and demeaning. Believe it or not, I'm on your side.
I just bought a 32 inch monitor and can't stand it.

27 inch is the sweet spot for me. The further through my career the more i've effective with smaller screen space and I am.

I actually prefer working on my 16 mbp nowadays.
But horses were still worse. They shat everywhere.