skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am in the middle of being laid off right now, and might as well share some of the details, because my situation is a bit weird.

My team of 12 was reduced by half in November. They told us that 6 would stay and 6 would go. I was told I was staying, and that my position was "unaffected", but I was also told that I was going to have an end date in either February or March, which to me sounds like my position is pretty well affected...

They have refused to give any of us an official end date, or discuss our severance terms in writing. Right now, I have been assured that my last day will be 2/28 and that I'll get 2 months if severance, but they could change their mind if they wanted to since they won't commit. I have voiced that this keeps me from effectively planning my next career move. What if I'm offered a job starting in March, and my current employer decides to they want to keep me until April? I'd be forced to choose between receiving a severance vs. accepting the new job.

All the while, they have us training our replacements in India, as if we have the motivation to do anything that benefits the company right now. Most of us are only cooperating at all because we want out in March and don't want to be dragged along for months while they try to keep the product afloat.

And the reason they aren't terminating our entire department and product is because they want to maintain the few million dollars in ARR they get from our customers, even though that ARR is 1/10,000 of the company's total revenue.

And they won't keep that ARR because they're getting rid of the entire customer success team and transferring the responsibility to a call center in India that is demanding to only work on India time (ending business hour product support entirely for our predominantly North American customers). They also have zero experience with the kind of product we make, and have no chance of successfully addressing the kind of work they're going to be expected to do for our customers.

All because the people who made these decisions have absolutely no clue what anyone in our org does. We really are just lines in an Excel sheet. We were a startup a few years ago that this much larger company purchased because they wanted to use our solution massively at scale inside of the company. Revenue wasn't even how we were supposed to be measured, and they're going to actively destroy the entire product that they spent so much time and energy implementing across the business.
> Buy gold bullion, rent a bank safe deposit box, store it there

This is the worst of all worlds. You have a high-transaction cost volatile asset in a box which provides you with less legal protection than crap stored in a home with renter’s or homeowner’s insurance [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...
People have a concept of corporate jobs that is just plain wrong. You are nothing but slave labor. You are treated well only as long as you are needed. But when that is not true, you will be treated for what you are.

You might think this is an anti-corporation view. But the truth is that corporation have become anti-people. Is Purdue Pharma the friend of the people they addicted to ? Is Starbucks the friend of the baristas they squeeze to make a profit?

Some of the "best", as in wealthiest corporations, treat people with contempt. Here's looking at you apple, amazon, google, facebook and microsoft.

Since Citizens United vs FEC these companies now "lobby" to get what they want and have corrupted what should be our democracy into a corpocracy. Union busting Amazon controls one of the major sources of information in the US. How much does microsoft owe in taxes now? How much money is off shore?

Corporations are an outdated, ineffective form of economic collaboration. They are designed to make profit at any cost to customers and employees. Colonialism anyone? And boy, are they stupid. Greedy, ruthless, but stupid.

Supposedly there are a bunch of technically skilled folks here on HN. Maybe they should start thinking about alternatives to corporation style jobs.
Maybe the problem is that the "UI" we're providing to the LLMs is not very useful.

Imagine dumping the entire text of a large code repository in front of a human programmer, and asking them to fix a bug. Human programmers use IDEs, search through the code, flip back and forth between different functions, etc. Maybe with a better interface that the LLM could interact with, it would perform better.
I'm sorry you feel your work is easily dismissed. You may believe that quoting "the rules" would make you appear stronger, but more often than not it would have the opposite effect: make you look weak. Nothing about my argument is shallow; it's a concise recognition of reality in education: ChatGPT is here, and it's here to stay. New capabilities will include generating, running code, and beyond.
Thank you very much. Next time I will add a link
Perhaps, but the US isn't a functioning democracy.
That much I'm aware of, but as I mentioned in previous comments, with wood strength is high in the direction of the grain but weak across the grain, plenty of academic studies confirm that (and it takes little to verify it empirically).

With 3D printing, despite the analogy, I couldn't find any sources for strength along/across the "grain" so i'm not sure how accurate that analogy really is.
What kind of toy camera?
I think the article, although well built and clearly criticising crucial points in the modern work structure, fails to see the fundamental issue that is at the core of these layoffs.

In fact, the recommendation for those who are still employed is incomplete and therefore doubles down on the issue without realising it.

While everything in the article is true, that you shouldn't romanticise your job, focussing on the job description only, only ever working the amount required and making lean résumés will reaffirm the status quo and aggravate the situation long term.

It does this because it doubles down on what fractured the working landscape to begin with, which is individuality, competitiveness and alienation.

You can't treat an alienating job as if it was already the job you dream of. This is wishful thinking. But going full hostile to your job won't make your situation any better.

Here's what I suggest instead.

Do everything the article says if you identified your work environment in the descriptions in the article.

At the same time do a honest and deep evaluation of your values and what you aim to be in 5, 10 years time. Thinking long term will have first the effect of putting the immediate problems into perspective and will highlight what's missing in your career today in order to get the job you'd want for you.

Invest in your portfolio. Keep doing interviews. Don't compromise on deliverable quality, because if you go down the road of actively crippling your performance, you will eventually become the bad developer you are allowing yourself to be just to get back at the current company that doesn't value you.

Remember, you don't get a dream job and then you become the great developer you think you should be. It's unfair, but the reality is you first become the great professional you want to be and then you get the dream job you want, if you are lucky.

It's never guaranteed. It's always a game of probability. The only constant and the only thing you can control is you and your relationship with your work as an ever flowing, ever changing process.
Oh my, so much cope and denial here...
No comments but From Burnout to Breakthrough is a conversation with the creator of Hedy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40582437
Sorry, I don't care about Fauci. From my perspective he stood up agaist trump, the all sorts of attacks appeared. They're always contradictive. He and his people don't care about consistency, because his followers only focus on what resonates with their fears and anger. They'll take that storyline and will find things to make that story work. For example on Biden in Gaza, he was both too pro Israel, and too pro Muslim, depending on the audience.

If you have lots of data, you can find all sorts of patterns. Now your looking at misspellings and inferring things from it..

More importantly, I don't care about 'getting justice' on an indvidual. I want lessons learned on how to deal with a new pandamic.
Let's see how the open vs close ecosystem wins in AI
FYI that burnout is not "working a lot". Burnout is the feeling of little control, ineffectiveness, COMBINED with stress. Working weekends could instead be an indication of excitement and enthusiasm, which as a manager is worth nurturing. Over time those kinds of people should be given broader ownership and the ability to delegate, where they see fit.
Sure, I'm trying! I don't even care about supporting or not supporting a specific political party or side. I just don't want to support oligarchy. I don't want to do business with companies that are participating in politics.

Also, email is the most critical service most of us use, it is very important to know your email provider isn't supportive of a political regime, specially when that regime is using data collection for retribution, deportations, firings,etc..
Cozy comfort: Research shows video games can ease stress and anxiety
The article talks about this. There are hashes that are generated for the tarball so the backend can't recompress anything.
Survey: Smartphone Consumers Willing to Pay More for a Better Processor
Assuming download and decompression cost to be proportional to the size of the incoming compressed stream, it would break even at 2000 downloads. A big assumption I know, but 2000 is a really small number.
The hard to lay off makes it harder to hire as well. Sure you get the 6 month probation period, but it is risky to hire anyone because they might make it past those 6 months before bad times come.

There is no good answer.
Devils advocate here: food has been packaged in plastics for decades and plastic containers have been around longer than that. If plastics were as damaging as you claim, wouldn’t we have already seen this in the epidemiology?
That was one of the most eye opening books for me. I think it all applies to Software development as well. It is not uncommon that you work all weekend to finish your task, only to see it waits two weeks in the next person's queue.
It's pretty much impossible to completely avoid microplastics. They're literally raining down on us at this stage. But it's parts per millions to consider.

I remember seeing a video about how all gortex and basically all waterproof great releases microplastics into the environment and then the rain basically carries it everywhere. If I find it ill post it.
I concur. In my work (analysing news show transcripts and descriptions), I work with about 250k input tokens max. Tasks include:

- Summarize topics (with references to shows)
- Find quotes specific to a topic (again with references)

Anything above 32k tokens fails to have acceptable recall, across GPT-4o, Sonnet, and Google's Gemini Flash 1.5 and 2.0.

I suppose it kind of makes sense, given how large context windows are implemented via things like sparse attention etc.
Answering the rhetorical question - because it may set a bad example for other, more junior employees; it may set a new expectation; if the good manager who prevents burnout gets fired, and is replaced with a worse person, they may come to expect you to work six days a week, and instead of preventing burnout by working when you want, you're now being burned out by working not only 5 days a week without any break, but also on one of your weekend days.
More like a tiny startup from a second tier Chinese city schools tech giants both in America and China. High-Flyer has only 160 employees and only some of those are working on Deepseek. They are beating companies 1000x bigger in budget and employees. All while embracing open models and publishing and having to deal with suspicion due to previous Chinese models cheating with eval data.

It's funny to read the SV cope. They are lying! They have thousands of H100s! Because a random SV CEO said so.

Deepseek's parent company was worth a miser $200m. And it looks like they were forced to pivot because CCP limited salaries in finance while getting no money from VCs.

This might be the biggest underdog upset in tech history.
I'm not sure legitimacy matters here. Their war in Ukraine is not legitimate, but that's not stopping them. And a legitimate reason to attack a NATO country does not mean they will. Keep in mind that Russia has also blocked sea traffic to and from Ukraine.

And it is kinda weird to sanction a country because of its illegitimate war, while still letting their ships through your waters. And it's not like Russia has no other access to the sea.
I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to hide behind a flag once Node.js supports zopfli natively.
In case of CI/CD, it's totally feasible to just add a --strong-compression flag. In that case, the user expects it to take its time.

TS releases a non-preview version every few months, so using 2.5 minutes for compression would work.
gcc and clang are also capable of it, given certain compiler flags: https://godbolt.org/z/z766hc64n
Or you're not understanding how he meant it: there are countless ways to roll out such changes, a hard change is likely a very bad idea as you've correctly pointed out.

But it is possible to do it more gradually, I.e. by sneaking it in with a new API that's used by new npm version or similar.

But it was his choice to make, and it's fine that he didn't feel enough value in pursuing such a tiny file size change
> The proposal wasn't rejected!

They soft-rejected by requiring more validation than was reasonable. I see this all the time. "But did you consider <extremely unlikely issue>? Please go and run more tests."

It's pretty clear that the people making the decision didn't actually care about the bandwidth savings, otherwise they would have put the work in themselves to do this, e.g. by requiring Zopfli for popular packages. I doubt Microsoft cares if it takes an extra 2 minutes to publish Typescript.

Kind of a wild decision considering NPM uses 4.5 PB of traffic per week. 5% of that is 225 TB/week, which according to my brief checks costs around $10k/week!

I guess this is a "not my money" problem fundamentally.
A few people have mentioned the environmental angle, but I'd care more about if/how much this slows down decompression on the client. Compressing React 20x slower once is one thing, but 50 million decompressions being even 1% slower is likely net more energy intensive, even accounting for the saved energy transmitting 4-5% fewer bits on the wire.
https://shot.3e.org/ss-20250127_095213.png
Avoid going above and beyond with initiatives.

It's been my experience that accepting whatever dumb challenge management presents is how you get kept on. The advice that "your job is to make your manager look good to his manager" rings true to me. I would add that boosting your manager's ego goes pretty far, too. I find both activities detestable, but necessary in corporate life.

Always keep interviewing. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen is stopping interviews after starting a new job, trusting in the company.

I've never understood how people can muster the energy for this. I'm sure it's a great idea, but I would burn out immediately.
If they can offer enterprise-level support for everything they're in a prime position to be the Oracle of AI. In the sense that open-source programming languages can out preform Java in certain instances, but they choose Oracle because they can just pick a phone and the person on the other can solve any issue they have. DeepSeek without a for-profit model just wont be able to offer such a service.
Ask HN: Useful and Rewarding Areas of Software
Shifting away from faang and startups in Silicon Valley that have allowed me to save some money but ultimately just build tech to help billionaires become richer, what else is there in software?

I don’t mean what else is there to do to relax, but I mean to get fulfillment and truly benefit society. I’m just an average dev, but my viewpoints about the world have changed since I was 20 (now 30) and feel it would be nice to at least consider shifting to something remotely useful for the world.

Mostly interested in those that left the cushion that is Silicon Valley to find joy in their work.

Edit: left the US to UK
Ask HN: Is there anyone working on multiple AI agent group chats?
I see a lot of AI agents and chats on the market. Everyone is focused on "Devin," like agents who can work for you autonomously, vertical and horizontal agents, and this kind of stuff.

But I'm still curious: Is there any solution for delegating tasks to multiple agents in the same chat?

Like: Input > Decide whose task it is > response

Imagine how big it can be to have agents for separate tasks. Each task will have its own prompt with its own specialization, and you will just assign them tasks to do it.

I will be happy to get references, It will help my research a lot.

Thanks!
This seems like a place where the more ambitious version that switches to ZSTD might have better tradeoffs. You would get similar or better compression, with faster decompression and recompression than zstd.It would lose backward compatibility though...
Yeah - hard agree with this. There's a lot to be said about giving your best effort in proportion to all the other things you're doing in your life.
Don't know the UK banking landscape, but it doesn't look that unusual in recent times: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/prudential-regulation/new-ba...
> don’t think disrupting banks is even possible

They’ve been disrupted on multiple sides massively in the last twenty years. Blackrock, Vanguard and Fidelity are disruptors to their deposit and savings-account models. Quicken et al a disruptor to their lending side. Private credit, securitised lending—all taking away their balance sheet operations.

Retail banking hasn’t changed inasmuch as people like branches. But the moment you go branchless the banking options radiate, and that’s more people every day.
Isn't it perfectly normal/healthy to keep some of your private feelings totally private? Your best friends/spouses shouldn't necessarily be your psychotherapists.
This assumes no (or very small) diminishing returns effect.

I don't pretend to know much about the minutiae of LLM training, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if throwing massively more GPUs at this particular training paradigm only produces marginal increases in output quality.
WhatsApp to Let iPhone Users Sign into Multiple Accounts on the Same Device
This is what Palmer Luckey criticizes in how the DoD do procurement. The way contracts are signed makes it that contractors are only incentivized to provide solutions that maximize the budgets set by higher management in government focusing on filling out those reimbursements rather than delivering effective warfighters that the military needs.

It seems that all this layoff discussions should shed light to the blight of managerialism that permeated modern business culture. It’s this system that encourages managers to obfuscate accountability for their high-stakes decisions, and while the low-level employees shy away from suggesting solutions that solve problems or identify bottlenecks because at the end of the day they're just part of the budget in an excel sheet table. It feels like a betrayal to the promises of capitalism.
if they use the email/smtp protocol then it's email.

plaintext password does not enter their system. For example I still have to enter a second password for the in-browser decryption (although these days they use the same password). Most of security feels like theatrics, but small measures that add difficulty for a potential threat actor add up.
strong disagree. from extensive experience.
it's a huge factor, and good referrals are really the only way to definitely get the job
I was laid off from Google in January last year alongside 150 people in my extended team. I managed to find a different team in Gemini, so now I'm part of Deepmind. I have very conflicting feelings because on one hand I really enjoy the work, the team, and the absolute genius of people I get to talk to; but on the other hand, I have some resentment for being so inhumanely laid off, I am sad for the people in my team who were not as lucky as me, and I know it can happen again any time.
> ideally would prefer something like reverse osmosis but not so practical

Just curious why that is? I was going to buy one for my new house and they seem pretty practical, at least for drinking water at home.
I'm surprised China's economic rivals, specifically India, hasn't made a serious push to bootstrap a home-grown chip industry based around RISC-V.
Meta Employees: AI Team Is in "Panic Mode" After DeepSeek R1 Model Release
not a single comment about overpopulation?
In my recent layoff, basically what happened is that another company won the contract as the prime and we became the sub The new company brought it a bunch of their hires, then management combined our teams and suddenly everything became redundant. Two dev leads (me being one of them), two tech leads, two product owners, too many testers, etc. After this, they laid off about half the team, most of them being from the subcontractor. It was sneaky and unethical. In the end they were all like “Woops we hired too many people. So sorry!”.

The kicker is that they used me in the RFP to win the contract since I was a specialized SME.
> being laid off will change you at a psychological level

it certainly can do, but it's also fine if it doesn't

when I was laid off, some family members simply refused to believe that it hadn't had a profound negative effect on how I viewed myself. Dealing with that disbelief was by far the most difficult part of the process

I felt absolutely fine, because at the time I had no emotional investment in my job or career
You should never be taking the advice on such a thing from the person who has a vested interest in you buying it.

Although you could well be right about the nature of the transaction, it's definitely a bad idea to be doing that with the bank!
> This is a solid example of how things change at scale.

5% is 5% at any scale.