coldbrewed

I agree that many people perceive this as an absolute truth, and I have to reluctantly acknowledge Milton Friedman's success in completely changing the narrative around corporate responsibilities. I don't think that the adoption of this narrative is due to the Internet though; the original Supreme Court decision of Dodge v. Ford legally enshrined it and the narrative has been actively taught for a long time. I know that I took it at face value for a long time as a result of my education along with the overwhelming share of my peers so I'd say this has been pushed by a broad segment of society.

At present we do rely on shareholders in different parts of society to fund new ventures -- most of us are here on HN because we worked at a VC-funded startup. Shareholders should get paid out. But workers have a stake in a company, the community has a stake in a company, and society at large has some small stake in a company. We shouldn't select shareholders as the main voting party in the operations of a company when the impacts of company operations are so much wider.

For good examples of companies whose impact was much larger than the shareholders, see also: DuPont/Chemours with PFAS, the manufacturers of CFCs, oil companies, etc.

The OC's perspective (that's me) is that there's a massive power asymmetry between the employed and employer. An employee can (typically) only work for one company at a time whereas an employer typically has many employees. The cost for an employee being terminated represents an immediate financial hazard for the employee; when an employee quits then the employer can absorb that shock more easily by distributing outstanding work between remaining employees.

When an employee quits for a new job, that's a speed bump for the employer; when the employer lays someone off, that's life changing for the employee. Employees have many fewer protections than do corporations so layoffs should be done with caution and the cost of layoffs should absolutely be shared with leadership.

> In reality, being laid off is a return to stasis.

Not even close, my dude. Being laid off starts a timer for when that person's finances run out. If that person is, let's say, badly burned out from a months-long crunch period then good luck getting a job. Being laid off is deeply disruptive; if you don't believe me then try it out for yourself sometime.

And going back to the original discussion of the CEO getting a payout as a result of layoffs, that represents leadership financially benefiting at the expensive of the laid off employees. Layoffs indicate a failure of leadership to grow and plan accordingly and leadership should be sharing in the pain rather than cashing in.

Productive, healthy societies survive and thrive when members of that society can afford to take risks can tolerate shocks, and aren't destroyed when they're unable to work. Systems like social security allow elderly people to retire which frees up other productive workers to have careers rather than be caretakers. Systems like unemployment benefits give people time to reorient after a layoff and search for a career where they can be more productive rather than having to reach for the first job that they can find.

These systems are paid for by redistributing income, either temporally with things like employment taxes, or along the income spectrum via progressive taxes. The case of a CEO financially benefiting from layoffs is the exact opposite of this pattern - extracting stock gains from the financial deprivation of employees.

I'm not arguing that we should redistribute all income and it shouldn't be possible to get rich, but I am arguing that we should, shall we say, have a little fucking empathy for people that have been disadvantaged and attempt to support them rather than celebrating the active progression of income inequality.

Edit: typo fixes and a minor clarification.

If you agree with the narrative of shareholder primacy and are looking at short term outcomes then sure, nothing is wrong here. But this means that we're ignoring the harm that was done to the people that lost their income and the disruptions that the rest of the org will experience.

Layoffs can be devastating to the people that were terminated; a job loss is one of the higher stress events one can experience. If you take into account the larger impact than "shareholder value" then dumping stock to capture value is an abdication of responsibility on the CEO for over -hiring, and has terrible optics of financial gain right when a number of employees took it on the chin.

> standardized packaging mechanisms, matrix testing across supported profiles

While this is somewhat true, it's not unreasonable to keep the matrix very small to start with and gradually expand it. People think that matrix testing is some insurmountable task when it mainly comes down to some reasonable, thoughtful engineering. If for some reason you've got some part of the matrix that's particularly expensive (looking at you AIX) then charge a heavy premium for that platform.

> dedicated staging environments

Even if you're a SaaS company you should have dedicated staging environments. Without this you're using your customers as QA, and that's just rude.

> sensible logging schemes

Please have sensible logging schemes. Your on-call/ops folks deserve to be happy too.

Having lived on both sides of the on-prem / SaaS flow, the things that make an on-prem offering successful also make the SaaS offering easier to develop, maintain, and troubleshoot. On-prem can be more expensive but it also means bigger deals, more predictable income, and higher margins. Not every company can fully adopt the mechanisms to generate an on-prem offering but the purported costs of an on-prem offering frequently come down to "ship higher quality software" rather than "shipping somewhat sketchy code at a breakneck pace."

> On prem means that someone is administering your application that does not understand it. Which means YOU are administering it but via slacking with your customers infra engineers rather than through your own control plane.

I got a first-hand view into how this model falls apart - and it wasn't the fault of the customer's infra engineers; it was entirely our fault and we walked away from piles of money because we couldn't deal with the issue.

Here's my rather salty take on the issue.

The killer issue with SaaS software that attempts to migrate to on-prem offerings is that SaaS companies tend to build up cultures that are locked into the "move fast and break things" model. Simply creating an on-prem offering from a SaaS product does not generate the cultural shift needed to successfully ship on-prem software.

If it's extremely easy to ship then the development cycle can be fast and sloppy. You can ship buggy software, bypass meaningful testing, lean on your ops team/on call rotation to limp the software along, skip documentation and use humans to glue the thing together. SaaS is popular because of the accelerated iteration cycle because shipping a bug is much less difficult.

Things fall apart extremely fast when moving from a SaaS offering to an on-prem offering because _all of the developers are still conditioned for the fast iteration cycle_. Developers are still going to be targeting SaaS first because they can interact with it, debug it, and evaluate telemetry from that running system. They won't be developing in the model where they're truly freezing features, polishing implementations, and shaking bugs out of the system. This ultimately means that regular releases are more of snapshots of main rather than something that can be shipped to a customer and run unattended.

In addition, having an ops team or on-call rotation for a SaaS offering means that troubleshooting/operational guides can be largely informal or loosely written runbooks. For an on-call/ops person, if given the option between scratching together a loose note or using Slack for documentation, or taking the time to write well polished documentation that can be consumed by outsiders, operational velocity is going to drive people to follow the easier, less labor intensive. The end result of this is that on-prem offerings are not going to have a lot of critical operational documentation.

I was on the team responsible for building, shipping, and supporting an on-prem version of our software; it was one of the most grindingly miserable work experiences I've had to date. In addition to dealing with the on-prem version my team was also on the on-call rotation and I can say from first hand experience that the SaaS model was only held together with a great deal of firefighting; shipping an on-prem version exposed every single weakness we had on the SaaS version in painful detail.

The project ultimately failed; millions of dollars of deals were left on the table and my entire team was laid off because the company was not capable of shipping a reliable, documented project that could be operated without constant babysitting. The product itself had a great number of incredible features and if people slowed down and focused on improved quality rather than sheer velocity then we'd be drowning in enterprise contracts.

> Which means YOU are administering it but via slacking with your customers infra engineers rather than through your own control plane.

If your product requires that you're remotely administering your software because your customers can't operate it successfully, then please invest in documentation, validation and testing, and troubleshooting. Your customers will need it as much as your on-call rotation.

Open source won the browser battle versus proprietary browsers, but it feels like FSF style "free software" is losing the war. Chrome is certainly open source but product development is completely dominated by Google. Google drives the web standards; they design the "reference" browser; as Google shifts to maintain ad-driven profit margins they're positioned to displace ad blockers.

It doesn't matter if they Manifest V3 implementation is open sourced; If Web Environment Integrity is ultimately implemented then having access to the source doesn't really buy you anything. In a future where WEI is mandatory then being able to build Chromium without WEI empowers you to run a browser that's summarily locked out of services that demand WEI.

Open source mattered much more when simple access to source code gave users meaningful freedom but we're transitioning away from that era. Google is on the path to make open source irrelevant by providing an open source browser that must be built with the Google-specified set of features in order to operate correctly.

We can't claim a victory when open source software implements embrace-extend-extingush semantics.

> After a person’s iris is captured, the biometric data never leaves the orb, they explain, instead converting it into the IrisCode, which itself is only used to create a verification of a person’s uniqueness through a convoluted system of zero-knowledge proofs and proto-danksharding.

It's definitely both of the first two.

Pictures of the RC models show that the bed walls are sloped; that'll eat up a bunch of space if you're moving crates or boxes.

The thing that I can't get over is the raised walls on the sides of the bed. The appeal of a pickup is that you can easily get things in/out of the bed without having to go through the rear of the vehicle; the raised walls are going to make it so much harder to quickly huck a heavy toolbox into the bed.

Elements like the sloped bed walls and elevated external sides of the bed make it clear that this vehicle wasn't designed to be used as a truck.

> James Russell was surprisingly keen to jump on board an experiment designed to persuade people to own fewer cars – especially for someone who has had up to four vehicles parked at his Melbourne home.

So we're starting with someone that has four cars and we're asking them to not drive a car that's likely already used? Okay, sure, but that weakens the premise quite a bit.

> So when he saw Uber’s ad offering to pay people $1,350 - in cash, public transport credit and Uber credits - to leave their car at home for a month, he jumped at it.

For a month. Huh.

I'm all for improving walkability and mass transit options, which is why this stunt is fairly disappointing. This smells like an Uber PR piece that's trying to paint Uber as part of a sustainable future. A much more compelling story would be a narrative about subsidized transportation for people that lack alternatives rather than asking someone leave their _fourth_ vehicle parked.

I can't comment on infrastructure in AWS, but I worked at an observatory for a hot minute when they used Precision Time Protocol (PTP). Their scheme was to record telemetry from all aspects of the observatory -- hardware state, environmental and atmospheric conditions, software and system state, commands, etc. The intent was to build a hyper-precise set of telemetry that could be used to retroactively reprocess old imaging from the observatory as more imaging and telemetry was generated and it would be easier to do that with more accurate timing.

With this level of resolution, multiple observatories can more effectively share and synthesize data; if you know the state of two observatories down to the tens or hundreds of nanoseconds you can do more advanced work with synthetic aperture imaging.

Beyond astronomy my other guess is that PTP or similar tech might be used for high frequency trading; it might also be useful for creating distributed systems; Google's Cloud Spanner uses TrueTime which IIRC is a proprietary equivalent of PTP.

Oracle's market capitalization is $298 billion, while Microsoft's market capitalization is $2.6 trillion. If there's anyone that can stave off Oracle's lawyers Microsoft is probably one of a handful that can.

Also, I'm guessing that Oracle is sufficiently desperate to wring any revenue out of their investment in cloud hardware so this might be a rare occasion where Oracle will just take the money and call it day.

Autism-related dietary preferences mediate autism-gut microbiome associations

> Overall, microbiome differences in ASD may reflect dietary preferences that relate to diagnostic features, and we caution against claims that the microbiome has a driving role in ASD.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34767757/

A casual skim of the research literature indicates the opposite correlation - ASD itself may influence the gut biome. If you have specific literature indicating otherwise I'd love to see it but arguing that ASD is caused by the gut microbiome bears the burden of proof.

In the wider topic regarding RFK, claims about the cause of autism is absolutely flooded with bad research and has a tendency to be related with acceptance of really bad research.

> You can not scientifically state "there is no connection between autism and vaccines".

I absolutely can. There is no high quality, widely accepted research that indicates that indicates causation of autism by vaccines. The original research was deeply fraudulent and has not been superceded by good research. If you disagree then shoot over a link to a study on pubmed.

Per the guidelines:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

If you're a dual income/parent household, you have to afford both the house payments and childcare; typical child care costs can be so great that it makes sense for one parent to drop out of the workforce to care for children so you're back at square one with a single income household. At a median income of $57k your options are house XOR children which does a decent job of explaining why we're seeing birth rates plummet.

> You must have used some insane electric chainsaw because the ones I've seen take 15 minutes to get through a 2 inch diameter branch that you could snap by hand faster.

Maybe that was the case 5-10 years ago but not these days. A buddy and I cut 10-12" dia tree sections into rounds in short order with a 16" bar Ego chainsaw. It was, let's say, 10% slower than an equivalent Stihl but it had more than enough grunt and was incredibly quiet - no need for ear protection.

If you're using a dinky little 18V chainsaw then they'll choke on anything but the new stuff using 56+ volt batteries pack some serious punch. Gas chainsaws are still needed for some use cases but the lack of noise, exhaust, vibration, and fuel/filter maintenance positions them to fully replace gas chainsaws in the reasonably near future.

Crypto doesn't have to be explicitly stopped or shut down to be consigned to niche cases.

In fifteen years Linux went from a hobbyist project in 1991 to a major infrastructure project underpinning the Internet; Golang started in 2009 and now is ubiquitous in the tech world. Plenty of analogous technologies exist that were created and flourished in fifteen years, and they did so by providing meaningful value without requiring universal adoption to become effective.

In contrast the Bitcoin paper was released in 2008 and blockchain still hasn't found the killer app that people outside of the crypto ecosystem rely on in some serious capacity. Fifteen years in blockchain tech is still slow, risky, and painful to use; scams abound and there's a distinct lack of boring, practical use cases that make blockchains a safe technology to use as foundational infrastructure.

What manifests as people trying to stop blockchains is typically regulatory bodies trying to stop money laundering or the sale of unregistered investments. This isn't some shadowy cabal trying to crush Bitcoin but institutions watching Celsius Network and FTX detonate and trying to catch up to keep people from getting burned.

So yes, the blockchain cat is out of the bag, but nobody cares. We are squarely in "put up or shut up" territory because enough time has passed for the tech to develop; if blockchains never catch on then it's because the tech just wasn't that useful to begin with.

Prior to LLMs, generating plausible-sounding misinformation took actual effort - not much effort, but the marginal cost was reasonably above free. With LLMs making the cost of bullshit vanishingly close to free we're going to tip into an era where uncurated LLM confabulation is going to dominate free information.

There's "one loony had a blog" levels of wrong, and then there's "industrial scale bullshit" levels of wrong and we are not prepared for the latter.

The thing that stands out to me is that the driverless car parked on top of the victim until the fire department arrived and extricated the victim. There are few vehicle-pedestrian crashes where the offending vehicle parked on top of the vehicle and wouldn't be moved; screaming bystanders are usually effective at compelling a driver to roll off the victim.

This isn't a simple matter of "humans good drivers, robots bad drivers"; it's an example of "humans can improvise and respond reasonably to novel situations; robots cannot reliably interpret and respond to novel situations."

While it's true that the financial discipline needed to protect an emergency fund isn't as prevalent as it should be, it's important to remember that an emergency fund only lasts if you don't experience an emergency. From 2017-2022 we had a pandemic that caused an enormous number of personal emergencies; between layoffs, inflation, disease, death, and all of the associated costs it's safe to say that a lot of people may have wiped out their emergency fund just trying to survive.

I'm really torn about this. Mauna Kea is the best place on the entire planet to observe the galactic center; it has the best seeing (minimal humidity and low atmospheric turbulence) that's not matched in the northern hemisphere. The ESO already has an equivalent observatory planned in the southern hemisphere so there's less value in relocating the TMT down to Chile, so effectively either Mauna Kea or nowhere.

Simultaneously, Hawaii has an ugly history of colonization that's not talked about enough. The area is sacred to native Hawaiians and indigenous people deserve say in how their ancestral land is used. The TMT is also a comparatively easy target for activists to push back on colonization compared to large corporations with continents of lawyers, or the tourism economy that provides revenue for the island. Folks know that chaining elderly folks across construction access works, and it would be a PR nightmare to forcibly remove them.

Scientific progress should be something that transcends politics but we're stuck with the legacy of colonization, and that makes us all a little poorer.

I dislike repeating "enshittification" so much, but behavior like this seems to be spreading at an exponential rate. It seems like there's going to be a steady uptick of torrenting and Usenet as people get fed up and discover that the piracy landscape has become much more ergonomic over the last few years.

It looks like it never took off[1]; I was working on this exact topic this week and just went with multiple vlan interfaces on the host and bridged in container interfaces via multus. Would love to know if there's a better practice floating around these days.

[1]: https://blog.ipspace.net/2012/02/edge-virtual-bridging-8021q...

> In general, the new GCs are optimised to work the least and give the best performance when the allocation rate is neither too high nor too low; the new GCs also reuse memory better than object pools.

This a little bit surprising to me that low object creation can degrade GC performance; what's the failure mode for G1/ZGC in this scenario?