staunch

They're paying severance, bonus, healthcare, etc which is the only way to do an ethical layoff. CEOs that wait until the last minute to do layoffs and then pay little to no severance are shitty people, and no one should trust to work for them ever again. CEOs that provide a softer landing for laid off employees should be rewarded by not having their reputations destroyed in the mind of current and prospective employees. It's a display of ethics and competence.

It's funny because the crappy modern technical interview (which every company cargo culted from Google) makes it hard for companies to hire in two ways:

1. Even very competent people don't want to do them, because they're high pressure, incredibly narrow, and highly capricious.

2. Even very competent people don't pass them reliably, because they're often poorly designed and run.

TripleByte really seemed like they had a shot at solving this problem, by interviewing people once really well and then getting companies to trust their credentialing. Unfortunately they didn't manage to pull this off at all, really. Their interview was above average but not great and companies just didn't seem to trust it.

There's still a massive prize awaiting whichever companies do solve this problem. And it will be a huge boon to the tech employee and employer market in general, by increasing "employment liquidity", productivity, job satisfaction, and retention.

In the meantime, more companies could take advantage of this market inefficiency to hire people in alternative ways. For example, some companies do contract-to-hire, which is one way to do a much more thorough evaluation of someone's suitability for a particular role.

One reason companies like Google instituted this kind of faux rigor in their hiring process is because they're so bad at firing bad hires. So another thing companies can to be better is to hire more easily but also fire more easily. Offering severance (say, 3 months + tenure increase) makes this a perfectly ethical policy but somehow this is usually viewed as a totally untenable option at modern tech companies (Netflix seems to be the exception).

> It's like there's fire in the house and all of us are discussing how to improve fire extinguisher design.

It's more like there's a problem with a new technology and people are discussing how to improve the technology.

Twitter is just a technology product that some few people created a few years ago. It's not a discovery like fire where we have to learn to adapt to its nature. We can change its nature radically.

Of course there are social problems that won't be resolved by technology but there's no reason to believe this is one of them. Twitter is a technology that created and exacerbated specific social problems. It's entirely plausible that it can be improved to eliminate and mitigate these same problems.

One part of the solution is letting people know the origin of the people they're communicating with. I'd like to see country flags on every piece of content on the internet, HN included. Not enforced by law but just by convention.

It's technically very feasible. The "unknown" flag could be used in cases where it's difficult to determine an origin, because that is informative as well.

And users should be given the ability to filter out content from origins they don't wish to interact with.

And this isn't xenophobia or racism or anything like it. It's about controlling and understanding who you're communicating with so you can take that into account.

In fact, in many cases users may find it useful to filter out content from their own origin, to get a foreign take on a topic, for example.

A good definition of The Cloud is just "servers in a datacenter" so the discussion is best framed as Private Cloud (on-prem or co-located servers) vs Public Cloud (AWS, etc) or some combination.

People with expertise in running private clouds and using public cloud services can judge each case pretty easily, by taking into account the organization's technical needs, plans, budget, abilities, etc. And for non-experts, the question is even simpler: use the public clouds if or until it becomes a technical or financial blocker. And in that case, hire an expert.

There's really not a lot of room for controversy. It seems most of the arguments come from people without the relevant expertise, who only know how to develop in public clouds, responding defensively. Like people with little programming experience flaming each other over which language is "best".

There's no single "best" cloud option, since they're just different tools for different things. Sometimes either way would work, in which case it comes down to personal preference, and sometimes there's a clearly better option for a specific organization's needs. Framed correctly, it's a "boring" question just like most technical questions should be.

> ...all three countries were quite thoroughly provoked by Nasser.

FYI "provoked" is the exact word used by many to rationalize Putin's invasion of Ukraine. One could just as easily say Nasser was provoked to his actions by decades of foreign domination and exploitation.

This stuff is complex but at the end of day those three countries were clearly wrong to invade a sovereign country.

> And because the US didn't get any of the spoils if it would have worked out.

That may be true of some people in his administration but I don't think that was Eisenhower's view.

Hah yes, of course, I deleted that part somehow.

> Ask the British and French what sort of ally the US was during the Suez Crisis.

The Suez Crisis is when the British, French, and Israeli governments conspired behind the back of the US to invade Egypt and install a puppet regime. With the goal of taking back the canal and stealing their oil supply.

Pretty much the same thing Putin just attempted in Ukraine.

It's to Eisenhower's credit that he didn't back their immoral attack. And one of the big wins for the morality of US foreign policy in the 20th century.

Ah cool, it should be more widely publicized. Maybe I missed it, but I don't recall seeing news about bribery whistleblowers being paid out. Maybe it should be a mandatory part of training programs for global companies.

I can't believe there aren't people at Oracle that would have happily collected on it. Or maybe that's what happened here.

From what I've heard, many cases of these kinds of bribery schemes are fairly widely known within the companies themselves. The general attitude is that "everyone is doing it" and any harm is so indirect as to not seem particularly unethical. For example, some government is already set to spend $100 million with X software company, so what's the harm in kicking back $10 million to the person signing the check?

Of course it's wrong but it's very easily rationalized by psychologically normal people.

If the goal is to actually stop this kind of bribery, we should give whistleblowers a 20% reward of the penalties. In other words, we should legally bribe people into reporting illegal bribery because bribery works.

This is exactly how to handle a layoff: do it 3-6 months earlier than required and give the laid off employees that money as severance. Waving the equity cliff too is very generous and good of them.

Everyone should note the companies that do brutal layoffs with little/no severance. It's a major red flag because it shows incompetence and/or a lack of ethics.

> Coinbase was also extremely generous with severance.

Regardless of what one thinks of Coinbase, their decision to offer employees generous severance deserves massive praise. If you were on the fence about working at Coinbase, currently or in the future, it should be a major point in their favor.

If nothing else, it shows competence. Too many incompetent CEOs (and their boards) wait too long and then do layoffs with little or no severance. Instead of the responsible thing and laying people off early enough to give them a proper severance.

> They do this already. They're called helicopters.

This is dangerously close to the infamous HN Dropbox critique[1] :-D

And it's likely wrong in the same way.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Pretty exciting. I consider this a real proof of concept for shuttlepods AKA flying cars. I'm sure there's a lot of work left to do this shows how much is already possible with relatively little effort by a relatively small company.

Seems like there's a few advances that should enable it to finally happen:

Automated: so there's no pilot to make mistakes and drive up costs. Automated flying is easier than navigating streets, so this is probably already doable at scale even though self-driving cars are taking longer than hoped.

Electric: so the at-scale/long-term cost per flight can be nearly zero. Seems possible something like this could be manufactured for $100k at scale and fly (with maintenance) for multiple years.

Multi-rotor w/efficient DC motors, multi-battery pack w/advanced batteries, and multi-computer w/advanced processors: so there's no single point of failure and lots of opportunity to recover from failure, and to enable easy VTOL without runways.

The Wright brothers would love it. Their initial vision was to not need specially built runways or airports. It turns out that was "too early" of an idea to be practical but we're getting close.

An "infinite highway of the air" (Wilbur Wright) is an exciting goal.

Audible: I listen to 2-3 books a month while exercising, cleaning, eating, etc. Often ones I've already listened to. Almost exclusively biographies and other historical non-fiction. My main frustration is that there are so many great books not available on Audible. But there is a lot of good stuff.

Podcasts: People like Sean Carroll, Dan Carlin, and Sam Harris are regularly having amazing public conversations and interviewing amazing people. There's also some funny podcasts like Conan O'Briens or David Spade/Dana Carvey's.

I find listening to good content more exciting, fulfilling, and relaxing than any other form of brain stimulation.

> And I believe we can all agree, regardless of political affiliation, that the fabric of society is itself 'at risk' of collapse.

No, we don't all agree. The most we can probably all agree on is that we're in for some unique and turbulent times. Because this is true of almost every generation, in one way or another.

Consider the possibility that your entire worldview may be highly skewed by an extremely unhealthy information diet. Like someone eating cheeseburgers for every meal, feeling terrible all the time, and then assuming everyone else must feel terrible too.

I would prescribe a new information diet rich in biography/history books to maintain mental regularity and perspective.

At first I thought the fine sounded excessive but after thinking about it, it seems far too low. I'd like to know the the people that were specifically responsible for this scam.

Did Jack Dorsey implement and endorse this scam?

Generous severance is the ethical test of a CEO during a layoff. It softens the blow of a layoff immeasurably to provide 4-6 months of severance.

If a CEO won't do it, the remaining employees should question the CEOs ethics, and ask themselves how they will be treated in the future. And if the business literally can't afford to do it (which is rare), then everyone should question the CEO's competence.

As customers, we should all do our best to avoid and boycott companies that do layoffs without providing generous severance. Because who wants to do business with an unethical or incompetent company.

If anyone knows what severance Bolt is paying, let us know.

This might've been the article that I read, which seems to disagree:

"The inconvenient truth is that our Navy has 12 carrier groups and all are now obsolete. The Chinese have developed an antiship ballistic missile (ASBM), the DF-21D, nicknamed the “carrier killer.” It has a range of 1,200 miles and can fly at speeds higher than Mach 5. During descent to the target, it can fly at Mach 10. That’s like launching one in Chicago and hitting the Statue of Liberty three minutes later.

We have no missile-defense systems that can counter the DF-21D. The Navy has a ballistic-missile-defense system, but the problem is it doesn’t work. Last year the Navy performed a test in which it tried to intercept two ASBMs. It couldn’t hit either one. This was a planned test—the Navy knew when the missiles were coming, from what direction and how many. Imagine a surprise attack on a carrier with 20 missiles incoming at the same time."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/navy-aircraft-carrier-fleet-bat...

Sure, but that doctrine is old. And has it not been partially obsoleted by China's advances in missile technology?

My understanding was that our fleets have sufficient defense for a limited attack but that a full scale missile attack by China would quickly overwhelm them.

My understanding is that Russia and China are building hypersonic glide missile so they can penetrate any US missile defense system, which the US doesn't really even have. And neither does Russia or China have an effective missile defense system that the US needs the capability to defeat.

So it seems like an arms race without either side really having advanced to the point of necessitating a further step. Then again, I suppose it makes sense to be one step ahead of where the game is going.

Or is there something more to this?

> And if we kill a few hundred or thousand innocent passengers and/or pedestrians along the way...

So you're just going to make up numbers to be outraged at?

As far as I know, no innocent passengers or pedestrians have been killed as a result of FSD. I imagine it would be big news as the (relatively few) Autopilot accident have been. It should be common sense to assume that FSD would be halted by Tesla themselves, or at least a government agency, if there were huge numbers of people dying.

We only have safe and cheap air travel and safe cars today because many thousands of people died beta testing them. This is basic history that everyone should know. When it comes to high speed transportation, there's simply no way to avoid significant risk while making significant progress. The best we can do is make intelligent trade offs, which is my entire point.

Yes, beta testers for hardware and software that is in mass production and many years into development. By this stage in the development of cars they were an extremely rational choice over the alternatives.

FSD is not a rational choice over the alternative and its adoption in no way resembles the adoption of cars. The analogy is bunk. But I won't keep beating a dead horse here, I was just trying to explain why it doesn't IMO make sense.

So ignorance. That does seem like Tesla's responsibility. Tesla should probably show the worst behaving FSD videos on YouTube (like this one) before it can be enabled.

It may be ethical if it really does lead to saving many lives by advancing the state of the art more quickly than it otherwise would have.

And given how many people are drunk while intoxicated or using smartphones, it seems like a relatively negligible increase in danger.

The math might be something like: police departments could increase enforcement of DUI and reckless driving laws by 1% and compensate for the total increase of danger caused by Tesla's FSD testing.

So you're comparing the very first prototype cars to the technology present in millions of Teslas? Seems like a very contorted analogy and makes no real sense.

Sure, stupidity must account for some large percentage. I guess I'm curious about the other reasons.

Sure, novelty makes sense. That would explain why a reasonable person might try it out for a few minutes in a dry, daytime, low speed, low traffic area.

Not really. Even early on cars were quite fast and priced around the same as horses and a carriage, and without the hassle of dealing with horses. They did tend to break down a lot but were quite usable.

Tesla FSD is much, much worse than just driving oneself when taking into account the risk.