6cd6beb

Some jobs just rely on attracting and retaining people with no boundaries and no ability to set them. Startups are great at this. They foster a sense of community between the workers and then understaff/overbook the team. When the invariable crisis rolls in no one even has to tell people to work until 5 am. They just do it because no one wants to "let down the team".

My last job I was at least the fourth or fifth person to break down and cry at work. Plenty of those happened in meetings where the boss man was present. They just quietly get replaced and that's that. Burn em and churn em. Never shows up on the ledger and everyone writes it off as a crazy one-off situation.

Then oh gosh a big deadline hits and we're down a person, better show off what a team player we are and make sure we hit the deadline.

Broken clock.

Businesses have gotten larger and more powerful than the governments that are supposed to regulate them. Moreover, infested the relevant regulatory agencies.

I don't understand; isn't this literally the point of running a free service? Harvesting data and using it for marketing purposes?

Fair enough, but there may be a small middle ground between "guaranteeing a return" and "never made a dime in profit and in fact is burning through millions or billions of dollars annually with no expectation to stop any time soon"

We have incurred net losses in all periods since we began operations and we expect we will continue to incur net losses for the foreseeable future.

The admission that "we've never made money and there's a good chance we never will" being boilerplate S-1 copy is monstrously troubling.

When no one needs to see that a company can made a dollar before investing because profit is for suckers and this company's probably going to be a unicorn, maybe that's the stock tip from the shoeshine boy.

Why would a marketing and analytics company shut down a service that gives them full text transcripts of all of your phone calls?

They may as well stop parsing your email for information about the purchases you make.

namely, genocide, a role in putting a fascist, white supremacist in the White House

A lot of people stopped reading the article right there.

Writers like this only reach a certain audience.

That parcs and rec meme is awesome!

They won the Internet!

I thought this place was supposed to be better than that.

Disheartening.

I grew up with absentee parents. This is an unwelcome spin on that situation. I can't even give an opinion on this that doesn't immediately fly into rage. I just hope I don't try to pair off with someone who ends up getting hoodwinked by articles like this. This is disgusting.

Tech jobs are paying insane rates.

If you need to work at one of the top five tech giants in order to manage your debt then your story must be a catastrophic one.

You shouldn't be building anything that relies on a google service unless

A) Google would die without that service

B) You're just fucking around and what your building could burn to the ground without consequence

https://killedbygoogle.com/ has 143 services listed.

It's definitely like that on the internet; a lot of people on both sides of the US political spectrum seem to think there are two problems:

1 - Their chosen political party is not pushing far left/right enough

2 - The opposing party is obviously criminally bent on destroying the country.

Actually maybe three problems; the third being that "centrists" (anyone who isn't radicalized one way or the other) haven't come out against the party that's obviously criminally bent on destroying the country.

I guess that might bleed into real-world politics, but it's unfortunate. I think I remember when it was more "their political ideas are stupid and don't work" and less "they're 100% acting in bad faith and literally trying to destroy the nation".

All I can say is prepare for some hard times, followed by the US not having the geopolitical 1st place. Maybe it's too stark a warning but unless we start to see each other as something other than demons hell-bent on destroying all good in the world, I don't see how anything productive is going to happen.

A note of hope though - the AOC/Cruz collaboration sounds nice.

We're not going to delete it but we're going to algorithmically prevent discovery

Tech monoliths like facebook, google, and twitter are starting to show very obvious political biases.

If we push them to be equitable to differing opinions, they basically get to continue enforcing their own political biases because we can only ever do blackbox testing. God knows what the backend is doing.

If we push them to own their biases try to get more platforms representing differing political opinions, we create admitted echo chambers and further polarize a political climate (in the USA) where we're already arguing whether communists or nazis are trying to destroy the country.

This is a complex problem without an easy solution but it's not unreasonable to bet twitter is going to abuse this new feature to either allow people they like to blatantly violate the rules (without actually algorithmically demoting the tweets, people will ignore the notice) or effectively shadowban people they don't like without explaining why a tweet doesn't follow the ToS until the subject matter is out of the news cycle.

We're not going to delete it but we're going to algorithmically prevent discovery

Tech monoliths like facebook, google, and twitter are starting to show very obvious political biases.

If we push them to be equitable to differing opinions, they basically get to continue enforcing their own political biases because we can only ever do blackbox testing. God knows what the backend is doing.

If we push them to own their biases try to get more platforms representing differing political opinions, we create admitted echo chambers and further polarize a political climate (in the USA) where we're already arguing whether communists or nazis are trying to destroy the country.

This is a complex problem without an easy solution but it's not unreasonable to bet twitter is going to abuse this new feature to either allow people they like to blatantly violate the rules (without actually algorithmically demoting the tweets, people will ignore the notice) or effectively shadowban people they don't like without explaining why a tweet doesn't follow the ToS until the subject matter is out of the news cycle.

Are people really interested in working for facebook in this climate?

If these drivers get everything they want, I cannot imagine a scenario where fares do not go through the roof, which will likely lead to a decrease in demand, which will have a negative effect on take-home pay for drivers.

With that in mind, revisit page 8 of uber's S1 document(link below), where their momentum towards profitability depends of a circle of arrows where

more drivers/driver availability → lower fares/wait times → more riders → more driver opportunity/earning potential → more drivers

Now just turn the arrows backwards and swap out less/more lower/higher ; if something like unionization occurs that's the path through which uber will (according to their own rubric) spiral down to 0.

The only way they could prevent hemorrhaging drivers and users once that spiral started would be to burn through VC money at a faster rate.

S1 document - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519...

Is this another one of those companies whose S1 says "We're not profitable and may never be"?

Why is that the right time to go public? Once the company has an obligation to move towards profitability, doesn't that expose its investors to the risk of another startup subsidizing the same product or service with VC money, undercutting the new established brand?

Like if slack wants to become profitable they probably need to push more people to the paid version of the app, but then won't another company just make a clone and convert some VC cash into a runway with which to poach slack's userbase, and eventually file an S1 saying "we're not profitable and may never be"?

I'm struggling to understand why this keeps working, because no one seems to have a problem with it at all.

It's dark, but you can manipulate and abuse people into staying through pretty much anything.

See abusive relationships or this handy article http://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html

A successful society is not just a rampant pursuit of economics and profits at the expense of everything else.

Right, but people are incentivized by the profit motive and generally do what they can to meet it.

To just say "think of the people" is swimming upstream; you're more likely to succeed by finding a way to modify the system to drive people towards actions that benefit each other.

Unfortunately it is not very human to forgo money, power, fame in exchange for what they think is the right thing to do. That's why we've had to create economic or political systems that saddle the drive for those things and steer it towards things that benefit society.

We could have a small handful of new great games from valve and an unknown number of crappy ones, or we could have steam.

Steam provides more value to me on an order of magnitude that makes the article laughable. Steam is like netflix before licensing fractured their content between 20 different streaming services. It's not perfect but I'm not crying over the loss of a few more valve games. Better to burn out than fade away anyway.

When there are cars parked in between the cycle lane and the car lane it's much easier for the driver to miss the cyclist, and few people check the cycle lane before turning right. I was definitely guilty of this until I started cycling.

Happened to me. I t-boned the car, flipped up and over it, landed on outstretched arms and damn near broke them. She drove off. Still haven't fully recovered after a few years.

Honestly you just have to be fast enough to keep up with cars or take roads where cars are sparse. I find that drivers get more aggressive and careless the more of them there are on the road. Anecdotally if you drive a car in a rural road, if you happen to see another car on your trip you're getting a smile and a wave. This does not happen in downtown Austin.

It's mildly interesting that ethics are flexible depending on the target, but from a technical standpoint this project is not interesting. The code just builds a proxy list, generates a random number, opens a page, and posts the payload. I work with selenium and this isn't solving any interesting problems whatsoever.

Posting it is unethical, and it's disappointing to find on the front page of HN.

I work in QA and don't like the reduced focus on quality (selfishly, because I've got the skillset to get paid by assuring quality).

The article shows a graph that indicates that, over the long term, teams that attack cruft or spend time reducing it make a better product with more features.

To be cynical though, who cares? Who cares about the long term? Your goal as a startup is to crank out features fast enough to keep ahead of the competition and do so long enough to get bought out, IPO, or otherwise exit with a wheelbarrow of cash. Then the cruft is someone else's problem.

We're not exactly in a "long term focused environment". We're over here moving fast and breaking things. Bugs on production are fine, we'll just do a hotfix and then thank everyone for staying late and being rockstars.

Hell, half the S-1 documents I've seen flat-out state "we're losing a billion USD per year, our operating costs are definitely going up in the future; we may never be profitable" but it doesn't seem to matter one bit. "We're going to get big enough to raise our margins!" Neat, enter a scrappy competitor using vc funds to subsidize their overhead, undercutting you with the same business model you started with. That's not long term thinking.

Yes there are better ways to produce higher quality software, but who cares?

So? There's more than one party negotiating that rate of pay.

Think it's unfair for one person to negotiate against a company? Maybe, but that's where unions become useful.

There's ill will against them, and they're not widely used (at least in tech), but maybe that's the problem. If so it's not a problem worth tearing down the whole system.

Two kinds of people in this system. One of them thinks if you work hard you can climb your way out of poverty through your own self determination and hard work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader

Certainly not a new thing.

If you train an AI using data from a system that already has certain biases, then the AI is going to replicate those same systemic biases

That's not what happened in the example at all. The example company isn't biased against summer interns, "who stops working after x time" was just a bad question.

The comment you're replying to can boil down to "do you want a monkey's paw solving your problem? If so then AI may be for you"

Or perhaps "stop pretending you're ever going to get ethics or empathy out of a computer"

There are at least two problems with this:

- "I'm sure there are managers and engineers crying in private in every big company out there": You're not excusing google here, just expanding the range of companies whose apparent behavior is mortifying a couple of people in this thread.

- "Google probably does some things very well to keep all the talent despite the negative press it gets.": probably. They probably do a lot of a/b testing to dial in the compensation/retention ratio they're looking for, or maybe they just heap rewards onto engineers because they can afford it. Be that as it may, some people think that what google's doing is detrimental to society, or at least the problems are bigger than a salary or even a total compensation package should make up for.

Unsolicited question: Does every man have his price?