iterminate

A bunch of people will come out of the woodwork drawn to the idea of being able to immediately walk into managing a popular project, but it'll end poorly. If your project has outgrown you, or you've outgrown your project, then you can either shut it down gracefully or transition into community ownership (by finding people who have a demonstrable pre-existing interest in the project itself and allowing them to take over).

Shutting the project down gracefully doesn't mean it has to end, and it doesn't mean failure: shutting down the project gives invested community members the chance to fork it and demonstrate that they want to put the work in to run a natural successor to your project, and people will naturally gravitate towards the best fork over time. Afterall, without people with a vision leading it, it's just code.

Handing over ownership feels cleanest but it's rarely the best outcome (unless you're handing it over to a natural successor).

The irony? High end home sales require much less work/effort than low end. Far fewer showings. No open houses, ever.

That's true of most work. Software engineering is much less work/effort than a minimum wage job. The higher you go, the easier it is.

Mass murder is not the natural conclusion of minor (or even major) untreated mental health issues.

edit: not the place to discuss this.

Then, the next day, I can listen to the call, pause, increase speed 2x,3x, take notes for myself, write minutes, write summaries for internal use (casual slack message), notice inconsistencies in our thinking, or run an AI note taker all on my own schedule.

The necessity of re-watching to identify inconsistencies in a meeting is a problem with the medium. An inconsistency in thinking early in a meeting can invalidate the whole meeting but because a meeting has to move at pace it's much more likely for an inconsistency to slip in. Team meetings also bias the conversation towards whoever is most confident in speaking up, this is especially disadvantageous towards people new to a team or those where the dominant language is not their own.

I'm not against meetings outright as some people much prefer communicating using their voice instead of in writing, and a good team is one that is able to accommodate each member's preferred style of working... but if a team meeting is taking place that is both important and also stretches the capabilities of participants, it should not be a meeting. A meeting should only happen when every participant has decided that it's the best medium for that specific conversation.

A meeting is like sitting in front of a hose: details will be missed.

How do ownership costs get driven up by profit-making?

The cost of owning a home for the average person is primarily reflected in the amount they pay for their mortgage. The cost of a mortgage is based on the value of the property as mortgages are secured against the property. The value of a property is determined by demand which is driven up when the market is filled with players who have easy access to capital to turn properties into profit-generating tools.

Historically, renting has existed for thousands of years. That wouldn't make any sense if owning was (until recently) always a more desirable prospect than renting.

Renting is a very useful tool that many people (including myself) value highly: I rent out of choice. However, renting as a necessity (because it is the only option to live) is the position most renters find themselves in. If you poll the people in your life who are earning an average income you'll find most would much prefer to own their home because it provides much more security and it's typically more cost effective over the long term.

If there's 10 families and 10 houses for sale, each family can own their own home. The most desirable houses will cost more but at the end of the day, every family will own their home at a price dictated by the amount that they can afford.

If there's 10 families and 10 houses but only 5 are for sale with the other 5 owned by a landlord, the price of the houses for sale is pushed up not just based on desirability but also based on necessity, up to the price that 5 of the families cannot afford. At that point, the remaining 5 families need somewhere to live and so they are forced to rent from the landlord who can set their own price. Everyone (including those who were lucky enough to buy their homes) is paying more all because a landlord is involved.

Home ownership isn't the perfect option and so landlords provide some value, however, that value could still be realised without interfering with the ownership market. Most property is built to be occupied by the owner, it's only later that it gets taken out of the ownership pool by landlords with access to capital. Landlords purchasing owner-occupied property are much like cats let outside: they kill everything around them.

A mortgage. The cost of ownership only exceeds the cost of renting because ownership costs have been driven up by profit making: historically (and still today in some countries) it was cheaper to buy a home than it was to rent. If landlords were restricted from buying homes then the costs of ownership would become affordable for the majority of people who rent. A Hacker News comment isn't the place to propose radical policy change but just for fun, consider a world in which the only way to become a landlord was by building property specifically to rent it out. The majority of rental properties were previously owner-occupier, landlords have decimated the amount of property available for owner-occupiers which has driven up costs (pushing more and more people into renting).

Most insurance is invalidated by operating outside of the very narrow boundaries. For example, car insurance is often invalidated by driving for uber. If you're generating revenue from your property (home, car) then you need specialist insurance which is much more expensive for this very reason. Presumably the author of this story chose to believe the most convenient version of reality: that Airbnb's "AirCover" was a suitable replacement for landlord's insurance -- but it is not reality, oops.

If the world wasn't full of landlords, people wouldn't need to use your stuff.

1,000 employees means a burn rate in the hundreds of millions per year just on the costs of having employees, $260m burned in a year sounds about right for a company of that size.

I'm generally sympathetic to the difficulties of building a sustainable business around open-source project stewardship but I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion that they were justified in this decision. The decision they've made here isn't actually much to do with the open-source project at all, and in fact, commercial products with no open-source component go through this every day. For example, every cloud provider nowadays offers "s3-compatible" storage which is built on the back of the work Amazon did early on. Currents (and co.) have taken what is effectively the Cypress protocol and built their own compatible product for it.

The benefit of being a commercial operation responsible for open-source project stewardship is that you have a low-cost marketing engine and most importantly you're able to set the direction of the project, you're able to operate at the cutting edge, delivering the best service to end users, in a way that others cannot. For example, the work Chromatic do in stewarding Storybook means their service is by far the best paid Storybook service and the alternatives (regardless of price) are rarely worth it.

If you're executives at the commercial arm of an open-source project and you're incapable of differentiating so much so that what Cypress are doing here makes sense, you've failed in your duty to shareholders and employees and should be removed. Cypress aren't protecting employee's livelihoods, they're protecting the executives in the short-term at the expense of the employees in the long term. They've bought their employees at best another 6 months with this.

There's examples of egregious commercial behaviour in open-source (like Amazon's situation with elasticsearch) where it's pretty easy to moralise about reselling free software with very little value-add. However, the entire internet is built on people taking concepts and ideas and iterating on them: building a product that is compatible with Cypress is worlds apart from ripping off the Cypress commercial arm.

I think the decision probably makes sense for the executive team at Cypress at this point in time: the writing is on the wall for the company, and taking this drastic action gives them a little more breathing room to somehow salvage a future... but the justifiable decision is to actually use their very advantageous position. If Cypress are threatened by Currents, that's embarrassing for the leadership, because they started a marathon at mile 20 while Currents was still sat at mile marker 0.

Gell-Bott Amensia.

A confident GPT hallucination is almost indistinguishable from typical management consulting material...

If you're measuring based on output, sure, but... the value of any knowledge worker is primarily driven by the input, that is, a client doesn't want "10 ideas" they want "10 [valuable] ideas [informed by the understanding of the business and the market they're operating in]". If a management consultant said "boat shoes" in response to this question they would not have a client much longer.

You could apply this same nonsense task to software engineering, i.e: ask ChatGPT to "write 10 lines of code" and it'll be indistinguishable from the code we churn out day after day.

Devices are just an interface for a lot of people, they might use dozens of devices during the period we (nerds) own a single computer. From borrowing their friends tablet, to changing their phone, to using a computer at a library or their office, they don't have a stable local disk. The cloud is far more stable.

There's a temptation to get caught up on quantifiable scores when working on SEO because so much of it can't be quantified, everyone is mostly guessing what Google wants... however, scores are ultimately meaningless and you should be measuring the impact on your business metrics. For example, if your website is designed to generate sales, did reducing your CWV to 800ms improve revenue? SEO is a means to an end, you can spend thousands of human hours to rank #1 for a keyword but if it doesn't improve a metric that matters (e.g: your revenue) it's a complete waste of time.

More broadly, prioritisation isn't about whether a piece of work will achieve its aim, it's about understanding which options are the best use of limited resources. For example, you may be able to say confidently that reducing CWV from 800ms to 600ms will increase your traffic from Google search by 5% but that's immaterial until it's compared against other options -- there's an opportunity cost associated with all work.

Personally, I would be surprised if reducing CWV from 800ms to 600ms is the best use of your resources, unless your business is one of the few that has a strong organic search strategy with organic search accounting for a meaningful volume of revenue -- nowadays, most companies find paid ads are much more effective.

I disagree with the premise of your comment but on a factual note: Russell Brand has been litigious on this very issue, he has threatened to take legal action and taken legal action against people who have spoken up about him. He has been widely "known" to be a predatory rapist for years but has used his money to intimidate those who wanted to speak up.

Sorry, poor phrasing on my part. I typically make 1 monthly transfer which costs me about £100 with Wise and would cost me £3 with Atlantic Money.

My company pays Wise around £100/month in transfer fees so reducing that to £3/month piques my interest but the headache I would experience if anything went wrong would cost me a lot more than £97. My worst nightmare when using a new financial platform is that I get caught up in some KYC nightmare after transferring money and it is stuck in purgatory forever.

The website doesn't include anything to reassure me that the service is as reliable (or more reliable) than Wise. There's no social proof. I found the news article with your first annual report and that's quite compelling.

- Add average transfer times so I can see what most people are experiencing when using the service

- Add social proof: positive reviews would be very helpful

- Add real time information about volume

- Shout about your reliability: Wise has reputation that does the work for them, you don't

- Mobile app only is a little concerning too for business usage: I use Wise for business and personal, business on the website, personal on my phone (I can't articulate why but using Wise for business on my phone "feels" wrong)

Any metric. Pick a country with a well regarded prison system (e.g: Norway) and then compare the U.S. system on every metric to see the disparity. Injury, sickness, malnourishment, violence, education, recidivism, drugs, forced labor, mental health. No country that is typically considered as part of “the west” comes close to any of these metrics when compared to the United States.

A question for you: which country in “the west” can you think of that has worse prisoner treatment than the US?

"Even" the US isn't much of a moral barometer for prisoner treatment. The US uses prison labor because the US is one of the worst countries for prisoner (mis)treatment, certainly the worst in the west.

There's a big difference between prisoners (who at least in theory are locked up as punishment for committing a crime) and people who've been trafficked into slavery[...] What's happening in SEA is kidnappping innocent people

Lots of people in prison are innocent, especially in the US. Prisoners are no less deserving of rights and fair treatment than victims of trafficking. Likewise, I'm sure many trafficking victims are guilty of committing crimes (as are most people).

I wrote a long a comment theorising why $100/year is a great starting point and then discovered you can toggle between "yearly" and "monthly". So they do offer $10/month -- it's just hidden behind a toggle.

I very much disagree with the premise that most of the time difficult engineers have the organization's best interests at heart. Most people (across any discipline) have very little regard for the "interests" of the organization that they're working for. Not because of incompetence or malice or organizational dysfunction but because most people just want to show up, do their time and get out to live their life with what little time they have left of their day. Maybe, at best, they care about the interests of some of their co-workers that they like.

Difficult engineers are difficult because they're difficult just like a difficult sales executive is difficult because they're difficult. I've worked in great companies and terrible companies with great people and difficult people. The reason difficult people don't survive as long at good companies is because the organization has the breathing room to get rid of them, whereas in a chaotic mismanaged organization there's still a framing in which a difficult engineer is valuable -- because mismanaged organizations aren't considering the long term implications of difficult employees, they're focused on answering "can this person help put out our current fire?".

Difficult engineers are given far too much room to be difficult because we're seen as geniuses who just need tending to. We should show employees kindness and support them in doing their best work and growing to benefit the organization, but we should not try to fix difficult people. If you're a manager dealing with a difficult engineer, you can be sure every one of their co-workers hates them and is making their life worse.

Terminate your difficult employees, don't change the number of points allocated to a sprint.