HN user

ttyp3

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www.bizjournals.com 4y ago

Eco accuses NY fintech of 'espionage' and copying its product

ttyp3
1pts0
www.rollingstone.com 4y ago

Taylor Hawkins’ Final Days as a Foo Fighter

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3pts0
vervetimes.com 4y ago

Apple interrogating staff at World Trade Center store, CWA says

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11pts1
techcrunch.com 4y ago

Akamai acquires Linode for $900M (2/2022)

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11pts3
www.theverge.com 4y ago

JetBlue launches hostile takeover of Spirit after earlier acquisition rejected

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11pts0
techcrunch.com 4y ago

Three PayPal Ventures alums strike out with their own $158M fund

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1pts0
www.bloomberg.com 4y ago

California Sees Record $97.5B Surplus, Driven by the Rich

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2pts0
www.bloomberg.com 4y ago

Tech Companies Coddled Their Employees. Now They're Firing Them

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18pts10
arxiv.org 4y ago

A New Class of String Transformations for Compressed Text Indexing

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5pts0
www.bloomberg.com 4y ago

Manhattan Apartment Rents Hit Record with Intense Summer Ahead

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2pts0
www.reuters.com 4y ago

Global crypto regulation body likely in next year, top official says

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1pts0
www.cnbc.com 4y ago

Cryptocurrency luna now almost worthless aft. controversial stablecoin loses peg

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2pts0
www.theverge.com 4y ago

Google is beta testing its AI future

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5pts0
zedshaw.com 4y ago

The Beggar Barons: The rise of the trillionaire beggars

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3pts0
www.theguardian.com 4y ago

Big meat is gobbling up fake meat companies

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4pts0
www.wired.com 4y ago

The Desert’s Fragile Skin Can’t Take Much More Heat

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1pts0
www.cnbc.com 4y ago

Bitcoin drops below $33,000 to hit lowest level since July 2021 after sell-off

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4pts0
techcrunch.com 4y ago

‘McEnroe vs. McEnroe’ the first tennis match between a person and their avatar

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1pts0
www.infoworld.com 4y ago

Oracle Java popularity sliding, New Relic reports

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1pts0
www.theverge.com 4y ago

Uber CEO vows to be ‘hardcore about costs,’ slow down hiring in memo

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1pts0
www.theverge.com 4y ago

Go read this report about long hours and stressful work conditions at TikTok

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1pts0
techcrunch.com 4y ago

Sequoia, Binance and A16Z back Elon Musk’s $44B Twitter bid

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1pts0
techcrunch.com 4y ago

Fintech MainStreet cuts about 30% of staff, citing ‘incredibly rough market’

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5pts0
www.protocol.com 4y ago

Cameo lays off close to 90, including senior executives

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16pts1
www.washingtonpost.com 4y ago

At TSM and Blitz, staff describes toxic workplace and volatile CEO

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1pts0
techcrunch.com 4y ago

GitHub will require all users who contribute code to enable 2FA by end of 2023

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6pts0
nypost.com 4y ago

Sony rejected China’s demand to scrub Statue Of Liberty from ‘Spiderman’

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16pts1
www.cnn.com 4y ago

Opinion: It's time Russia and NATO stop playing games with nuclear war

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3pts1
www.theguardian.com 4y ago

‘We are living in hell’: Pakistan and India suffer extreme spring heatwaves

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3pts0
www.theverge.com 4y ago

What Twitter’s still-in-development edit button looks like

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3pts0

"But now, he says, the heat is getting worse. “In those days there were many trees in the whole city and there was no shortage of water and we had other facilities so we could easily beat the heat. But now there are no trees or other facilities including water, due to which the heat is becoming unbearable. I’m scared that this heat will take our lives in the coming years.”"

"Others point out that most of the trees that used to shade the city and the surrounding fields have been cut down and sold, or burned in cooking stoves."

They weren't working when I used them--the top would gradually moisten, bend, and crack. I noticed the store switched back to plastic straws, so assume others had the same problem.

As another poster mentioned, this is with a plastic cup and lid (unfortunately).

The subtitle's better, this is specifically about hourly workers who struggle due to not being assigned enough hours:

"Employers often give people less than 40 weekly hours, leading to resignations and more trouble finding workers"

'Many cars that were towed were not worth much, so owners never showed up to repossess them, which created a massive unpaid bill to the tow companies. Holland said the government should pay, while the government countered that it was Holland's responsibility.'

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'When Holland was running out of cash, he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation he had planned to sell the personal data, like bank accounts and drivers' licenses, of more than 21,000 people obtained through his towing app.

"A driver's license detail on the black market is worth $80 and we're talking tens of thousands of these types of records," Holland told the ABC. "It is hugely valuable information for people looking to obtain that kind of detail."'

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'Andriske was one of them. He received a fraction of the amount he says he was due. His lawyer wrote to Holland's company in March 2018 stating that Harvey's Towing was still owed $594,477.39 in Australian dollars (or about $423,000 in U.S. dollars), according to a document reviewed by NPR.

"He made a promise, made a promise. We get a small payment then he disappeared, mate," Andriske said in an interview, referring to his correspondence with Holland after Andriske said he stopped getting paid. "He then jumped on a plane and he's flying to America."

Andriske decided not to sue Holland. He tried to move on. Yet, he said, seeing Holland's publicity stunts and his startup's soaring valuation rankles him and other small business owners that never got paid.

"There's a lot of people he ripped off. They want their money. I know I want my money," Andriske said. "So if he's got several million over there, how about he sends a bit back over here?" he said.'

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'"Domm embraces Tow as part of his journey," Alderman said. "It has made him a better CEO and Fast is a stronger company as a result."'

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'Two venture capitalists who backed Fast told NPR they knew how Holland's towing startup dissolved, but did not see it as a red flag.'

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'Other Fast employees describe a workplace culture not unusual for a Silicon Valley startup: Growth and sales goals constantly shifting and sometimes completely unfeasible, or "utterly irrational," as one former employee put it. Workers felt like they were sidelined for trying to align quotas with reality. When issues were raised about data and security practices, these employees said the company was slow to respond. And at the center of it a bombastic founder whose penchant for hijinks did not impress everyone at the company of some 400 people.

"The one time a week we heard from the executive team, Domm was often not there because he was skydiving," said one ex-Fast employee who, like the five others who talked to NPR, requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. "I always thought that was a great metaphor for how the entire company was managed."

Another former Fast worker said Holland seemed more interested in slickly-produced commercials featuring people snowboarding and surfing than anything else.

"They've been able to spin up an image around this company that has nothing to do with payments whatsoever," this person said. "It's just branding and optics."'

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'In Fast's early stage, it contracted with about a dozen experienced Nigerian software engineers to build out a prototype of the company's product. Holland offered the developers $800 a month, or about $5 an hour, to work full time on designing and building the company's website, mobile app and features, according to a 2019 email Holland sent to engineers in Nigeria that was reviewed by NPR.

Contracting foreign labor to keep costs down is not uncommon for startups. Still, the way Holland handled the relationship raised eyebrows among Fast employees.

Fast has claimed it paid market-rate wages to the engineers in Nigeria, but two engineers in Lagos countered that the rate is lower than what many other U.S. tech companies pay. They said Nigerian tech companies pay about $1,000 a month to entry-level developers, but that this work demanded more advanced skills.'

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'One of the Nigerian engineers said three months into his contract, he tried to log into Fast's Slack, a workplace communication service, and his credentials did not work.

"We just got kicked out with no notice. Slack stopped working. Domm stopped replying. It was really weird," the developer said.

But the biggest insult, according to the developers, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, was that Holland never credited them for their work. Instead, Holland, a self-taught engineer, told investors he had built the prototype himself.'

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'"He fired everyone from Nigeria. He completely erased us even though we built the first version of the app he was demo-ing to VCs," one of the developers said. "A lot of people were really, really pained. It's like we never existed, but we didn't want to speak up, because we didn't want to develop a bad name in Silicon Valley."'

"Industry opposition

As the sludge ban gains momentum, Maine’s largest waste management company, Casella Waste Systems, and some wastewater treatment facilities, have responded by saying that the state doesn’t have enough room in its landfills for more sludge and that the ban will increase customers’ water and sewer bills.

Landfilling sludge is a problem, said Joe Fusco, Casella vice-president, because its storage requires more material as a bulking agent and that’s going to “take up scarce landfill space”."

The solution was to spread it around, and: "their soil, drinking water, irrigation water, crops, chickens and blood were contaminated with high levels of the toxic chemicals."

It's also using a current media darling to help promote awareness of privacy/surveillance issues (at least incidentally).