Soundest · HackerTrans

hace 8 añosdiscuss

Well, let's lay aside the fact that there clearly are plenty of jerks in academia. The entire article seems to layout a sort of string of unusual and problematic situations. Whether it's people who hit upon the problem conjecture and chose not to speak out for fear of causing trouble, or the journal publishing the proof being edited by the author, or the large number of 'delegates' who seem to be pushing the proof without being able to explain the proof, it seems this is a mix of problems that are arising from an unhealthy situation.

Soundest

hace 8 añosdiscuss

Under Intel both happened, sites were shut with people relocated to the main hubs (Portland in the US, Poland in Europe, somewhere in India too) and anyone with 'bad' (less than the median grade) were laid off too.

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hace 8 añosdiscuss

I disagree, the 2016 layoffs were organisational in nature. Basically they canned the Mobile CPUs, a big chunk of the GPUs and several other areas they decided they weren't performing. They didn't really touch the core chip design teams.

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hace 8 añosdiscuss

That's not taking into account that a $5m property from 1999 will have required significant refurbishment, property taxes and maintenance to even retain it's value let alone increase.

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hace 8 añosdiscuss

It seems that every large company is guilty of this to some extent. I used to work at Intel and they had this exact problem when they tried to shrink the work force. The dynamic goes like this: Managers find it easier to use the performance management tool to make everyone happy rather than to follow the policies and procedures in place. So you end up with lots of quirks on an individual level -- someone wants more pay and less stock so you stick them on a low stock grant and high pay increase. Or the work in a given team simply isn't that difficult and so as your traditional journeyman gains more experience they get more expensive but not more useful- so they become at risk.

Then HR comes in to do the mass headcount cut, look at performance reviews and just cut all the people with low performance reviews. Because it's done on a mass scale of 1,000s of people they really can't do it on a case by case basis. The problem is that to safely fire staff you need to have treated them fairly and that's where it all comes out of the woodwork. You put all the data together and it turns out you've fired way more people over 50 because the organisation is a pyramid and older workers aren't value for money at the bottom of the pyramid and there's not many places at the top.

Obviously it's also true that if you can fire 10 older engineers on high salaries lots of managers will choose to do that simply because it means they don't need to fire 20 younger engineers. It's the easy option.

Not to mention the fact that if you've been at a company a long time you've most likely had your salary rise during the good years and stay flat in the bad years, either way when you get to a bad cycle again suddenly you look very expensive to the organisation.

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hace 8 añosdiscuss

To be honest, this article just seems like a thinly veiled attempt to poke google because he doesn't like their political leanings.

Frankly, I'd be surprised if any of the services I used today were still around 12 years from now, let alone waiting with my previously saved settings. If it was that important to you, you should have either used a paid service (hey, bloomberg exists for a reason) or stored the data locally at your own cost.

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hace 8 añosdiscuss

It's very traditional. The second you show that you're significantly scaling back you raise questions about whether you're a going concern. They could have canned the japanese office much earlier but then it's possible investors would say 'Hey, we thought the plan was to build strong links with Mitsubishi to prime for an acquisition for an exit, what's the plan now'. So the only real option is to push aggressively and hope it works out.

Soundest

hace 8 añosdiscuss

Whilst that's true, narratives at some point do have to meet reality. If rental prices drop by 10%, it doesn't matter what you believe, WeWork will be underwater.

Soundest

hace 8 añosdiscuss

Many months ago I listened to a podcast about WeWork that summarised the problem as: renting office space is a very traditional business. It's demonstrably true that the cost of these rental spaces is cyclical with the business cycle, and companies like WeWork are basically taking on long term leases at the height of the boom. These leases are 10-15 years, and realistically the value of those spaces are going to dip at some point over that time, at which point the business goes bankrupt because it's massively leveraged.

Everything I've seen about WeWork indicates that this is exactly right -they've got a very traditional, poor business strategy, alongside full on insanity scale silicon valley optimism. Does anyone know why WeWork is valued at close to 10x competitor Regus?

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hace 8 añosdiscuss

Altera is hilarious, they shit the bed with Stratix 10 - delayed by years and bet the house on Intel. Intel bought them and then totally shit the bed on what was meant to be the process shrunk version of Stratix 10. What a way to go...

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hace 8 añosdiscuss

Bingo, straight across the middle. See that, I never thought I was going to get optical and quantum in the same headline but there you go. You never know with bullshit bingo.

Soundest

hace 8 añosdiscuss

This looks interesting. Whilst I agree with other commenters that it's hard to compete in hardware I think there's a good niche for this product. Google isn't going to start selling TPUs so something off-the-shelf for machine learning might make some real traction. Best case, lot's of sales to cloud providers (amazon, microsoft etc.) and lots of custom houses. Worst case would be acquisition by MS or Amazon.

Having said that, it's certainly true that Nvidia are tough to beat. But right now we're in a bubble, VC will throw millions at companies and big corporations will throw billions at acquisitions. So I think it's probably a very profitably move in general.

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hace 8 añosdiscuss

>KeenCorp doesn’t read the emails, exactly—its software focuses on word patterns and their context.

Well if that isn't the biggest pile of horse shit I've ever heard, I don't know what is.

We don't read your e-mails, we just have a program that injests the contents of your email and assign you an unexplainable number that might get you fired. Oh, and we lied about reading your e-mails, this software totally does that. Trust us!

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hace 8 añosdiscuss

Whilst that's true, it doesn't seem likely that we go from where we are now (Can't do autonomous driving) to a point where can get fully autonomous driving, and then to a point where we can do fully autonomous driving with the reduced sensors available on existing Teslas in a period of time that makes sense.

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