Sounds like a really interesting problem space. I'm curious if you have any comments about how you approached dealing with inconsistencies between information sources? System A says X, system B says Y. I suppose best approach is again just to bail out to manual resolution?

In the early days, we bailed out to manual resolution. In the later days, we had enough disparate data sources that we built oracles to choose which of the conflicting data was most likely to be correct.

For example, we integrated with a data source that used OCR to scan container numbers as they passed through various way points while they were on trains. The tech wasn't perfect. We frequently got reports from the rail data source that a train was, for example, passing through the middle of the country when we knew with 100% certainty that it was currently in the middle of the pacific ocean on a boat. That spurious data could be safely thrown out on logical grounds. Other cases were not as straightforward!

One example is that instead of adding support for edge case mutations/changes late in a process, it's sometimes better to force those records to be thrown away and reset with a new record from the start of the process. You avoid chasing down flow on effects of late unexpected changes in different parts of the application.

To give a contrived/trivial example, imagine a TLS handshake. Rather than building support to allow hosts to retry with a different cert, it's better to fail the connection and let the client start from scratch. Same principle can be applied to more complex process automation tasks in business. Imagine a leave tracking system. It might be better to not support changing dates of an existing leave application, and instead supporting cancel & re-apply. Best part is that the user facing part of both versions can be exactly the same.

It's not "until sales shows up", it's until regulators start causing problems for Cloudflare because you are using Cloudflare infra to host a grey market online gambling website.

Notwithstanding the content of the site, I think it's pretty scummy to send an email insinuating that you're stressing CF's network, only to get some non-specific information, and a call with sales.

Harder to justify contributing back when the open source project is so tightly coupled to your biggest for profit competitor.

Even grosser is that they explicitly limited the iOS version of Google Photos to refuse to work with scoped access. So on iOS the app will refuse to work without being granted whole library access, a permission that Google no longer allows to any third party photo app on Android. Blatantly anticompetitive.

I'm also completely sick of fielding API migration emails from Google on mobile Android/Firebase. Feel like I get some "action required" every couple of weeks. This stuff saps our resources, both to fix it, and to diagnose if the issue even applies to us in the first place. If you are lucky Google includes details of the app using the API, but often this part is even left out.

Yeah the amount of disrespect of developer time they show here is crazy. You could have made the billing api backwards compatible for 10 years, its a super small api, but instead they force breaking changes every couple of years

Maybe it is a strategy for cleaning up old apps or something, but I doubt it

What’s crazy is the range on the liability estimate. Maybe there is a good reason for it. But 1b-10b is an absolutely massive window?

It does seem weird that there is this separation though. I would have assumed that there is a lot of overlap between machine design and operation.

I don't think there's much overlap between things like making a sufficiently-bright EUV light source and designing a transistor.

More engineers doesn't automatically mean better software. Sometimes the opposite.

Layoffs almost always mean the few engineers that can do better than more engineers are on the way out, if not via layoffs, then voluntarily.

A lesson I learned at my first programming gig. I worked with a lot of really smart people, one might describe as 'rock stars' or 10x or whatever. The company was flush with government contracts and it showed.

Apparently one of the largest contracts wasn't renewed, and there was a couple rounds of back to back layoffs. Though none of them were affected, every single one was gone within a year. The only people that remained were those who couldn't get a job elsewhere, and those super comfortable who weren't necessarily bad but not setting the world on fire. The company was pretty much a zombie until it was bought out years later.

Last year GM offered Voluntary Separation Package. Those who had 5 or more years of experience would get 1 month of pay + prorated bonus + health insurance compensation.

You can guess who took the offer. 5000 of your experienced employees who have the ability to pursue other opportunities.

Absolutely. The good engineers are always the first to leave a smelly ship. Then you're just left with engineers whose chief skill is kissing their manager's ass.

And the ones that remain have terribly reduced morale and lose productivity.

This seems like a great Reason to avoid hiring as much as possible , and use contractors for any work that could potentially be lost by non-renewal of contracts or program cancellations.

Agreed on your first point, not on your second point. Lots of tech companies did over-hire during the pandemic in a way that had entirely foreseeable results, but everyone simply got caught up in the FOMO.

On the contractor front though, you aren't going to remotely get the best and brightest by going that way, not unless you're actually contracting with industry leaders who are going to be charging way more than FTEs will cost you (and there aren't that many industry leaders). There are so many good tech companies out there offering FTE positions, so a company offering a lower-paid, lower-benefits contracting positions is simply not going to be competitive in the labor marketplace.

Large-scale layoffs almost never means better software though.

I'd venture a company like GM would just try and replace them with as many third party contractors or outsourced vendors, and not actually "slim the team down", etc

Exactly twitter was the biggest proof of that.

Twitter became a much worse app (as far as user experience goes) imo after the firings. The replies to a tweet being filled with bots/ads instead of relevant conversation alone makes the app borderline unusable.

They have released ton's more features including AI - grok, premium subscription with no ads, growth has been record high all run with much less engineers, it's more optimized and better now IMO. In tech companies, it's not just about headcount, one needs a strong leader to drive company towards greater success like Elon.

any dev can ship tens of features, they will be as bad as everything twitter did

It's baffling that people can still think this way in 2024. Almost none of Musk's forecasts, estimates, or product promises have been delivered on time. His history is basically a long list of missed deadlines. Believing that Musk is a good leader is pure delusion, especially now.

I don't mean to be snarky, but... and?

As a reminder, the sitting POTUS announced the suspension of their reelection campaign on X. It wasn't announced on CNN or the NYT or via WH direct broadcast, it was on X. These events will be written about without any political rose-colored-glasses in 100 years from now.

You can regurgitate your genuinely stupid rhetoric all you want, but I hope you understand that nobody of any importance, relevance, or power agrees with you -- in fact, they haven't for a few years now if you've been paying attention to anything in reality.

Nobody cares about the things you're enumerating. But, even if they did, Musk is better on those points than anyone you're going to suggest.

Nobody care if Twitter goes out of service tomorrow, too. And everyday it has like, 10% chance of it happening lol

I care. I'm sure Musk cares. I'm sure the private investors care. I'm sure the 500M+ paying users of X care.

You should be genuinely embarrassed at your brain dead and stupid reply.

We can only have intelligent discussion here if you're willing to. Dismissing the conversation so severely suggests you're a liar, propagandist, demon, and/or retard (possibly, all of the above) acting in bad faith.

The onus is on you to demonstrate the ad hominem fallacy here, not me. If you can't even imagine a world where the owner of X cares, you're so disconnected from reality that derision the only means of bring you back down to Earth. The bar cannot be any lower.

I can see why the elite view people like you as slaves.

hahaha! That's the most brainwashed gibberish I have read in HN forever, congratulations! You are ready for your neuralink chip.

The site was seriously broken for a long time. And that attracted all kinds of bots, and 'List of 10 Machiavellian things to learn' kind of bots, not to forgot all sorts of other evil bots.

For a long time, the search and trending section was broken. Many times you could not hear anything in a space, empty tweets would show up, tweets would come up with Unix timestamp and therefore sorting was broken. Site would be down a lot of times. Even till date you don't see an ad for a thing you want to buy.

Perhaps the biggest damage is there seems to a significant increase in toxicity platform wide.

>>They have released ton's more features including AI - grok

Compared to most AI products out there, you can't even try their AI product and see if you want to buy subscription.

>>In tech companies, it's not just about headcount, one needs a strong leader to drive company towards greater success like Elon.

Note, code and features are not all there is to a business. Its only natural for us developers to assume the world revolves around us. The reality is actually very different. You need lots of other people to keep a company running.

At this rate Mr Musk won't see return on his investments anytime soon.

This is a rod Samsung has made for their own back though. Fewer SKU's, and more shared parts between models would be better for consumers and for the planet.