Hacker News Reader

shmatton Discord is laying off 17 percent of employees

>We grew quickly and expanded our workforce even faster, increasing by 5x since 2020

Am i reading this right? Once the pandemic hit headcount went 200 -> 1000 -> 830

What is different in the user experience since 2020? I can understand needing an army of SRE's but this feels extremely bloated for a company who was able to run their product on a 200 person crew

shmatton Discord is laying off 17 percent of employees

Discord isn't profitable

shmatton Israeli group claims it’s using back channels to censor “inflammatory” content

I thought this was common knowledge?

I often see posts in technical groups im in from people asking for help re-opening their hacked instagram or facebook accounts. Apparently there is an internal-only form for Meta employees to speed up the process for friends/family

shmatton 23andMe tells victims it's their fault that their data was breached

Is there OpSec better than my local doctor or hospital? I feel like I hear about ransomware attacks on hospitals every week.

My DNA was also scanned[1] and saved by a hospital before having my first child - as most people with my heritage do. So thats 3 times in my life I did genetic testing. Which one is more prone to be hacked - Mount Sinai, LabCorp, 23andme? Who knows

[1] https://womenshealth.labcorp.com/providers/carrier-screening...

shmatton 23andMe tells victims it's their fault that their data was breached

It cost me about $99 to get my DNA mapped by them a decade ago. I used a 3rd party service to sync my results with SNPedia which returned a pretty cool report, at the top of the report was a very dangerous gene I was the first in my family to discover, and has since saved lives. 23andme added that gene to their reports at least 5 years if not more later

My doctor scoffed at 23andme finding a dangerous genetic mutation and said its probably just a false positive. I had to spend $500 to get a single gene tested in a hospital, still came out positive.

So bang for your buck that $99 was a great deal for a full mapping, it feels like most of their issue is what the government allows them to show. Im pretty sure that SNPedia syncer isn't online anymore, but that was what made 23andme a great service for me

shmatton Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

Bolt can't fast charge, at some point we need to look beyond the single family home consumer

shmatton Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

EVs aren't cheap either, in 2 years one will get better battery tech and a new connector, plus whatever deprecation the battery will go through if you buy one today. 2023-4 and earlier EVs will lose a huge chunk of their worth once NACS cars with better than 200 mile range become available

The value of my leased Volvo C40 has already fallen off a cliff and is less than my residual value. Once my lease is over there will be an NACS EX-30 that will be cheaper brand new, than what Volvo are charging for me to keep my old connector used battery car

shmatton OpenAI Is in Talks to Raise New Funding at Valuation of $100B or More

Its much better trying to appease 15 VCs than the entire trading world. Literally anyone rich enough can create a meaningful stake in your company and start disparaging you in public if they wanted to. Im sure there would be an army of short sellers lined up the moment OpenAI IPO'd in its current state

In the current state no one has financial interest in spreading negative news about them

shmatton US agency will not reinstate $900M subsidy for Starlink

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Abandoned_military_pr...

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

F35 Survived but there are like 50 other planes that didnt in that second list

shmatton Tesla Recalls 2M Cars to Fix Autopilot Safety Flaws

(White) Teslas are just more common, but EV acceleration is dangerous in the wrong hands. My family friendly electric Volvo CUV does 0-60 as fast as a Porsche 911. The EX-30 is going to be about 25% faster. Mass adoption is going to be pretty scary

shmatton Beeper Mini is back

Every consumer facing tech company with a paid product (physical or digital) I've worked at had Android as <10% of conversions. This includes just retail browsing from their phone shopping. Android users make no one money

Unless they're trying to join iOS group messages I guess

shmatton The pro-Israel information war

Iraq never attacked anyone. A better comparison is the war in Afghanistan.

If we compare # of people in each country. 10/07 for Israel was like 15 9/11s (this is a quote from a President Biden speech).

So not only is it worth asking - how many Americans didnt want to fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. But how many would be against some sort of war like that, if tomorrow morning they woke up to a 9/11 sized attack in 15 of the biggest US cities, happening at the same time

Not only did the US go far from home to destroy Afghanistan, but the whole world joined them to do it together

shmatton DoorDash raises minimum pay to $29.93 per hour in NYC

While true this would lead to thousands of people being online without demand. If one really wants their food in 45 minutes, or an uber driver always 3 minutes away, they need a lot of people doing nothing staring at their screens for long periods of time

Capping the # of people online would cause tons of other issues, its very easy to exploit a system like that, plus it would slow everyone down

Either we want people to do things for us, want it super fast, and want to pay everyone for every second of their time. Can't have all of these without hiring a personal driver working just for you full time

shmatton AI and the Rise of Mediocrity

Top 10 summer movies 1982-1989 - 25% are sequels. In the 2010's that ticked to over 50%[1]

This is way beyond AI. Culture just repeats itself, from movies to fashion to music. In case anyone was wondering - in the never ending loop between oversized baggy jeans and skinny jeans, we are right at the very end of the baggy era, looping back to skinny in a year or 2

So is this article complaining that instead of looping between baggy and skinny we should all be wearing silver spandex space suits? I guess thats true, but also Im good with just jeans personally

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/24/business/medi...

shmatton We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

He’s a white male replacing a female board member. Which is probably what they wanted all along

shmatton To the Board of Directors of OpenAI from former employees

> OpenAI's employee attrition rate between January 2018 and July 2020 was in the order of 50%.

and

> Those who questioned this practice were dismissed as "bad culture fits" and even terminated, some just before Thanksgiving 2019.

Would be pretty easy to verify, and could be concerning (mostly the 50% part)

shmatton Satya Nadella: "We have all the rights and all the capability."

crushes? sarcasm? Free Vicuna is 90% as good as the 100 Billion Dollar company made one. This makes my point.

And between Vicuna and GPT4-Turbo There are the Claude Models and WizardML. This is as even playing field as i've ever seen for the tech world.

When a $100B company gets to 2000, and the rest stay behind, thats when we know the tech has changed. Thats what OpenAI was hiring for. Not for anything they already gave Microsoft access to

If Microsoft wanted to get to 1100, they could do that with 50 smart hires from across the industry and universities. They don't need Sams teams $1M salaries for that

shmatton Satya Nadella: "We have all the rights and all the capability."

Well, I did say they are willing to burn money more than others - making their commercial availability better. Better yet ask yourself - will hollowed out Open AI and/or Satya be willing to lose money on every API call? Are you willing to pay the full cost of running GPT-4?

Google et al have gambled the answer for most API consumers is no

shmatton Satya Nadella: "We have all the rights and all the capability."

OpenAI won the current state of the adoption war because they focused on commercial availability and being willing to lose money on every API call more than others. There is no groundbreaking tech behind it.

>Microsoft take the code, model weights, everything of ChatGPT 4, and just continue developing it and produce a new MS-ChatGPT based on it?

They don't need Sam to do that, or his employees. With the current state of LLMs they can hire a few dozen people with some experience and that wouldn't be the hard part.

In my mind the aggressive poaching OpenAI has been doing with Meta and Google is because they have nothing special. If they did they wouldn't need to grow to 800 headcount and still hiring. They're anticipating some company will have the next breakthrough, and they wanted every important brain on their side

Having the weights to another transformer based LLM is great, but its not going to change humanity. The only thing I saw this weekend was a bunch of entrepreneurs who's new startup is 100% dependent on the GPT-4 API freaking out. Thats not ground breaking

shmatton If needed, you have a role at Microsoft that matches your compensation

Remember all those Apple and Amazon employees who signed a letter that they're not going back to the office? Last I heard Apple was at 100% compliance

Make no mistake, if Microsoft is matching $10M PPU's with $10M Microsoft RSUs vesting over 4 years, every single employee will join. But I kind of doubt that this is their plan

shmatton If needed, you have a role at Microsoft that matches your compensation

0% raise and lower bonus pool in 2023 for Satyas engineers

then the $1M-$2M/year OpenAI folks who never built a profitable product enter the building

shmatton Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

This makes the most sense, people would actually get paid for their PIU's. Im confident otherwise they are going to cry looking at what a level 63 data scientist makes at MS

shmatton Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

truly a Win-Win-Win-Win-Win situation for MSFT

shmatton Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

There was so little drama around Continua and Mistral AI - which had actual researches and not product managers create a new company

shmatton Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

A few things come to mind:

* Emmett Shear should have put in a strong golden parachute in his contract, easy money if so

* Yesterday we had Satya the genius forcing the board to quit. This morning it was Satya the genius who acquired OpenAI for $0. Im sure there will be more if sama goes back. So if sama goes back - lets hear it, why is Satya a genius?

shmatton OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend

Im far from a Musk fan but Xitter is still online

Big difference between how do we develop GPT-5 and can we keep our current model online

shmatton Microsoft Swallows OpenAI's Core Team – GPU Capacity, Incentives, IP

People are haluscinating that this could go through easily in a $3T mega corp. Level 68 at MS makes about $700k TC, and is equivalent in level to a Google L8. You think they're just going to bring in hundreds of people all at L10 or something, thats not how any of this works. Any ex OpenAI engineers will soon learn

shmatton OpenAI's chaos does not add up

AGI will be created by engineers and researchers. Don’t worry about millionaire non technical CEOs

Even in the most positive posts about Sam, it was about the researchers following him to NewCo, following him to Microsoft. He needs the actual workers to do the job.

To me Mistral is 10000x more interesting than the OpenAI drama. Here are the actual researchers leaving the non technical CEO and starting their own company

shmatton OpenAI's misalignment and Microsoft's gain

I’m referring to Satyas email from May saying there will be no raises and the bonus pool will be significantly reduced

That’s fine for corporate employees, but OAI employees were promised mountains of money to leave Google/Meta, they might not be as happy

shmatton OpenAI's misalignment and Microsoft's gain

Im referencing large PPU grants in OpenAI offers, with 4 year vests, they sure made it feel like regular employees are being given a chance to join now and be millionaires via theirs PPUs

If this was never true, that’s on the OpenAI team that misled their engineers

https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-recruiters-luring-goo...

Their job postings even specifically mention “generous equity” - again if there is no equity in the contract - that’s OpenAI misleading its recruits

https://openai.com/careers/research-engineer-superalignment