simplotek

> Shouldn't come as a shock that sometimes it work the other way.

Isn’t “the other way” the norm on all US companies?

What “the same industry” taught its professionals is that loyalty should not be a one-way deal when corporate dictates that every person can and should be automatically discarded at the drop of a hat, and benefitting from a demand-driven job market is shown to be the only option that employees have to safeguard their livelihood.

I’ve lost count of the number of LinkedIn posts of veterans with >10years in FANGs being summarily fired during the night and only finding out because their access was revoked. This is exactly why people proactively switch jobs. This is the consequence, not the cause. Using these cases to justify labour abuses is victim-blaming.

> (…) better than Tesseract

Isn’t Tesseract also neural network-based?

https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract

> That's what I'm worried about and that's why I'm calling BS on this.

Didn't Microsoft execs put on a lavish party in the eve of announcing firing thousands without notice?

> Lot of people sounding very personally slighted by companies trying to remain profitable (or just in business).

Do you really need to make an effort to figure out why employees feel slighted for being fired without notice, and specially by an employer whose profitability is not questioned?

You made it sound like only unreasonable people would be bothered by being forced out of a job while having rent/mortgage and bills to pay.

> It’s notably better than traditional approaches which were optimized for business documents.

I'm not sure I agree, primarily because "better" is subjective.

A pipeline with template matching is extremely effective at extracting fixed form text in a standard layout, such as telephone numbers or credit cards, and computationally cheap as well.

But I presume a drop-in black box model which isn't bound to a low computational budget, can output plenty of false negatives and false positives, and can run on a single pipeline might be preferable at least from a product management point of view.

Also, neural networks looks good on resume while template matching doesn't. Just like statician/image analyst looks lukewarm but AI engineer looks superb.

> Apple's AI is on your phone. It unobtrusive. Recently I needed to quickly find a company's QR code which I had photographed and Photos search found it in an instance.

I believe the iPhone automatically classifies photos based on who or what show up in them. Users can contribute to train classifiers, but the iPhone already works out of the box.

The iPhone also creates theme-based photo albums from the photos you took. I recall it creating Christmas photo books, photo books featuring a pair of people, persons and pets, etc.

This might be low-key AI, but it's the useful kind.

> It even finds text inside images.

I'm not sure OCR counts as AI. But yeah, the iPhone indeed does that too. We can take a photo of a telephone number or even a credit card and automatically fill in those numbers.

I worked on a similar feature in the past for an unrelated project, but that was not AI though. Marketing changes though.

> In all honesty, 100 people is not a big number, you need people like accountants, lawyers, office staff and so on

I expect the bulk of those positions to be people trying to get someone else to buy the products/services they're selling.

In the end, it might really be just 10 guys doing the actual coding.

"I take full responsibility" sounds more and more like "your sacrifice is a risk I'm willing to make".

> There are potentially massive improvements in productivity in the pipeline (ChatGPT/Lambda/Copilot), which might reduce headcount requirements.

I’m not sure this hypothesis makes any sense. The bulk of all development work is fixing bugs and adding features to existing code, and in the process refactor code. How would automatic code generators help in that?

> They are not better than modules.

They are. You don't control your runtime environment with modules, nor your deployment. You create problems due to the need to manage releases and deployments. You can break everyone's work if you make a mistake, which worsens the problem. You are unable to pick and choose what technologies you use. Etc etc etc.

With a service, you just tell everyone where it is and what's the interface, and leave it to everyone else to work around that.

> I have not talked to anyone before (...) who claimed that the operational story of microservices was "basic" or "trivial".

You somehow failed to read what I actually said, and proceeded to go off on a non-sequitur.

I repeat what I said: it is trivial to launch and shutdown multiple services in a local software dev environment. It's trivial with Docker, it's trivial with minikube, it's trivial with microk8s, etc. It is a solved problem. Why is anyone trying to pretend that this is impossible?

Enough excuses and scapegoats.

> Except I never said anything like that.

Except you did. You tried to claim that the small teams you were involved failed to setup working software environment because reasons, and that was the reason why you also failed. Bad form. You own your work.

> I'm not going to join an organisation and tell them "you're all doing it wrong!" in my first week.

Bullshit. It makes zero sense to forego setting up a working dev environment as the very first onboarding task, and excuses like "being able to debug would make team members pissed" is absurd. Either you can do your job or you can't, and throwing your team members under the bus like this is bad form.

> they over hired during the pandemic thinking the growth would not stop.

I have to call bullshit on this scapegoat.

We're seeing FANGs killing projects that started way before the pandemic, without providing any clear rationale.

At most there's this vague excuse that the company decided to scale down investments, but internally we're seeing entire teams being written down and everyone fired without any notice, from managers to engineers.

> They just hired loads of people to do jobs that they now realise don’t need to be done.

I'm not sure you got the point.

It's sop to start and stop projects, hire and fire people, invest and cut, etc.

But this event is a concerted effort to fire a massive amount of people without criteria or rationale that's immediately evident.

FANGs just woke up one day and decided that they would decimate their companies.

The article refers explicitly to "legacy datacenters ill equipped to handle new, higher wattage systems".

I'm not convinced this article makes a good case. It sounds like it's complaining that old data centers need to invest in their infrastructure.

> What problem are you solving with microservices?

As I've already said in this thread, microservices solve primarily organizational problems. They define concrete organizational barriers and limit discussions with stakeholders on issues pertaining to service contracts, and ensure that service owners have complete freedom, responsibility, and clear accountability, on all aspects of their design, maintenance, and operation.

Scalability is a welcomed benefit but lower in importance, below reliability and perceived performance.

Any other discussion on microservices boil down to strawmen.

In a service I manage I have distributed tracing in place, as well as centralized logging.

I also have sandbox deployments in place that individual developers can take over and deploy the services they're working on to be able to test them in an environment that is very similar to the prod environment.

I also have in place a few Docker compose scripts for specific services that deploy a combination of dependencies, either the service itself or stubbed services.

For function-as-a-service code, I have special local-only, pre-beta deployment stages that fake clients.

> "A" solution does not mean the only solution or the best solution. They're often treated as the only solution though.

They are often, and by far, the best solution though, specially taking into account the tradeoffs of whatever alternative you come up with.

Specially massive monoliths in a monorepo.

It makes no sense to mindlessly crap on operating services, specially when compared with alternatives. I get that some people feel the need to vent their personal frustrations, but this does not mean they have a point.

> It's not "on me"; I joined long after all of this was set up.

Except it is. It's bad form to go down the "everyone else sucks and I'm flawless" path that plagues software development circles. You work on the project, and it's on you to get it in working order. Setting up a basic local software dev environment is step #0. Just because your predecessors failed to set one up that does not mean you're not to blame for failing exactly like your predecessors failed, except your predecessors didn't tried to throw you under the bus.

Also, it is a collosal red herring to talk about dozens of services. You can and should fake services you consume to isolate the services you actually work on. It's also bullshit to pretend that nowadays there is no way to launch and shutdown dozen of services in one go. It's trivial to launch them locally with multiple technologies to choose from and trivial to setup cloud environments for development purposes. These are all lame excuses, and one that illustrates problems caused by the developer's inability to go through the very basics.

> The worst part is that these "fake team microservices" tend to have a barely working or even a non-working development environment.

That's far from my experience. In all the projects I worked with that involved services, the very first thing that was setup was a working local test environment and at least a non-prod stage. With tools like Docker compose and any of the myriad local kubernetes clusters this is outright trivial.

If your team failed to setup a dev environment, that problem is on you, not on a type of software architecture.

Once I worked on a legacy desktop application project that didn't even had debug builds. Would it be fair to pin this failing on how awful desktop apps are?

> Exactly, microservices make things unnecessarily complex and are often just a poor way for a team to avoid implementing design patterns, namespacing in a codebase.

This is simply not true. Microservices are a solution primarily to an organizational problem and secondarily to the problem of allocating and managing computational resources. The organizational problem is solved by the hard boundaries and loose coupling imposed by operating and consuming independent services. Allowing a team to own and operate their services allows them to have more control over all aspects of a their life cycle, reducing the scope of other stakeholders to what contract their interfaces need to comply with.

Those who naively shit on microservices seem to be totally oblivious to what it would be like if all we had were monoliths. We tried that already. It's awful, and we learned from that mistake. Well, some of us did.

> American bubble. US people don’t realise the world runs on Android.

It's not even an American bubble. Some sources show that the iPhine market share in the US is only slightly above 50%.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/north-amer...

> It does not follow that it leads to greater disposable income.

It wasn't supposed to. It was suppose to point out a concrete example of how stronger worker protection leads to being paid fairly for the work you do, while US workers are not.

Meanwhile, feel free to check how any FANG salary for software engineers in places like Seattle compares with the cost of living, and how the salaries for equivalent positions in European cities like Amsterdam, which also has a notoriously high real estate, lead to higher disposable income.

> This is an uncharitable take. The ability to fire at-will is the reason companies in the US are able to hire and pay as high as they do.

I feel there is no rational basis for this belief, and it's mostly guided by wishful thinking to fool yourself into believing that all this penance leads to some kind of salvation.

It doesn't.

There are highly paid professionals in other countries who benefit from higher worke protection laws and even public services like working national health services and free education. Virtually all European countries ensure greater workers protection and half have a higher human development index than the US, and FANG salaries in Europe often lead to far greater disposable income. Heck, I personally know a FANG who was forced to pay overtime for oncalls in europe while US workers only get the pager app and the shaft.

Also, being subjected to abuse is not a requirement for mobility. Mobility only requires that you can quit your job and apply for other positions. There is no piece in the equation that requires abusive revolving door hiring practices.

People should shed their victim mentality and stop fooling themselves on how the path to riches is through suffering. It isn't. Basic human decency doesn't need to be thrown out of the window. That's only a requirement to screw over workers out of their rights and livelihood.

> Why would they spend any amount much less $3b or $10b to keep people they don’t need/want?

I understand that HN is a US-centric forum, where neoliberalism dictates the baseline and the interpretation of all things in life is reduced to a simplistic transaction in a theoretical free market.

However, society is comprised of people with family and a personal life and hopes and dreams and aspirations. Hiring someone has a profound impact on their life, and firing them moreso. There's the income aspect, but also the impact it has on where a person can live and consequently all roots their family have in a community. Hiring a person entails a tremendous social responsibility, and moreso firing them. Microsoft has a hefty amount of immigrants from all corners of the world, and some who have visas that limit the odds they can stay even in the country, let alone their community.

It's deplorable how a company can toy with someone's life like that just because some exec feels like it.

> On the other hand, maybe there should be pushback against shitty inefficient software?

How would that work? You whine on an online forum over how bloated a software is, and in the process opt to be deprived of it's usage? Or would you continue to complain about bloated software while using it? Because none of those scenarios offer a compelling reason for the software maintainers to rearchitect their whole application.

Meanwhile, a 8GB stick of RAM can be bought for what? 40€?

Does anyone know if Mac Minis integrate with Xcode to perform distributed builds? It would be superb if a small software team could expense half a dozen Mac Minis to handle the team's build jobs.

Discussion on the official release.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34412671

> The fact that the standards committee simply chose to just add every feature every other language has.

Again, this take is outright wrong and totally clueless. I mean, the summary of each change introduced by any of the C++ standards is freely available. C++20's most compelling features beyond concepts and modules were small improvements over existing features like lambda captures and template resolutions, or new atributes.

What compells you to make such nonsensical claims?

Interesting read. I was looking for a thorough review of parsing algorithms for a while, and this article scratches that itch. Really nice.

> To me, it’s just another of saying “the more life experience I gain…”.

I believe that if you never were in a position where your job was a soul-crushig source of misery and despair, you've been lucky to live a sheltered life.

Most people don't have the privilege of picking and choosing outstanding jobs with decent work/life balance, nice colleagues, reasonable deadlines and considerate stakeholders. Most people have rent/mortgage to pay, kids to feed, and unfavourable odds of improving their life with low risk and impact on your life. I'm sure they gained a lot of life experience too.