The best Hacker News stories from All from the past day
Latest posts:
Update on Hiring Plans
CNN cutting back on over-hyping everything as “breaking news”
How fast are Linux pipes anyway?
Google cancelled a talk on caste bias
Tell HN: I'm Afraid We're Shutting Down
So it’s with deep professional and personal sadness that I must announce my plans to shut down 70 Million Resources, Inc., the parent company of 70 Million Jobs (the 1st national, for-profit employment platform for people with criminal records) and Commissary Club (the first mobile social network for this population).<p>When I launched 70MR in 2016, I was motivated to build a company that could short circuit the pernicious cycles of recidivism in this country--cycles that destroy lives, tear apart families and decimate communities. I sought to disrupt the sleepy reentry industry by applying technology, focusing on data, employing an aggressive, accountable team, and moving with some urgency. And for the first time, approaching the challenge as a national, for-profit venture.<p>This approach, which I named “RaaS,” (Reentry as a Service), turned out to be wildly effective, and by the beginning of 2020, we were delivering on our mission of driving “double bottom line returns”: build a big, successful business and do massive social good. With the help of Y Combinator and nearly 1,500 investors, I assembled a team and got to work.<p>We succeeded in facilitating employment for thousands of deserving men and women and became operationally profitable.<p>However, the pandemic had other plans for us. When it hit in force in March 2020, companies made wholesale terminations of nearly all our people, and continued their halt in hiring for two years.<p>Our revenue dropped like a rock to almost nothing. I immediately responded by paring our expenses to the bone and began letting team members go. There was no opportunity to raise additional funding, so I began injecting my own money into the company—money I barely have—just to keep the lights on.<p>When the economy and job market began storming back, we were inundated with inbound requests for our services. Our perseverance seemed to be paying off. Except now we were hit with a new gut punch: “The Great Resignation.” Now our workers were reticent to come back to work. And if they did accept a job, they’d often leave after only a few days.<p>It became obvious that we lacked the resources to weather this new storm while hoping and praying the world would normalize soon. (It still hasn’t.)<p>Our coffers are empty. We’ve incurred a relatively small amount of debt (that I personally guaranteed) that I hope to negotiate down. All employees have been paid what they were owed (except for me). I will explore sale of assets we hold.<p>On a personal note, I can’t tell you how grateful and humbled I’ve been that many would entrust their investment or business with me. For a person who’s done time in prison (me), it’s almost impossible to ask for someone’s trust. I have not yet forgiven myself for things I did which ultimately got me into trouble. But I will be eternally grateful to those that assisted me in my efforts to settle the score and win back my karma.<p>From the beginning I was blessed by an unbelievable team of smart, funny, passionate young people who shared my ambition to cause change. They stuck with me/us until the very end.<p>I’m most saddened by the millions of formerly incarcerated men and women who we won’t be able to help. These are some of the most sincere, honest, and heroic people I’ve ever met. It was my life’s honor to work with them.<p>I’m pretty sure I’ll continue my reentry work. Several prominent organizations have indicated their interests in me assuming a leadership role. I need to work, and I need to continue my work.<p>I’m so sorry for this outcome, despite the good we’ve done. I’m not sure we could have done anything differently or better, but ultimately, I take full responsibility. Needless to say, if you have any thoughts or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out, here or at Richard@70MillionJobs.com.<p>This has been the greatest experience of my life; it couldn’t have happened without my getting a second chance.<p>Richard
Tell HN: I'm Afraid We're Shutting Down
So it’s with deep professional and personal sadness that I must announce my plans to shut down 70 Million Resources, Inc., the parent company of 70 Million Jobs (the 1st national, for-profit employment platform for people with criminal records) and Commissary Club (the first mobile social network for this population).<p>When I launched 70MR in 2016, I was motivated to build a company that could short circuit the pernicious cycles of recidivism in this country--cycles that destroy lives, tear apart families and decimate communities. I sought to disrupt the sleepy reentry industry by applying technology, focusing on data, employing an aggressive, accountable team, and moving with some urgency. And for the first time, approaching the challenge as a national, for-profit venture.<p>This approach, which I named “RaaS,” (Reentry as a Service), turned out to be wildly effective, and by the beginning of 2020, we were delivering on our mission of driving “double bottom line returns”: build a big, successful business and do massive social good. With the help of Y Combinator and nearly 1,500 investors, I assembled a team and got to work.<p>We succeeded in facilitating employment for thousands of deserving men and women and became operationally profitable.<p>However, the pandemic had other plans for us. When it hit in force in March 2020, companies made wholesale terminations of nearly all our people, and continued their halt in hiring for two years.<p>Our revenue dropped like a rock to almost nothing. I immediately responded by paring our expenses to the bone and began letting team members go. There was no opportunity to raise additional funding, so I began injecting my own money into the company—money I barely have—just to keep the lights on.<p>When the economy and job market began storming back, we were inundated with inbound requests for our services. Our perseverance seemed to be paying off. Except now we were hit with a new gut punch: “The Great Resignation.” Now our workers were reticent to come back to work. And if they did accept a job, they’d often leave after only a few days.<p>It became obvious that we lacked the resources to weather this new storm while hoping and praying the world would normalize soon. (It still hasn’t.)<p>Our coffers are empty. We’ve incurred a relatively small amount of debt (that I personally guaranteed) that I hope to negotiate down. All employees have been paid what they were owed (except for me). I will explore sale of assets we hold.<p>On a personal note, I can’t tell you how grateful and humbled I’ve been that many would entrust their investment or business with me. For a person who’s done time in prison (me), it’s almost impossible to ask for someone’s trust. I have not yet forgiven myself for things I did which ultimately got me into trouble. But I will be eternally grateful to those that assisted me in my efforts to settle the score and win back my karma.<p>From the beginning I was blessed by an unbelievable team of smart, funny, passionate young people who shared my ambition to cause change. They stuck with me/us until the very end.<p>I’m most saddened by the millions of formerly incarcerated men and women who we won’t be able to help. These are some of the most sincere, honest, and heroic people I’ve ever met. It was my life’s honor to work with them.<p>I’m pretty sure I’ll continue my reentry work. Several prominent organizations have indicated their interests in me assuming a leadership role. I need to work, and I need to continue my work.<p>I’m so sorry for this outcome, despite the good we’ve done. I’m not sure we could have done anything differently or better, but ultimately, I take full responsibility. Needless to say, if you have any thoughts or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out, here or at Richard@70MillionJobs.com.<p>This has been the greatest experience of my life; it couldn’t have happened without my getting a second chance.<p>Richard
The US “labor shortage” is just a wage shortage (2021)
I got hacked and Facebook banned me
Ffmpeg Buddy
Ffmpeg Buddy
Ask HN: If Kubernetes is the solution, why are there so many DevOps jobs?
Arguable the goals of DevOps align partly with the goals of system administrators in former days: Provide reliable compute infrastructure for<p><pre><code> 1) internal users: mainly developers by providing CI/CD
2) external users: end users
</code></pre>
Nowadays we call people that do 1) DevOps and people that do 2) SREs (so one could argue that the role of sys admins just got more specialized).<p>The platform of choice is mostly Kubernetes these days, which promises among other things stuff like<p><pre><code> - load balancing
- self-healing
- rollbacks/rollouts
- config management
</code></pre>
Before the cloud days, this stuff has been implemented using a conglomerate of different software and shell scripts, issued at dedicated "pet" servers.<p>In particular, a main critic is "state" and the possibility to change that state by e.g. messing with config files via SSH, which makes running and maintaining these servers more error-prone.<p>However, my main question is:<p>"If this old way of doing things is so error-prone, and it's easier to use declarative solutions like Kubernetes, why does the solution seem to need sooo much work that the role of DevOps seems to dominate IT related job boards? Shouldn't Kubernetes <i>reduce</i> the workload and need <i>less</i> men power?"<p>Don't get me wrong, the old way does indeed look messy, I am just wondering why there is a need for so much dev ops nowadays ...<p>Thanks for your answers.
Science needs more research software engineers
Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2022)
Please state the location and include REMOTE, INTERNS and/or VISA
when that sort of candidate is welcome. When remote work is <i>not</i> an option,
include ONSITE.<p>Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no
recruiting firms or job boards. Only one post per company. If it isn't a household name,
please explain what your company does.<p>Commenters: please don't reply to job posts to complain about
something. It's off topic here.<p>Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job.<p>Searchers: try <a href="https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/" rel="nofollow">https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/</a>,
<a href="https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com" rel="nofollow">https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com</a>, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519</a>.<p>Don't miss these other fine threads:<p><i>Who wants to be hired?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582793" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582793</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582795" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582795</a><p>---<p>Edit: YC is hosting a job expo on June 6. If you might be interested in working at a YC-funded startup and would like to talk to founders who are hiring, check out <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584034" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584034</a> and <a href="https://www.workatastartup.com/events/startup-tech-expo-summer-2022" rel="nofollow">https://www.workatastartup.com/events/startup-tech-expo-summ...</a>.
Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2022)
Please state the location and include REMOTE, INTERNS and/or VISA
when that sort of candidate is welcome. When remote work is <i>not</i> an option,
include ONSITE.<p>Please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no
recruiting firms or job boards. Only one post per company. If it isn't a household name,
please explain what your company does.<p>Commenters: please don't reply to job posts to complain about
something. It's off topic here.<p>Readers: please only email if you are personally interested in the job.<p>Searchers: try <a href="https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/" rel="nofollow">https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/</a>,
<a href="https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com" rel="nofollow">https://hnjobs.emilburzo.com</a>, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519</a>.<p>Don't miss these other fine threads:<p><i>Who wants to be hired?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582793" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582793</a><p><i>Freelancer? Seeking freelancer?</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582795" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31582795</a><p>---<p>Edit: YC is hosting a job expo on June 6. If you might be interested in working at a YC-funded startup and would like to talk to founders who are hiring, check out <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584034" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31584034</a> and <a href="https://www.workatastartup.com/events/startup-tech-expo-summer-2022" rel="nofollow">https://www.workatastartup.com/events/startup-tech-expo-summ...</a>.
Tim Hortons app violated laws in collection of ‘vast amounts’ of location data
Tim Hortons app violated laws in collection of ‘vast amounts’ of location data
Sheryl Sandberg stepping down as Facebook COO
Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released
I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story.<p>More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort.<p>Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam: <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1594320/Captain_of_Industry/" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/app/1594320/Captain_of_Indust...</a><p>I am still not sure if this was a good decision financially, but unlike in a corporate environment, I am so much happier working on a product that I can put my love into and see people enjoy it, see my direct impact, and be able to make big decisions (although this also adds a lot of stress).<p>I also quite enjoy the added SWE challenges. I had to write so many complex algorithms (path-finding, logistics, serialization, ...) and optimize things down to bits (shaders, compression of in-memory data, ...) that were rarely required by my corp job.<p>Anyhow, this is getting a little long, feel free to ask any questions, I will do my best to answer them.
Show HN: A friend and I spent 6 years making a simulation game, finally released
I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story.<p>More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort.<p>Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam: <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1594320/Captain_of_Industry/" rel="nofollow">https://store.steampowered.com/app/1594320/Captain_of_Indust...</a><p>I am still not sure if this was a good decision financially, but unlike in a corporate environment, I am so much happier working on a product that I can put my love into and see people enjoy it, see my direct impact, and be able to make big decisions (although this also adds a lot of stress).<p>I also quite enjoy the added SWE challenges. I had to write so many complex algorithms (path-finding, logistics, serialization, ...) and optimize things down to bits (shaders, compression of in-memory data, ...) that were rarely required by my corp job.<p>Anyhow, this is getting a little long, feel free to ask any questions, I will do my best to answer them.
Asking robots to design stained glass windows