Twitter announces layoffs - <AUTHOR> https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000156459015008360/twtr-ex991_6.htm <comment><USER2> > Emails like this are usually riddled with corporate speak so I'm going to > give it to you straight.

I tried rewriting his email to live up to this promise:

\- - -

Team,

We're cutting our workforce to strengthen Twitter as a company.

The team has been deciding how to best streamline Twitter, Vine, and Periscope to put their focus on the projects which will have the greatest impact. Moments, which we launched last week, is a great beginning. It's a peek into the future of how people will see what's going on in the world.

We plan to cut up to 336 people. This was a tough decision, and we'll offer each person a generous exit package and help finding a new job. Product and Engineering are going to make the most changes. Engineering will be smaller but remain the biggest percentage of the organization, and other departments will be cut in parallel.

This isn't easy. We'll honor those who we're losing with our service to all the people who use Twitter. We'll do it with a more purpose-built team. Thank you all for your trust and understanding here. As always, please reach out to me directly with any ideas or questions.

Jack

<comment><USER3> Everyone should take note of this person's excellent structure: he put the decision first.

If you are writing a decisive message that can greatly impact many people's lives: write the decision first.

Don't "sandwich" the truth. Sandwiching only makes sense when the decision or the mistake is not of huge significance. Beating around the bush in matters of great import will always harm the sincerity of your words.

After you've stated clearly what the decision is, right after that, you can justify it however you wish.

<comment><USER4> > Everyone should take note of this person's excellent structure: he put the > decision first.

Going by my twitter feed, they _implemented_ the decision first, with people discovering they were locked out of their twitter accounts and RAS before the announcement was made.

<comment><USER5> It's a hard problem to solve, but given that many of the folks being dismissed are engineers with elevated access to Twitter's data and services, it makes sense from a security and privacy perspective to disable access first. There's no good way to lay off 300 people at once. Hopefully Twitter actually follows through on the separation package and job search assistance. That's far more important.

<comment><USER6> Do former twitter engineers really need that much assistance in finding a new job? I'd assume people will be clawing at them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The world needs a strong Twitter

Really? Does it? I think Twitter needs a strong Twitter, shareholders need a strong Twitter even Twitter employees need it. However the world is, at best, ambivalent about Twitter, if it disappeared tomorrow a replacement would spring up within a few weeks if the world really needed a way to shotgun their messages into the ether.

<comment><USER8> A few automated trading algorithms would become marginally less effective. Some poorly written ones might crash or make a few million dollars worth of bad trades.

So, you know, there's that.

<comment><USER9> I don't know why the parent post is being downvoted: trading using Twitter sentiment analysis is apparently a thing [1][2].

[1] [http://www.deltixlab.com/research/an-automated-trading- strat...](http://www.deltixlab.com/research/an-automated-trading-strategy- using-twitter-sentiment.html)

[2] [http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2011/TrusheimChakoumakosYendlu...](http://cs229.stanford.edu/proj2011/TrusheimChakoumakosYendluri- Automated_Market_Sentiment_analysis_of_Twitter_for_Options_Trading.pdf)

Edit: typo

<comment><USER7> there have even been a few instances shown on HN where these algorithms picked stuff up from the internet and have run with it, i.e. placed real trades. I remember at least 2 instances of this recently, once where the story was fake and once where an earnings forecast(i think) was released on a site but they had not published the URL so the assumption was no one would see it. The bot made a significant sum on the second example.

<comment><USER10> Many stories are deliberately faked to push the sentiment bots. Its a murky world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The number, 336, is roughly 10% of their employees - which is pretty much exactly the number that Jack Welch recommended turning over each year to improve the work force.

I often wonder whether these "layoffs" aren't actually layoffs, but simply performance based assessments. It's not like Twitter is shutting down an entire office, or abandoning some technology, and letting everyone associated with that office/technology go - presumably they are being selective on other factors as to who they let go - and I'm guessing that performance is likely a key factor.

If, over the next year, twitter doesn't hire back that 10%, or hires employees in different technologies/positions (I.E. Web developers instead of thick client developers, sales people instead of developers, etc...) - then this is a layoff. But, if headcount returns to the same number, in roughly the same job areas, then this is just a performance based annual rank/yank process.

<comment><USER12> This. I never understood this mentality that all cuts are bad or evil or whatever. Funny, we never question when these companies go on a hiring spree. No one asks, "Do they need this many engineers? Will these people have jobs in two years?"

Restructures happen all the time, especially at dotcoms. If you work in this industry, then you can expect some level of volatility.

<comment><USER13> _No one asks, "Do they need this many engineers? Will these people have jobs in two years?"_

Clearly you're missing @Pinboard from your life.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "we plan to part ways with up to 336 people from across the company. We are doing this with the utmost respect for each and every person."

Bart might disagree:

[https://twitter.com/bartt/status/653946266938818561](https://twitter.com/bartt/status/653946266938818561)

<comment><USER14> Did you read his followup email? He said they called but he did not pick up.

Whenever you have a large layoff, it is fairly standard to lock accounts immediately.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. For security reasons, you have no other option, even if it's rude.

<comment><USER16> That's ok,

But the opposite should also be true. Don't scream 'disloyalty' when a employee wants to leave on a short notice.

<comment><USER17> There's likely a severance package, so pay will continue for a period (usually at least two weeks, often several weeks per year of seniority). Not that this blunts the message much.

And FWIW, I tend to agree with your comment regarding loyalty -- that ship sailed long ago, 1980s, possibly 1970s.

<comment><USER18> For the employees affected, the "generous exit packages" is all that matters. Do you know what I consider to be generous? 6 months of pay, no less. What did they probably get? 4 weeks. It's disgusting to see this kind of language in an email, when the employees are obviously being screwed beyond belief.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > _The roadmap is focused on the experiences which will have the greatest > impact. We launched the first of these experiences last week with Moments, a > great beginning, and a bold peek into the future of how people will see what > 's going on in the world._

That Moments is mentioned so high up in the email isn't particularly reassuring...since it means they haven't launched many other initiatives of note recently. Moments as a feature is extremely disappointing given the years of interesting discoveries that Twitter has yielded algorithmically via its, well, "Discover" tab. What's on Moments looks like a half-baked newspaper front page except when you click on an item, you go to tweets about that item instead of a full story.

I don't want to pile on the project as it is new...but it should've been given more thought and design time given how much prominence "Moments" has on the interface (it is one of four main icons on the menubar)...Nearly all of the stories are hours old...e.g. "Wave of terror attacks hits Jerusalem" and "Playboy covers up"..."FedEx truck splits in two", granted, is news to me...but not something that makes Twitter unique to me.

There's so much more potential in the Trends section...OK, maybe Twitter wants to filter out potentially visually NSFW topics like #NoBraDay...but things like #MH17 and #VMworld and #ILoveYouAboutAsMuchAs...just show me an automated feed of tweets by reputable sources (rather than spambots or random kids) so I can understand why these topics are suddenly trending without having to click through the trends tag and sort through a overwhelming timeline.

edit: that said, I like all the other products...besides core Twitter, Vine and Periscope are standouts (at least, as a consumer)...I just think that "Moments" isn't worth putting into the spotlight, unless there is literally nothing else to be proud of publicly.

<comment><USER20> > What's on Moments looks like a half-baked newspaper front page except when > you click on an item, you go to tweets about that item instead of a full > story.

How? When I click on it, it just peaks at the next picture.

Moments is a glorified image slider.

<comment><USER19> Hmm...on closer inspection, clicking on a Moments item does not seem to bring up a timeline of "Top" tweets (as it does when you click on or search for a "Trending" topic)...it seems to bring up a human-curated list of tweets.

Here is the "moment" for "Wave of terror attacks hits Jerusalem"...there's only about 10 tweets there:

[https://twitter.com/i/moments/653855067158614017](https://twitter.com/i/moments/653855067158614017)

And here's a Twitter search for "terror attacks jerusalem"

[https://twitter.com/search?q=terror%20attacks%20jerusalem&sr...](https://twitter.com/search?q=terror%20attacks%20jerusalem&src=typd)

Though Fox News may not be everyone's choice of top news source, scrolling down, you'll see a great variety of tweets...maybe not as efficiently informative as the curated tweets, but I'm sure a hell of a lot more expansive and scalable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Emails like this are usually riddled with corporate speak so I'm going to > give it to you straight.

Well, since you said it that way, I should assume that what comes next will not sound like a steamy pile of meandering corporate speak, right?

> The team has been working around the clock to produce streamlined roadmap > for Twitter, Vine, and Periscope and they are shaping up to be strong. The > roadmap is focused on the experiences which will have the greatest impact.

A roadmap focused on high-impact experiences. Got it. I hope your firings go really well, Bob.

<comment><USER14> He said he would give it to you straight, not ELI5. They are focusing on fewer things that they believe are the most valuable, and stopping stuff that isn't core to their purpose. What about this is confusing to you?

<comment><USER21> What you said is as near the definition of "giving it straight" as one might expect to follow his preface. What he actually said is as near the definition of corporate speak as possible. There is no confusion on my part. Perhaps Jack is the one confused about what people mean by "corporate speak".

<comment><USER22> how would you have phrased it?

<comment><USER23> "We're laying off up to 336 people, with the biggest impact to Product and Engineering. We'll be providing generous exit packages and helping find new jobs. Sorry. It's our fuckup, not yours."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "The world needs a strong Twitter, and this is another step to get there."

Let's not get carried away here. Twitter is great. I use it too much of the day. But the world hardly _needs_ Twitter.

<comment><USER25> In fact, many places in the world did need twitter: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Revolution)

<comment><USER26> Reading that just indicates that the world needs _social media_ , not Twitter per se. Many of the quotes there seem to indicate that Twitter's role was exaggerated.

<comment><USER27> The world needs _the internet_ ; the specific software running at the endpoints isn't particularly important. Twitter was used because... it was already used by the people involved.

The benefit of any place or tool for social activities is only tangentially related to the benefits provided by that place or tool. The value is the _people_ that are using it, who can (and do) move all the time.

Anybody interested in the relationship between a service like twitter and the people that _create it 's value_ by using it may be interested in the talk[1] given by an admin o fark.com a few years ago, where they discuss how they almost destroyed their community ("you'll get over it") from a failure to remember _why_ people came to their site.

If there is one lesson that Twitter or any other social media business needs to learn, it's the one discussed in talk: involve the people that use your service at least _somewhat_ in the changes you make to the service, and absolutely don't _surprise_ them with sudden change, or they will find some other place to hang out.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnVeysllPDI) (language warning, if that matters (it's veyr mild))

<comment><USER28> > The world needs the _internet_ ; the specific software running at the > endpoints isn't particularly important. Twitter was used because... it was > already used by the people involved.

Hmm, the world needs _networked communication_ ; the specific protocol running at the endpoints isn't particularly important. TCP/IP was used because... it was already used by the people involved.

Further, the world needs _easy communication_ ; the specific mechanism to communicate isn't particularly important. Networking was used because... it was already used by the people involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > Emails like this are usually riddled with corporate speak so I'm going to > give it to you straight.

+

> We will honor them by doing our best to serve all the people that use > Twitter.

SYNTAX ERROR

<comment><USER30> I like how he talks about the ex-employees as they are dead. Honouring the memory of the lost by continuing to fight for the cause.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31>
      "Emails like this are usually riddled with corporate speak so I'm going to
      give it to you straight."

Three paragraphs later...

      "So we have made an extremely tough decision: we plan to part ways with
      up to 336 people from across the company."

Edit: My bad, I should have been clearer in what I meant. There isn't really any corporate speak, but I wouldn't call 3 paragraphs of fluff 'giving it to you straight'

<comment><USER32> It's not great, but it's certainly better than something like "We've decided to move forward with a new strategic initiative that will involve a synergistic restructuring of our organizations and in that process it's possible that some people may find themselves seeking opportunities"...

<comment><USER33> Where I work, they called it a "workforce rebalancing," which I thought was a nice touch.

<comment><USER34> Or " _plan social_ " in french.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This was discussed pre-announcement at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10364197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10364197).

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm a little surprised that they're only firing 336 people. Unless this is just the first round of layoffs and more will follow once products and management has been streamlined/trimmed whatever you want to call it.

<comment><USER37> That's nearly 10% of their work force.

<comment><USER36> I'll admit that I have no basis for this number, but I would expect them to layoff 20 - 25%.

10% is a high number, but not for a company that has never made a profit and is currently hemorrhaging money.

<comment><USER38> This could just be round 1.

<comment><USER39> There have been a number of little rounds since summer 2014.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This truly sucks - I'm sorry to hear that. If you're one of the unlucky engineers that caught up in all this - reach out to the email address in my profile. We're hiring tons of awesome engineers at Uber, and if that's not the right fit for you I can help get you connected to other SF companies as well.

<comment><USER41> Spit balling an idea here for Site X.

-Twitter lays off a bunch of engineers.

-Twitter employees create job profile, with Twitter permission on Site X.

-Site X is accessible to other large tech companies looking for experienced engineers. Site X is a showcase of recently laid off employees filtered by layoff group (#368 employees, Twitter, Fall 2015).

\----

Pro's - other tech companies can locate talent without having to weed through thousands of resumes.

-engineers can transition from one company to another quickly.

-Twitter shows support for "helping transition to another job."

\---

Con's - is this considered poaching?

-Do other companies want those engineers that got laid off? Are they considered low quality, or just were redundant?

<comment><USER42> Even if they were good engineers, the perception will be that they weren't as a result of product progress being delayed.

<comment><USER41> True, however if you were head of HR for a tech company, would you rather take a risk with a recent Twitter employee, or take a risk with applicants you receive online? It would almost be like a pre-vetting process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The "moments" feature will be a failure. They're essentially building an editorial model on top of Twitter - something they (as the platform creators) shouldn't be worried with.

The decentralized model of Twitter's content creation is an asset. If you group those into a more traditional top down model, you lose the uniqueness and power of the Twitter platform.

<comment><USER44> I've been searching for a replacement to Circa News since it shut down and I'd love if Twitter's Moments turned out to be something like that. Surface what is happening around the world via social and then add the context of it with editors and journalists for people not wanting to slog through social media all day long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Why is this email on sec.gov?

<comment> dj-wonk I'm guessing the fact that this email shows up on the SEC web site may have to do with this:

> Per Chapter 4, Part 4, Sections 1400-1408 of the Labor Code, WARN protects > employees, their families, and communities by requiring that employers give > a 60-day notice to the affected employees and both state and local > representatives prior to a plant closing or mass layoff.

[http://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WARN...](http://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WARN.htm)

<comment><USER46> No, that would have been put on the Department of Labor site.

<comment> dj-wonk Good catch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm seriously impressed by Twitter's service ... doing fan-out for so many popular celebrities, so seamlessly, for so many readers is an accomplishment.

But I'm seriously curious why they have 4,000+ employees.

What in the hell are all those people doing?

300~ people being laid off is nothing. I wouldn't have been shocked if they said they were laying off 1,000+ people. I think entire departments probably need to go.

There has to be a lot of dead weight at Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER48> "[..] Engineering will move [..] faster with a smaller [..] team [..] we [will] part ways with [..] 336 people. [..] with the utmost respect [..] the world needs a strong Twitter, and this is another step to get there."

Or basically, Twitter is weaker with you in it.

</comment><comment><USER49> _> Let's take this time to express our gratitude to all of those who are leaving us._

Gratitude in the form of not telling employees that they were laid off, and letting them find out when they try to check their email in the morning? [0]

Fuck that noise.

[0] [https://twitter.com/bartt/status/653946266938818561](https://twitter.com/bartt/status/653946266938818561) \+ exact same thing happened to a good friend of mine who didn't tweet about it + hearing reports of it happening to others

</comment><comment><USER50> There seems to be a large disconnect in this thread between what is actually corporate speak and avoiding being blunt and insensitive

</comment><comment><USER51> Slightly OT, but honestly I think the world really doesn't need Twitter. If you view the evolution of the internet as a phenomenon fundamentally linked to the emergence of a global cultural consensus, or even consciousness, then to reduce a sizable fraction of its bandwidth to 140 chars, vicious echochambers and a communication mechanism custom designed to bump people's thoughts out- of-context for the purposes of ridicule then Twitter should be viewed as harmful. I hope some of these coming changes directly address the harm current Twitter does to the quality of human communication on the net.

</comment><comment><USER52> I wonder what this means for the Boston twitter offices (Crashlytics and Bluefin Labs) - No mention of them, whereas Vine and Periscope are.

</comment><comment><USER53> Well, the stock's up 4.35% today.

That's roughly $2.7m per fired employee!

</comment><comment><USER54> TL;DR: We're making some changes to the company. We're firing the 336 of you we don't need anymore. Thanks for your work.

Everything else is fluff. But I guess they have to sugar-coat it a bit with "utmost respect" and "tough decision".

<comment><USER55> But they'll honor their memory for the benefit of all Twitter users.

Whatever the hell that means...

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> What's the reason for this e-mail being housed on a .gov TLD?

<comment> dj-wonk > A WARN notification is required if more than 500 people (or 33% of the > "active workforce") are being laid off. Check your state's Department of > Labor (or whatever it is called in your state) to see the notices that have > been filed by employees in your state. (from [http://www.job- > hunt.org/layoffs/pending-layoff-signs.shtml](http://www.job- > hunt.org/layoffs/pending-layoff-signs.shtml))

For California: [http://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WARN...](http://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/Layoff_Services_WARN.htm)

<comment><USER57> It's not a WARN notification, it's an SEC filing.

WARN wouldn't even apply here since the cutoff is 500 or 33% of active workforce. Twitter's cuts are below both.

<comment> dj-wonk Thanks for correcting me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Revenue per employee is an interesting performance metric although not usually applied to growth companies. Twitter's was growing fast relative to other big public tech firms but still much lower than most.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/revenue-per-employee- charts-a...](http://www.businessinsider.com/revenue-per-employee-charts-are-a- fascinating-way-to-judge-the-health-of-tech-companies-2015-4)

</comment><comment><USER46> Here's what "giving it straight" really looks like, while also having a chance to save face:

        Everyone,

        As part of a restructuring of our workforce, we must layoff 336 people from across
        the company.

        This is an extremely difficult decision. We believe this is a necessary step to put
        our company on a stronger path towards growth. The team has been working around the
        clock to produce streamlined roadmap for Twitter, Vine, and Periscope and they are
        shaping up to be strong. With the utmost respect for each and every person, Twitter
        will go to great lengths to take care of each individual by providing generous exit
        packages and help finding a new job.

        The roadmap is a plan to change how we work, and what we need to do that work.
        Product and Engineering will make the most significant structural changes to
        reflect our plan ahead, focused on the experiences which will have the greatest
        impact. We feel strongly that Engineering will move much faster with a smaller and
        nimbler team, while remaining the biggest percentage of our workforce. And the rest
        of the organization will be streamlined in parallel.

        Let's take this time to express our gratitude to all of those who are leaving us.
        We will honor them by doing our best to serve all the people that use Twitter. We
        do so with a more purpose-built team, which we'll continue to build strength into
        over time, as we are now enabled to reinvest in our most impactful priorities. As
        always, please reach out to me directly with any ideas or questions.

        Jack

Notice I left out Moments, because I think it's in really poor form to mention efforts made _before_ the layoff, with those 336 people, as being a part of this new roadmap that includes laying off those 336 people. Really, really poor move.

</comment><comment><USER59> Focused on what exactly?

 _> We launched the first of these experiences last week with Moments, a great beginning, and a bold peek into the future of how people will see what's going on in the world._

Wonder what's next, because with Moments it feels like they still have no idea what to do with this platform. It would be such a pity to turn Twitter into TV-like manually curated breaking news channels.

</comment><comment><USER60> "up to 336" \-- that's a very specific number, suggesting this was somewhat surgical. Most other leadership types are of the "any manager worth her salt should be able to cut 10% of her staff, so do it". Layoffs are never easy, but it sounds like Jack is doing his best make the right cuts and take care of affected.

<comment><USER61> > any manager worth her salt should be able to cut 10% of her staff, so do it.

And that's how every manager worth their salt learns to keep a bunch of dead weight around, so they will in due time be able to offer a victim to the dragon without a significant impact to her team.

That's why these draconian methods end up enticing the very behaviors they are meant to prevent. You treat people like... not even animals, like inanimate objects, and they will start to behave like inanimate objects themselves with all the implications. That 3rd Law of Newton is such a lovely thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> When 80% of the promotional mail in my inbox is from Twitter trying to drive engagement, something is going badly.

</comment><comment><USER63> > Emails like this are usually riddled with corporate speak so I'm going to > give it to you straight.

[...]

> we plan to part ways with up to 336 people from across the company

Nothing says "give it to you straight" like using "part ways" to mean "you no longer have a job".

<comment><USER64> It's better than "rightsizing".

<comment><USER65> or "streamlining"

or "must be accomplished within an appropriate financial envelope"

Or any other of Stephen Elop's greatest hits..

<comment><USER66> The Twitter layoff uses "streamline": "the rest of the organization will be streamlined in parallel."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I guess the message was a bit too long for a tweet.

<comment><USER68> But, cf, this one: [https://twitter.com/jack/status/651003315212300289](https://twitter.com/jack/status/651003315212300289)

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> What about Twitter's none-core products? GNIP and Fabric (crashlytics and Answers)

</comment><comment><USER70> Maybe I'm a little self centered but this line:

> We will honor them by doing our best to serve all the people that use > Twitter.

seems a little pep talky to me for the people left.

I feel saying this would have been better:

> We will honor them with the utmost respect for each and every person. > Twitter will go to great lengths to take care of each individual by > providing generous exit packages and help finding a new job.

<comment><USER71> Well, I lost my job and it's been really tough on the wife and kids, but at least Twitter will do its best to serve all the people that use Twitter!

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> On the bright side, Twitter will only fire 140 people at a time, giving the others time to prepare.

<comment><USER73> Cut the snark, this still affects real people's lives.

<comment><USER74> Some of the most employable people in the current job market. Nobody likes getting fired but it's not like they don't have great prospects.

<comment><USER73> You're thinking of engineers. Those make up ~45% of the workforce. Some of my friends affected by this don't have recruiters queuing for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I feel like this could spark a massive bubble pop. I mean if investors have lost confidence in a company with one of the largest user-bases in the world, what does that say about all the startups that are valued so high and will likely never make a dime, unless they're bought out.

</comment><comment><USER76> "We are moving forward with a restructuring of our workforce so we can put our company on a stronger path to grow. Emails like this are usually riddled with corporate speak so I'm going to give it to you straight."

Riddled with corporate speak like ... the very first sentence.

</comment><comment><USER77> Good thing that his email about a roadmap for moving forward with a restructuring for a nimbler team and an organization streamlined in parallel as well as an invitation to reach out wasn't riddled with corporate speak the way those emails usually are.

</comment><comment><USER78> Tech community reaching out with job postings.

[https://twitter.com/cra/timelines/653925058600046592](https://twitter.com/cra/timelines/653925058600046592)

</comment><comment><USER79> [https://about.twitter.com/careers/positions](https://about.twitter.com/careers/positions) Still doing a lot of hirings.

</comment><comment><USER80> How many employees does it have? I recall it's about 4000 or so, so this is like a 10% cut?

It's better to do a big axe once instead of slicing it gradually, will this be it?

Been there done that, and it sucks.

<comment><USER81> It's being reported as 8% so pretty close.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> I think the engineers will be in a good position.

The rest, I'm not as sure.

<comment><USER83> >We feel strongly that Engineering will move much faster with a smaller and nimbler team

What percentage of 336 cuts would produce a team that is smaller and nimbler, I wonder? It sounds like engineers not on the "greatest impact" projects will be cut.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Tbh twitter is pretty good professionally, if you follow the right people / organisations in your field and write accordingly. Much better than spammy Linkedin too.

</comment><comment><USER85> not sure how related it is, but a few days ago twitter demanded to change my password, after I changed it - they locked my account demanding that I would provide a phone number to tie to the account, yet none of the numbers I provided do work.

May I supposed they'll be even more focused on collection of various marketing data from their users given how little leverage they have over user's personal lives?

</comment><comment><USER86> If anyone who's part of the layoff is looking for the opportunity to work from home (ruby + javascript), let me know -- me [at] gmail.com

</comment><comment><USER87> If you're impacted, know ruby, want to make healthcare better, and are open to a position in Boston let me know! email in profile.

<comment><USER88> Growth hacking at it's finest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> Oh god. My roommate was literally offered a position at their Boulder office last week. I wonder how systemic cuts will be?

</comment><comment><USER90> A more focused Twitter is much needed if the company ever hopes to become profitable, and not just remain a money pit.

</comment><comment><USER46> Can someone explain to me how these places figure out that it's engineering's fault for failing to figure out how to monetize passive aggression, 140 characters at a time?

I mean, if I were asking myself "why did we fail to achieve our expected growth potential", am I going to blame the people who did what I told them to do, or am I going to blame what I told them to do?

Well, clearly, if I'm an MBA, I'll blame the stupid proles.

<comment><USER91> It's not the engineers fault. It is a statement that they need fewer people going forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> This is great for the startup ecosystem because likely many of the engineers are very talented.

</comment><comment><USER92> Any info on whether this is just to appease shareholders or actual redundancies?

<comment><USER93> I wouldnt think of it as being that black/white. However I do think this is a <strong> move on Jack's part.

<comment><USER94> Until he runs for office and then it'll be in his negatives column.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> Wait why did the subject change?

Isn't the correct headline the subject line of the email?

</comment><comment><USER91> It would have been better if it was a total of 124 characters.

</comment><comment><USER96> Does this mean Twitter Bootstrap 4.0 release will be delayed?

</comment><comment><USER97> I feel sorry for people that were laid off but to be honest does Twitter need 4100 employees? I cannot imagine what all these people do for not such a complicated product.

</comment><comment><USER98> Wow, these aren't proofread by anyone?

 _> The team has been working around the clock to produce streamlined roadmap for Twitter,_

"to produce streamlined roadmap" Really?

<comment><USER99> I'm not sure what the typo is, care to explain?

<comment><USER98> Since "streamlined roadmap" is singular, it must be prefaced with an "a".

The correct phrase would be "to produce _a_ streamlined roadmap." (if it were plural, you could instead use "to produce streamlined roadmap _s_.)

I'm normally _not_ a Grammar Nazi, but when you're talking about drafting a short SEC filing that will be read by hundreds of thousands, declaring the fate of 8% of your workforce... I think the least you can do is make it look like you put some effort into it. Of course, my initial post has been downvoted to hell, but such is life. I probably should have actually included this explanation and disclaimer in my OP rather than expecting it to be self- evident.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Forgets to remove the corporate speak.

</comment><comment><USER101> Actually, this is really well written.

</comment><comment><USER102> Yesterday TWTR went down almost 7%.

</comment><comment><USER103> If anyone who's part of the layoff is around SF and is looking for a new opportunity, let me know -- me [at] smaili.org

</comment><comment><USER104> any idea what is 336 as a percentage of their tech workforce?

<comment><USER105> From what everyone else in the thread has said and what Google states, about 10%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> Message me if you've been impacted and want to join us at Leftronic!

</comment><comment><USER107> Have a feeling that Twitter is one of the uniocorns to go next year.

He's approaching this as a simple restructure & pray with engineering teams when in fact the problem is a much more serious problem, there's a loss of confidence in Twitter from investors.

I guess cutting when investors feel like it's due is a good way to appear like you are making changes when in fact the problem with Twitter is much more deep rooted and a fundamental flaw.

1) Investors realize twitter is horrible for monetization

2) Investors are out of patience or trust

3) Twitter scrambles to find a sustainable revenue source.

4) Twitter cuts off Hootsuite and launches competing business

5) Twitter's massive botnets disappear revealing only a small number of it's userbase is active sparking SEC involvement.

<comment><USER91> Yes but Twitter fits in within mainstream media. Facebook could take the #hashtag business, but the pseudonymity of Twitter has general appeal. Doing anything but advertising is a bad deal for either Facebook or Twitter. CPA is really a bad deal for the platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> >We launched the first of these experiences last week with Moments, a great beginning, and a bold peek into the future of how people will see what's going on in the world.

I am terrified about the future of Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER109> The sheer vulture-like behavior of recruiters around this event is a sight to behold! Truly recruiting is the occupation for the shameless.

<comment><USER110> Speaking in personal capacity here rather than as CEO of a recruiting company: isn't after you've just been fired or near-fired the best possible time ever for a recruiter to try to give you a job offer? Most people need to work for a living. Getting people without jobs good jobs seems to be the socially most beneficial thing a recruiter could ever do.

What's the argument for waiting an hour? "I had a job for you but wanted to give you some time to process how you're unemployed and cast out as valueless?" Eff that. "You're awesome. Fault was with Twitter. Here's one of your numerous options. If you need a few weeks before start date we can totally do that but we're more than happy to fix your pressing issue today." seems objectively better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> "Dorsey is no Jobs" sound very fitting now.

</comment><comment><USER112> fewer

<comment><USER35> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10380365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10380365) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> Dear Mr Jack, please do not cut my job. I have a wife and two kids and a big mortgage. Thank you, NanooJaboo

</comment><comment><USER114> As a hobbyist coding small projects like Twitter in my spare time, I feel their pain and have consistently had to re-adjust the code base, and the amount of project contributors. This is observable on the micro-scale, and I would loathe to think how this plays out on the scale of Twitter, where unbridled and unchecked scale was allowed to take over the company, causing them to lose focus.

Twitter is essentially one big DevOps success story / failure after another, and I have faith they can start to focus again. One motif / question I have seen in every pundit's post about Twitter as a company is why the market (up until now perhaps) has not decided Twitter's faith? If it really is the case that Twitter is a big data company, then how come 90% (random estimate) of their users are fembots / fake accounts?

</comment><comment><USER34> IT world need a better class consciousness. The class struggle _isn 't_ something from the past. Twitter is one of the biggest company of the net economy, and it actually _can_ fire 336 employees because " _the world needs a strong Twitter_ ". How a big company like this one can be authorized to fire people this way? Who employee are gonna react? Are they gonna fight?

Ok, we are not working at the mine, we are working on servers and data, and concept and communication tools, comfortably sitten in white offices, but these company makes a huge amount of money with our work and then will throw employees like garbage? Noooo, this is not acceptable. Jack, do you think that people will take your _generous exit package_ and feel fine: no, some will experiment some difficulties to find a new job, some will divorce, some will be obliged to sell what they build to survive, some will get depression because of unemployment, some might even commit suicide. The price to pay for this can't be equal to your exit packages.

There is a serious problem here. And we are not organized at all to fight this. But workers could unite again. After all organizing a servers strike is not that hard. I wonder why it don't happen.

 _Workers of the world, unite!_</comment>


Why developers have side projects - <AUTHOR> http://sherstan.com/post/43573104276/why-developers-have-side-projects

<comment><AUTHOR> Thought provoking for me, as I've been involved in hiring folks in the past.

I think the current trend is to use traditional methods of looking at a candidate (resume, cover letter, interview) and augment the background check with a combination of GitHub profile + Stackoverflow profile + side projects.</comment>


MtRed Bitcoin mining pool will be shutting down - <AUTHOR> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=15929.msg1793833#msg1793833

<comment><USER2> More and more small pools are closing their doors due to the influx of ASICs.

It's sad to see, and a big worry for the future security of the blockchain.

<comment><USER3> What is ASICs? Google is giving me tennis shoes.

<comment><USER4> It's basically a computer with specialized hardware whose sole purpose is to mine Bitcoins, see <http://www.butterflylabs.com/> for an example

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Would anyone like to translate this? I'm reasonably familiar with bitcoin mechanics, but I couldn't understand what had occurred based on this post.

<comment><USER6> Normally, Bitcoin mining has fairly high variance - you only get paid when you find a block, and because blocks are relatively rare and found at random intervals your income varies a lot too. MtRed were what's known as a PPS pool, which meant they basically ate the variance and paid miners based on the amount of mining work they did.

The trouble is that running a PPS pool requires a huge buffer of your own funds to cover payouts during periods of bad luck, and if the buffer isn't big enough the pool will inevitably go bankrupt. It appears this has now happened to MtRed and it sounds like they only have enough funds to pay out half the money they already owe miners. (Technically, over a long enough period of time PPS pools will go bankrupt with 100% certainty no matter how big the pool buffer.)

<comment><USER7> Would adding a fee allow them to continue?

What if they only paid out when a block was found?

<comment><USER8> > What if they only paid out when a block was found?

Then the miners would have no impetus to help them and would instead mine for themselves

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure this is true. For example, consider the following scenario at $200 USD per bitcoin: 5 people pooled mining capabilities, and mined a single bitcoin. They could then split that, and effectively pocket $40/ea (or 0.20 bitcoins each). If you mine solo, is it possible to mine a partial bitcoin, rather than increments of a whole bitcoin?

<comment><USER10> Right: mining produces whole bitcoins, and does it infrequently. That's why pools exist; people weren't willing to wait months to randomly win the bitcoin lottery. (Maybe that's a design flaw!) Most pools pay proportions of their actual winnings, not their predicted ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Question: At current electricity prices, what is the total cost of mining the complete 21 million bitcoins set?

<comment><USER11> The difficulty of mining is dynamically adjusted based on the currently available mining capacity so that bitcoins are produced at a constant rate over time no matter what.

In other words, you could mine the full set of bitcoins for virtually no electricity whatsoever if you could convince the world to abandon bitcoin mining completely, then just let a single old, slow, cheap miner run in the corner for the next 100+ years. Or you could use as much electricity as you wanted on the project by throwing more and more computational resources at it.

<comment> mkr-hn So if someone set off a series of EMPs across the planet leaving only a handful of computers functional, the difficulty would adjust downward to account for it?

<comment><USER12> Or convince everyone that it isn't profitable for the amount of electricity involved.

<comment><USER10> Sometimes electricity is essentially free. My home is heated by electricity (I live in California) - any watts that I spend mining bitcoins produces the same amount of heat as my electric heater, but has the advantageous side-effect of maybe making money.

(I don't actually do this because I don't have a desktop computer, and it's unclear if building one at this point will pay for itself before custom integrated circuits push the bitcoin difficulty so high that GPUs become worthless)

<comment><USER13> Does your home have a heat pump? If so, your house heat pump is 3 to 4 times more efficient than the waste heat produced by your computer, and you are using 3 to 4 times more electricity compared to the same heat output from a heat pump.

<comment><USER3> Wait, Energy in = energy out. So what is the extra output that makes the computer so much less efficient? is it noise?

<comment><USER11> As the name implies, a heat pump _moves_ heat around. When you heat your house with a heat pump, you're not (just) converting electricity into heat. The electricity is being used to move heat from outside your house into the house. You make the interior of the house warmer while making the exterior (very slightly) colder. It's exactly the same as an air conditioner or refrigerator, just pointed the other way.

Of course, energy has to be expended to move heat around, and there are inefficiencies. But with real-world equipment and common cold-but-not-too-cold temperatures, a single unit of electricity can be used to move several times as much heat as it would produce if you just converted it to heat directly.

A computer is as efficient as anything when it comes to converting electricity to heat. Heat pumps win because they're ultimately playing a different game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hey, This is RR, To anyone curious, I will be on #mtred@freenode this evening answering questions.

</comment><comment><USER15> bitcoin pool shutting down are there any implications in terms of network hashrate or the overall exchange rate ?

<comment><USER16> On top of the already mentioned fact of indivudal miners switching easily, MtRed was also a comparitively small pool so it had little impact on the network as a whole.</comment></comment>


Don't hire Hotmail users and other tips to save your company culture - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/dont-hire-hotmail-users-other-tips-save-your-company-culture-kogan

<comment><USER2> That on-leave out-of-office tip seems completely wrong to me. That's the culture you are trying to "save"?

If someone needs you badly enough to interrupt your hiking trip, then they probably know your phone number already, and can judge whether it is important enough to interrupt you, contact someone else, or wait.

Generally when you get back from leave, your inbox is full of ephemeral out of date crap, and it is totally inefficient to wade through it all.

A friend of mine used to have in his (internal) out of office reply:

I will delete all my emails upon return except for those with the word "RELEVANT" in the title. If I need to deal with this upon return, please re- send it with "RELEVANT" in the title.

If it was important enough, people re-sent it. A little extreme, but it worked for him.</comment>


Real-Time Surveillance Will Test the British Tolerance for Cameras - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/15/technology/britain-surveillance-privacy.html <comment><USER2> The British tolerance for cameras, and other oppressive behaviour by the police, is actually very high. Football fans have been subject to all sorts of illiberal measures ranging from face recognition to passport confiscation for decades. The rest of the public support it because they like order. See also the "ring of steel" London security system and everything related to terrorism.

This is partly why there haven't been any significant anti-Brexit protests; the police have very effectively dismantled the structures from which violence might spring.

<comment><USER3> This comment is just the silly kind of bile that gets spewed on Fox News to convince Americans that countries like the UK and Canada as Dystopian Hellscapes. If you had any cultural context around the history of violent football hooliganism in the UK you might understand why those measures were considered necessary and a re supported by a large part of the public. Also there have been very significant anti-brexit, anti-austerity and anti-trump protests in recent years so I'm really sure what you're talking about there. I can only only assume this is some sort of hand wave to the idea that people in the UK aren't able to protest or express themselves like they are in The Land of The Free (TM).

<comment><USER4> Except there's a core of truth in what they say, though I might differ on the point about protests. Football hooliganism was well on the way to being solved by the early 90s. The international ban ended in 1990. It was the seventies and eighties that most would have been hesitant to take the kids along to a match, and the big clubs had scary reputations. Most of the measures since have _not_ been necessary, and most of the fixing of the problem wasn't down to cameras.

Police tactics, ground changes, putting responsibility more on to the clubs, and a good degree of managing the groups of supporters. Companies would once finish early if there was a Wednesday match and their office was even vaguely on a route to the ground. By the nineties and noughties, normality was far more expected.

Far more has been for security theatre and red top media campaigns that the "government must DO something!!!!". So government _does_ do something. Like rings of steel around London. Tanks at airports (huh?) and all the rest. Despite this a man in a van can still perform a terrorist outrage on a bridge, or take a bomb to a teen pop concert.

We're far more likely to hear some days after that some perpetrator was known to police or security services, than all the security theatre prevented some atrocity, or the perpetrator was arrested en route.

<comment><USER3> I think the problem is that we have no real way of knowing how many threats have been successfully countered by the security services, and no one knows how many potential bad actors have been dissuaded by them either. So it's easy to call them out as security theatre. People on this thread are talking about the rings of steel like there's some sort of TSA checkpoint on every road into Greater London. Unfortunately the reality is a lot less exciting. It only surrounds the square mile (a much, much smaller and higher risk area) and is pretty uninteresting. It consists of some ram-raid bollards and police booths that have fallen into a pretty bad state of disrepair. I struggle to see the downside of ram-raid barriers in a pedestrianised area - you'll note none of the van attacks occurred in the City.

<comment><USER4> it's the presentation as much as anything else that makes it theatre. Protecting pedestrianised streets from unauthorised traffic with pop up bollards happens in towns and cities everywhere. Presenting it as a terrorism ring of steel does not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was once asked by a visting American friend why there was so much trash (rubbish) in London. I answered that it was because there weren't very many trash cans at all.

"Then why don't they install some? Perhaps people would respect their environment a little more".

"Because the IRA put bombs in them".

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://archive.is/v0Bmd](http://archive.is/v0Bmd)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm from the US and recently took a trip to UK for about a week. I was honestly surprised at the number of cameras strung up everywhere in the metro areas. Indeed the article states "The roughly 420,000 closed-circuit television cameras in London are more than in any other city except Beijing, equaling about 48 cameras per 1,000 people, more than Beijing." I did feel slightly safer knowing they were there however. The tolerance for surveillance there is already quite high it would seem.

<comment><USER8> I don't understand why you should feel safe. Cameras won't prevent a crime and won't make you immune to a knife.

But they are very convenient to monitor daily life of political activists.

<comment><USER9> Most of them are privately owned and not networked. This renders them very inconvenient to monitor the daily life of political activists.

<comment><USER10> They might be privately owned, but the police actually get to say to new bars, restaurants, etc. how many CCTV camera they must have in order to get an alcohol licence.

It got a bit ridiculous at one point with one perfectly normal pizzeria in my town being asked to install 6 different CCTV cameras, but they started pushing back at that point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I guess we need a comparative term to appreciate the sentence:

>The police said that since 2017, 58 people had been arrested after being identified by the technology.

I mean, 58 people in 2 years is like 2-3 per month, if the scanned faces were (say) 1,000 per month is one thing, if they were (still say) 1,000,000 per month it would be another.

And it all depends on how the 998 or 999,998 not-identified people data (if any) is used (or stored).

The analogy of:

>a police officer standing on the corner looking out for individuals and if he recognizes somebody, saying, 'I want to talk to you.'"

is fine and dandy exactly because those that were not recognized are not "talked to" nor any note about them is taken by the officer.

</comment><comment><USER12> A strange thing, British continue letting its spy agency doing away with domestic espionage of the most extreme form (operation optic nerve,) but complain about "their face being scanned"

I can't think of an explanation for that.

<comment><USER13> "Doing away with" means "getting rid of" or "stopping". Is that how you're using the term?

I think you're right though. British people have a complicated relationship with surveillance. Mass government surveillance is mostly seen as okay so long as there are some checks and balances. CCTVs (and most UK CCTV is privately owned and run) are mostly seen as ok so long as there are some regulations around how it's used. But police surveillance does make some people feel uncomfortable.

<comment><USER12> I meant as if letting it go unchecked

<comment><USER14> You meant "getting away with", which means "not being stopped/punished for". "Doing away with", as was pointed out, means to stop/abandon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20980754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20980754)</comment>


How a geek grills a burger - <AUTHOR> http://www.mensjournal.com/nathan-myhrvold

<comment><USER2> > _They sit around a room together, dreaming up new ideas for inventions that > might become lucrative patents — while a team of lawyers records the > freewheeling conversations to document every iota of potential intellectual > property_

How is that not patent trolling? And worse, how is that supposed to aid or speed up innovation in _any_ conceivable way?!

</comment><comment><USER3> When you start typing "myhrvold" in google, "myhrvold patent troll" comes up very prominently. (For me it is #3.)</comment>


Opera: Browser market is broken—thanks to Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080219-opera-browser-market-isnt-functioning-thanks-to-microsoft.html <comment><USER2> How big is the problem of interoperability really?

I'm the people guy in my company, not the computer guy - but I do a bit of programming for the web in my freetime in order to keep up and being able to deal with programmers on their own turf, so this question is out of curiosity - not trolling.

In my sparetime I often do small sites that include javascript and CSS, which seem to be at the heart of the problem, and I have found that once you know a few hacks it is pretty easy to work around. If I can do this, then surely programmers will be able to as well.

So my question is: Am i missing something? Why is everyone talking about the huge amounts of work involved in interoperability between browsers? Isn't it just a question of a few simple hacks in your css and javascript?

Or am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER3> This does come off as a bit of boo-hoo by Opera, but the sadder truth is that the browser should be providing the most advanced ui available right now, but the technology has been dragged down by a company which has a greater interest in seeing a copy of its OS on every desktop.

</comment><comment><USER4> As article correctly points out, firefox has managed to become successful browser. It is perplexing to me, because I find Opera just as good if not better browser.

</comment><comment><USER5> Cry me a river

</comment><comment><USER6> Change "Opera" to "Netscape" and "2008" to 1997", and what's different?</comment>


Facebook iOS app has camera active during use - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/JoshuaMaddux/status/1193434937824702464 <comment><USER2> FB definitely does not deserve the benefit of doubt anymore regarding privacy issues.

That being said, this feature soon to be called a bug, feels like one of those things being done in the name of performance. I do not agree with this solution, however, the startup time for the camera on older iOS devices can be frustratingly slow. My 6S now on iOS 13 can take several seconds for the camera to turn on. This is most evident when trying to capture something in the moment on Snapchat. The stock camera app takes long enough that I often miss key moments (I plan to upgrade soon, but have not yet committed to losing my headphone jack).

I'm not at all excusing this, but I can see why they'd try this if they want their users to post more original content

<comment><USER3> Whatsapp refuses to function if you don't give it permission to read your contacts. I want to manually input the numbers I want to message via Whatsapp, but that isn't an option. Whatsapp wants to collect my entire contacts. My refusal to grant such permission means I can't use the app, which means there's no point keeping it around.

<comment><USER4> I installed Whatsapp for the very first time last week. I feel like there's additional friction and nagging if you don't give it access to your contacts, but you can definitely open it and send/receive messages.

<comment><USER3> Please explain how, in detail? I tap the message button and it asks for permission to my contacts. I tap deny which only dismisses the permissions request. I don't get a chat field or any way to manually enter a phone number to start chatting.

Last time I used Whatsapp, there was no way to chat with someone who was not in Contacts, on Android. I first had to add each person to Contacts before Whatsapp would let me chat with them.

<comment><USER5> You can continue active chats or respond people who had started a chat with you, but yeah, you can't start a new one without the contacts permission.

Maybe you can use a number link ([https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/26000030/](https://faq.whatsapp.com/en/android/26000030/)) without the permission, but I'm not sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Life imitating art...

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

If you knew the trouble I had getting an AI to read and duplicate facial expressions. You know how I cracked it?

I don't know how you did any of this.

Every cell phone, just about, has a microphone, camera and a means to transmit data. So I turned on every microphone and camera across the entire fucking planet and I redirected the data through Blue Book. Boom! Limitless resource of vocal and facial interaction.

You hacked the world's cell phones?

Yeah. And all the manufacturers knew I was doing it, too. But they couldn't accuse me without admitting they were doing it themselves.

\- Ex Machina (2014)

</comment><comment><USER7> I have a strong feeling this is a hamfisted attempt to make stories or some other camera related feature more seamless.

But FB has kind of burned any goodwill anyone had for them, so I can't exactly be sympathetic if that's the case and they're getting skewered but didn't do anything nefarious.

<comment><USER8> I find it a little hard to believe tapping on a profile picture "accidentally" opens the camera shutter, and behind the main UI nonetheless. Maybe this is an edge case for their UI tests and human QA didn't catch it?

<comment><USER9> Have a one plus 7 pro with a pop up camera. There are a number of websites that seems to invoke the camera. Becomes more viscerally disturbing when it just pops up out of nowhere.

<comment><USER10> I found this only happened in Firefox. No other app caused it, so I disabled the camera permission for Firefox and it's stopped doing it.

Definitely disturbing having it pop out and you know something is trying to read it.

<comment><USER11> Mobile Firefox doesn't have per-domain camera permissions with the default being "ask?"

<comment><USER10> Yes, I think it does; but Firefox still popped the camera up so I blocked it at the OS level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Every week or so there's a new theory that some tech company is constantly using your phone's microphone or camera and siphoning all the data back to HQ.

Every time the reason is the same: incompetence. Something like this can result from a single misplaced line of code. On the other hand, no tech company on Earth wants to have the job of processing a billion extra audio or video feeds. This would require enormous resources, on the scale of whole engineering departments, for questionable gain. And it couldn't be secret, because the _point_ of gathering all that data is to target ads, so advertisers would have to know about it. The notion that this is intentional is about as credible as the average conspiracy theory.

(Of course, _selective_ monitoring by the government is perfectly possible -- but we already knew that, and it would be a lot more subtle than this.)

<comment><USER13> I love hacker news but this is one trigger topic where the community goes a little crazy.

Your comment is entirely rational and yet it's been downvoted to the bottom. Privacy is an extremely important issue, but it's 100% clear in this case that Facebook is not doing anything nefarious here.

I've got a buddy in growth marketing who tells me any headline inciting privacy hysteria is a super easy way to game the front page here.

<comment><USER14> Community goes crazy because community values it's privacy, while big corporations are exploiting it for obvious reasons.

You are saying FB is not doing anything nefarious here like Cambridge Analytica never existed. And it's only one thing we know - how many leakages - or shall we call it deliberate exploitation of personal information - we were not aware of?

While corporations will continue dealing with private data as they please without letting us know, those cases will gain attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really wish the App store rules made it so non camera apps were not allowed to access the camera and had to ask the OS to present the OS camera. Same for access to the photos. I wish an app asked the OS for photos and an OS level UI let the user choose the pictures and only those pictures are provided to the app. As it is any app that asks for camera access gets too much access and any app that asks for photo access gets access to all photos. neither of those are in line with Apple's privacy stance

</comment><comment><USER16> I can't wait for the post in the Facebook Newsroom:

"For the last two years, we have been accidentally using your facial reactions when scrolling past sponsored content in order to more closely tailor your Facebook experience to you. We've very, very sorry, and we'll disable this feature in a coming update. As always, your trust and safety are our number one concern."

</comment><comment><USER17> Some responses to that tweet point out that this is a UI bug when using the "Add Story" feature, as certain UI elements can still be seen on the camera feed.

Looks like a Hanlon's Razor situation.

<comment><USER18> Hanlon's razor is conditional to having a low level of paranoia towards the actor. If your perceived prior probability (in bayesian terms) of villainy is high, it doesn't apply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Instagram does screen recordings when a user is in certain portions of the app. If you swipe to the right and then back again, you will see a small red indicator in the status bar finish its animation. You can also see this if you return to the home screen quickly.

I removed camera and microphone privileges from the app when I saw this, which means I can't create Stories anymore.

</comment><comment><USER20> Anyway it was consuming too much of battery (phone's as well as mine). So I switched to FF browser on iOS. Then after some months I stopped going to FB.

Now I have lots of productive hours.

</comment><comment><USER21> I would love to have a (software) indicator that the camera/microphone are being accessed, similar to the location services icon. I think that would already be enough for users to start asking questions and keep abusive use in check.

</comment><comment><USER22> Seeing the Chromium blog post that said it's going to put a "slow badge" on some sites based on speed and responsiveness measurements, I'd like to see Apple put an "usually untrusted" or "deeply untrusted" badge that's shown every time the Facebook, FB Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and related apps from that company are opened on Apple made devices. There needs to be a lot more mass shaming on Facebook the company and it's endless loop of "oops, it was a bug, we're sorry" abominable practices.

<comment><USER23> In this case it's simple. When Facebook asks to have access to either your camera, microphone, or photos library, just say no. You can still use the photo picker to upload pictures without giving FB access to your library.

<comment><USER22> Yes, I know that, but most users wouldn't know or wouldn't follow that because it's inconvenient. But I don't agree with this solution for this particular case. It is a good practice in general.

In this instance, nobody would expect that an app that you gave camera or microphone access to would be recording video or audio without you explicitly initiating such a recording. Imagine if WhatsApp was found to be recording audio all the time while you were reading chats or responding to chats in text just because you gave the microphone permission to it since you use it occasionally to send voice messages to certain people. Would that be acceptable, bug or otherwise? Why should one's reaction be any different for the Facebook (or any other) app?

What's happening here is a serious violation of trust and expectations.

<comment><USER24> Are WA voice and vid calls also e2e encrypted, or only the text msgs you send?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> And if the claim is true and provable, Facebook ($55 billion revenue 2018) will probably be fined $1-4 million which will sure "teach them a lesson" to never be bad again!

Google, Facebook, and others must just have a budget set aside for these issues - costs of doing business I guess as they profit more than they are fined.

</comment><comment><USER26> Is it possible to install custom CAs on a jailbroken iOS device and use a man- in-the-middle proxy? The difference between honest mistake and sinister intent should be clear if FB is transmitting any of that audio or video data while it has access to the camera without you knowing.

<comment><USER27> This can be done easily and without jail breaking on any iPhone with tools such as Charles proxy (provided they don't do certificate pinning). They work by having you generate, install, and trust a profile which includes a root CA.

</comment></comment><comment> why-oh-why If you swipe right on the feed you'll open the camera. I'm gonna guess this is a bug related to that.

</comment><comment><USER28> Do someone have a solid reproducer ?

[https://reclaimthenet.org/iphone-facebook-camera-access- bug/](https://reclaimthenet.org/iphone-facebook-camera-access-bug/)

So far it seems to only affect iOS 13.2. for iphone 8 or older devices

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't know why would anyone install the FB app on their iPhone. The mobile version is sufficiently good, given the fact that their app doesn't even support messaging.

</comment><comment><USER30> Can iOS apps use the camera without the user seeing the banner at the top?

I was under the impression that was baked into the OS?

</comment><comment><USER31> FB are just no longer trusted by me.

</comment><comment><USER32> Facebook has somewhere in the ballpark of 800 iOS developers. And fewer than eight apps.

</comment><comment><USER33> iOS has this feature that shows per app a coarse history of its access to location info; an similar overview for camera access would be useful too.

</comment><comment><USER34> I see all the comments and everyone is blaming Facebook. What about Apple? Why did Apple let such an app through unless Apple was fine with it...

<comment><USER35> Because they didn't know about it? It's not a conspiracy.</comment></comment>


Show HN: DietManager - <AUTHOR> https://dietmanager.com <comment><AUTHOR> I promised myself that I would post this on the eve of my YC rejection so here goes...

Note: I am setting it to upgrade all accounts tonight so tomorrow you will be able to do everything except order food (because that requires you to enter your CC). So if you sign up tonight you should get a healthy breakfast nudge. I have stopped the billing jobs so no subscriptions will be charged until 1/1/18.

Here are some answers to things people (current users) have asked me.

1: I used diet books and Meal Plans for my training data (Meal Rec's)

2: The Restaurant and Menu data I scraped myself and am mapping to items that I have nutrient info on when I make food log entry. (Yes I know this is risky; and it is why I am not supporting serious allergies right now)

2: What can DM do

a) Goal coaching (12 Goals work as of now)

b) Order food (LA/SF Postmates)

c) Shop (Amazon)

d) Track stats (WiiThings Scale & GH Activity)

e) Manage your food log ie: Take a pic of your food and the nutrient info is committed to your food log.

Dev. Note: I releasing a new version of the chat engine that uses neo4j so I apologize in advance if you get an odd response to your message.

Spam Note: DM cant spam you because its not allowed to send you more than one message w/o getting a response.

Other Notes: If you like this idea but just think I am doing a horrible job of it (please be patient...its getting better by the day or you can try eatwithava.com. None of my current users liked it but it is further along than I am.</comment>


US Navy Soliciting Zero Days - <AUTHOR> https://threatpost.com/us-navy-soliciting-zero-days/113308 <comment><USER2> What exactly should we do with this information? It's clear there's a cyber war heating up. Between Stuxnet, the US gov's OPM getting hacked, kaspersky getting attacked, it's become pretty obvious. And since there's seemingly no need to declare such a war before doing it, it'll only get hotter.

So what do we do? Is it time to just start running open-bsd? Should I just assume my systems won't be a casualty because it won't get that hot? Air gap the important part?

<comment><USER3> Don't you get it. The cyberwar isn't "heating up", what "cyberwar" exists has existed since the 90's. Yes technological pervasiveness is making vulnerabilities being taken advantage of hit larger swaths of devices, but that's not why you see the heating up of the arena.

The real reason is that we need a new boogieman to justify the level of surveillance. The public, as deluded and propagandised as they are, is starting to get tired of the same ol terrorism argument, so this is the new communism/terrorism, etc.

The point is that it's never about what they say it's about. It's about control. Inverted totalitarianism.

<comment><USER4> Control for what purpose?

<comment><USER5> So many different purposes. Sometimes control is necessary for everyone's benefit - government has a legitimate claim to power. Sometimes control is self-interested - it does one party more good than it can do the other. Sometimes control is about a brace for an uncertain future - the American Empire right now is being seriously challenged for its global primacy. Sometimes control is about self-benefit - it consolidates power specifically to disadvantage the other power. Etc. Etc.

Power consolidation right now is a mixed bag. Those who want power for their own purposes find a good partner with those who consolidate power for noble purposes find a good partner with those who brace for the future, etc.

You can only pick voices from the cacophony if you train your ear in one direction. They are all there and it takes every singer in the chorus to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find it really strange the Navy is doing this. Does it actually have an intelligence wing capable of taking advantage of this? And if you thought the NSA was the cyber intelligence wing of the DoD, so did I.

<comment><USER7> The ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) is the US's OLDEST Intelligence agency, so yes.. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is why the mission of securing America's networks needs to be removed from the NSA.

"What's more noteworthy is how little regard the government seems to have for the process of deciding to exploit vulnerabilities," wrote Nate Cardozo and Andrew Crocker of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "As we've explained before, the decision to use a vulnerability for 'offensive' purposes rather than disclosing it to the developer is one that prioritizes surveillance over the security of millions of users."

<comment><USER9> > This is why the mission of securing America's networks needs to be removed > from the NSA.

And who should be responsible for this mission? Are you saying that the offensive and defensive cyber capabilities should be split between different agencies?

> "What's more noteworthy is how little regard the government seems to have > for the process of deciding to exploit vulnerabilities,"

The article mentions that the government itself acknowledges that there is a delicate balance between disclosure and maintaining the ability to accomplish other missions [1]. That dilemma never going away, no matter how the responsibilities are organized.

> "As we've explained before, the decision to use a vulnerability for > 'offensive' purposes rather than disclosing it to the developer is one that > prioritizes surveillance over the security of millions of users."

Haven't read the EFF paper yet (and I hold the EFF in high regard), but in the context of zero-days, that quote is a bit of a strawman. You don't burn zero- days by indiscriminately propagating exploits (eg, for mass surveillance), it would be found out pretty quickly. You tap cables and get NSLs for mass surveillance. Payloads attached to a zero-day would be used for more specific purposes, rather than slurping up data en masse.

[1] [https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/04/28/heartbleed- unders...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/04/28/heartbleed- understanding-when-we-disclose-cyber-vulnerabilities)

<comment><USER10> > And who should be responsible for this mission? Are you saying that the > offensive and defensive cyber capabilities should be split between different > agencies?

In theory, they already are. The Navy, Air Force, Army, and NSA all maintain somewhat separate cyber capabilities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Site seems overloaded. Link for the lazy: [https://web.archive.org/web/20150615233609/https://threatpos...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150615233609/https://threatpost.com/us- navy-soliciting-zero-days/113308)

</comment><comment><USER12> Just to be clear, this is not really the Navy as most of you think of it that is seeking this.

</comment><comment><USER13> Give it some more time, all dissenting posts will be greyed out hehe.

</comment><comment><USER14> $27.5m fixed bid for a 24 month contract. That's extremely good work if you can get it.

<comment><USER15> It doesn't say that. the number $27.5 million is the cut off for a business to be considered a "small business" which would receive special considerations under the law.

<comment><USER14> Ah. You're right. Thanks for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Didn't foresee all this nonsense when I started to enjoy IT back in the younger days.

Wish I didn't see it now either. What a mess. Long live the petrodollar and killing other humans for a fiat currency.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why not 0 seconds, instead of 0 days? I didn't think you can buy time anywhere, but why the gratuitous use of the "days" unit when the quantity is zero anyway?

Still, a gov't agency would surely pay plenty, even for nothing at all, so what's the going rate for "no time at all" these days?

<comment><USER17> Days convey immediacy and scale. "Today" and "same day" balance precision. If time between an exploit becoming known and fixed consistently happened in 100 seconds or less, 0-sec might sound ok. Come to think of it, 0-sec is a fitting pun.

<comment><USER18> "0-sec" isn't too bad, but the plural can make for awkward conversation.

<comment><USER19> 0-sec is a terrible name if you're working in sec...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft accused of adding Windows 10's spy features to Windows 7 and 8 - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2015/09/microsoft-accused-of-adding-spy-features-to-windows-7-8/

<comment><USER2> All this news just makes me want Wine to be better.</comment>


Building SaaS startup from scratch - <AUTHOR> http://startupmyway.com/building-saas-startup-from-scratch/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey! What do you think about this idea of creating a business in front of the audience?

<comment><USER2> StackOverflow did something similar. In the early days, Spolsky and Atwood podcasted their weekly phone conversations. An advantage of their approach was that other than recording and publishing the audio it was an organic business activity. That's somewhat different from writing blog posts about the process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool. That's actually a good idea to record and publish real discussions about the product.</comment></comment></comment>


Protest the pope at 1:30: why? - <AUTHOR> http://bengoldacre.posterous.com/protest-the-pope-at-130-why

<comment><USER2> If Ben is really for Equality and Diversity, as he says, he would be pushing for Catholics to allow anyone to be a priest that had the faith and ability to be one, using the scandal and the dwindling number of priests in the church as the reasons, and leave it at that.

By not allowing women priests and not allowing priests to marry, priests' numbers have dwindled and they've basically had to take most of the people that applied for the job, if they showed significant faith.

This was less of a problem when being a priest was something many families thought were important. Parents would groom one of their children to become a priest who might have otherwise gone on and been an average person in the laity. This was a respected position, and a pretty good living up until the last hundred years or so, so many would aspire to it. In many places in the world, to some extent, many still do. However, it is much, much harder to find priests than it used to be.

The church really needs to consider the fact that there were a significant number of women and married people in the early church, and that even though Jesus asked the disciples to put God and service to their neighbors first over family, he did not say that women can't be priests, nor that priests couldn't marry.

But, I respect that the Catholic church is doing the best it can given what has happened, which was awful, and my heart goes out to all of those affected, as does every Catholic I know.

I think anyone protesting the Pope though is probably less interested in actual reform than just emitting anger and promoting division in the church.

</comment><comment><USER3> Any organization that tells its followers that using birth control will earn them eternal damnation is an enemy of the planet.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you prepare your self for a tech interview? - <AUTHOR> I would like to know how everyone here at HN prepare them selves for a technical interview? I know that reading Skiena's and CLRS book again is one also try to solve problems in papers in paper is another good one. Mind sharing the tips and how much time do you actually spend in preparing this? <comment><USER2> Step 1. Be a good techie. Step 2. Interview at companies worth working at.

<comment><AUTHOR> Define step. 1 and how to be that 'good techie'?

<comment><USER3> Read a lot. Do neat stuff. Show it to people. Repeat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The best preparation doesn't involve studying detailed test examples or cramming about the fundamentals you have become a bit rusty on since your University CS days.

The ultimate prep for a tech interview or any interview for that matter is plenty of rest, reasonable research on the company you are interviewing with and getting a clear understanding of their expectations for the role you are applying for.

Tech interviews aren't designed to test how much study and preparatory work you can do, the most effective Tech interviews are designed to find out what your general competency is with specific technologies and what sort of coder personality you align to. The tests aren't designed to find out how good you are in one specific circumstance, they want to gauge what calibre of code you will produce should you work for them on a daily basis.

My advice: Get plenty of rest, stay calm, do your best on the day and if you failed miserably then chances are you avoided joining a company where the level of expectation would have led to unnecessary stress and pressure down the line.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm very curious to see the other answers to this, myself. Some things I've learned so far:

1\. Different companies often have very different interview strategies. If you're interviewing with Google or Microsoft, you need to be mentally on your toes and able to solve programming problems and maybe some puzzles. If you're interviewing for a developer position at a large bank, the experience is completely different.

2\. Don't focus on getting "the right answer" to the exclusion of everything else. You're not taking a standardized test--you're talking to a human being. Sometimes demonstrating _interest_ will take you farther than being able to answer correctly all the obscure questions that get thrown at you.

If there's anything to take away from this in terms of how to prepare, I'd say its that being alert and engaged is just as important as knowing your stuff. Staying up the night before trying to memorize design patterns is likely to be counterproductive.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't think you are supposed to "prepare".

Make sure interviewer understands what you already know or can learn quickly if its something specific that job requires.

If you have to prepare for that role.. you are probably not a good fit. move on...

*Of course its a different matter altogether if you are fresh out of school.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sometimes I'll skim the documentation on a certain technology if I expect I'll be asked on it, but most of the time I don't really do any sort of preparations. My experiences cover a lot of the technical questions I'm asked, so I usually have a quick answer.</comment>


Adobe Launches Online Office Suite and New Flash-Enabled Acrobat 9 - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/adobe_launches_online_office_suite.php <comment><USER2> Not a good start. I went to "acrobat.com", and I see a blank page titled something like "Flash Player Installation" (but of course, I have Flash already).

There's no paragraph blurb, no E-mail link...just a black background. So I can't even let them know about the problems I'm having, and of course they haven't presented me with any actual information about their product.

In 2008, from a company the size of Adobe, this is an incredible blunder.</comment>