EnKopVand

In what world did you see this? At least here in Europe the main conversation about Social Media has been that it shouldn't be operated by big tech companies. We've always viewed Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, and so on. Basically the way Americans are now viewing TikTok. Especially in the wake of Snowden.

It's true that more people are now putting actions behind their words, and leaving Twitter for the Fediverse because of the new leadership at Twitter, but this seem to be only partly because of the right-wing turn and much more because of the instability showing just how insane it is for the world to let a social media platform be moderated by the whims of a billionaire.

I frankly think Trump is right to stay on Truth. Because what happens when Elon eventually loses interest in Twitter and sells it to someone else? That is the strength of the Fediverse to be honest. You get to operate your own servers that are part of the larger whole. This would let journalists, politicians and NGOs run, and more importantly moderate, their own "Twitter" that is still part of the larger whole. Here in Denmark it would allow our government agencies to operate a "Twitter" where all our elected officials could have an account and not have to rely on an American tech company to moderate their feeds, or risk being banned for violating American laws. Yes, the consequence will very likely be that ultra right-wing networks will be largely isolated, but that's still free speech.

This seems very misinformed and I would like to see a source on it. In many European countries it's fairly easy to fire people. I can use Denmark as an example as this is where I'm from, here you can fire anyone if their position is no longer needed within the company. It's true that you cannot just fire someone and then hire another person to fill the same position without legal repercussion. This is to prevent things like firing people who get pregnant, but if your company is removing the position entirely, like when you're downsizing, you can fire people.

There are ways to fire people you really don't want in your company, however, it's just a matter of how expensive it will be. The typical Danish outcome of wrongful firing is 1-2 years worth of pay, which is (as I understand it) much lower than the outcome of similar American law-suits. In Europe, this is mostly handled by due diligence, where companies enter agreements with an unwanted worker, giving them 1-2 years of pay to fire them legally. But typically this doesn't happen, because why would you want to fire someone with no valid reason?

Firing someone for not responding to a single e-mail is insane.

One of the advantages to running a company in Europe compared to America is that many European countries are designed to make it relatively "easy" to fire people. This is because we have really good social security networks. In Denmark we have something called a "dagpenge" system, which is a type of unemployment system where you pay some tax-deductible money to be part of an "a-kasse" that will then pay you a healthy sum for two years after you lose a job. The sum isn't quite "programmer level salary" in Denmark, but many companies tend to deal with this by offering 80-100% insurances for those two years through either unions, pension-fonds or private security. In the public sector the unions tend to do the same thing.

I think you may be confusing our overall workers rights with company to employee relationships. Because it's true that countries like France sees some massive worker strikes once in a while, but these have more to do with the government vs workers than anything and typically have to do with how long a work week, how early you can go on pension, how long the social security period should be.

I think it has been time to leave the massive American (and now the Chinese one too) "tech" companies for a while. So in a sense, it's great that Elon has shown the world the existence of Mastodon and the ActivityPub beneath it. I know, I know, a lot of you already knew about it and were already on it too, but I sure didn't.

I'm European, Danish to be exact, and I've had this weird feeling about our politicians and public institutions being on things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on, for about a decade now. Not because it's wrong for them to use the social media platforms, but because they rely so much on American advertisement companies in doing so. In that sense, something like Mastodon just makes a lot more sense. Our government could operate a Mastodon server where they house all our elected officials, and nobody would be at a risk of being banned for breaking some American TOS. They would even be able to moderate their comment threads a lot better, by not allowing stuff like American anti-vaxxers to comment on things about Danish vaccine programs without first having to rely on Twitter or Facebook to police it for them. It seems the EU has already gone in that direction, or at least did so back in the spring of 2022 when Elon first announced his plans to buy Twitter, but our local politicians haven't yet followed.

Similarly, our journalist profession has something called a "pressekort" which is basically a certificate that shows the world that you're a Danish journalist. They could come together and build a Mastodon server where a "pressekort" is required to be a member. (There are already some of those springing up, so I guess it's already happening), and it's already limiting the amount of misinformation that happens on their posts by a massive amount.

I know this won't be the "free to say anything without consequences" haven a lot of people here on HN want. We're already seeing right-wing network servers and users completely blocked, but it's sort of how free speech works in a democracy. Before the American advertisement companies gave the village looney a platform, nobody around here listened to them. We still largely don't listen to them in my country, but we sure waste more time on them than we did in the world before Facebook.

So yes, the time has come to leave centralised Social Media companies. The real question is, whether we will actually do it. I'm not going to say that joining Mastodon was hard, because it wasn't. But I spent about a week researching a good server to join, and that's sure "harder" than just pushing my telefonnumber into TikTok.

It's a good question, and it's frankly so complicated that I'm not sure I can explain it. Basically own capital is the operational capital that is on your company's books that your company can budget and spend. Investor money aren't.

This can play out in a lot of different ways, and many of them are probably a little different than what HN is used to, but in many cases, especially in investment banking, it's common for investors to buy into projects rather than into companies. Of course the projects are likely going to be multiple companies as legal entities, but basically, they are a lot like school projects in which one computer is great at doing the project and the other owns a computer to do the project on.

Let's say I'm really good at building offshore windmill farms. I'm also great at selling them for a nice profit once they are build, but a 40% profit on 10 is still just 14. You're rich on the other hand, but you're not really sure how to grow your fortune. Now if we pool my 10 and your 100 and the banks 100 together, then we can turn those 210 into almost 300 in the same amount of time that I could turn my 10 into 14. The 10 is own capital.

Even if you were to invest in my company directly, it would still make sense for you, and the other investors to keep some operational capital on the budgets. Both because it's healthy, and because it allows the company to move in on opportunities before they are sold to investors. Maybe there was an opportunity to turn the 210 into 1000, but you had to act NOW. I could put my own 100 up, and then slowly sell them to you, or other investors, over the following year.

And so on. It's much, much, more complicated than this, and then you also have to add the real complexity of all the bureaucratic "magic" that goes along with finances.

> I can’t say I understand why trillion dollar companies are doing mass layoffs

Most companies finance new projects with a combination of three things. Own capital, investor money and loans. Right now interest rates are high, I'm European so I can't speak for the US, but in some areas of the Eurozone the interest rates hit 12% a month ago. At that point it becomes impossible to utilise the loan part, because it's just too expensive. The investor money are similarly either slowing down or disappearing, not so much because they aren't around or that they don't have money, but because they are waiting to see what happens. This is fuelled not only by the loan part of the equation, but also by the inflation and global supply lines pushing the costs of projects to a point that has eaten a healthy chunk of the would-be investor profits, or put in another way, investors don't want to risk their money for 5% return when it was a 50% return a year ago. Lastly there is the own capital, one way to maintain this is to cut the work force, which aligns with how you need a smaller work force as things slow down.

Where do people go? Well, typically they find new jobs. Some change professions entirely. Some retire. A few unfortunate people break down and head down dark paths. But really, it's not unlike layoffs in good periods, there is just more of it with fewer opportunities.

> it still even possible to get a tech job in this downturn?

As with most things this depends on your situation. What is your educational background, your skillset and your history of work. I can't speak for the US, but here in Europe some countries you could double our amount of good programmers and still need more.

> good paying

As with everything, this depends on the amount of people who can do what you do, but compensation doesn't necessarily go down during harder periods. But it does mean you'll likely have to justify what you do to earn it more than you did before.

> in my shed so it is off-site.

My neighbour had a lightning strike hit their robot grass mower. It fried every electronic device on their parcel. Including half the non-connected power tools in their non-house-connected shed. It was a wild thing to witness the aftermath of. Basically anything electric that had been semi-close to the robot grass mower "stop here" line circling the grass, got fried. The plastic of on none-electric tool literally melted. Nobody got hurt, thankfully.

Your shed may be on another planet for all I know, but the amount of damage caused sure made me respect the "two separate physical locations" more than I used to.

It doesn't exactly save your privacy and it won't matter to everyone, but Hetzner is European.

I mostly write Typescript these days, and being lazy, I'll just quote wikipedia, but I'd much rather debug:

  const result = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
    .filter(n => n % 2 === 0)
    .map(a => a * 10)
    .reduce((a, b) => a + b);

than:

  const numList = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10];
  let result = 0;
  for (let i = 0; i < numList.length; i++) {
    if (numList[i] % 2 === 0) {
      result += numList[i] * 10;
    }
  }

Maybe it doesn't make so much sense in this simple example, probably even less so if you're not familiar with Javascript, but it mostly comes down to the state of what you're working on. In FP you know what you get, how it looks while you're working with it and exactly what to expect as the outcome, in OOP, well, you sort of don't. Reading Wikipedia, though, maybe what I like is called Functional Programming with Higher-order functions and not just Functional Programming?

Like I said. I'm not extremely religious about it, and I do think a lot of OOP design principles and code practices are slowly heading toward a more FP way of thinking. In that way I think it's sort of interesting that you mention Go, because with Go you seem to mostly work with immutable states and functions, rather than mutable objects, which is more functional than imperative programming, but maybe I just haven't worked enough with Go to know better. If you ask me, everything should frankly be immutable by default, but retrain the ability to become mutable like they do it in Rust with the "mut" keyword. I really, really, enjoyed working with that for the brief period I did. Anyway, I'm not sure I'm ever going to get into religious FP, I may very rarely use classes, but it's not like an abstract class can't be healthy for your 17:00 afternoon self once in a while.

But basically every best practice in regards to OOP that I was taught at university back 20+ years ago, the stuff they still teach today (I'm an external examiner a few times a year), has proven to be sort of useless in the real world for me. Maybe it works in more professional or competent organisations but it sure hasn't worked well in any place that I've ever worked, and yes, it does feel sort of dirty to examine people in theories I disagree with, but it's good money and a good way to keep up with both the CS world and possible hires.

There is a Danish scientist called Morten Münster who's done research on behavioural science. He's written a book for management that's gotten very popular in my country, and this is how I became acquainted with it back when I did a stint in management (which around here includes getting a MBA type education in management).

Aaaaaaaanyway, in it he talks about two ways of how we function as human beings, and I'm likely presenting this wrong, but one is basically the best practice theoretical mode of being and the other is how we operate at 17:00 on a Thursday after a week where both our children have been sick, and the overlaying message is that everything that isn't designed for the second mode of being is likely going to fail. Now the way it's presented in the research and the educational material, this has nothing to do with programming. It's more along the lines of companies needing to formulate missions and goals that aren't corporate bullshit, because nobody understands corporate bullshit when they are faced with an angry customer some late Thursday afternoon.

After a few decades in SWE, however, I've become sort of a fan of designing software for that 17:00 Thursday EnKopVand mindset, and functional programming helps a lot in that regard because it kills soooo many of the complexity pitfalls that you really don't want to deal with when you're tired, lazy and incompetent. Of course the other side of this is that I'm not religious about functional programming either, I rarely write classes these days, but if there is a good reason to write one, I will.

Considering the way it works, where your "twitter handle" is defined by the server, and I assume thus locked to it, I'd probably consider running my own instance if I wanted to use it for something serious.

I actually do think the federated version of Twitter, where organisations run their own "Twitter" which then connects to the rest of the "Twitters" is a solid foundation to build an internet that is not too reliant on massive advertisement corporations. I'm European and I did spend a decade in our public sector, but I think there is just something fundamentally wrong with Danish politicians being on Twitter or Facebook instead of being on something like a Mastodon server operated by the Danish state, and I frankly think the same for media organisations like our news papers. They'd be much better off in the federated version of Twitter.

The downside is of course that it's not easy. I looked into a few servers for Mastodon, and the one I liked the most would cost me a monthly fee of €1 with all profits going to planting trees. Which is nice and all, but looking into the "organisation" behind it, well... Most servers seem to be run by just a few people, who aren't really accountable. This is probably going to be just fine. It works pretty well for Open Source Software, but here you can't fork projects when their operators lose interest, and it seems like sort of a design flaw to have your "twitter handle" tied into something you still have no real control over unless you operate your own Mastodon instance or join one of the ones that are operated by real world organisations that you trust.

I think it depends on the circumstances and what you hope to get out of it. If my CEO said something that was technically wrong, I'm not sure I'd even reach out to them in private unless it was actually important. They run the company, and hire people to do X, and while CEOs very likely know a lot about a lot of the different Xs, they often don't really need to. If I knew my CEO would appreciate, and, need to know something, I would tell them in private, but not over the stuff you've seen with Elon. Though to be fair, in some of these cases Elon has asked some of the engineers directly in public first, and then you sort of get what you ask for.

That being said. If I was currently at Twitter in a high value position, I might also take the opportunity to get myself publicly fired. Maybe not in a fashion that is as rude as this particular example, but I'm guessing that even this display is still good exposure in terms of getting promptly rehired elsewhere.

We're in an in-demand field. Most of use exploit it by wearing programming joke t-shirts (again, not the rude ones) in dress code companies where we get away with it as long as we can dress up for when it matters, but I can certainly see why you'd want to get aboard the wave of people getting personally fired for correcting Elon Musk if you had no interest at remaining at Twitter under his leadership.

It works on all of us, doesn't it? I know I clicked this article because it was on page 2 of HN and not really because it was something that I actually wanted to read. I know it's not exactly the same as someone posting a picture of a pair of shoes on picture/shortmovie-app, but it's still driven by the social network algorithm of popularity = more popularity.

Maybe I'm ignorant but I still don't really understand it. There is a picture of some protest with someone wielding an actual Nazi flag... Which is pretty fucked up, but it's also sort of hilarious to see it next to someone wearing a hippie straw hat, another person wearing a bicycle helmet and then, what I am assuming is another ultra right wing idiot with a viking shield.

I'm Danish, I wonder what that those people would do if they knew that the viking culture they are appropriating was actually pretty "liberal". Homosexuality wasn't an issue, neither were mixing races or religions. They just recently discovered an Islamic Viking lord in Sweden.

Anyway. If one side of the "culture war" is Nazis, then why is it a war?

Don't get me wrong. It's not like we didn't have our share of village idiots who thought Bill Gates put Microchips in the Covid vaccines and thought the Face Masks were the end of democracy here in Denmark, but the vast majority of people who thought that Face Masks were stupid still wore them with the reasoning that they wouldn't hurt, even if they didn't help, and basically everyone above 18 got vaccinated.

On a side note, I do wish our own village idiots would come up with their own conspiracies though. I mean, why couldn't our Queen be behind the Microchips instead of Bill Gates?

What culture war? Is this some American thing?