Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | this_user's commentslogin

Didn't they do that? Staples only came in as CEO at the end of 2024, and I assume he has been working on a plan to restructure the company since then. Because their financials are not great, and they have been losing money every year since 2019.

I don't know about gitlab, but tech companies (Meta and Grab) tend to hack off the bottom of the management chain, instead of cutting off the top (aka as the people that created the 8 layer system).

bottom level teams are merged to form larger teams.


Yeah, they never fire the VPs and SVPs in this process. Just a bunch of the hard-working line managers who are actually involved in the day-to-day engineering work

Companies are shaped more or less like pyramids. If you want to cut a meaningful amount of people from the organization, there's just not enough of them at the top.

If one person at the top of the pyramid earns 100 times what people at the bottom earn, cutting a few of them is still meaningful. Also, cutting a single/few person(s) that are mismanaging the whole organization is extraordinarily valuable too.

But salaries - sorry, operational costs - are an inverted pyramid.

It's gonna get a lot worse with all the AI slopcode that is about to be pushed directly to production.

I predict in the future many will blame the poor overall quality of software and the poor uptime of services on AI, as if things weren’t terrible before AI.

That's already happening in the gaming world. Gamers blame any bug, glitch or upstream issue on AI. In WoW, the most recent patch 12.0.5 had a ton of bugs and users on the forums and other fan sites relentlessly blame Blizzard and "microslop" for using AI to "do their jobs" now.

(And maybe AI was to blame in WoW's case, but the speculation is baseless.)


You mean all the AI "slop" that's finding and writing new kernel exploits every day? And submitting hundreds of previously-unknown security bugs in critical software?

What are you saying here? An LLM helped humans do something right once therefore it's perfect to use in every other situation too?

llms aren't doing any of that. Some smart people are using llms find those vulns, there's a huge difference.

Your definition of "do" seems different than mine.

Call it agentic all we want, the LLM has no agency. It's not a living thing, it's a tool employed by humans and it helps humans do things we wouldn't normally be able to do, like a calculator. The fact that Claude is getting the credit for it and not the humans guiding it is just an artifact of Anthropic's marketing.


It's A Trap! ~ Admiral Ackbar

The only thing that Cohen has done is shut down stores and cut costs massively at the expensive of revenue. He hasn't really fixed anything, he is just managing their demise. All of his strategic initiatives like expansion of e-commerce or an NFT platform were complete disasters that had to be wound down. The only reason the company is even showing a profit is because they repeatedly diluted shareholders to raise cash and then re-invested that money into Treasuries. Basically, if you are buying GME stock, you are getting an expensive fixed income wrapper.

Buying EBAY would be a bad deal for pretty much everyone involved. GME shareholders get diluted to buy EBAY for way too much money. EBAY shareholders get paid in vastly overvalued GME shares. And the entire thing would be managed by some guy whose only strategic idea is to cut costs. The only one who would benefit is Cohen, because it would create a sufficiently liquid market for him to sell his stake, something that is not currently possible in GME.


You’ve presented a plausible and concise counter argument here. Time will tell.

https://dasams.substack.com/p/the-cohen-endgame?r=af3hc&utm_...


> The only reason the company is even showing a profit is because they repeatedly diluted shareholders to raise cash and then re-invested that money into Treasuries.

That's simply not true.

Profit excluding the interest from the cash in 2025 was ~110 million. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326380/000132638026... page 27.

Yes, closing unprofitable stores reduces revenue. It also improves profit. You're describing... Good business.

You're entitled to your opinions about the products and the merger. We'll have to see how it plays out


The Firefox UI is getting worse and worse with every version, because they are constantly adding more useless features. Any time you accidentally hit the wrong button, it launches something, because everything is a shortcut now. The latest being their split tabs, which I also had to disable. Maybe they should stop trying to turn their browser into an OS.

just use seamonkey oor palemoon

OpenAI and Anthropic are both planning IPOs this year. They are clearly trying to polish their finances before filing their S-1s. Because their advisors will have told them that it's going to be a very difficult sell at these valuations if they cannot at least present the idea of a path towards profitability.


Their legendary "goto fail" debacle as well as the ease with which ios has repeatedly been jailbroken would disagree. I think geohot once quipped: "My lawyer could write a better malloc."


I much prefer the defect where the root password was the empty string [1].

https://security.it.miami.edu/stay-safe/sec-articles/macosx-...

[1] Actually, the defect was that creating a root account was a unprivileged action, so anybody could create a root account on your machine with a password of their choice. The most obvious presentation is that you could login to root by pressing enter twice with the empty password; the first time creating root with the empty password and the second time logging you in.



Never understood that if statement style, it seems to only exist to create subtle bugs.


I think of it as BSD style, though of course it could be suggested/mandated elsewhere -

  [...]Use a space after keywords (if, while, for, return, switch). No braces are used for control statements with zero or only a single statement unless that statement is more than a single line, in which case they are permitted.[0]

As I look, GNU guide is less specific, but examples[1] show the same style.

The good thing is that -Wmisleading-indentation [2] (comes along with -Wall) catches this indentation error.

[0] https://man.openbsd.org/style - happens to be same for at least NetBSD.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Syntactic-Conve...

[2] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Warning-Options.html


It's slightly less lines of code which is nice. I'm someone who prefers terseness so I get it.

However, it's bad. I much prefer the rare, elusive, postfix if:

   goto fail if (condition);
It can create some very readable code when used right, with short and simple conditionals.


iOS (and MacOS) now use Google’s BoringSSL instead and have for many years


Do they? Based on what I’ve seen with a quick search, this doesn’t seem to be true


See e.g. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/network/creating-a... where the logging output makes it clear BoringSSL is what is used.

Or comments such as: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/Security/blob/rel...

Unsurprisingly, given BoringSSL doesn't have a stable API (yet alone ABI), it isn't exposed as a system library.


Seems like they use BoringSSL on their open source distributions, but their own library on their own platforms: https://forums.swift.org/t/native-implementations-and-boring...


CryptoKit isn't relevant to `goto fail`, which was the origin of this thread, given CryptoKit merely implements primitives and not TLS.

If you really are doubting what gets used for TLS, open up Console.app, start streaming, run `nscurl https://example.com/` (or load it in Safari, etc.), and you'll see logging like:

    default com.apple.network boringssl 18:11:46.229209-0700 libboringssl.dylib nscurl boringssl_session_apply_protocol_options_for_transport_block_invoke(2360) [C1.1.1.1:2][0x1008cef10] TLS configured [server(0) min_version(0x0303) max_version(0x0304) name(redacted) tickets(false) false_start(false) enforce_ev(false) enforce_ats(false) ats_non_pfs_ciphersuite_allowed(false) cc_mode_enforced(false) ech(false) pqtls(true), pake(false)]
It really is boringssl which is nowadays used for TLS by the Network framework.


iOS Safari definitely used BoringSSL last time I checked it with Frida


Dare we not look to Android.

goto fail was relevant in 2014 - perhaps not the most useful point in 2026.


I mean, we have been saying that exact thing for close to 30 years at this point.

Yet, they are still around, they are still deeply embedded in most businesses, and no matter how much they screw up, it just keeps going.


> there's no good way to do LLM structured queries yet

Because LLMs are inherently designed to interface with humans through natural language. Trying to graft a machine interface on top of that is simply the wrong approach, because it is needlessly computationally inefficient, as machine-to-machine communication does not - and should not - happen through natural language.

The better question is how to design a machine interface for communicating with these models. Or maybe how to design a new class of model that is equally powerful but that is designed as machine first. That could also potentially solve a lot of the current bottlenecks with the availability of computer resources.


That's their choice, but they also choose to suffer the consequences. Expecting the world to cater to your needs specifically is such a typical boomer attitude and should no longer be tolerated.


And, expecting people who are happy with what they already have and have already paid for to switch to your newer, more complicated, more expensive system so that your numbers go up is another attitude that should not be tolerated.


I am sure that you also think they should have a place for his horses to feed because he doesn’t want to deal with a car.


Horses, no. That would impose quite a lot on everyone else. But walking, or taking the bus, vs. owning an expensive personal transportation device... yes.


While we're at it, let's get rid of the ADA. Those disabled people expecting the world to cater to their needs specifically are so abusive to those of us with perfectly functional bodies and flexible minds.


There's a big difference between legislating accomodations for people who physically can't do something, vs. those who can but choose not to.

The former makes sense. The latter doesn't. I don't get to park in handicapped spaces that are closer to the store just because I'd like to.


The ADA forces reasonable accommodations. It doesn’t mean that car manufactures have to build cars for blind people.


Using a battery powered electronic device as a “pass” detected by another handheld electronic device, both of which are contacting cell towers, exchanging data with data centres 100s of kms away, filling out detailed profiles of user behavior … rather than a paper ticket?


You will be the "boomer" some day. I wish people had more empathy.

An example: Presbyopia came on hard for me in the last couple of years Now I really appreciate low-vision affordances that, as a younger person, I couldn't have cared less about and would have seen as an unnecessary cost.


I used to laugh about the 'picture signs'; like the universal nose in book sign that means library. Or the airport logo on the exit sign on the freeway.

Until I spent some time in a country whose predominate language (and signage) was not english.

Maybe those pictorial signs are a good idea after all.


Exactly.

When OP is 85, I hope some whippersnapper 20 year old says to him, "Come on, grandpa. You need to get that neural advertisement brain implant like the rest of us, or you can't buy anything. Why should businesses need to support your lame smartphone? Step into the 22nd century, pops!"


No need to wait until 85. Just slip on something at the age of 22 while playing a quick game of basketball and blow out a knee.

Suddenly you start seeing and using all the wonderful ADA affordances that have been installed in plain sight all around you.


Learn how to use whatever shitty technology is being pushed onto the masses or die, yes, that's the right attitude for sure.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: