I honestly can't tell if this is satire or not. If so, great job. If not - destroying the world so you can look up a lightbulb is not worth it, and you could have done that before anyway.
This is far more than just "bad vibes", and just a handful of many examples. The vibes also tend to be pretty bad around things that are used to enable spying, a secret police force, or bombing children.
This isn't even touching on the name of the company itself and the origin of that name, or the fact that Peter Thiel founded it, or many of the other things that give it "bad vibes".
Anything critical of Palantir or mass surveillance in general tends to get auto flagged / downvoted very quickly. It's a bit ironic for a site calling itself Hacker News, but it's also very fitting and not surprising that a tech site these days is being influenced so heavily by bots/llms.
> Two weeks ago I laid off more than 20% of my workforce. I didn’t do it because Cloudflare is struggling. We posted record revenue growth, have strong free cash flow and are adding an unprecedented number of customers around the world.
Huh, I wonder why people hate AI so much?
> AI isn’t the harbinger of bleak youth unemployment—it is quite the opposite.
This makes no sense and directly contradicts everything else said before. How is gloating about how you're laying people off despite making more money than ever supposed to increase employment? Do they honestly believe everyone is gullible enough to believe blatant lies like this?
It's been a decade since I was in college but I used to send applications to every vaguely interesting internship, expecting less than 20% of them to contact me.
My university required an internship for graduation so you had to cast a wide net unless you wanted to wait to graduate.
Given how high-profile is and the number of students in the US, 1000 doesn't seem all that impressive.
idk, when I was applying for college a lot of people in the class applied to like 10 schools. There was always space in the education system for them (although maybe not at all of those colleges).
Kids these days are probably just more efficient and can 100x that!
Teen here, I think that I have also applied on the same ~10 colleges level rather than 1000x but I do feel like I have looked for many colleges and I tried to find some international colleges but I am not quite sure about them too. I even made an HN post about it: https://qht.co/item?id=48097377
Anyways I would love to hear your suggestion.
That being said, I feel like an number of colleges apply to rate might still be lower (people might look at many many colleges though) but still not increased 100x
but I can't say the same about internship numbers and I feel like those numbers might have been very different.
I live in India and the Indian education system works a bit differently than American one which I think that I have hopefully fairly detailed it in the HN post.
Anyways, I would love if you would have some advice for which colleges I should apply to if you might have any as I would love to hear it!
It's a declaration that corporate America intends to impose all the costs of AI on individuals. Cloudflare could have retrained people, found new roles for them, etc. Instead it is throwing them to the wolves.
It used to be unacceptable for companies to lay people off purely to improve their margins. It's a sign of how dark the times have become that now CEOs don't even question the acceptability of layoffs that aren't driven by financial distress. The idea that they owe any loyalty to their employees has disappeared entirely. And boy you couldn't have invented a more fitting name for an entitled prick of a CEO reveling in this neo-aristocracy: Prince.
I hope everyone who still works at Cloudflare takes note and starts looking for an exit, because it's clear their boss is just waiting for the first possible chance to cut them and they cannot rely on any glint of humanity from him. Longer term, I think these types of layoffs will prove counterproductive for exactly that reason. It is poisonous to company culture, and all but sure to drive away talent.
Also I have had to deal with multiple breaking bugs from Cloudlfare and their absolutely atrocious customer service over the past few months, so I pulled all my personal and professional sites. They are shitting out vibe coded crap and not providing even minimal customer service anymore, even for an account spending six figures with them annually. Which might not be a huge number by CF standards, but surely should be enough to offer at least some human customer service to handle breaking bugs. Instead, all I got was a chatbot that regurgitated their FAQ and then gave me an email address that was no longer in use and a phone number that was disconnected. It was bafflingly unprofessional. So clearly whatever changes they have made are not working, and Prince is just too thick to recognize he is set to tank the company.
it sounds more like the fallacy of trickle down economics. Anyone who still believes that the wealth of the company will tricke down to their pocket book, even if they have stock options, is smelling their own farts.
These companies are spinning of metric tons of external costs that no bunker in hawaii will protect them from consequences.
It is absolutely disconnected from reality. An old billionaire does not in any way understand what new graduates are feeling and fearing about AI and its impact on the world. He has not existed or lived like any normal person does for decades at this point, and holds significant blame for the current state of tech/AI and everything that comes with it.
Elaborating on this viewpoint: those seniors also had their chance to save for retirement in the cushiest and most prosperous economy of all time. If they didn't choose to do that because they wanted to party or "find themselves", that's on them, and they still got to live it up for cheap while simultaneously removing the ability of future generations to do the same. No millennial or gen Z is going to care that they didn't bother to save a few bucks in a time when houses and college cost as much as a McChicken.
Obviously there are exceptions, but that's the general perception.
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