I imagine even in such a job, your shift lead, team boss, or warehouse manager or whatever, would be able to confirm "yes, Bob worked here in truck driving capacity from 2022 to 2024".
References have many levels of usefulness, but the bar starts low - did this person actually perform the job / hold the role they claim in a resume.
Next, and the one I'll agree you don't get as much in modern environment, is how much did they burn bridges / how competent they were. The team boss might be allowed to say "Bob?!? He drove well but god dammit the guy never showed up on time for his shift!". Or they might not.
Many companies don't allow details, but are allowed to confirm a person was employed in a specific role. That's in many cases a sufficient to serve as a reference.
E.g. In my company we have a very strict policy for this, but are still allowed to answer "yes, Bob was employed as problem manager team lead from 2023 to 2025". Conversely as a hiring manager, I'll take that as a minimally sufficient data point in confirming resume entry.
It's a data point, not a final or primary determinant.
Vast majority of corporate team members or leads are not allowed to say anything bad or much other than whether that person was employed or not.
Nevertheless :
1. If a person has a comprehensive long resume but cannot provide meaningful references, that poses a significant question as to why
2. A person will not typically say anything bad about their ex colleague or team members due to legal and policy constraints. Nevertheless if they stick to the "this person was employed here" and don't give even a perfunctory "oh Bob? Yeah he was a good guy. He was employed here from 2023 to 2025" even after some soft prompting, again, a data point.
Depends what you're looking for in an employee or colleague. If "history of not completely burning bridges to the ground " is relevant to you, references are "a" data point.
It is my limited understanding that as much as many of us groan at the notion of Spacex becoming "an AI-first company", markets in general, and Musk investors in particular, are slurping it up. Musk is very very very good at promising the sky. I don't think he can backtrack, he always digs in further - and it has historically worked well for him. He will drop AI only when the next big hype thing comes along and he hitches a ride on that train.
There's the internal reality and external perception.
As an outsider, it feels all levels of USA government are constantly fighting and going back and forth and back and forth over big topics like minority rights, marriages, religion in schools and public matters, funding, environmental concerns, police approach, rights and freedoms, spying, choices of utilities, etc.
I think parallel comment has a much better answer than I could provide - EU is a set of heterogeneous political units which each have multiple nested political units within. Given complexity of USA states rights and legislative bodies, vs municipal and county governments, and then vs the federal judicial executive and legislative branches, including a complete house and a complete Senate, all permeated at all level by two binary polarized parties, all within a single country, I'm not sure EU system is that different or suboptimal anymore.
I've read the "how revival works" section, but still have no idea "how the revival works".
("We've used ai" is all I got from both this intro on HN and the we pages I read, though possible I missed some section.)
Can you share?
I.e. Did you take original audio recordings and run it though some audio chain that optimizes the mix and volumes? Did you put the sheets and lyrics into ableton and recreate the music? Did you feed audio files into chatgpt and prompt "make it better"? Something else?
In the interest of transparency, understanding what happened here will significantly guide my own emotional response :). I appreciate the details of 5 core principles, but spending so much time on principles without actual detail on what got done makes me skeptical and even cynical, which may not be the intent. For example, I personally distinguish between a raw photo, edited photo, composite image, and AI regenerated image, and one of the things I'm trying to understand is the path / traceability from human to final audio file.
That's implementation details though; one can absolutely think that "EU is a good idea" and "specific EU systems need improving" simultaneously, without contradiction.
It's like thinking "I like Canada and am a proud Canadian, though I think there's still a lot of inequality and many policies can be improved upon and we can certainly be more efficient".
I'm neurodivergent, and on various nerdom bell curve tails, including know more than averga bear about technology societal implications and misuses, but I still wouldn't use that term; here in particular, it seems a strong pejorative for anybody who disagrees with your world view :-/
It is my limited understanding this is other way around - you plan your vacation, you get it approved, then on your vacation an emergency vote to reduce your salary is called and you automatically voted yes.
When I go into listening node, I listen. Actively and intensely.
Apparently it unnerves people. My wife coaches me to give occasional Yes,Go On, or UhHuh. But it's a conscious, learned, active mechanism for me. Intuitively, I'll tell you if we've weered off my desired conversation path and I'd ask the same courtesy. I've learned very late in life it's apparently an autism thing. Either way, I don't seek mmms and umms in real live people and I especially
don't need fake ones in a machine :)
Whether that's due to my slight autism or massive nerdery, I don't want more realistic voice. I already switched to non-advanced voice in gpt, and I cannot imagine wanting the mmmhms, the yesses, the laughs, in my ai interaction. I want to ask a structured question and get a structured meaningful response. Informative and structured are really the KPIs. The umms and ahms of existing gpt advanced voice are annoying enough, the recent increased usage of first person almost a deal breaker (when asking for bike technique on lose surfaces yesterday, it literally gave me "back when I was learning bikes riding" story - eww).
Fascinating to see the architectural advances though, even when they deliver something I personally don't need :)
I don't agree with OP, and I'm willing to hear why you're correct in that assessment, but can you elaborate?
To be explicit about each other's assumptions, I think Race (however ill-defined or specific construct as it may or may not be), is not the same thing as Country, Political System, Culture, Religion, etc.
Understanding racists these days mostly use euphemisms and codewords, and it's a devil's work sometimes to figure it out, in the "Principle of Charity" sense, I read that post as being a critique of China's political and cultural systems in general, and their sport-league / development in particular, leading to specific societal outcomes. I could be extremely naive though but I'm willing to learn if you may provide more backing/thought for that?
>>I think “when you buy a product, be it a game, a house, a car, a computer, a tractor, washer, TV, it should continue to operate without rent-seeking behavior” is the best type of straightforward, uniformly-applicable pattern of regulation one could hope for.
This is why I love Hacker News; I feel you genuinely believe this - that designing and enforcing the law around digital property rights is the easy, straightforward, and the priority/important law :).
(I don't disagree! I'm a computer geek too, this stuff is important and visible to me as well. But let's have awareness of a) the actual complications around crafting and implementing laws around something so massively complex and constantly changing, and b) where the actual priorities for vast majority of people in the world may be:)
Yes; and to make it extremely politically explosive, I do enjoy observing American politics and seeing each side (there are, brilliantly, two, because there ARE only two sides to every story and they neatly correlate with each other 100%:) massively enlarge the government, apply massive new restrictive regulations, but one side claims they don't do that because of somewhat specific types of massive government regulations and enlargements they do :)
At its best, a government law/regulation/policy is people saying "Ouch, that hurt, let's not do THAT again!", or "Oooh, I like this, this is good for us, let's do more of THAT please!".
At its worst, its self-preserving bureaucracy run rampant.
Any oversimplifying platitude like "I'm against big government!" or "I'm against government regulation!" so tremendously lacks specifics as to be worse than worthless.
And this is an extremely complicated issue which a tiny minority of people care about that'd be ridiculously over-complicated to implement with huge difficulty in tracking and enforcing! But because where we are, it resonates with us, and we on Hacker News feel it's an obvious and easy policy to apply :). You know, unlike the minor issues of war and peace and hunger and poverty and economics and minority rights et cetera :)
100 internet points and tip of a hat to you sir :)
Not in all / not anymore. I'm in Canada a 300k IT/consulting company and rated top performer several years in a row. No raises last couple of years, before that it was 0.49 and 1% respectively. This year there was zero salary increase for anybody in our branch.
About: www.nikolanovak.com
(sometimes I try to type on work-mandated iPhone; apologies for occccasional aWfu l typoes:)