Well it's part of the hiring strategy with tech companies. You hire based on your competitors hiring. The company that can raise to hire more talent is able to get to market on the next big thing before the competition and see stock value rise. But when a down cycle hits, they all drop hiring to match because you're overspending and will see stock prices drop to the competition.
Worked with Malaysian counterparts for a number of years. You have decent talent there but one of the key constraints I've heard from higherups is that the market doesn't have enough workers and a large multinational can saturate the skilled workers you need. So some companies are skipping to go to India instead.
They say that but in my experience, automation leads to more work. If AI does lead to cost savings and improved business, they will have additional demand and need more people though the type of workers they have may change.
And if everyone is dumping employees then we'll have a recession and everyone will blame it on AI and start hiring new talent to pivot for shareholders.
I think eventually the hardware will be so cheap it'll make more sense to use them as solar fences. Reduce the cost to install and maintain by 3-4x easily. Or DIY for practically nothing.
There's an apartment building here in Seattle which has solar panels mounted flat on its west-facing wall (602 12th Ave). The panels were apparently cheap enough that they did not care about maximizing daylight exposure and simply installed them in the easiest place. Quite a change this is from what I remember when I had solar panels installed on my roof eleven years ago!
I remember asking a friend who understood solar what angle was best to capture the most energy. He told me "you don't aim for the sun, you aim for PG&E"
This is fantastic! Somehow I hadn't heard about vertically mounted solar panels until now but it sounds great. There are so many advantages to vertical mounts I would expect them to become the norm.
There is research coming out that vertical solar panels are more efficient. I think part of it comes from lower temps allowing for more efficient operating. No tracking or pointing required. Less cleaning as its not a flat surface for dust or fall impacts.
I'd say the simpler answer is likely the right one. Rates being higher means it's more expensive for the business to maintain it's cash flow. Shouldn't be an issue for a company like Google but here's the rub, an exec at one public company sees a peer at another (that's probably doing worse financially) drop headcount and a rise in stock, if that exec doesn't do the same they get perceived as not doing enough and see a dip in stock. So they drop headcount too.
While it sucks for those who get the boot, this has the benefit of raising salaries overall. Because the company that does this usually cuts too much and has to later rehire at market rates which rise over time.
Flow batteries biggest issue has been density. If they have solved it at better cost effectiveness than current EV batteries then it may take off. I doubt the complexity of the electrolyte water solution, pumps, and membranes would really win out against an equivalent electrolyte in a rechargeable battery for car sized volumes.
Where this could be a major use case is large scale grid batteries. That would allow for an effective baseline power store for solar and wind power.
I don’t know about the other practical considerations of putting this into a car, but certainly the article suggests the density problem to be solved
> With the basic science problem resolved, Katsoudas adds, Influit is now developing a battery with an energy density rated at 550 to 850 watt-hours per kilogram or higher, as compared to 200 to 350 Wh/kg for a standard EV lithium-ion battery. The company expects larger versions would also beat old-style flow batteries at backing up the grid because the nanoelectrofuel can be reused at least as many times as a flow battery—10,000 or more cycles—and it will probably be cheaper.
The closet idea was a good one but you need intake and exhaust fans to circulate the air for CO2 and good temperature control. Something like the airframe system would work fine.
I feel like I must be missing out on something or be very adaptable relative to the HN crowd. I’ve worked in my cloffice - barely big enough to stand in, ventless, and windowless - for nearly four years now. It’s not my daily workspace, as I occasionally work on the porch, at the dining table, by our bay windows, etc etc.
I’d say 60% of working full time at home is spent in the cloffice that, based on these comments, might be depriving my body of oxygen in a harmful way I must not be noticing. Am I oblivious?
I think the easiest explanation is people rightly figured back during the pandemic lockdowns and wfh policies that people had more money than they usually did even in spite of some people losing their jobs. Gov spending was very high to be honest and people suddenly had somewhere between 1k to 2k extra cashflow. That kind of increase leads to every business trying to extract that as fast as they can.
If your business didn't increase their costs during the last three years it's a dying business.
Stack ranking biggest flaw is that it results in managers gaming the system by over hiring to create strategic buffer ftes they can drop if they need to. Which leads to a reoccurring need to use stack ranking and more over hiring.
The reality is there are very few other types of businesses where you can scale your product so cheaply and still save or increase productivity to justify high prices. Sure music and entertainment can scale but at the end of the day, it's regular people buying the product and there's only so much money there.
It's a temporary issue, rates being what they are means money goes to easier profits. Just like the dotcom bust, it'll eventually make a comeback but good luck figuring out if your company will survive it.
> you can scale your product so cheaply and still save or increase productivity to justify high prices
You've just nailed an aspect of the software industry that I've never understood; if it's so easy to cheaply scale a product, then what's preventing a competitor from charging a bit less and beating your high price?
Nothing, that's why VCs will invest an enormous sum to grow faster than the competition to become the dominate player. Once established and people are used to the product other companies will struggle to compete against it without doing so purely on a cost cutting model that they can't sustain against bigger players.
Problem for many companies is that they are in the middle of a constantly changing tech landscape and become obsoleted fairly quickly or try and use their size to artificially increase margins too much and allow for competitors to eat their market.
