sonthonax (u/sonthonax)

sonthonax commented on Thunderbird 140 “Eclipse” blog.thunderbird.net/2025... · Posted by u/TangerineDream

smokel · 2 months ago

Nitpick: not all bugs have to be reproducible to be taken seriously. Defensive programming, and adding extra logging could be a mitigation to avoid future problems, or to help fixing them in the future.

sonthonax · 2 months ago

Yeah, parent comment is deeply unserious.

Imagine you're writing trading software, you have an algo go haywire and it machine guns the whole order book, and then you refuse to put a "max order size" outside of the algo to stop it from happening again because you can't figure out why it happened in the first place.

Try telling a regulator or your boss that was your reasoning.

sonthonax commented on Why do transit agencies keep falling for the hydrogen bus myth? cleantechnica.com/2025/03... · Posted by u/guerby

neves · 6 months ago

Why? Because Oil Companies are lobbying for inefficient hydrogen to delay a green revolution:

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/carbon-notes-5-green-hydrog...

> The members of the hydrogen coalition are all obviously incumbent fossil fuel and petrochemical interests looking for a bridge to the new era. If realized, their ambitious hydrogen projects may overload the available supply of green power, for little real benefit. By diverting badly needed clean power, green hydrogen vanity projects may even slow down the energy transition. And the subsidy regimes that are being put in place could become self-perpetuating. As Gernot Wagner and Danny Cullenward recently warned, “hydrogen could become the next corn ethanol”, a ruinously inefficient and environmentally damaging creature of subsidies that are too big to kill.

sonthonax · 6 months ago

Just not true. Lots of oil companies have a vested interest in renewables now. A lot of the infrastructure for offshore oil is being redeployed for offshore wind.

sonthonax commented on New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike washingtonpost.com/style/... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect

lallysingh · 10 months ago

Plenty of companies have more engineers for fewer products. Take any game studio, or the Photoshop team. What's your point? Do you have any comparable basis for comparison? The Guardian isn't one.

sonthonax · 10 months ago

600 people on a median 200k salary in New York, when including taxes and obligatory benefits is about $150 million dollars a year just in payroll. This is an enormous spend. Unlike a game studio or a software company like Adobe, these people are all operational cost centres, they're not the bread and butter of the firm.

In a true software firm, more capital invested in headcount loosely means more features which is what drives sales. Here you can attribute a per employee profitability. When you hire more employees at a tech firm, the expectation is that you become more profitable.

At a non-tech company like a newspaper, technologists are a cost centre, you invest in technology in order to be more efficient, and hire as few people as possible.

Of course some technologists at the NYT will be profit centres. like those who work on advertising operations and games. But the NYT at its core is a news firm, it makes money on its influence and prestige which is driven by its journalism. Writers and content creators are the profit centres, everything else is a cost of doing business.

sonthonax commented on New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike washingtonpost.com/style/... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect

lallysingh · 10 months ago

Well let's get into what NYT does: apps and widgets for several platforms, a separate paid "games" product, advertising backend, podcasts on separate apps, visualizations for key stories.. the list goes on. And at a very large scale.

NYT isn't comparable to The Guardian. It's subscription based so the news isn't enough. They have to add cooking, games, The Athletic, etc, across a ton of different apps, feeds, and presentations.

Games is solely a software product sold as a separate add-on subscription. It's almost certainly a profit center at the rates they charge.

sonthonax · 10 months ago

I know they have a larger range of services, but are they 20x the breadth of services? Think of what other companies do with 600 tech people and compare what the profitability per employee should be at an tech organisation of such a scale.

sonthonax commented on New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike washingtonpost.com/style/... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect

MisterBastahrd · 10 months ago

They have a union. They don't have to "move on." They get to negotiate. That's why they have a union. If more companies had unions, then more companies would be forced to treat their employees like people.

There's no data to support the idea that they have a massively bloated headcount. Just because you don't know the extent of what they do doesn't mean that they aren't doing it anyway.

sonthonax · 10 months ago

They have at least 600 employees, get some perspective on just how much that is. It's least $150 million dollars a year in technology payroll alone. They have more technology workers than some major newspapers have in staff alone.

Why do you think that people on 200k should have a union? How does it benefit anyone besides people looking for sinecure jobs?

Unions were needed to combat the powers of corporations where you are in some ways trapped by the relationship; like miners in appalachia who had to fight cartels of mining companies who suppressed their wages; or teachers who have one state employer.

If you're a competent tech worker, you're at the other end of the spectrum. So much so you're generally advised to switch jobs every few years in order to maximise your salary. There's nothing binding you to a particular employer, particularly in New York!

To be honest, if you're a good technologist, you should be looking at making 400k a year in at a trading firm. If you're working for the NYT you're doing it because you're weirdly attracted to the prestige of working there, or you're looking for a cushy job.

If the job is no longer as cushy as you want, have the dignity to leave and find other employment rather than trying to hold your employer hostage.

sonthonax commented on New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike washingtonpost.com/style/... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect

lallysingh · 10 months ago

This is also Tech in NYC. The average salary ($190k) is low for that market, so they're asking for an easier work-life balance.

Why they have 600 people is a question for management, no?

Kafka's not exactly hard to set up, especially for simple configs for low event rates. The justification from the link you posted:

  > On the other side we have a wide range of services and applications that need 
  > access to this published content — there are search engines, personalization 
  > services, feed generators, as well as all the different front-end applications, 
  > like the website and the native apps. Whenever an asset is published, it should 
  > be made available to all these systems with very low latency — this is news, 
  > after all — and without data loss.

sonthonax · 10 months ago

If it's low for the market why choose to work at the NYT?

Being a tech worker isn't like being a steelworker where you're kinda screwed if the plant shuts down. You're fully capable of moving job if you're dissatisfied.

> Why they have 600 people is a question for management, no?

It's a question for everyone at the organisation. If you're joining a firm with a massively bloated headcount you need to think if you're going to be there in a year's time when someone in management finally gathers the political capital to slim your department down to sane levels.

It's certainly not a position to start bargaining even more concessions from the hand that's feeding you.

sonthonax commented on New York Times Tech Guild goes on strike washingtonpost.com/style/... · Posted by u/ChrisArchitect

FredPret · 10 months ago

Have you ever done knowledge work with offshore contributors?

It’s challenging to say the least. Even when working between first-world countries speaking English, there’s a host of serious problems. Cultural differences; different expectations; time zone differences.

sonthonax · 10 months ago

The New York Times is a glorified blogging platform. Not to long ago it was a Wordpress site.

I'm fully aware of how jaring it is for the median HN reader to hear this, but maintenance of a news website isn't the kind of skilled labour that commands a 250k a year paycheck anymore.

sonthonax commented on Microsoft says EU to blame for the worst IT outage euronews.com/next/2024/07... · Posted by u/matthewmorgan

jcfrei · a year ago

What a disingenuous argument by Microsoft - I really hope nobody buys it. Lots of the most mission critical software runs on Linux. They don't have these security issues because they were open from the start.

sonthonax · a year ago

Linux outages and upgrade fuckups happen all the time. The difference is that Linux isn't on a unified upgrade cycle so issues come as a trickle rather than a dulge, so the problems are usually localised to a corporation and don't make the news.

Also Linux fanboys will usually blame the system admin for not configuring things properly if things break: "it's not the operating system, it's <something stolen from OpenBSD>".

End of the day Linux is only popular because of the inertia UNIX had on mini-computers/servers. For standard end users GNU Linux is lightyears behind Windows and macOS in terms of usability and stability.