The reason for the lack of those is that employers want to hedge their bets - emailing a rejection will make the candidate move on and potentially take another offer which would make them unavailable.
Letting them stew means the candidate may remain available if you suddenly change your mind or your top pick flakes out and you need a replacement on short notice.
It's understandable - what's less understandable is being butthurt about it when candidates start playing the exact same game and flake out because they too hedged their bets, picked another option and need to let you down.
This might make sense in the late stages of a hiring process (where it can veer into kind of unethical), but for early stages, it’s just not very compelling.
At any stage, if you take more than a couple of weeks to a month, the applicant has probably moved on anyway.
And for early stages applicants, almost no one is going to wait and not taking an offer in the hopes that they’ll hear back from a company that hasn’t given them feedback from a phone screen.
SIM cards is (one) of the ways the big boys do it. It gives you a nice CGNAT to hide behind and essentially can’t be blocked without blocking a nontrivial chunk of the country. Although more and more fixed-line ISPs are moving to CGNAT too so you can get that advantage there as well.
The whole “blaming Gen Z” thing is getting old. You get what you pay for.
You’re likely offering “market rate” roles. You’re getting “market rate” candidates and behavior. It’s like walking into a Fiat dealership and being mad you’re not getting Ferrari treatment.
If you want better you are welcome to pay more and then maybe people will have less incentives to ghost you. The Ferrari treatment still exists, you just need to pay for it.
The job market didn't get rude, it just regressed to the mean. "Rude" is the default; when one side shows respect it's likely for the other side to reciprocate. When one side doesn't, there is little reason for the other side to put in the effort.
Rude is the default if you optimise everything down to perfection to prioritise profit, which tech is really good at doing. After all, that extra second you’d spend being courteous could be used to make the line go up and create shareholder value instead.
* malicious: hostile actors want to gain footholds into companies - North Korea, etc
* benign: people in lower income countries want to do the job and can make good profit even when giving half the salary to you.
For the second option, some are scams and only want to pocket a month or two of salary without delivering before the company fires them. Others actually deliver and can keep the arrangement going long-term.
I don't think true mastery exists in a continuously-evolving field like tech, it's all people just figuring things out, and accumulating enough knowledge/experience means the things you build no longer blow up and mostly do what you want them to ("mostly" being load-bearing here - even the big boys publish errata notices for their chips because even they miss things sometimes).
I assume this is mitigated by delaying the uploads by a month (which you may need anyway due to sporadic internet access & not always having the time to edit videos).
This is absolutely doable by a niche company. The problem is that you need to run this as a business. What plagues every free/open/libre project is that they're not run as a business; so they get distracted in all different directions trying to cater to ideals about free/libre licensing and so on, and end up missing the big picture.
You need to operate this as a business first, with the freedom part being a nice bonus. Nobody cares how free your thing is if it's dead on arrival and gets beaten by an entry-level smartphone.
Make a competitive product. Nowadays that could very well just mean Android with manufacturer-sanctioned root access and preinstalled terminal & X/wayland server for those who want to run desktop apps.
The Jolla phone someone linked below actually looks like a decent product. The Android app support means it's actually usable in the modern world, and the specs look competitive.
> "You need to operate this as a business first, [...] Make a competitive product."
Not only that, but you should not get suckered down into overcomplicating things by chasing complex novelties, e. g. integrated slider- or clamshell-implemented keyboards, silly and outdated form factors (clamshell UMPCs, OQO already showed the way), etc.
You want a good, small keyboard? Design it to be attachable. This is possible in a variety of ways and can be adapted to your manufacturing expertise. It also leaves open third-party hardware support for your device. Not to mention maintainability/repairability. It's utterly puzzling to me how many hardware start-ups already fuck up the basics.
And never forget: In a satured market, even catering to a niche, means you should go for a somewhat unique feature set. How many ultramobile devices are out there that are truly accessible and usable? That goes beyond just safety or repairability.
OLED screen? I'd rather prefer something PWM-free. Precision control? Digitizer/stylus support. You don't even need to house the stylus in the device. But it would be very useful to have at least one. Audio? Yeah, 3.5 mm is a must. Dedicated, easy-access mSD (Express) card slot? Yes, please. Exchangeable batteries? Good idea, as long as it's a standard design in good supply. Kill switches. Maybe a modular camera set up like those Chinese flagships that are otherwise rather useless. Full-feature connectivity (1-2 x USB 4). Etc.
Maybe you're right. But at the same time I feel (based on nothing) that even the performance of an entry-level Android phone, coupled with libre hardware and software, and a tiny little keyboard like the N900's, running an ordinary Linux distro, actually would find a market. A small market made up of us weirdos who find this HN thread interesting.
I recommend against GPD, since they're from Hong Kong / China and their warranty is terrible.
If you do decide to buy one, the hardware (of the Pocket 2 at least) is OK. Easy to open and such. You can even buy replacement battery. Buy one from Amazon in EU if you can, they have to provide 2 years warranty, at least.
Are any of those drones being shot down? Is anything being done about it besides (AI-assisted) fear-mongering? That is the real question. If the drones are a problem, shoot/neutralize them and thank Russia for the free target-practice exercise.
It seems like the danger even bigger than Russia is government incompetence and the system of broken incentives where everyone does everything to appear busy but actually solving the problem.
If there's a drone there, and you don't want it there, the solution is obvious. It's obvious enough to any nutcase in the US with access to a shotgun (with various degrees of success, but at least they're got the right spirit). If nobody's taking out the proverbial shotgun then I have to assume the drones are not an actual problem and merely yet another excuse for busywork.
Edit: I am not saying to literally use a shotgun against them. But offensive solutions need to be developed and put to use; otherwise if we sit helpless now, what will we do when those drones evolve and start carrying offensive payloads? Fear-mongering and finding endless excuses about not doing anything is not going to help.
The drones here aren't your neighbor's kids' quadrotors. Some sightings over airports have been large (>2m) fixed wing aircraft travelling at 200 km/h. Even the quads are pretty fast. And they can appear out of nowhere, taking off from the ground near the target.
Shooting them down from the ground is next to impossible. They don't hover around waiting for someone to come by with a shotgun in their hand, catching them by land (ie. chasing them in a car) is not feasible.
Just to give an idea how hard it is to hit airborne targets from the ground with traditional guns: I once spent an afternoon shooting at a slow moving fixed wing target drone with tracer rounds from a 12.7mm anti-aircraft machine gun. There were about 50 of us taking turns, each with a few hundred rounds to shoot at the damn thing and the target aircraft didn't get a single hit.
My guess is that the drones are conducting signals intelligence, listening to radar signals and radio comms around sensitive installations (airports, military bases) and surveying the response time to a sighting.
>The initial pilot batch, consisting of up to 1,000 drones, will be built in the UK at state-owned facilities. The Octopus drone will become the first Ukrainian combat drone to be serially produced in a NATO country, with Ukraine retaining full intellectual property and technological control. https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/10/26/uk-to-build-pilot-bat...
If you watch some videos from Ukraine, you will see, that shotguns can hit them with much increased chances. So if possible without endangering civilians around the place where drones are sighted, I say get finally started, take the shotguns out and take out Russian resources. Just for the time of war make private drone flying without special permission and preflight registration illegal, then take down any drone that moves and is not registered to have a flight at the time. This also won't be giving away very critical military knowledge either.
One thing I don't know about shotguns is, how dangerous falling projectiles are. How much velocity they accumulate. That could be a real problem with this approach.
I've seen my fair share of frontline combat videos from Ukraine.
The hard part isn't shooting a drone when it is in shotgun range. It's getting the shooter close enough to the drone to have a chance of taking the shot in the first place.
For example the drones mentioned in the article can fly at 2.5km altitude at 140km/h.
I guess the only solution then is to already have people in places where it counts. I would suspect military bases have more than enough people. But then again the drones can just fly too high, at which point it becomes a cost/benefit tradeoff, or futuristic laser weapons.
It's actually not easy to shoot down a drone with a gun if it takes any measure to evade interception. It's not like shooting ducks taking off from a lake.
That said, last week the French navy did shoot at drones around the Île Longue nuclear submarine base, but as far as I understand just one drone came within close enough range to be targeted by radio jammers (which means maybe a few hundred meters at sea) and either it went away on its own or sunk but it apparently wasn't retrieved. It's very unlikely they could shoot it down with conventional firearms.
Also it's not like the US did any better when their airports and military bases had those massive drone sightings a little while back, except in that case it wasn't the Russians but "aliens" (lol).
The solution is only obvious if you're naive and/or don't know what you're talking about. They can't reliably shut down drones in active war zones with complete disregard for any kind of safety and you think we could do this in populated areas ?
Do you realise some drones can fly hundreds of meter above the site, even a few kilometres ? Do you realise that what you send up must come down eventually ? Do you realise that you need to send massive amount of projectiles to take down an object that size ? Do you think you're smarter than everyone on the ground and in the command chain ? If shotguns were the solution you'd see much more videos of them being used on the front line, but they're only sporadically used, and from videos circulating online you can clearly see they're barely better than useless.
For short range, a shotgun with birdshot is pretty safe. The pellets aren't going to have much velocity on the way down to do any harm.
For longer range, there are a lot of options, but an interceptor drone is probably pretty good. You do have to worry about the drone pieces hitting something, most drones aren't that heavy but I would not want to be hit by one.
Still this is much safer than firing explosive shells.
The reality doesn't match all these armchair specialists takes on HN though. Neither Russia nor Ukraine can defend their critical infrastructure... and they're all in, at war, with 0 regards for safety and side effects.
What happens if you interceptors locks in on the plane behind the drone, of falls down on the school behind the naval base ? Planes are shot down all the time, even military planes by friendly fire. I even doubt European countries have legal ways to start shooting down aircrafts during peace time
I guess I'm talking about drone defense in more of a "Coast Guard" scenario than a "Navy" one. If there is some mass drone swarm coming at your cities you probably want to take a Navy approach and shoot them down by whatever means necessary.
In the case we're talking about though, the Russians are just able to fly their drones over European countries with impunity. Now these may not yet be armed, but you can't just let another country violate your sovereignty. If a drone is operating very close to a commercial aircraft, or there's a good chance of collateral damage, you may choose not to shoot it down, but you do need to demonstrate that you have some defense and that there's a good chance that they will be shot down.
I have seen videos of shotguns working on the frontline. Recently, there even circulated a video showing a super lucky one shot hit. However, what those videos have in common is, that they are targeting drones maybe 100m or at most 300m away. Obviously, the further away the drone, the more difficult it will be to align the barrel sufficiently precise to hit anything.
Shutting down a drone with a machine gun is difficult, there are lot of videos where you can see it. There is even video of a Russian-Iranian drone destroying a car with a machine gun which cannot even protect itself. What is efficient against drones, are Soviet ground-air missiles (which might be dangerous to use around airports), and interceptor drones (which Europe doesn't have). Jamming the radio/GPS probably won't help because drones have antennas on top which form a simple phased array, to ignore the signal from the ground. Drones might also use mobile networks, and there were reports that Russia used Starlink antennas on some drones.
Of course not. Because reasons. Because it's illegal to shot drones. Because let's not provoke putin. Because they pose no threat. Because the debris can hit civilians. russians will continue observing military installations with full impunity.
... and Russians will find new reasons not to shoot their drones, which they will happily share with EU residents via social networks. They are the masters of excuses.
The Dutch military fired on drones. However, they are all over Europe and generally not shot down for various reasons. First, shooting at them can be very dangerous. Debris and whatever is used to shoot at them (usually bullets) can hit civilians. Second, the laws tend to not allow military and police to shoot at drones that don't pose an immediate threat to life. A new police law has been passed in Germany to fix this issue, but it was only passed very recently. I suspect other countries have similar legal issues that first need to be fixed.
Exactly. Whether those drones are Russian or not the expected course of action is to intercept them, their operators, and launch vehicles. I would say even more so if they are Russian as weakness only encourage more hostile action. So if these vessels is indeed known or highly suspected to be hostile and linked to drones we would expect them to have been intercepted by special forces.
More broadly, the "Russian scare" in Europe is very murky. I have little doubt that it is vastly overblown for domestic purposes. I.e. it serves the EU's agenda of further political integration and involvement in military matters (in which it is normally not or barely).
Generally, whatever happens one way or another in those situations has been decided, and we should never take any public narratives at face value.
So you have an invader trying their best (which is luckily not much) to grab a neighbor's land, just at your border, and you call that "murky and overblown"? Sorry this is not the Facebook grandmas knitting group giving likes to a carrot horse, we refuse to accept such bs.
The "Russian scare" in Europe is not about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that's just the premise, it is the narrative that the EU (and Western Europe at large) is next to be invaded and that we should be ready for WWIII against Russia.
Russia hasn't stopped invading their neighbors ever since the fall of the soviet union. To state they will stop doing so while Putin is in power is either naive or on purpose to propel some agenda.
That's just post-Windows 8 Microsoft quality for you. Every product has been like that - looks "ok" on the outside (in reality it looks shit, but at least that's intentional), but the second you dig deeper and start using it you get all kinds of paper cuts like that.
The reason for the lack of those is that employers want to hedge their bets - emailing a rejection will make the candidate move on and potentially take another offer which would make them unavailable.
Letting them stew means the candidate may remain available if you suddenly change your mind or your top pick flakes out and you need a replacement on short notice.
It's understandable - what's less understandable is being butthurt about it when candidates start playing the exact same game and flake out because they too hedged their bets, picked another option and need to let you down.
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