skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is why I would never want to work at Amazon. I get requests from their recruiters all the time and based on these stories even though they most it seems are not related to the technology department make me disgusted when I think of working for them. They have great products (which I really enjoy) and software but if they cannot take care of their employees how well can they take care of their customers? It is sad that a company like this does this. It tells me you cannot enjoy your life working for a company like them.
Fusion: only twenty years away. Always.
They could have just said, "My computer had latch that worked just like the iPhone's slider." And then silly people would come along to argue about the missing details. Can't win either way!
https://web.archive.org/web/20110511182424/http://www.atlant...
Congratulations on twins!
Yes that's true. So the 9 countries who have higher GDP's per capita (PPP, although nominal is similar) have more money to distribute per person.

However, those nine countries have a few million people each, so the US has more money per person than 99% of the world.
Robots Learn to Make Pancakes from WikiHow Articles
I don't think you need to be a rocket scientist to "make the connection" here.

I read the piece as a commentary on Amazon's lacklustre (or worse) HR department, poor parental leave policies and systemic aversion to women in leadership rather than a "health insurance screw up". That seemed to be a subplot in a more wider issue - Amazon's callous disregard for employees and a culture which seems to actively discourage women from reaching executive leadership positions.
Sure. But you don't need a 50 Cent Party, or even to be at all active on social media to find some conspiracy theorists who'll happily do the legwork of promoting the video for you; you can probably entirely outsource the job to the people and organizations you keep files on.
As if large corporations aren't full of bureaucratic businessmen.
This is why the PIP exists - it's "documentation" and "proof" the the employee is an underperformer. PIPs provide legal cover for firings that would otherwise not pass cursory examination.

[edit] The PIP may have started out as a good faith effort to improve underperformers, but at this point I see them used more frequently as political and legal tools than honest attempts at "salvaging" poor employees.
The Learning Myth: Why I'll Never Tell My Son He's Smart
Quite frankly they shouldn't of been as popular as they were. They stole gameplay from existing flash games and threw an "angry bird" skin on it.
It could be GCHQ actually had bugs, recorders and malware installed on those specific computers, knew it, and didn't want their existence revealed.
So are we just going to spout Marxist dogma, or do you have some idea for a solution? Preferably something that doesn't require a massive government apparatus and that doesn't infringe on the rights of every individual to make their own choices?
aaaah, now I see, thanks!
> The company also scrapped the staff warm-up sessions scheduled at the start of every day, on the grounds that German employees found them ridiculous.

Ah, Germans. Gotta love the directness of the culture. Keeps things real.
It's a problem that is pretty easily solved. You appoint an interim leader. Look for someone on the team to step up a bit to assist the substitute.

I had back surgery a decade ago that kept me out of the office for two months. I managed about 30 people at the time in 4-5 groups. My director and his admin took on the administrative stuff, and one of the team leads took over the day to day. I was able to do a call about every other week to go over project items.

I came back, and things went back to normal, the positive benefit is that a couple of previously unrecognized employees got director-level recognition.
You said that consumers don't matter in this scenario. I'm denying that claim, since consumers can simply leave the service/platform to force the VCs' hand.

Whether the company is profitable is irrelevant here.
Electronics-Sniffing Dogs Help Solve Cybercrimes
Unfortunately Aldi in the States doesn't do as well as Aldi in Germany.
The Hazard of Computer Science Illustrated
I even checked all of the ones I could think of on Wikipedia, and no, I didn't find any. Interesting indeed.
From memory of quantum class the amplitude is a complex number and are not directly probabilities:

Most convenient reference:

> In quantum mechanics, a probability amplitude is a complex number ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_amplitude#A_basic_...
Being a foreigner not quite knee-deep in the American election yet, I was actually fishing for more information on Cruz and Sanders and whether you're basing this on polls, their relationship, intuition, major (dis?)similarities in political programming or some such.

Sorry if "unfold" wasn't used correctly.
Amazon did what they were required to do, which is give her 12 weeks before giving away her job. Obviously that was not good enough so I ask again what should the company have done? No one has answered that question
Just out of curiosity, what do you think about "that point"? Do you think the Mexican government is pushing large numbers of drug dealers and rapists into the USA? Do you think this is an issue important enough that it should be a major part of a would-be president's campaigning?
For most readers of Hacker News, though, I suspect that they see these anecdotes rarely, and for many the NYT article is the first one... yet they have seen press releases from Amazon that are designed to tout it as a tech company and Jeff Bezos as the next Steve Jobs, every month, like clock work for the past decade. (and we'll get even more of them now.)

The anecdotes are hard to find. Glassdoor promotes positive reviews over negative ones, effectively burying them, even when the negative ones have more up votes and you're looking at reviews ranked by vote!

Most people Amazon is hiring aren't exposed to the negative reviews of the company.
Débat Autour Des Noms De Domaine – JDN
SavvyRoo Is Revolutionizing the Way We Present Data
A Woman Who Spent Six Years Fighting a Traffic Stop
I have been running UE4 on linux since the community builds around 4.6, but 4.8 official builds are now pretty fully functional, minus the launcher, and my main gripe: having to build linux dedicated servers on windows...

I am pretty dedicated to releasing for SteamOS as a main target platform, and have been trying to untether from windows. I have a few friends are love unity and want me to join projects but my main complaint has always been that there was no linux editor. Looks like I will have to test out the this unity test build.
I'd suggest a Hollywood movie studio model. One parent company that can groom and produce multiple games in different genres. Each game gets its own company with money invested in development and profits over a limited lifetime in sales. No one expects Titanic to make the same amount of revenue in year 2 as the year it gets released. Expect a huge spike in revenue for popular games early on with a long tail of diminishing returns. If you can capitalize on the intellectual property like Disney does you can create a merchandising revenue stream that may last a long time.
Who cares. This "actually, we're not #1" pedantic bs is just a distraction from the problem.

The point was we are VERY rich and could afford to not have our citizens stress about healthcare.
What about trial versions? Are they supported by the app stores already? Seems like they'd solve the psychological problem.
contraception is female empowerment, we can see how much societal expectations have shifted as female contraception technology have gotten cheaper and better, reflected in the magazine covers.
Individual contributors, sure. I've never seen someone in a leadership position who had their staff suddenly stripped away and put on a PIP for not delivering make it through without some "divine" intervention.
Clearly I read the entire article. I don't consider that to be relevant to the quotes I pulled and I'll explain why. She had a team, she went away for several months, the team needed be reassigned and when she returned, she (rightfully) expected to be returned to that same leadership position. But, what had happened, was that the team was reassigned. That much makes sense. I'm sure she got screwed over in that situation but I still don't make the connection she's drawing.
In short: Tri Alpha demonstrated plasma confined for 5ms. So their concept works.

Their next step is burning D-T fuel (needs 10x temperature increase). Their goal is burning H-B fuel which requires much higher temperatures, but has numerous advantages.

Update: "Tri Alpha is backed by Sam Altman, among other things." -> not at all.
So, having tried to offer support for a game on linux before it's a giant nightmare. If you don't want to open source you end up with a never ending support task.

Unity should solve that now. Maybe.

To answer a few specifics with out getting too ragey:

To get real usable 3d you need to be running the proprietary drivers. The opensource ones at least a year or so ago when I was paying close attention were uniformly too slow and supported such a limited subset of the specs that the were usually pointless.

The take away for me was to always assume that the user system is completely dumb and to ship EVERYTHING. We ended up packaging the kitchen sink to get rid of the majority of the "I installed this on <nightly build of obscure distro> and it says it can't find libc" issues.
Reinsurance doesn't completely let the company off the hook for the costs (in the long run). Even if reinsurance covers 100% of costs above the cap (which it typically does not), those costs will just get factored into the future premiums charged to the company[0] .

It makes it hard to place an exact price tag on how much this employee's coverage would have cost the company without knowing the details, but it's clear that it would have been very expensive to them one way or the other - and certainly a lot more than it cost them to have her switch to her husband's insurance instead.

[0] It's just like how your renter's insurance rates will [often] skyrocket immediately if you try to file any claim at all. People aren't used to this in the consumer health insurance market because there's a lot of indirection in the healthcare system, but that's how all insurance models work at a high level[1], so that's how the costs all (eventually) flow (extra emphasis on "eventually").

[1] There's also the added wrinkle that we also use "health insurance" as a political tool to do things that have nothing to do with risk smoothing at all, so the model gets tricky to unpack, but that's a separate matter.
I don't - apparently people prefer nagging screens in games subsidized by a minority of whales over games everybody has to pay to download.

After all, this is how the app stores started. Nobody would have switched to Freemium if Gamers preferred the Paid Games.
So this process re-introduces the brine back into the ocean, in turn making the ocean water more salty. What type of ecological ramifications does this have on the wildlife in that area?
Actually, before Ubuntu's Unity we had the Unity distribution (http://unity-linux.org).

Granted it was never popular, and it definitively isn't now, but still.
Angry Birds 2 felt like the exact same game to me with new birds and scenery maybe. I couldn't figure out how they could pull this IAP nonsense - especially when so many other versions of their games are out there for free, most of which I haven't finished 10%.

If I feel the need to sling a bird, I'm sure there are plenty of levels I haven't tried yet that I can still play for free in other versions.

I couldn't wrap my brain around what their strategy might be for this new game.
Amazon's Room 101, very neat Bozos indeed.

I must say that I admire this guy's "ingenuity" and psy ops he subjects employees to to make them conform and yield at their job.
Totally, but couldn't you point back to telling your boss that you're pregnant and be like "I literally told you a few weeks ago that I'm pregnant and now you're putting me on a PIP, this is not a coincidence"
It's the same thing Nintendo does with Mario.
And this pedantic distinction does nothing whatsoever to diminish the outrage that the parent poster rightly feels.
Another great resource is the AAAI "AI Topics" page. Not all of the linked resources are free, but there's a lot of useful info here:

http://aitopics.org/
http://www.websafety.com offers a monitoring solution which informs parents of suspicious activities.
Public transit doesn't work very well in the US but that's mostly a problem with the way US politics and government works rather than something intrinsic to public transit. France isn't exactly known for low labor costs but they can still build subways for roughly 1/5 the price per mile you see in the US. So maybe we ought to be doing more private mass transit in the US but that doesn't mean it's a good idea everywhere.
Typical "You are the product" disclaimer
I think a smarter approach would be introduce this new API and only deprecate the portions of XUL that haven't been replicated in the new API. Once you reach parity you do the rest as you suggest.
What do you have against Nelson Mandela's leadership of South Africa? Of Olof Palme's leadership of Sweden? François Mitterrand's leadership of France?

All of them were socialists who lead a capitalist society.

What makes you uncomfortable about them or their leadership?
This is a battle of power between the federal level and the state level. With more power centered at the state level (distributed), it would be less likely that everyone would suffer across all states. Look at policies such as "No Child Left Behind" act, it applies a one size fits all law to all schools. It has its problems, and all schools across the country suffer because it is applied at the federal level.
In addition, an important part of Aldi's recent success in Germany is that they do not compromise on quality. Often their products (say olive oil, toilet paper,...) win/score at the top of consumer reports. They have a great brand image (much better than Lidl).
Why would you expect to be able to come back into having people report to you after a five month leave from a high-paced environment? Getting brought back up to speed will be obviously necessary, and the PIP thing sounds like an explicit effort towards exactly that. So, in the end, she collected half a year's pay for no work, and then quit.

The insurance "glitch" is highly suspicious, but, aside from that, I can't help but coming away from this article with an impression of an air of self-entitlement.

The obvious agenda (and probably the only reason this weakly composed and unconvincing narrative even got published) regarding gender in tech seems absolutely shoehorned in. At companies like these, women in fact have a clear advantage in getting hired - though that is damaged by stories of women collecting pay for no work and then quitting right afterwards.

I am glad that the author has recovered and is healthy, but this article is very unconvincing.
A coworker of mine at Amazon was diagnosed with cancer, and as far as I can tell, he was treated with the utmost respect and decency. His team and managers made a lot of accommodation for him while he underwent treatment. Unfortunately, he eventually passed away - to my knowledge, he was still employed to the very end (I moved away and left the company for other reasons, but many of my friends/coworkers stayed and are still there today).

So, I have an anecdote, and this story is an anecdote. I'm not saying that my friend's story offsets the story here (especially because I wasn't the cancer patient in either case). Let's slow down before we draw too many conclusions from either one.
Yes, but starting the PIP after there is a documented pregnancy announcement to management isn't going to shield them from liability I suspect.
Lots to dislike about Amazon in that story, but 5 months leave and still have a job! (Or maybe not because of the PIP...) Oh to be so lucky on that point!
I think that makes sense.

When another group with (possibly) different norms has no affect on you, it's easy to ignore them.

When that group can exert some effect on you, but the effect is unknown, people get scared, and act accordingly. This is exacerbated by people that like attention and/or power that will stoke these fears to further their own agenda.

When that group is finally encountered, often there's understanding, a willingness to compromise where needed from both parties, and as the unknown subsides, so does much of the fear (and the power that grants those that use fear).
man if this was an an api then i could use these from cmd line and a sublime text plugin. sooo fancy.
They showed a "stable" reaction of 5 ms, which is quite good.

The video was quite nicely done. I recommend watching.

Caveat: As with all fusion companies, they're only 10-20 years from being ready to market : )
what does PIP stand for?
This seems like a very strange lesson to take away from a woman being denied healthcare.
Even if it is the masses and media that hold the government accountable, they can still be more effective by pointing their power towards Uber than a government. The media's effect on Nike's labor practices in the mid-90s comes to mind as an example.
Tubidy+Mobile+Video+Search+Engine+-+Linkis.com
Tooltip.io – tooltips without code
No, it doesn't mean that there are no socialists in the US. But if the people of the US, as a whole, have by whatever means come to hate and fear socialists and socialism, then someone who's willing to describe himself as a socialist is not likely to do well in a US general election.
All Websites Look the Same
I've been following him since I took the 'isidewith' quiz. I hadn't even heard of him before, but he's 96% compatible with my stances.

Wouldn't it be nice if everyone instead of voting for a certain candidate, voted on the issues, and the candidate who voted most like the population would win... and their votes would be made public.
> Why would you expect to be able to come back into having people report to you after a five month leave from a high-paced environment? Getting brought back up to speed will be obviously necessary, and the PIP thing sounds like an explicit effort towards exactly that. So, in the end, she collected half a year's pay for no work, and then quit.

PIP is a prelude to firing the majority of the time and is basically putting you on notice that you'll be laid off/fired if there is a need to reduce head count.
Google Container Engine
I once took a class on business operations. In it, we studied the value discipline model of the firm:

To succeed in the marketplace, companies must embrace a competitive strategy. Authors Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersma describe three generic competitive strategies, or value disciplines: operational excellence, customer intimacy and product leadership. These are described in their book, The Discipline of Market Leaders (1997).

The author’s main premise is that companies must choose—and then achieve—market leadership in one of the three disciplines, and perform to an acceptable level in the other two. [1]

Operational Excellence: Amazon, Walmart

Product Leadership: Apple, Mercedes Benz

Customer Intimacy: Nordstroms, Home Depot

We studied Amazon and Walmart as case studies for companies that have pushed the boundaries of operational excellence. You can also think of these companies as the ones who cut costs on a race to the bottom; companies at which efficiency is prized above all else.

Don't have a kid while working for a company that demonstrates a strict adherence to the value proposition of operational excellence. You will be regarded as just another expendable cost on the bottom line, and you will be replaced by a younger, hungrier individual with less commitments outside of work. The company will find a way around the laws that generally protect mothers/fathers in these situations - that is why they are a market leader, because they will go where no other companies are willing/able to in order to uphold the mantra of operational excellence.

[1] http://www.marsdd.com/mars-library/competitive-strategies-in...
On another note, those are some of the cheesiest stock photos they ever could have picked.
Are they new (to MUD's) players? New (to the game, but not to MUD's) or old (maybe returning to relive the good old times)?

I ask because some of the most popular MUD's still have hundreds of active players at peak times, but as far as I can tell, most of them have been there for (made up number) 15 years. Basically, I'm saying that unless there is growth through new players, then ultimately MUD's will slowly fizzle out, but if there is growth, then that is very interesting!
Yes it is, by far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_wealth
Well, I think now we can all start replying to those recruiters by citing these issues and sending links to these articles. They may not care, because those of us for whom these are horror stories rather than romantic tales of an energizing sink-or-swim environment may just not be their target demographic for employees.
"USA is much more diverse and has to deal with these issues up front."

What metric of diversity? UK is pretty diverse in larger cities.
Even before getting to anecdotes about the experience of working there, I was put off by the interview process. They have asked me to drive from Indianapolis to Chicago to interview with a large group of people.

Thanks, but no thanks.
Why?
Linux covers that kind of hardware so much better already.
I'm sorry you've had bad experiences, but this isn't really true, in the sense that HR is different from any other department in this regard. Think about it – doesn't the same apply to corporate IT for example?
"Anyway, long story short its the same everywhere. "

So shouldn't we be yelling even louder? That seems to make it even more unacceptable.

"Im sure Larry and Jeff had good intentions when they started their companies but now that it's in the hands of middle management it's no different than any other big corp."

I'm not so sure, especially about Jeff Bezos.
When I saw that The LEGO Movie had not even been nominated for the Academy Award for best animated picture, I immediately stopped the recording of the awards show, and deleted it from my DVR.

The decision to buy the DVD was absolutely effortless.

With respect to the team behind the Angry Birds movie, they're using Sony Pictures. On the one hand, they have a couple Aardman releases and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. But on the other, they have The Smurfs.
A blind vote. I can dig it.
That's exactly what the pip has turned into, it's justification and legal air cover for a decision you've already made.
performance improvement plan
Community-contributed list of referrer spammers
> Most people Amazon is hiring aren't exposed to the negative reviews of the company.

Yeah, that's why it's so important for people to gain awareness of this while it's so visible. It's not just anecdotes, it's a pattern. Every large company has things about it that suck, every company has its former employees with complaints about it. But Amazon is in a qualitatively different category. Other companies don't get such a bad overall reputation.
As an extension author this is disappointing. For all the hate XUL gets, it was a powerful tool to manipulate the UI. Hopefully the new API will be as empowering as the old without the same risks. And ideally this will happen before the old APIs are completely removed.
Performance Improvement Plan. In other words, it provides legal protection when they fire you.
Isn't maternity leave covered by FMLA ? Does PIP circumspect FMLA requirements ?
If you like this, I recommend oh-my-zsh [1] or prezto[2], both have themes for things like this.

[1]: https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh

[2]: https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto
Performance Improvement Plan - it's when you get "evaluated" for "underperforming" but is really just often used as a first step to getting rid of someone.
Performance Improvement Plan