skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's not an assumption so much as an observation based on her definition of transphobia. This is the point I'm trying to get at throughout this thread: Github says she was fired for the way she conveyed her beliefs, and not what they were. I disagree. Those who do agree seem to be mainly those who disagree with her beliefs. I'm trying to understand that disconnect.
Do you help non-USA startups import talent to non-USA countries? If yes, what country have you found is immigration the easiest?
A "tirade"? I read her statements in that thread. I'd say they were very measured.
> PIPs are used to try and demonstrate cause so that collecting benefits is harder.

I mean, I'd agree that someone at some point in time has used a PIP for this reason, but I'd strongly argue that this is wrong.

I'd argue a much more charitable and accurate description of why PIP's are used is to protect the company from a litigious former employee. They are designed to show that they company tried to help the fired employee before they took the final action of letting them go.
Scientists are about to change what a kilogram is. That’s massive
That's weird. You should be able to copy the document and then view the source in your copy.
Defending websites with gzip bombs
Again, as noted above, to be able to port your green card application, your new employment needs to be in the same or similar occupation as your previous employment.
Will lag compared to what? Not to China from 10/20/30 years ago.
Well, that was disappointing. I thought we left this kind of over-abstracted code behind with Java. A simple one-level switch on typeof or instanceof really does not deserve to be called "pattern matching". Given that TypeScript supports tagged union types it would make far more sense to actually use them and stop using instanceof all together.

If are we going to do this kind of thing why not a least do it simply:

switch(typeof x) {
case "string":

or

switch(x.constructor)
case Thing:

Ok, so TypeScript can't handle the types for this yet but it's valid JS so you get the idea.
Agreed heat is the real problem.

I think something between Tesla's snake and a slot track car toy is the inevitable future. Drive on top of something that knows where to put two metal prongs. Very easy problem if you get to design both halves.
I agree wholeheartedly. As soon as political and emotional appeals overrule standards of professional conduct, everyone is walking on eggshells.

> assume mistakes are honest and be polite in correcting them.

Especially big on this. Nobody can read minds, so when people make mistakes, there is no winning tactic other than to assume good intent.
> I was very disappointed at this 101 mistake, and sadly opened an issue referencing the question. The body of my issue read:

> "'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."

She was disappointed. She explained her problem with the survey in a non-judgmental way- "This question is based on a false premise, the correct way to ask this question is X". I don't see how she could have handled this particular interaction any better.
Can a person on H1B visa use options such as driving lyft,uber, or amazon flex to deliver goods, as they provide 1099 and not W-2. Will it violate the H1B visa status and any complications for filing taxes? Thank you very much in advance.
What is the optimal way for a USA company to hire foreign remote workers? 1099 contractors?
>I think it is possible that there is some sexism here in that I'm not confident a male employee at Github would ever be challenged over failing this communication standard.

What leads you to this conclusion?

Sexism may have been at play, or she may have been rude to the wrong person (or perceived as rude). I don't think it is appropriate to draw broad conclusions with only one side of a story and zero evidence.

> Also, I have never, ever heard of a PIP being used as anything other than a strategy for building a case for firing someone.

Agreed on this point, as soon as she had a phone call with manager + HR they had already decided to fire her.
I don’t think anyone, including the author, thought that the intention of the question was to be transphobic. That doesn’t mean it’s not a transphobic question, though. Especially when the point of the survey was to gauge engagement in Open Source by marginalized people, having such a mistake can be seen as pretty tone deaf, and imply that the company really doesn’t care.
I don't consider getting women into tech as the only problem facing our industry. Because once they get in, a lot of them face abuse.

Nobody is saying you should get special treatment. Only that we need to acknowledge and label a problem in order for it to have visibility so we can make the problem better.

She also says:

"I also wish gay rights == human rights. If you throw a parade celebrating women who did awesome shit in STEMM and invite the world to join, I’m in and I’m bringing pom-poms!)"

So, wouldn't you take this as saying that the gay rights movement should change their entire PR to advance "human rights" and not gay rights? How do you solve a problem and market a problem without actually calling it out?

This all feels like she is reading too much into a label.
Neat to hear you're in the edtech space as well - I am as well at present.

Would love to learn and chat a bit more about your previous startup (I see you have posted below and will reply there).
AMA reacts to dave mcclure's sexual harassment issue
Hmm. That entire thread is full of people communicating in a fairly brusque manner -- OP's comments didn't seem like a 'tirade' to me! But I guess it's up to the receiver to decide what a tirade is.
This is not a comment on the experiences described in the article, but it makes me extremely sad that the word "meritocratic/meritocracy" is used pejoratively, almost as if it were damning in itself. To me, meritocracy is something to be cherished, being far preferable to the systems that came before it, and being inherently anti-discriminatory.

(Yes, people's hardships which prevent them achieving their full potential should be taken into account, when determining "merit"; anything causing these hardships, including (especially?) past discrimination, should be countered; and people who had been subjected to the hardship should be treated with care and compassion, but that's orthogonal to meritocracy itself.

Also, obviously, your skills and abilities (in the context of work and meritocracy) have no bearing on your intrinsic value as a human being (so we need something like guaranteed basic income or progressive taxes to reduce issues like pay inequality).)
I don't agree with that description of what the brain does when you catch a ball, or with the principle it's proposing. I don't think the brain does any kind of calculations to figure out how to catch the ball; I think it's effectively muscle memory. If you've never caught anything before, your brain will have no clue what to do. As you practice running to catch things, I think a better description of your subconscious process is something like: "The ball (or whatever) looks like it's growing bigger in my visual field at a certain rate. A previous time when it grew bigger at a rate kind of like that, I applied about x force in the legs, and I didn't get there in time. Another time when it was growing at about this rate, I put applied a larger amount of force y, and the ball landed behind me. This time I'll try to apply a little more than x force, but less than y force, and see how that works."

This is a substantial oversimplification of course (there are many more factors involved than how fast the ball is growing in the visual field), but I think the point is clear enough. I doubt there's any trigonometry happening in the brain's circuitry; it seems much more plausible to me that the brain is really good at remembering how it felt in previous circumstances, recognizing how those remembered circumstances relate to the current one, and trying to adjust.

As I understand it, this is actually a significant debate in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and related fields. One prominent proponent of a view like the one I've expressed here, that the brain doesn't require or use heavy math to do things like catch flying objects but rather acquires the ability over time through experience, is John Searle. He is known for using the example of his dog's ability to catch a ball that's bounced off a wall when discussing and arguing against theories of mind that propose that all unconscious processes must be following algorithms or rules (like running through computations to figure out how to catch a ball). Here's a quote of his from the BBC program Horizons (quote found in "New Technologies in Language Learning and Teaching", issue 532, on page 37 [1]):

If my dog can catch a ball that's bounced off the wall, that may be
just a skill he's acquired. The alternative view (the pro-AI view)
would say: "Look, if the dog can catch the ball it can only be
because he knows the rule: go to the point where the angle of
incidence equals equals the angle of reflection in a plane where the
flatness of the trajectory is a function of the impact velocity
divided by the coefficient of friction" - or something like that.
Now, it seems to me unreasonable to think that my dog really *knows*
that. It seems to me more reasonable to suppose he just learns how
to look for where the ball is going and jumps *there*. And a lot of
our behavior is like that as well. We've acquired a lot of skills,
but we don't have to suppose that, in order to acquire these skills,
the skills have got to be based on our mastery of some complex
intellectual structure. For an awful lot of things, we just *do* it.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=fWQhj0HVCbUC&pg=PA37&lpg=P...
I don't but I know good local immigration service providers in a lot of countries if you need referrals.
This feels like the mostly likely scenario, quickly change your image by hiring a bunch of 'diverse' people and soak up the PR, then quietly let them go over the next few years if they don't conform.
"The same day that I had this review, I got some devastating personal news. I have bipolar depression and was already in a bad place mentally, so I found myself feeling crushed and hopeless. In an attempt to deal with things I ended up taking a dangerously high dose of my anti-anxiety medication."

I'm all for being compassionate and helping people through tough times, but does this sound like a stable person?
Cobb County is way more red than most of Atlanta.
My cousins, who are not tech people at all, moved to Ecuador in the 90's and apparently everyone there used mIRC over AOL. It seemed to be the default messaging platform for most people in their country at the time.
Please at least tape it! A nuclear reactor mounted on a gigantic explosive sounds like a stupid idea once you count this risk, but even if we did it, would it be among the most stupid things we did?
> "'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."

I Imagine this read to the survey writer like:

"Hello, I'd like to complain about your use of the term Linux on the corporate intranet. A page provides instructions for running the data parsing scripts "on Linux". Since we do not do any kernel work, it is improper to refer to them as Linux instructions. Instead, people should be familiar with either POSIX, bash(with extensions), or GNU coreutils."
Hi Peter,
Appreciate your taking the time to do this. I'm on an L1-B currently with a software product firm, and have been researching ways to move towards an EB1C application for a Green card.
My position in the company, in terms of "job level" is at par with Engineering Management.
I've been in this role prior to my move to the US and am in line for a promotion here. However, my job description does not involve "hire and fire" capabilities or people reporting directly into me. I lead a functional area and engineering teams within it. Does this then qualify me for an L1B to EB1C application or is this very unlikely?
What would your suggestion be in my case? My company qualifies for all other requirements for the EB1C.
We don't see any of the correspondence other than the one small portion quoted, so it is entirely possible that something more confrontational was said.
OK, but why should we consider the economic concept of money changing hands more rapidly to be an inherently good thing?

There are both environmental and quality of life issues with the way our culture has evolved recently, particularly around advancing consumer technologies, which aren't (directly) financial in nature but are definitely things we could change for the better. Meanwhile, the increases in money moving around on paper are mostly in the direction of manufacturers taking advantage of consumers one way or another, and I don't have a problem with damaging that effect in favour of the others.
Removing Complexity from Cloud Infrastructure Means Quicker Cloud Adoption
Meritocracy is actually a very damaging thing, the way we tend to implement it in tech. Without concrete and public metrics of "merit", it becomes a buzzword for reinforcing the biases (conscious or not) of the evaluators. Particularly in tech, those biases tend to favor white, upper middle class, males.

This kind of bias is demonstrated over and over in studies, even (and in some cases, especially) among people who are highly educated and even forewarned about the study objectives.
We ban accounts that comment like this. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704219 and marked it off-topic.
If they remain outside, they can be employed as W-2 employees or 1099 contractors. Which option is best (meaning from a tax perspective) will depend in part on the local rules in that country.
Especially in a company that seems to communicate through comments/emails etc. and not so much face to face interaction.
Writing documentation for the equivalent of 8th graders is pretty common for any writing, so I made a habit of doing that a long time ago. It's like coding - if you're too clever, it's hard to understand and read later.

How hard is it to really use reasonable font sizes and contrast ratios? How hard is it to add a few more tags to your site? How hard is it to caption videos as you're making them (most time you're working from a script anyways).

If you're not starting these good practices from the beginning, yes, it will be harder to do all at once later. But if you start doing it from the beginning, it is pretty easy to do. Just like testing. Just like coding standards. Just like design patterns.
> Sexism may have been at play, or she may have been rude to the wrong person (or perceived as rude). I don't think it is appropriate to draw broad conclusions with only one side of a story and zero evidence.

It comes back to that implicit expectation. Something I've been bringing up a lot in this thread as I read the comments throughout it is that whether we consider somebody rude or not seems to depend a lot on a) who they are, and b) whether we agree with them. We are more charitable to people who are more like us and whose ideas we find more correct. We're all human, so that's part of life. However, as an organization, Github can and should do better than that, and I think here that it did not. The sexism here, if it exists, is implicit in the way problems with this person were handled and in the expectations (mostly unwritten, at least at first) about how she'd behave.
Wow. That particular maintainer is really off the deep end - here is their writeup on the incident (which is pretty fucked up reading IMO):

http://meh.schizofreni.co/random/lulz/2016/01/08/tales-from-...
I am really torn on this one. I want to discuss the article because I think it brings up interesting topics, and for the most part HN folks are good at discussing polarizing things like this without devolving into Reddit-style nonsense. On the other hand, I want to flag it, because the article itself is absolute garbage.

EDIT: I see now it is flagged. To be clear, I didn't, because I still think it's worth discussing some of the points made.
David Harum.

It's a race to the bottom without standards enforcement.

Also Market for Lemons: good product is driven out.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Harum
In my opinion webtorrent hardly qualifies as a proper bittorrent implementation due to the limitations of webrtc.

It cannot interoperate with existing bittorrent clients.
And it cannot maintain decentralized networks, i.e. it needs a central rendezvous server and session tokens, bittorrent needs no such thing due to the DHT.

Currently there is no single entity that could be ordered to shut down a bittorrent swarm. With the need for rendezvous servers on the other hand you could order them to block specific content.
The impression I have after reading this that Ms. Ehmke had a shit attitude and people got sick of it. And that she hasn't seen that yet.

I'm sorry if this seems unempathetic - getting fired sucks, and is extremely painful. But there's no other way I can put it.

A long time ago, when my career first started, I also went through the "PIP deathspiral", and it took months... maybe years after my termination to realize I was just fired being a shithead.

I see the same "it's not my fault it's theirs" attitude I had at the time in this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

Productivity has risen in manufacturing, tech, and automation. This provides a moderate wage increase in those jobs, but a sharp drop in employment as well. Meanwhile, you also get a similar competitive wage increase in essential service industries (health care, education, construction), but because those sectors have experienced no increase in productivity, this is reflected in the price others pay for those goods, not in the employment figures for them. The drop in employment in high-productivity sectors then forces laid off workers into marginal service-sector employment.

Because of Simpson's Paradox [1], this results in flat or declining wage statistics across the whole economy, but the statistics obscure a lot of detail. Nurses, therapists, teachers, et al are doing okay; they're not going to get rich, and the rising cost of housing in some metro areas means that if they don't already own their house they may need to move far away, but their relative wages are keeping pace. Same with the few remaining union jobs: unionized longshoremen at the Port of Oakland make mid six-figures, as much as a software engineer at a startup.
But employment in those fields is dropping, because of productivity increases, and everyone who is displaced out of them needs to find employment in the undifferentiated service sector, usually at much lower wages. And the people who actually provide the automation support that's driving this productivity growth are making out like bandits: that's where you see all the new millionaires being minted.

This'll continue until either society breaks down and goes to war or a bunch of new industries spring up and absorb all the new workers, who then differentiate their skillsets and bargain for higher pay. Both of these happened last time this occurred, in the early 1900s; the world wars were the springboard that drove adoption of new technologies like automobiles and airplanes. We see some possible beginnings of this with things like ridesharing and delivery startups, but it seems unlikely these are the big industries of the 21st century. More likely, they're transient uses for large crowds of unemployed people, and the real 21st century industries will be the micromarket: individual entrepreneurs that are each specialized in reaching & designing for a small group of customers, using home manufacturing & automated shipping tools that are in their infancy now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox
... and the reason that they want to do that is so that the person cannot collect benefits, or has a harder time doing so.

Maybe you've worked with better employers than I have, but it's pretty much been an open secret in a few different places I've worked, both inside and outside of tech.

Or, sometimes it's not a PIP, but something similar. Many fast food places have a policy where if you're underperforming, your hours get reduced. If they want to fire you, they don't fire you: they give you one, four-hour shift a week at the slowest possible time of the week. That way, they didn't fire you; you quit, and so you don't get unemployment, etc. If you don't show up for your shift, then you're fired with cause, and so you don't get unemployment, etc.
Yes, that's what I mean. Pledging allegiance to a flag is dangerous (remember the roman legionaries swore allegiance to their standard, not to the republic, and took the sides of their generals in civil wars). Perhaps to you, steeped in it, it doesn't look like a prayer, but to an outsider it appears little different from a religious invocation.

These differences my seem subtle or even trivial, but history has shown that it is dangerous.

Note that in the US soldiers and other holders of the public trust swear to uphold the country's constitution, not its flag.

It all comes down to the order of primacy: the country, constitution, civil institutions, chain of command etc are all in service to the support of the citizenry not the other way around.
So basically, no matter what someone will be unhappy with your design. I don't know about you but I'm not convinced its worthwhile
If president Trump does abolish the International Entrepreneur Rule, would the requisite to enter the US then be get an H1B1 (get hired by your own company) and get paid a salary that passes the new H1B minimum salary?
[..] I find these kinds of situations so confusing. Some people want these differences to be highlighted, while others like yourself want the complete opposite. I'm left believing that my only choice is to have no opinion.

The post and the parent comment show that this is not a matter of opinion, not a matter to be confused of; we're all human, nothing more, nothing less. Keeping this in mind will clear things up for everyone eventually.
Not exactly the same thing, but the new movie War Machine with Brad Pitt was quite good. Its theme was the stark irony of the US "helping" the Afghans when in reality they're causing conflict thats destroying their country.
I would argue that this is not the caller making the mistake; it's this function. That is, since this function is safe, any safe code should be able to call it and not generate UB. It's not the caller's fault here, it's the incorrect implementation.
Is it really that common for a court to have no (or only a few) "easy" cases pending?
> This practice seems pretty common in California, but given California is an at-will employment state, I'm not even sure why.

Because the PIP exists to to support the argument that the firing was not for a prohibited reason in the event that the employee charges that it was. “At-will” doesn't mean there aren't prohibited reasons for firing, and if you don't have any evidence for what the firing reason was, it doesn't take much evidence of an improper purpose to meet the “preponderance of the evidence” standard for civil litigation.
Guy on my team at my last company was - he was non-technical, but was in charge of looking at raw data and finding discrepancies and things we could write code to fix on an ongoing basis as he was a domain expert. He had a rough time with technical topics, and so part of his PIP, as I understand it, was to become basically proficient in using SQL to query, and understand the basics of RDBMS. He did so, and was removed from PIP and went on to be a key contributor on the team, and had some light technical duties assigned to him, which he performed competently.