skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Be sure to read the update at the bottom of the article:
http://www.askamanager.org/2016/10/update-a-coworker-stole-m...

Looks like the situation worked out fairly well in the end.
Well, to me it seems plausible that the writer is not telling the whole truth. They noticed food being stolen from the fridge and he purposely put extremely hot spice in the food to harm the perpetrator.

But how do you prove that. And even if you prove it, would it hold in court since the food was stolen?
One way to optimize is to maximize expected revenue - expected cost of false positives or fraud.

A savvy business will know (or can estimate): customer lifetime value, false/true positive/negative rates of their fraud detection system, rate of charge-backs, expected rate of fraudulent purchases, revenue from given suspected transaction.

If average discounted customer lifetime value is $10k, charge-back rate is 2%, your fraud detection false positive rate is 0.1% and true negative rate is 99.9%, fraud detection true positive rate is 95% and false negative is 5%, customer is purchasing a $20 item. Then

* expected revenue if purchase is fraudulent: $0 * (true positive rate) - $20 * (false negative rate) = -$1

* expected revenue if purchase is non-fraudulent: $20 * (true negative rate) - $10k * (false positive rate) = $9.98

* total expected revenue value (with fraud detection enabled): (expected revenue if purchase is fraudulent) * (rate of fraudulent purchases) + (expected revenue if purchase is non-fraudulent) * (1 - rate of fraudulent purchases) = $9.7604

Without fraud detection, your expected revenue is: $20 * 0.98 = $19.6

Simplifying assumptions: false positive results in complete loss of customer value (realistically, replace this with big drop in customer lifetime value). Fraud rate is constant (realistically, should be modeled). Fraud rate is charge-back rate.

In this case, it's easy to see that seemingly low 0.1% false positive rate is still too high for this small of a purchase and these customer lifetime values. The 'smart' decision would be to ignore fraudulent purchases of this size in this case. (for this scenario, you need FPR below 0.004% with all else same)

Better model still would be a fraud detector that outputs a confidence score rather than "yes/no", and use the formula above to determine if the predicted false-positive-rate at this confidence level is sufficiently high to expect a revenue uplift from enabling the detector.
Kind of orthogonal to the story, but anyone who steals lunch or food from a co-worker should be fired immediately. There's a 0% chance that someone who steals others' stuff is a good, honest person in other parts of their life.
Years ago I used up my free digital ocean credits, wanted to start paying. They asked for more details which I provided, then asked for my facebook profile. A pretty unusual request, but I complied. They told me the names don't match up and just won't deal with me anymore. Literally gave me no obvious way to proceed. Felt pretty violating to give up personal info just to get brushed off.

Happily used AWS ever since.
I don't know you, but the same is true for nearly anything you could create. Software included. The difference is, you go out of the way to fill whatever gap is unfilled. Maybe you'll never be able to write a better Young Girl Becomes Werewolf As Metaphor For Growing Up YA Novel, but perhaps your happens to have a main character that not only is Young Girl Becomes Werewolf, but Young Girl With Problem Burping That Becomes Werewolf, and that connects just right to a certain group of people that never knew they needed this particular book.

Same for weird little dumb tools/libraries you could publish on github, songs you could write, etc.
> They noticed food being stolen from the fridge and he purposely put extremely hot spice in the food for the purpose of getting back at the perpetrator.

Even if that were the case (which I doubt), why is that wrong? On what planet is it OK to defend the actions of the thief?
> If you forget about interpretations of their policies, how they handled the retraction looks strongly ethical to me.

But don't you agree that it would increase transparency to leave the original text available on the website with a large disclaimer that the story was retracted and NPR no longer endorses the text?
My guess is this falls under the same purview as booby-trapping your house: Yeah, they're committing a felony by breaking into your house, but you're not allowed to setup a "Home Alone" defense system (if nothing else because first responders might need to get into your home).

It's dumb in this case because the "booby trap" likely isn't one at all, but at a very cursory glance I could buy that someone would make their lunch exceptionally spicy to thwart a would-be thief - in the same vein that people might suggest laxatives, etc.

Anyway, I'm surprised people don't just have locked lunchboxes or something like that.
And he's being compensated to build his skills and increase his professional value. Excellent leadership shown by the owner once he caught wise of what took place IMO
I read some musings by Warren Ellis [1] which brushed up against easier space travel, very briefly:

"The Olympus Mons mountain on Mars is so tall and yet so gently sloped that, were you suited and supplied correctly, ascending it would allow you to walk most of the way to space. Mars has a big, puffy atmosphere, taller than ours, but there’s barely anything to it at that level. 30 Pascals of pressure, which is what we get in an industrial vacuum furnace here on Earth. You may as well be in space. Imagine that. Imagine a world where you could quite literally walk to space."

It's mostly not about your question, but I liked this part.

[1] http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14314
The update is far more delicious than the original: http://www.askamanager.org/2016/07/a-coworker-stole-my-spicy...

I'm not sure that the original advice given was ideal. I'd recommend consulting with a lawyer first before giving any information to HR given that OPs job was at risk. But I'm happy for OP that it all worked out in the end.
reddit is ordinarily a cesspool, but the https://reddit.com/r/antimlm page is a wonderful source of amusing things about MLM.
The way Rust treats shared mutable states makes it, probably, an interesting choice for GPU-style computing.

Disclaimer: I've played with Rust a tiny little bit.
TempleOS Terry Davis Interview: see chatroom on website
There are examples where at it may make things worse, sure. But in general if one browser is not able to understand how to layerize your page, there's a good chance other browsers will struggle as well.

Some operations are just fundamentally more difficult for any modern engine to handles such as animated properties in a container that has group opacity or transparent layers with subpixel anti-aliases text.

A bit of careful tweaking can really improve the performance of a page. The problem is its a lot of domain specific knowledge.
Mine was a pretty big player and we had to track times like crazy (two separate systems and a third opaque one, plus I did one for myself to cover my ass).

But it really depends on the company, I worked in both scenarios. Sometimes I can't broker a better deal or find a better company and again, a good team or an exciting project may make up for dickhead management and their paranoid lack of trust.
Yes, this seems more likely.

If you create a new website with first 10 toxic users, it will never grow, because they will scare away any potential 11th user.

But if you create a new website with awesome users, it get useful content and grow. When it grows very large and attracts too many users, you will have to start moderating heavily. But moderating a website is an exhausting task, and awesome people usually have other things to do; so gradually the job will be taken by people hungry for some kind of power. Then the site becomes toxic.
Or as William Gibson called it, "Disneyland with the Death Penalty."

https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/
It's literally incredible that they fired someone for having their lunch stolen. It's great that sanity prevailed, but gods what a ridiculous situation. I hope whoever that HR person was is never employed in a position of authority again. The lunch thief is bad, but the HR person is much, much, worse. I'm still mad over here just thinking about it.
Is it not always wrong to cause someone harm?

edit: If he would have poisoned the food and the thief died, would that be ok?

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that if he did purposely contaminate the food in order to get back at the thief, instead of just talking to him about it, the talk with HR seems justified.
It is a lovely ending!

What I fear for is that the termination will be in his records and he will have to explain this extremely bizzare story to whoever asks or is interested. I'm glad it all worked out so well for him. Hopefully that silly detail will not affect his future.
You don't escape Earth's gravity at sub-orbital velocities. Escape velocity is always larger than orbit velocity.

What the GP said is that if when you reach Earth's escape velocity, there is still a long way to go until you have Sun's escape velocity (so you are on a solar orbit), and after you reach that, there is a huge distance until Milk-Way's escape velocity, and an even huger way until you escape the Local Group.
Don't worry, you aren't allowed to repair your tesla vehicle anyway.
As a brown person I don't agree. I think it comes down to how "handsome" you look. Your color might help but not that much.
This sort of assumes the only return from seeking a prize is the prize.
This is on top of only allowing new users to watch four movies per month.

Cinemark has a 8.99 a month plan where you get one movie credit per month, and they roll over the credit if you don't use it. That's starting to sound like a far better offer.
Maybe somewhat OT, but the flange review triggers some of the same criticisms I have of AvE.

With Uncle B, any time he gets something wrong (and there are plenty of examples) it's always "I'm just a dude in the shop, having a laugh, etc. etc." But when he's tearing things about it's always, "this design is shit, these engineers suck, they're trying to fuck you over here there and everywhere." There's a huge disconnect in how he presents these critiques as though they're gospel truth, but he won't eat the humble pie. There's the exception here or there, he'll nibble at a particularly big piece, but overall it just doesn't serve the purpose of learning and understanding. He veers into some sort of moralizing about modern manufacturing.

Don't get me wrong, on balance it's great and the juice-squeezer definitely deserved it, but it keeps me wary.

In the same sense, I don't know about that flange. Is it wasteful? Could well be. Or maybe there's a good reason it's there. What I'd like is a good explanation of how they can be sure it's excessive. Tell me why. Maybe they do; I haven't a bit of the autoline video, but I don't see a good writeup.
In the chest is 40lbs of lead and a key with a note. The key is to a safe deposit box and the note says what bank and where. He also has a key to the same box and can check that box whenever he wants. He knows it's found when the real loot in the safe deposit box is gone.
Why not? It isn't because they don't like money. If they aren't selling such data (which is not clearly the case) it's because they judge that they can put it to more valuable use themselves.
The usual Haskelly way is

thirdFunc . anotherFunc . someFunc $ data
Who steals other people's food? This is completely bizarre to me. Do these people do it every day and just never bring their own lunch? Do they just see something that takes their fancy and decide to nick it?

The mind boggles.
The owner caught a lucky break, I think, in having an employee that was so forgiving and being able to rid his company of two toxic people.
Reinventing a browser based theme design studio
They are now risking with running out of money and bankruptcy.

It would have been better idea to make money from outsourced Model 3 and continue R&D.
Is there a point that you're trying to make? As a reminder you're responding to a message about the historical connection between gun ownership, home ownership and racism in the USA. I don't see anything in your message that's relevant to that, except maybe to confirm that colonial militias were created to "kill indians", and that the settlers were squatting on indigenous land.
Spaceflight from super-Earths might be easier (for a civilization to accomplish) than from smaller planets as the difficulty of not using nuclear power will cause nuclear tech to be developed. Development of this tech could make spaceflight easier than the chemical rockets we have on Earth.
My wife had to learn just about every one of these lessons the hard way in the first few years of running her own (small retail) business. In retrospect, we should have posted the hard-learned lessons online. I'm glad this person did.
What "records"? Unless he filed for unemployment, the only other people who would know would be his employers.
I used HE in my informatics b.sc. thesis to do privacy preserving surveillance: Store data on multiple servers and need server majority to reconstruct (non-HE), perform face recognition on encrypted data and then use (S?)HE to query a database if that face is in it - of course without the db learning about the content of the face data.
So, turns out just throwing some math on the problem works (I just applied some previous work; you know what they say about the shoulders of giants) and gives you the advantages of surveillance with less potential for abuse - but the necessary computational power is absurd :(

(And yeah, HE "noise" is a pain)
> passively convert thermal energy to a powerful enough EM field

This is much easier said than done. If such a conversion were simple, we would not use turbines in nuclear or geothermal plants. You might be interested in looking into thermocouples [1], however.

Also of note, any such conversion must by nature exploit an energy gradient, which means any energy spent redirecting particles in such a manner would heat up the interior of the spacecraft by an equivalent amount.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermocouple
Ask HN: How do you build genuine connections while you also badly need a job?
There is a book on personal networking that is titled "Dig your well before you're thirsty." It's an interesting saying, to be sure. Paints a good analogy of avoiding desperation from procrastination. But there is also the saying, "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."

When the job situation is more dire but you don't have that good of a network, how do you avoid making people feel used, while also considering the time-sensitive urgency of your job situation?
You're not wrong, but neither is rms. The little boy pointing out that the emperor's new clothes are non-existent is no less right for breaking social mores, but is rather less likely to actually be paid attention to.
We can send a person to space, but we can't colonize another planet yet, so our capabilities are virtually the same as in the premise you state.
My favorite OOP language is Smalltalk. I'd say it helped me make more sense of CLOS and Javascript and Ruby Objects.
Yet here you are, using HN to interact with us...
> It has not been proven, and will not be proven, that every single person in the world has no reaction to MSG.

And you have an example of a food anywhere that meets that standard? Literally nothing meets this ideal of "safety", so I don't understand why you're OK with peanuts or shrimp when those are clearly shown to be death sentences for some people.
How Slack Got Ahead in Diversity
I feel like if my card gets stolen and I don't notice before it gets to Japan and starts spending money, I have bigger issues.
You can reduce delta-v it a little by floating to the edge of the atmosphere. Beyond that, there is no method of getting higher that does not involve gaining some speed.
(Having had an EMV chip card for about 15 years.)

The banks still advise customers to inform them when travelling, but I've not found that to be necessary when in countries with chip and PIN. (If I'm going outside Europe I will inform the bank of my main card, but in South America, Asia, Africa there will be some point where it isn't accepted, and I use a backup card -- that bank doesn't know I'm travelling.)

The USA used to be the problem -- about once a year, someone in the office would get a robot phone call from the bank saying their card had just been blocked due to suspect activity in the USA. That should be becoming a lot less common.
Also, a learning opportunity. If it had just worked, we would know less. Sometimes you have to blow up a few things to make progress--ask Elon.
I am a YIMBY who lives in the western neighborhoods of SF and would love to see them upzoned. I always think it's silly that there are perfectly pleasant pre-zoning 5-8 story apartment buildings down the street from my place that would be illegal to build under current regulations.
It's on flathub for those using flatpak.
No, it is not always wrong to cause someone harm.

But more directly relevant, does the thief have no agency?
I would like to see the bosses of these techies consider basing their headquarters and satellite offices not smack-dab in the middle of the hottest tech towns but rather in cities where there is lots of housing and room for commercial development, which are often former industrial areas.

In New England, it boggles the mind that startups and giants like GE throw millions into building offices in Kendall and Seaport when they could build elsewhere in the region for much cheaper (Worcester, southern New Hampshire, Rhode Island/Fall River/New Bedford) and allow many of their employers to get reasonably priced homes. Many are served by commuter rail or bus systems, have nearby universities, and are within reasonable driving distance of Boston/Cambridge.

And then there's telecommuting. Automattic, Zapier and a few others have embraced it but they are the exception.
This Fungus Borrowed from Ancient Bacteria to Defy Gravity
What "records" do you speak of? One can choose to include or not include references on your resume, and your former employers can choose to say whatever they want to people checking refs (but, by convention, and to avoid legal trouble, will usually just confirm dates of employment). And since he was re-hired and is on good terms with the owner and his boss, I don't see any reason to even include anything about leaving the company, at all.
Firing someone for a mistake is a fairly extreme response, and should be reserved for extreme mistakes. This sounds like a correctable habit, with some mentoring and coaching.
I heard about this at my wife's former workplace that there was a food thief haunting the break room fridge. It's nuts but really happens.
That is a great resource. Another great example is a 16 byte paint program
http://www.sizecoding.org/wiki/Paint16b
Maybe AI has already taken over and they're going for a divide and conquer strategy to overthrow humanity :). Sure seems that way in 2018...
'Records'? You mean, like the 'permanent record' teachers talk about to scare kids in school?

Just an FYI, there is no such thing. There isn't going to be a record that he was fired.
I think it bears repeating that HR exists to protect the company, not the employee. Often, an interaction with HR will work out terribly for the employee when HR is acting in the company's best interests.

That's not the case here though. They're just terrible.
We won't all agree on ethical system and world views, but a useful thought experiment is whether or not you'd be willing to shoot Hitler at any point in history.
So, if you find the order suspicious enough that you would rather lose the order/customer than ship it and probably lose your money, you are probably still far short of the standard of proof which would allow anyone to get prosecuted for anything, even assuming that you could get law enforcement to investigate.
Pretty sure you're all just markov chain bots.
Why are you inventing scenarios in this story that you could never possibly prove to exist?
Plus a neurotransmitter and a fuel as I remember. Modern domesticated plants have far larger amounts than other plants, however.
If you crowd rats together in a small cage (the modern open office) they will start irrationally attacking and abusing each other. 95% of office dysfunction can be explained by this.
And employers rarely confirm anything other than hire and seperation dates during reference calls due to liability/litigation risks.
It's often considered justified in self-defense.
Is it illegal to booby trap your property?
Mistakes happen. There are all sorts of ways you could accidentally eat someone else's lunch, and having a 'zero tolerance' policy is a good way to end up firing an innocent person.
Maybe it is "always wrong" given a particularly rigid and simplistic code of ethics, but in American society at least we are very comfortable with the notion of causing deserved harm (whether physical, financial, or merely emotional) to wrongdoers as a deterrent to others.
This has been big news in the UK for a while now.

The child is unfortunately seriously sick in such a way that he will never get better, and, from what I've read, doctors aren't sure exactly what is causing it.

He will never be able to eat, drink or breathe without assistance, and his brain is being destroyed by his illness.

His parents have been fighting to take him to a hospital in Rome (which has links to The Vatican) in order to try some experimental treatment.

They've made numerous appeals to as many courts in the UK and EU as they can, and have at every stage been told that keeping him alive amounts to cruelty and that his life support should be turned off.

So it's not a case of "evil government refuses to acknowledge parents' sovereignty over care of their child".
The warmth has no relation whatsoever with the CRI.
If your first led had an awful CRI you should blame yourself for not checking it rather than saying that all the spec sheets are useless.
I wonder how it would have been different if the boss and the coworker were the ones romantically involved.
Both the original and the update read like somebody's college English class creative fiction writing assignment.
Interestingly, though (just to digress -- your point is quite valid) it's not an essential amino acid for humans. Obviously it's required to make proteins, but if we don't get enough in our diet our bodies will synthesize it.

It's just interesting that the molecule we evolved to recognize as a "protein!" marker in our food turns out not to be one of the protein submolecules we actually need to surive.
Only in combination with other negative signals. Plenty of honest people use those. For example, I have use a prepaid phone and a VOIP number. I have no other phone numbers.
Not sure why there's three replies asking about "records." It's right there in your resume - date you worked at a company, huh weird, only 2 months, what happened?

The alternative is having whatever you had on your resume before + 2 month gap, which if anybody asks about you I guess lie. It's not a nothingburger though.
Exactly how I read it.

Except it wasn't a booby trap. It's like a thief complaining because they crashed the car they stole from you.