skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, on the legal side: the firm can leave the position open, or hire a full or temporary person for it, but when the parent returns they get their old job back (or an equivalent one). Also it's not exactly 52 weeks parental leave, it's 13 weeks medical leave (for the mother expressly) and 39 weeks for either parent, to be split as desired. And that's just the paid component (which is paid by the unemployment insurance system). You're also able to take unpaid leave as the other parent. Same difference to the employer, of course. They're not on the hook for the direct cost.

What generally happens is the firm hires a person on a one year term, and then at the end of the year the original person comes back and the replacement person is either kept on (if they were good) or not (if they weren't). It's a decent way to hire new people, actually.

>>What if the person takes parental leave again after 1 month back? Do you accept that you've torpedoed some role? Do you try to slowly phase out this person's job description and offload their work onto their coworkers?

In Canada you can't take parental leave simply at any time, it's tied to the birth of the kid (wth leeway). It's very unusual to have a child 13 months after the previous one, and there are rules about how often you can take the paid unemployment insurance (tied to how much you've worked over the last year). But yes, you'd be entitled to leave from you job.

>>More succinctly, what if someone is definitely necessary in the near-day-to-day, and does not do work that is interchangeable with other employees?

A well-structured organization typically doesn't have very many of these people, because it's a ticking time bomb. That person will leave; they'll quit or get fired or get hit by a bus or get cancer or take a three week vacation and the business has to figure it out. And babies don't really sneak up on you that much - there's plenty of time to train someone, etc.

>>I suspect that firms have learned to deal with it, but by doing things like passively selecting against women and younger people for critical roles. Is that how they manage?

I've never seen any data that Canada has poorer gender equality or more age discrimination than the US.

Overall I think that the parental leave laws in Canada do make things marginally more difficult for businesses but significantly easier for new parents. That's a tradeoff I consider reasonable.
Notes on Fuzzing ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick
Ethereum Just Escaped Massive Hacker Attack, Parity Urges All Nodes to Upgrade
>Over the years, the big impact of Orwell to me has been how readily people can look at systems that they consider to be Other than their own and critique them while eagerly ignoring the implications for their own situation.

"Capitalism is terrible" is a pretty constant meme on the left in US politics right now, perpetuated by many people who have read that book.

>where I live in Texas, all the sheep just think they are the farmer.

Ah the classic "people that don't vote to tax the rich for entitlements think they are rich". If your model of how people vote depends on people being completely stupid, it's wrong.
Have you read any of his other books? I loved his TED talks and few lectures that are up on YouTube.
I think one strategy is to question the goal of perpetual growth.
How is the XR the cheapest phone people can buy when the iPhone 7 is still for sell for $475?
Can someone help to explain whether this is similar to TLA+?
You’re right, that’s not good either. We need a better balance. Right now, European companies can just export production to India/China, skirting our environmental laws, making them essentially useless.
Was it meant to be funny or relaxing in some way? Just strikes me as sadistic or incompetent.

When facing a potentially life altering event I'd rather be told face-to-face, like an adult.
Can you share your rubric?
Two years compared to the iPhone 5S that was introduced in 2013 and still getting updates?
We discovered these displays could be updated via a curl command at one of my previous jobs and they quickly started saying things like "FEED ME KITTENS".
> To be fair to the journalists, those are actually open research questions.

There are strong consensuses about some aspects of those problems, however, especially regarding the benefits of using government debt to finance stimulus programs as part of a counter-cyclical action against a recession. Saying it's all unknown is about as intellectually honest as saying that we don't know whether the world is flat or round because we're unsure of its topology at the millimeter scale.
Frankly, open plan offices exhibit far worse versions of all the same things found in cubicle life. Really it’s just companies that respect basic human needs enough to foot the bill for private offices.. and everyone else who either engages in rationalized cost cutting or cargo cult bandwagoning.
I fail to see how the "nah-gonna-work-here-anyway" joke is a racist microaggression. Being unable to pronounce a name and making a joke about it could happen just as easily with a name like "Tom Snuffaluffagus." I see a distinct difference between joking about a difficult name and joking about the physical attributes or ethnic history of a person of color.
I've seen it coming for a while. I'll have to decide which is the lesser evil: blocking QUIC/HTTP3 or using MITM.
Canadian dial-up art is older than the internet
You know what, you nailed it. I do not want helpful guesses from a machine. :) I liked them better when garbage in made garbage out and people knew not to trust the machine blindly.

Wow. I didn't notice it happening, but I've become previous-gen tech...
Such behavior needs to lead to jail time and not just a trivially payable fine so that the rich like the poor understand that wrongdoing has consequences.
No, because in this case your vote changes the final number of the vote. Even the losing side can have political power if they have a big enough base.
Prison labor undermines UBI. If you can force someone to work why would you pay someone else to work?
Instead of responding to everything s%&t about cubicles, organisations made all those things even worse by going with open plan.

Good heuristic on these trends. "Will everyone absolutely hate it?" If so, it'll get really popular.

Hotdesking. Oh yeah! It'll drive everyone nuts!

What else you got?
Fortnite Is the Future, but Probably Not for the Reasons You Think
I rarely see a comment on HN whose assessment and opinion are more foreign to my personal experience than this one.

Open plans are much better than cubicles. The transition to open plans and standing desks has been a boon for social interaction in teams, more role-crossover, and just more physical movement in general.

Office Space is a timeless and incredible film, but one aspect of it that seems almost like fantasy is the idea that people primarily working on software might sit down in cramped cubicles and prefer fake privacy to real social interaction.

edit: Look, I know that some people like cubicles. If you do, that's fine. But if you actually seriously like small, cramped, stuffed cubicles in Office Space (or The Matrix) - which absolutely existed in the late 90s and early 2000s in IT and seem to have largely disappeared - I'd really like to hear why. If you do like cubicles: how do you move? Do you really have the discipline to get up and walk around every once in a while? Or do you end up having much less body movement than open plan participants?
1. All of Nassim Taleb's Books - They changed the way I thought about tail probabilities and risk taking + bar bell strategies in general

2. Thinking Fast and Slow - made me think about all of the biases that my mind has that I dont even realize

3. The organized mind - This book gave me a lot of ideas about how I can change my life to live with less distractions and maybe do thinks more efficently

4. The Vital Question - Made me realize how lucky we as humans and complex cellular beings are to even exist.

5. Misquoting Jesus (and all of Ehrman's other books) - Gave me talking points I use against any/all overzealous Christians in my life. The stories of the bible are not remotely close to the stories that where handed down by the people that were with Jesus when he died. Over 100s of years and many errors (and a lot of luck), people decided Jesus was the son of God. Unfortunately for them, the chances of that being true are very very close to zero.
There's a great between-the-lines take in this movie. Bill Lumbergh is dating Peter's girlfriend on the Saturday. That's why he forces him into work ... and why the girlfriend also leaves a message.
Not to brush this off in particular, but there are quite a few target demographics that are more than "half of all humanity". For example, people who use toilets.
Supposedly "birth of a nation" led to a revival of the KKK.
From the article:

Analysis of the semen samples showed that men who had smoked marijuana had average sperm concentrations of 62.7 million sperm per millilitre (million/mL). Those who had never smoked a joint had an average count of 45.4 million/mL.
Location: Knoxville, TN
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: NodeJS, Express.js, Javascript, Websockets, HTML5, Bootstrap, LAMP stack, (Some) Java
Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11ZnKG-EM6Y0SGhhE6mXqRCNr...
Email: (On Resume)
Website: www.kahootbird.com

I recently finished a full stack multiplayer game in NodeJS using asynchronous programming. I am adaptable at learning new technologies, love coding and looking for a developer position to grow in. My general focus area is web technologies.
Come on, are you for real? This is one of the most melodramatic, childish, cruel things I've ever heard of happening in a workplace.

If this is true, I think you have an obligation to name the company and allow this to be researched and investigated.
Holy cow that is one of the single saddest things that I have ever heard. I've known some cowardly heartless bastards in my career but no one that low.

There is a local tech company here that used to have a yearly event where they'd invite the entire tech community in for beer, popcorn and a screening of either Office Space or a bunch of episodes of the IT Crowd.
I don't know if you meant to be sarcastic or funny here. However, business have to earn profit in the long run, otherwise who'd pay for all the employees, infrastructure costs etc.?
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What city and currency are these calculations for?

Can you live with your parents?

Why do you not consider paying taxes?
Saved this quote to show to my future data structures students. Thanks.
So you're saying that in the UK I can legally walk around shoving and slapping people at random?
If you're an extravert. I'm not; I hate open plans. Give me a cubicle any day.
State sponsored basic income like support for pregnant women and more support for parents.
Tying benefits to your job and salary results in discrimination of women when hiring, women postponing motherhood and employers eating the risk of women looking for a job just to get pregnant and get benefits.
an open floor plan with a small team is great but anything over 5 is just too much.
Despite heavy insulation, quite a bit of heat still migrates upward in new apartments and condos. Your neighbors are also nearly perfect insulation compared to your exterior walls too :P
Your tech support organisation needs an ombudsman
I had a critical technical problem with outbound emails from my systems. I'd configured them to send confirmation emails to new users, they had not verified my DNS setup. Without outbound email, my systems were completely down. I won't name the company because usually their service is damn fine.

I posted a tech support request for help in their forums.

I got a (slow) response from tech support.

They reply: “your config is wrong”.

I told them I know I have configured it right.

Time passes….

They reply: “your config is wrong”.

My reply "please stop saying that, I know I have configured it right".

Time passes….

Again: “your config is wrong”.

At this stage I'm going crazy. Fortunately I know someone at a very high level in this company. I emailed him "please is there anything you can do? I've been trying for a long time to get this sorted out but your tech support people keep telling me I've configured it wrong."

Within one hour, it was fixed at their end and I got an email asking if all was now ok. For the record, I did have it configured right.

If I didn't have a friend at the company I would be completely stuck. How do you get issues resolved with a company when their support system is completely failing? Most ordinary people can't email senior management and say "Hey can you please help?".

SO .... Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and all companies down to the smallest startups .... you NEED an ombudsman - someone who your customers can go to when the system has failed, when they need an "inside friend" who can help you out when the ordinary channels have failed.

Right now, what is the mechanism that you have in place for customers to get help when the ordinary channels have failed? Probably none,

I got stuck in a tech support loop, it was lucky that I knew my own personal ombudsman at the company who could go and rattle the right cages and get the issue sorted out.

You owe your customers an ombudsman.
Depends where you live
Preachers Perform Mass Exorcisms–And Live-Stream Them
Hungry Trolls
Name the company or it didn't happen. This is really absurd.
Policing Big Pharma’s Influence Over Doctors’ Treatment Guidelines
The feel and the smell of books engages me a bit more than a screen does. When I’m really into a book, it’s much more likely that the texture of the stack of pages will pull me out than my partner saying it’s time for dinner.

Books are weird.
Those who have studied economics will not be surprised at how Canadian companies do this. The law effectively makes it illegal for all Canadian companies to operate in Canada if they can not afford this 52 week leave. Pretty much like how minimum wage makes it illegal for low productivity individuals to work or be employed.

There is a definite cost to this which is paid for by the other employees,share-holders and economy in general. It also makes age an issue in hiring decisions and employers would be less willing to hire potential new parents. Secondly, people figure out clever ways to avoid this through contractual employees, outsourcing and other methods.

Without such law Canadian society would have been more rich, more innovative and ensured welfare of all in the society.
Agree. Is similar on rust, where circular links are also hard to do. Easy graphs is a killer feature of a GC.

But also, is a localized problem. I have more issues with obj-c in the past, some ergonomic of swift make it even rarer.

However, certainly suck for the ones that hit this!. I'm building a relational lang in rust and damm, I miss a GC!
>"inept managers, mind-numbing bureaucracy, forced office parties, repetitive busywork and jargon-filled memos read by none."

till date, I have to read jargon-filled memos and watch mind numbing training videos. Nothing has changed.
Elizabeth Khuri Chandler Tells the Origin Story of Goodreads
Their salary & compensation isn't public, they have less information on what the market will bear for their skills. And that's how the company wants it to be.
I like this idea, but unreasonable people would escalate any and all issues they encountered. So the ombudsman would just end up dealing with similar triage problems to the rest of the team.

(This is not to say that your CS experience wasn't dissatisfying and unacceptable. It sounds like it was.)
They should change their name. I wonder how many people ignore the articles when they see "Buzzfeed". It would be like the National Enquirer trying to start a serious arm under "National Enquirer News".
I thought that the NSA used backdoors and didn't need keys... (ie: direct access to large corporation's servers, where the data is not encrypted)
Open office plans are great if you want to plan a skiing trip with your coworkers who are incidentally also your friends. If you're the sort of person who wants to keep it professional in the office, they're a nightmare. Blurring the line between work and personal life is encouraged by companies because it gets people working longer hours (on paper anyway, since so much more time is burned socializing.) Thanks, but no thanks.
As a more technical companion to Freakonomics, I would recommend "The undercover economist" and its sequel by Tim Harford. It's a great introduction to the way economy shapes our lives and choices. You will never drink coffee or sit in a queue the same way after reading it.

Another book that changed allot about how I look at the world is "The long tail" by Chris Anderson. Maybe too thin of a concept for a whole book, but definitely interesting.
Yeah that's definitely fair. There have been a lot of movies that have been very successful (for better or worse) at changing how people think about and contextualize the past.
Not a fixed number of hours per week – more like "Here's the project proposal, I estimate it'll take 5 weeks, here's roughly what I expect to get done each week." Some weeks would be easier than I expected and I'd get ahead, some weeks would be harder and I'd end up working more. If a major event happened that would make the project take a lot longer, I'd renegotiate.

> - Could you have asked to see the data first to avoid this?

> - Could you have offered an initial paid discovery phase that would have given you time to go over things in more detail first and even prototype it?

> - Could you have broken the project into chunks where some parts were fixed price and the really unsure parts were hourly?

I could, but
(1) most of my projects are quite different from each other, so the risks change, (2) the benefit seems pretty small. My clients weren't clamoring for more predictable costs – mostly they wanted transparency if a project was going to take longer than expected, as well as the ability to wrap up or cut scope if that was the case.
Wasn't it a different Bill Lumbergh that she had actually seen?
Not to detract from your overall point, which I agree with, but I'd like to clarify "it's still moving" =/= alive. I grew up in a coastal town in Australia so fished a heck of a lot, you can completely sever the head and the body can still "swim" or move around for quite a while - especially in salt water.

This seems to be why the 3rd step is necessary in Ike Jime even after crushing the fish's brain.

As a side note too, my personal opinion would be that thinking of fish as feeling pain in the same way we do, is anthropomorphizing them too much. I've seen fish missing half their body see some food float past and still try to swim after it and eat it. They clearly don't have the same capacity to process incoming signals as we do, nor does that processing result in anything close to the same cognitive stress. A man cut in half wouldn't worry about food no matter how hungry he might be.

To take the absurd extreme example, I wonder how much "suffering" I'm inflicting on the worms or insects that I put on the hooks.
A coworker at a previous company had a red Swingline stapler on his desk. He told me that at one point, the company was giving them out to any employee who had to change desks more than some number of times in a single year.

They eventually stopped this practice when they moved so many people that they ran out of stapler budget. (But they didn't run out of moving budget!)
I could swear this didn't exist when I was learning how to use Z3. Is it new? Did I just fail to find it? At any rate, it clears up a lot of points I was confused about. Tremendously glad this was posted.
That's going to be very location dependent... mostly in the form of rent and utilities. Larger cities will have much higher rent rates than sleepy college towns. New York City, for instance, would roughly triple your rent budget. Most places in the US, you would be able to live on that budget, provided you could find public transportation. That's not as easy to do everywhere either.

If you're looking at a fairly small locality, meaning your daily commute distance is only a few miles, you may want to look at a motorized bicycle. They are easy to keep in a small apartment, offer a higher degree of freedom than public transit, and are about comparable in total travel time.
Of course they won't tell you that they are doing it...
Dutch radio amateurs image far side of the Moon using Chinese satellite data
I think the most blatant scenario involves a code-base where only one engineer knows where the skeletons are buried. Yes it's bad architecture, caused by sustained bad development choices, but it is RAMPANT in our industry. If said engineer gets hit by a bus, or goes on parental leave, the company is fucked. They deserve it, but they are still fucked and they are going to kick and scream whatever excuse they can think of to prevent these scenarios from being legislated into higher frequency.
This is crazy but Peter Thiel and Blake Masters' book Zero to One changed the way I thought about everything. Thiel's thoughts were so contrarian to everything I had learned or thought I knew that it literally changed my reality.

It was kind of like when I learned how to program - what I read in his book - gave me a new lens to interpret how or what I saw in the world. It created a crack that made me wonder what else I wasn't seeing or able to see.

There was a page in there about secrets in plain sight and it bothered me for years because I couldn't understand what he meant until I finally read Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday.
Small business doesn't have "custodians and admins". It has a few people every one of them absolutely crucial for survival.
Have you ever started a company without outside funding? Usually you have some savings, maybe for a few months and a lot of hope. Someone quitting in the middle of that to take care of the child means you won't make it.
The Dale Carnegie comparison threw up a red flag for me because that book is all manipulation. I have an ex-friend who read it and swears by it, but she's just become completely insufferable and fake. It's like she's constantly in a job interview.
>>To me local journalism is public service. I don’t think we should expect that anyone profits.

Ok, I get it. But why should McClatchy, a for profit corp, shoulder all this?
where lies a myth? It's customer needs vs. tech that wins.
> The transition to open plans and standing desks has been a boon for social interaction in teams, more role-crossover

The social interaction results in less work. Most of a programmers job is staring at a wall of text and trying to concentrate, anything that distracts has a serious impact on productivity. As for role crossover, I've got enough on my plate without being concerned about what other people are dealing with. Some cross-over might be good but there are many areas of a company that are completely disconnected and crossover is just noise.

> but one aspect of it that seems almost like fantasy is the idea that people primarily working on software might sit down in cramped cubicles and prefer fake privacy to real social interaction.

It's not so much fantasy as a portrayal of the time, the cramped cubicles are presented as bad because they replaced actual offices.
Vanlife: Build your own van to live on the road