skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And the “standard review process” was to get approval from two coworkers. Does this even pass any type of bar of what is acceptable behavior?
LogMeIn Acquired by Private Equity
I was implying I took the trip to vacation, not to do work. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
Well a good start would be to try to predict agriculture outputs with those temperature. Honestly I tried asking this question but got no answer.

Cereals might be just fine, and growing food in places where it's not possible to grow food is also a solution. But I'm terribly curious about the impact on food.

Heatwaves will probably cause a lot of deaths at first, but once it happens, there are easy things cities can do to mitigate them.
I was initially tempted to side with Google, a code review process is not just rigorous enough for catching features being sneaked in.

However, it looks like the sole purpose of the extension is to warn employees about security issues in websites, and this engineer coopted that to show a union forming message.

The final paragraph suggests that there's legal precedence for doing this:

“You’re allowed to put posters up on the wall to help organize your workers, and this can be seen as kind of a digital extension of that,” said Veena Dubal, a professor at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. “Whether or not you’re in a union or there’s a union being formed, the law protects organizing activities by employees in the workplace organizing to improve their working conditions.”
Well the article didn't really go into details. When I read it I got the idea she got two thumbs up on a merge request which is a far sight from getting approval from introducing a new feature by some change management board.

I suspect the details of what really happened would be quite illuminating.
Also John Lewis & Partners in the UK with 38,000 staff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_%26_Partners
If my company's handbook on privileged access is anything like Google's, it's completely against the rules to do something like this, even if it's for a noble or worthy cause for its employees, even if other employee's must sign off on the change. Our employee agreement comes with an NDA that tells us to not speak bad about the company, and insubordination of this has resulted in firings just from social media criticism.

I'm not siding with Google, but I'm not siding with her either. The facts and evidence presented to me don't give me an impression that Google was in the wrong by firing her. My opinion will change if I see that the guiding principles or Employee handbook that led Google to this decision are not in agreement.
I don't know about you, but "Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities." seems pretty political to me.

Personally I think that modifying a work tool to achieve political goals is wrong.
Well on the face of it, it's a simple tool isn't it? It's a spinning saw blade, and surface(s) against which to rest the wood being cut.

And I've never used one, but I'm sure it takes some learning, skill, and practice to get good cuts the way you need them, e.g. bang on 45deg all the way across for a 'mitred' corner joint. And it certainly needs learning, care, and attention to operate safely.

I don't mean it to be an insensitive analogy - accidents involving table saws are obviously horrendously worse than those involving git.
Unionization is definitely a political issue.
Not sure why you're downvoted. This does sound like a code review. News sites most often either willfully or through ignorance prefer not to investigate the entire story to truly get to what broke or what didn't break. It's typically just for shock value. I remember a story where cell tower signals were blamed for decline in the North American honey bee population.
> Why would any sane person be against unions?

I have no horse in this race. But as a counterpoint, pretty much everything in New York is more expensive due to heavy unionisation, particularly around construction and public services.
This isn't political. It's about unionising.
All these 10x developers terrified they'd have to make a reasonable wage like the rest of us serfs.

*By the way, that's very much sarcasm since a well organized union doesn't need to cap wages at any level. It's just the argument that keeps getting put forward and I get sick of it.
I'm curious what those carbon removal techs are exactly.

Because a lot of the CO2 tends to stay in the atmosphere.
Do you understand that you can follow the process by the book and still do something wrong and be rightfully fired? "The book" doesn't contain everything that an employee shouldn't or should do.

Sending political messages thorugh a browser extension to other employees seems like a reason for being fired no matter how many reviews you've got.
Prefixing this by saying I am not siding with Google (since people make assumptions). The standard approval process sounds like most merge review processes on any engineering team. There's a sort of assumed good-faith for this process. The fact that 2 coworkers were fine with your change doesn't mean it was made in good-faith and was within the bounds of normal types of changes.

Any engineer with the freedom to make changes without manager approval knows that adding features or making major changes isn't not the sort of thing you just do on your own. You'd go through another process for that.

So I don't buy this argument at all. This was a knowing violation. That does not, however, mean that they punishment was warranted, I don't think that it was.
Refuses to run for me. with Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0

"Detected Characteristics - Mobile browser"

Don't tell me the web developers now assume that Linux == Android...
Is it possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?
> Fully agreed, except that reading your comment made me realise that 'retrofuturist 80s interpretation' is exactly my picture of 'the future' now, and I was born in the 90s.

Did you see the Cybertruck? itshappening.jpg
The trope that says "asking for rules to be enforced in a sane and human manner leads to authoritarianism" is a pretty recognizable form of bullshit.
Climeworks Direct Capture Carbon Dioxide Removal
I think then the responsibility is on the manager?
No, it feels like wilful cognitive dissonance where you all seem to think having two coworkers of no real managerial importance signing off on your company-wide political statement is somehow 'by the book' and everyone else is just a shill, ignorant and somehow didn't read this press release for this poor, poor person who knew exactly what would happen.

EDIT: Let's read the second paragraph of the article again:

"each time Google employees visited the website of IRI Consultants — the Troy, Michigan, firm that Google hired this year amid a groundswell of labor activism at the company"

You see that phrase 'labor activism'? This is the exact cognitive dissonance I am describing here. You want to pretend activism isn't political, that an employee planting a message on the website of a company affiliated with their employer related to this political subject is totally innocent and not a politically charged message. Just 'totally telling you your rights' and nothing more than that. That's intellectually dishonest.
It's not so much a circle as just a newly coined term for "agent":

user agent ~= browser

agent ~= microbrowser

The terms on the left seem more technical/archaic, those on the right seem more populist/accessible.

On the other hand, since this one blogger seems to be the inventor of the term "microbrowser", it's still going to be ambiguous: easily confused with potential alternative definitions such as "lightweight browser", "headless browser" (e.g. selenium webdriver), "browser with low market share", etc.
Does anyone have the code approval process?

The chrome extension was modified but approved by two other people? Were these two other people on her side?

Regardless of policy or no policy, having an internal tool modified to say, “we have the right to organize,” clearly sets off some trust concerns with me.

If this extension was approved by two people who were on her side, then those two need to be removed as well and there should be a rethinking of the approval process.
Did you come to the comments to discuss this, or just spam your empty response at everyone?
Animating SVG Icon Transitions
I'm sane, and don't want to join a union (I'm not against them in general; there are certainly fields where they make sense). I don't know if your question was serious, but in case it was: I don't feel like my employer is a rival or an enemy; I feel like they are a partner in our mutual goal to make a lot of money. I've never worked at Google, but I've worked at similarly famous large companies, making several times more than any reasonable person would think the average programmer was worth.

To the extent that unions would make the company able to make profit less efficiently, for example by making it harder to fire poor employees, it would have been against my own interests.

I also totally never felt that there was a power imbalance between me and my employer. I got to work whenever I wanted, worked on whatever I wanted, left whenever I wanted, and when I got burned out and started disliking the job, I quite easily found a job somewhere else. Again, probably different for non-software-engineers, but it's not hard to understand why many of us feel no draw to unions.
> We dismissed an employee who abused privileged access to modify an internal security tool,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement, adding that it was “a serious violation.”

See my other comment reply.
If they're footnotes, they're already at the bottom of the article. No need to hide them further.
According to Spiers[1], modifying software that runs on every employee's computer was her -job-.

[1] https://medium.com/@ksspiers/google-fires-another-worker-for...
Since you can’t spend 53000 dollars on a Mac laptop last I checked, yes! However the whole purpose of a managerial hierarchy is to establish a responsibility chain so at very least I would expect the manager to also get fired.

Google doesn’t care about these antics. They, like all employers, don’t want their employees to have meaningful bargaining power.
Does anyone know of any open source microbrowsers?
Screen could offer better safety tests for new chemicals
Which is why I code in Common Lisp. My code from the 80s compiles and runs without errors.

On the other project, which compiled to C, apparently some bright spot decided to change the standard C library so my code no longer compiles.

And don't get me started on C++.... standards, so many C++ standards, "breaking" news... your code won't compile anymore.
This is absolutely the right way to do things. My time, and my developer's time is far too important to handle mundane tasks, and if we're manually doing those tasks, that just another thing I need to double check to make sure I did correctly, and that seriously wears on me.

I'm paid a lot of money to solve problems, not write code. Is code involved? Yes, of course, I'm a programmer, but my job is to solve issues. I have never been at a place where I've though, "you know if I automate this button, I don't have a job anymore." There is always WAY too much work to do that actually requires my attention.
Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor Supports Practice of Jury Nullification (2016)
I hope I'm not carried away by the example, but I would definitely not build Docker images using make. A multi-stage Dockerfile can take care of building, testing, packing, etc. source code a lot more predictably than any amount of make, by using known images of the tools involved (e.g., node, webpack, etc.).

Moreover, Docker's caching implicitly allows to declare dependencies with a lot fewer headaches than make. On the downside, it is all to easy to write something that busts Docker's cache early in the build process, rendering `docker build` super-expensive.

So my opinionated tooling: docker, git (to extract project versions and inject them into the image), bash (to glue everything together). Everything else belongs inside the Docker build.
Spiers wasn't fired for adding code, Spiers was fired for using a pop-up and that simply isn't the Google way.
There's also some draft for the proper sum types (aka tagged unions). But we need 'm confirmed! Cannot get my code to use it and then they do not get in and I have to un-cleanup the code base.
For anyone else who didn't get that far the first time:

> Spiers' pop-up message was inserted into a tool that notifies employees of privacy and security concerns about using non-Google tools and services, like warning employees not to upload proprietary information to Dropbox, Spiers said. The tool is managed by the platform security team, for which Spiers worked for almost two years as a security engineer.

So, seems like the bulletin was pretty far outside the intended function and should have required more than a code review. I wonder what will happen to the people who accepted the patch?
You can be against her actions and for unions.

To me this sounds like someone snuck a PR that does questionable things into the code base.

Sure you can say that's a failing of the PR process, but it doesn't mean putting up the PR in the first place shouldn't be punishable.

"Following the process" doesn't absolve you from the fact you initiated the process with questionable intents.

Honestly, I would not want to work with someone who'd do that, and would be surprised if that wasn't a fireable offense.

I value the fact I don't have to scour PRs for covert (or honestly, even overt) attempts to stick political messages into our codebase.
Recommendation: Raise your kids around homelessness.

Why? Because then they will learn to have compassion for these people.

And maybe then, with compassion that doesn't come from a sheltered life, one will use their privileged education and resources to execute an innovative solution successfully.
The extension was specifically designed to notify Google employees about problematic reliance on non-Google services. Seems like her warning fits that use case. How is "warning about Dropbox" any different from "warning about X management consulting firm"?

Edit: Her warning literally said: "Do not violate NLRB notice. Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities." (see screenshot in article, bottom right.) This is something that Google is already obligated to acknowledge under labor law. They're simply shooting the messenger.
Spiers' account of what happened: https://medium.com/@ksspiers/google-fires-another-worker-for...
Why is that? You can't just get code review / deployment approval. You need to have approval that a certain feature or process is wanted / needed for the system. My guess is the sec engineer in this story did not get approval for this feature in the first place, she just went ahead and changed the code.

What if this change allowed passwords to be captured in plain text? Browsing history? Surely those are fire-able offenses? So how is this situation any different?
As Quora answer mentions, this paper exists because of Bell's inequality. But that answer is not convincing at all. It's a simple non-controversial fact of physics that whatever experiment you choose to perform there is some common element that influenced it all in the past. There is no true independence in the real world and you don't need superdeterminism to acknowledge that. Am I missing something?
As soon as management starts looking at optimizing efficiency numbers like "Average CPU utilisation" a smart developer starts to run low priority "while(true);" loops to make CPU utilisation higher.

Instead management should be looking at the cost of running a service, and ignoring efficiency or utilisation numbers. It turns out basic things like enabling caching in the application can have a far bigger resource saving than stopping the test VM's over the weekend.
You are right. In fact, why don't we stop having elections? After all, why would any sane person be against your views of the world? ;P
“usually” being the operative word. I’m not quite ready to throw IE6 (Internet Explorer 6) and all http-only browsers completely under a bus yet.
Lot of people are confusing "following standard procedures" with "immune from consequences". To be honest, looks like the employee got a few sympathetic people to sign off on an inappropriate use of a tool. According to the Verge, there are two other people who are also being disciplined.
> “You’re allowed to put posters up on the wall to help organize your workers, and this can be seen as kind of a digital extension of that,”

Well, that digital extension belongs to Google. If she wanted to rally company developers she could have used email, created her own website, slack account, WhatsApp, telegram, etc. There are plenty of channels that don't belong to Google.

I doubt anyone in upper management asked her to do this, maybe she took too much freedom and abused her privileged access?
"Oh but someone else approved that PR", well probably they ganged up.

She is a Security Engineer, not HR/Management.

If this approved by HR/Management, there would be no problem at all but I think she/they did whatever they wanted without thinking about it.
Literal decades of highly-funded propaganda by business interests to manufacture this consensus, for starters, Taft-Hartley banning sector-wide bargaining to render unionizing as company-level adversarialism vs. a broader fight for worker security and rights, the purging of leftists from the labor movement with Red Scare postwar...
Pretty interesting story. A little history, a little science. hi-sci?
Bernard Arnault Was (Briefly) the World’s Richest Person Today
There is warming that we are committed to at this point even if we could magically turn off the tap and stop emitting greenhouse gasses all of the sudden.
Federation is actually quite centralized and explicitly so. DNS resolution is “federated”.

Proof of work is the opposite end of the spectrum; maximally decentralized yet slow.

The worst of all worlds is proof of stake / stake-based consensus. It’s expensive yet super fragile.
I think the point here is that there's also no way to distinguish a http request from an attack.

It's fair enough to an argue that a self-signed cert could be an attack, but so could any http request.

> a no-cert (unencrypted) connection can be distinguished from an attack on an encrypted connection: the browser knows a priori (through the protocol in the URL) that the connection is supposed to be unencrypted.

I don't understand how that allows one to distinguish it from an attack. Knowing that a connection is supposed to be unencrypted is just equivalent to knowing that a connection could be under attack.
I'd agree, it sounds a lot like a code review, but at Google that was also the approval standard for deploying such an extension.

I don't really see how Google could be in the right here though. If they have an internal program for creating alerts/extensions for specific websites, and Spiers followed the normal procedure for adding such an extension, there doesn't seem to be a problem. The only problem is Google being anti-union, and retaliating against someone for quietly promoting unions in line with existing policies seems a lot like illegal retaliation.
A couple of pictures of Roman dials from around that time:

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/roman-sundial-pompeii-sc...

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/515149/rare-2000-year-ol...
No its deterministic, but it appears to be probabilistic to you. Which it can be.
> injecting javascript into an employer's internal chrome extension

The purpose of the extension is to serve site-specific pop-ups. Spiers added a pop-up to an existing pop-up tool using existing, precedented processes.

The analogy to a poster in a cafeteria, which is explicitly protected by federal law, passes a first-order smell test.
This is a good list, but I have to disagree on the tab thing.

> And you will never again pull your hair out because some editor swapped a tab for four spaces

How many editors out there in 2019 will automatically replace tabs with spaces by default? Unless you're editing makefiles in Microsoft Word or something, I don't see why a working code editor will do something you didn't tell it to do.

Vim, Emacs, Nano, Sublime Text, Kate/Kdevelop, Visual Studio/Code, Atom, Brackets, Text Mate, Scintilla/SciTE/Geany/etc, Programmers Notepad, CodeBlocks, Eclipse, and JetBrains all know not to mess with your tabs.

Rather than switch away from tabs so you can keep using a broken editor, the correct solution is to switch an editor that works. And if you configured your editor to replace tabs with spaces, and it doesn't give you an option to handle Makefiles differently, then that's a broken editor.
This extension popping up messages on various sites was a completely normal thing for it to do, she simply added another message.
> With that said, I do believe AI will replace most developers in our lifetime.

I don't see this happening. I don't believe AI is anywhere near sophisticated enough to tackle the majority of problems that developers are solving on a day to day basis. Even if we somehow manage to have a major breakthrough with AI, it's not going to be commercially available/viable enough for average-joe dev shop to implement it.

I'm far more worried about AI replacing lower income jobs and widening the pay gap even more than I am about tech workers losing their jobs.

>A lot of what we do is converting business rules into code, storing that data, returning it, and performing some useful operation with it.

Sure, but you still need someone to make those business rules. I don't see AI being able to interpret the direction of MBA filled meeting rooms without some sort of translation later (i.e., developers).

AI is hype right now. I have not yet been convinced of its practical application, or anyone's real desire to invest in it (other than the handful of companies who would benefit off of its implementation).
<glitch>
I did but I still have to say it sure sounds like a code review process she went through, not a new feature addition she went through. Although generally I wouldn't approve code unless I could figure out what feature it was related to so I also think huh, maybe it was okay by Google's inner processes - the workings of which I a not informed of.
> She did it exactly according to internal policy.

I don't think this person or the other organizers should have been fired, but code review is not the same as organizational approval.

(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)
Yeah let's be real, if she programmed a popup to appear over twitter with a message like "Don't slack off dummy UwU" and or something equally ill informed she would have been rebuked at worst.

To say that it wasn't the union overtones that got her fired is naive.