skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the US, in most states, 'at will' employment often means zero notice is required from either side. A contract can specify otherwise, as can other things (such as a company HR procedure).

> You can't just say "i'm giving you 1 month of formal notice of resignation" and expect the company to be bound to that month... otherwise, to take it to extremes, what's stopping you from giving them a 20years formal notice of resignation?

You actually can say that if you want.

What stops 20 years notice from having any effect is that the company can terminate you anyway in the normal way before that. I.e. they can still make you redundant, fire you, assess your performance etc in all of the usual ways, or in 'at will' locations just let you go without a reason. They will still be subject to discrimination law etc if they fail to comply with all the usual constraints on terminating employments, but nothing about your 20 year notice prevents them from following the normal rules at any time.

ps. I really meant to say "giving 1 month formal notice in accordance with my contract of employment", but I realised in the US people don't always have any notice in their contract (due to 'at will') so I removed the part about being in accordance with it.

Ignore employment as a special case for a moment. In general, for any contract (implied or not), parties can give each other advance notice of something that is going to take effect in future, as if they told the other party on the future date of the effect; the effect will not occur until that date. The other party in the contract can't just decide the effect has taken place earlier. You can also give conditions. In a sense, notice of this kind is just a courtesy, an advance warning if you like.

I believe in US 'at will' terms, Timnit effectively gave notice that she was going to resign at a specified future date under certain conditions. Timing had not actually resigned at the point at which Google is said to have terminated the employment. That makes it a termination.
why so little trust of the HN mods?
Google has internal mailing lists dedicated solely to rants (and related discussions) and others on which rants are certainly well accepted.

Google exercises a subjective standard to determine whether or not an employee is using mailing lists inappropriately (e.g. James Damore).

Source: ex-google
At the risk of invoking Godwin's law....this is exactly Rodolf Hoss' defense at the Nuremberg trails:

"Don’t you see, we SS men were not supposed to think about these things; ... somebody else would have done just as well if I hadn’t"

https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-human-behavior/c...

I would be extremely cauticous about using the argument of "well If I don't do it, someone else will".
Huh? Because conservatives don't like safety? Or they like dishonest business practices?
From The U.S. Has Passed the Hospital Breaking Point in The Atlantic [1]:

In South Dakota, a network of 37 hospitals reported sending more than 150 people home with oxygen tanks to keep beds open for even sicker patients. A hospital in Amarillo, Texas, reported that COVID-19 patients are waiting in the emergency room for beds to become available. Some patients in Laredo, Texas, were sent to hospitals in San Antonio—until that city stopped accepting transfers. Elsewhere in Texas, patients were sent to Oklahoma, but hospitals there have also tightened their admission criteria.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/12/the-worst...

Edit: typesetting
This used to be a problem for us too but I believe the UX changed a couple of months ago. Teams now shows a largish purple button that says “New Conversation” at the bottom of the chat window, and they added a little more space between that and the bottom of the previous conversation. It made a big difference.
Ayn Rand's following, probably.
Citation: https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/k77sxz/d_t...

Sample comment:

Another ex-colleague here. I was not going to participate in the discussions but your post made me realize objective truth should come out. I do believe she actually thinks she is making the world a better place but in reality any interaction with her has been incredibly stressful having to carefully weigh every move made in her presence. When this blows over her departure will be a net positive for the morale of the company.

To give a concrete example of what it is like to work with her I will describe something that has not come to light until now. When GPT-3 came out a discussion thread was started in the brain papers group. Timnit was one of the first to respond with some of her thoughts. Almost immediately a very high profile figure has also also responded with his thoughts. He is not Lecun or Dean but he is close. What followed for the rest of the thread was Timnit blasting privileged white men for ignoring the voice of a black woman. Nevermind that it was painfully clear they were writing their responses at the same time. Message after message she would blast both the high profile figure and anyone who so much as implied it could have been a misunderstanding. In the end everyone just bent over backwards apologizing to her and the thread was abandoned along with the whole brain papers group which was relatively active up to that point. She has effectively robbed thousands of colleagues of insights into their seniors thought process just because she didn't immediately get attention.

The thread is still up there so any googler can see it for themselves and verify I am telling the truth.
Wonder if the nefarious party used magnetrons or masers to carry out the attack. Guessing magnetrons given that this seems very similar to other documented cases [1] before the development of room-temperature solid-state masers.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3509929/
Cryptocurrencies are being used by so-called cybercriminals (cybercrooks) as we speak. Because it is decentralized, its more difficult to close down illegal transactions, and they consider themselves anonymous after mixing.

I don't find cryptocurrency interesting at all for a free society. I don't see any purpose of it, if you live in a free society. And I do live in one.
key quotes:

> Arconic realised its polyethylene-cored cladding had a horrendous reaction to fire following French tests in 2005, where it burned fiercely and obtained a basement ranking of Class E. Despite this, Arconic continued to market it as the much safer Class B

> The Irish company Kingspan’s insulation passed one of these tests, which took place on a fake wall made with non-combustible cement. This test pass permitted its use on tall buildings, but only in an exact replica of the system tested. Despite this, the firm marketed its insulation as ‘suitable for use on high-rise buildings’. [...] After the test was passed in 2005, Kingspan altered the chemical composition of the insulation so that it was no longer the same product

> Celotex, a smaller firm [...] its insulation had also passed a test, also using a non-combustible cladding panel, and it too began to market its product as safe for use on high rises. But the test was not as it seemed: fire resisting boards were used around the temperature monitors that record the pass or fail, distorting the result.

> the Local Authority Building Control [...] appears to have written its certificate simply by copy and pasting an email written by Celotex's Jon Roper, even including the same typo on the certificate.

So, among Arconic, Kingspan, Celotex, LABC (or Spectator, if they're pulling a Bloomberg) - I wonder if anyone is going to jail...
Programming the IBM 650 Magnetic Drum Computer and Data Processing Machine [pdf]
Why are we conjuring hypothetical situations in which you are oppressed, instead of condemning the concrete case where Jeff Dean looked for flimsy reasons to get rid of Timnit Gebru?
Blockchain or not blockchain is perhaps the least interesting part of all the so called "blockchain" projects.

It's a term without an accepted definition. A lot of useless branding is expected. Just you wait until IBM gets their hands on .. oh, they already did.

Both the Bitcoin-like zero trust ledger and the m-of-n trusted notaries model have useful use cases. While more descriptive terms would have been great, arguing definitions only goes so far.
Colleges Cut Tenure
You can subscribe to Klaatu show on hpr using
http://hackerpublicradio.org/rss.php?hostid=78
Per Diem. It sounds a lot like per diem.
In free space:

lambda = c / f

lambda = 3E8 [m/s] / 10E3 [1/s] = 3E5 [m]

You’d be right for acoustic waves, but we’re not talking about those.
It is still Facebook, so nope. Actually, hell nope.
I agree with all of this, except you miss that she started playing those ultimatum games with her boss, this particular act, let’s be real, is something that gets you fired from most places. There would be a lot of merit to what you’re saying and a lot more sympathy for this woman if she hadn’t made these missteps.
I liked this post, as i am building a PAAS now. We are still at the product stage trying to go public. Going public is not easy because I think we are too scared it does not get the traction it deserves. So we keep delaying and fix a comma here and there...
The goal is set for Jan 2021. Let's see if we keep the promise
Three Ways to Get Away from Your Computer When Working Remotely
I've never seen any requirement, or even social pressure, to use caffeine at work. Plenty of people in all offices I've worked at didn't take coffee, or only very ocasionally. It was widespread, but no expected of you.

I wouldn't mind some coleagues taking some drugs, as long as they didn't make them very antisocial or generally bad to be around. But I would very much mind an employer expecting me to take something.
5 or 95 it makes no difference to him. Or to us.
You can organize a strike BUT this is absolutely not the way you do it.

You have to follow strict procedures, work with your union and go into one or more formal negotiating tables with all the representatives of all the interested parts before even thinking about giving an ultimatum like that. And for sure you cannot communicate in that way using directly your work email
What is the strongest argument that you can come up with? Not that's been presented.
Curate a list of articles worth reading
read because personal development starts there.
A news report from June of this year suggests a figure of 2,000 other UK buildings affected:

https://metro.co.uk/2020/06/12/2000-buildings-still-have-gre...

Edited to add:

The UK government publishes "ACM [aluminium composite material] remediation data" every month. This is "being collected to help the Building Safety Programme make buildings safe and to make people feel safe from the risk of fire, now and in the future".

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/aluminium-composite-material-cla...
That was true in the past. Today you get gigabytes of garbage and you better like it, because you have no choice.
That's not a strong argument. Can you come up with anything better?
I remember keeping my eye out for the PASemi IPO, based on the track record of that team, and then Apple went and ruined it by buying the company to acqui-hire that team for their A-series CPUs.
I think nobody tries to suggest you can learn Japanese just with Anki cards. You use it to learn a part of the language which needs repetition-based learning, while learning other parts of the language - and experience indeed is a very important focus of that learning process.

Also nobody tries to suggest you can learn programming by practicing language keywords.

So I don't understand what is the problem. We knew this all along, we are using learning by experience for as long as I can remember, nobody even thought of reducing learning to Anki cards.
AFAIK peercoin is recognized as the first PoS cryptocurrency.
I’m not sure I’d count compiler macros as a separate namespace to functions or macros. It feels like they’re the same to me. I think I also wouldn’t count throw tags as a namespace as they can be objects rather than symbols (but then again lists like (setf foo) are valid function names).

I think method combinations and packages are other namespaces.
This is meant to be a completely different ecosystem, no? An ecosystem not controlled with the US. This isn't a normal financal service, it's not banking, it's outside of banking hence why it's aimed and people without banks.

And other companies are already in this space providing basically the same service.

It seems to me, people applying how companies 1st world countries + the US operate to how companies in 3rd world countries (except the US) have to operate.
That's not true.

You can as an employer walk away whenever you want, you just don't get the salary for the difference between the notice and when you left.

Example: if you have to give 30 days notice (very common in Italy) and leave on the spot, after your resignation have been accepted, you have to give the company the equivalent of 30 days of pay.

Which is exactly the money they should give you aniway if you stayed for the entire notice time.

But usually the employer and company find an agreement before coming to that.
Visualizations look nice, though this site could use a bit of introduction and context. I’ve never heard of this podcast so I didn’t know if “Lex Fridman” was the author of the site or the host of the podcast. In fact, if it weren’t for the HN article title, I wouldn’t have immediately understood it was about a podcast at all - it’s not mentioned until half way down the page.

Just a brief sentence or two at the top to give context would help immensely.
A Secret Career Superpower – Data Integration
The information being sold there wasn't from mobile providers, they were collected by apps. See the first paragraph of the third article: "location data quietly harvested from ordinary smartphone apps over 10,000 times". The same applies to the other two articles.
> many of the MPs who voted against are landlords who had a financial interest.

Unfortunately the same MPs who were trying to force us back to the office even though coronavirus was still spreading
I'm agree, 100%.
This sounds very similar to "Why would anyone need more than 640K?"

It's not just about speed, a 5G network supports a greater density of devices compared to a 4G one. 4G can support about 4,000 devices per square kilometer, whereas 5G will support around one million.

5G will be able to connect the plethora of next gen IOT devices coming to a store near You!

Just imagine smart shopping carts that will finally enable the homeless to have connected homes too! How about smart protestor signs that will automatically change to display what ever SJW message the technocracy wants to get out in real time. There are so many wonderful things that "Harder, Better Faster" connectivity will bring us all...Queue Daft Punk background music!!
Reminds me a while back on eBay I saw a magnetron by one of the big military industrial manufacturers with a potential output frequency matching what was used in some recently controversial microwave weapon.
Maybe some dont like to hear this, but publishing in PNAS is usually when your publication is rejected from other more respected peer-reviewed journals. I wont trust this publication much.
Well, the problem that exercise supplement marketing has created is that they try to convince you that their products, like pre- and during-exercise drinks, are helping you. Otherwise your default state would have likely stayed at bringing just a water bottle and empty stomach to the gym.
The Four Buddhist Mantras for Turning Fear into Love
Private Eye has been talking about this for over a year. The Page 94 podcast gives a very good account.
Intel upgrades quantum computer ambitions with new control chip
Swedish Vaccine Skepticism Is Latest Obstacle to Herd Immunity
Basically talk like a lawyer and an accountant, and it may get their attention
>But I suspect the real reason Microsoft has kept this default over the years is that it prevents users from accidentally breaking the file association when they rename the file.

I doubt it. There's already enough preventative measures if you have "view file extensions" enabled. If you try to rename a file, only the part before the extension would get highlighted, and if you try to change the extension you get a scary warning.
EmacsConf 2020 Talks
As I said in another sibling post, you cannot strike that way. You have to follow procedures to organize a legit strike.

If I wrote an email like that not only my union would not protect me, they would most probably tell me the employer took the right decision because I put at risk other employees positions (if they followed my reccomandations to stop working just because I said it)
Yes, it can be done the trivial way in most languages. For deep nestung, that's ugly and awkward, which is why some languages have piping/composition operators [or threading macros] (sometimes more than one). Python has no close equivalent of a piping operator or threading macro (decorators don't seem helpful at all here.)
Lol would we say crushed?
Went down this road recently. I wrote some python code to handle some big archives of music, pdfs, and other media, normalizing the names of everything. I decided to try and correct the extensions to indicate the file type properly. This turned out to be a little complicated. In most cases the libfile estimate was good (using the magic number) and provides an mimetype as an output. However, it sometimes overgeneralized the file type to something more general, or outright flattened it out to "binary data". To make this more robust, I used pythons mimetype library to infer the mimetype from the filename as a secondary source of the information. I then needed to use a set of heuristics to reconcile the two mimetypes: derived from libfile and from the file name. This works pretty well to identify consistent cases, getting them out of the way. When the libfile mimetype is precise it is usually safe to fix the extension, particularly if the difference is just audio or image format. Nonetheless, there are a lot of corner cases. If I were even more ambitious, the tough cases could probably be drilled down on further with some media metadata utilities. I am curious if someone has just worked this out already in the form of a library.
Gaming Mathematics: Probability
Sure. Email them and ask.

Keep in mind though that affiliate programs are not necessarily sleazy. By default nobody knows about your product. Some of our partners have been making tutorials in other languages and building API integrations into their products. They deserve the money we send them.
If you just saw someone get terminated at your employer, and you considered it unfair, wouldn't you fear that speaking up might get you disfavor, perhaps due to whatever element resulted in the earlier unfairness?

Personally, I've been a scaredy-cat about this. I actually didn't go to a different FAANG a couple years ago, partly because I anticipated a dilemma: the company had been in the news for some alleged unfairness, and I decided that I could easily imagine being there, and trapped between wanting to speak up on behalf of a fellow employee facing a similar unfairness in the future, and suspecting that I would be terminated if I did. Had I already been there (rather than merely anticipating the situation with a hypothetical) I don't know whether I'd speak up. (Personally, given past battle scars, I'd probably make quiet and delicate internal inquiries, trying to find a sympathetic person in a position to look into and correct or mitigate what seemed to be unfair, while being clear that I'm still a team player.)

So, I do think speaking up in a big-corporate environment, in the public manner these people have done, would tend to come with some personal risk in most companies. When people do it (perhaps) despite a perception of personal risk to themselves in doing so, we should pause and consider what they are saying.

Also, I don't blame people for not anticipating this situation to which they're objecting (based on the information available I've seen at this point). If the concern had instead been "I'm shocked -- shocked! -- to find the amassing of intimate personal information of Internet users going on here!", then I'd wonder how they couldn't have realized that before going to that company, but I don't think that's the concern.

I'm not taking a position on the concern itself, since the information I have so far is incomplete and complicated -- only suggesting that, when people are saying something at some personal risk, those people and what they're saying shouldn't be dismissed offhand.
My mother claimed to be sensitive to WiFi and feel sick when it’s on. She would often power it off and claim she felt better. My sister lived with her at the time and when I visited, complained she could not use the Internet most of the time. So I hid the station ID but left it on. Told mom the WiFi is off on the router.

Guess what? She stopped complaining about feeling it or feeling sick from it. I don’t know if she eventually found out it was on the whole time (from my sister), but she now uses WiFi herself and has even asked me to help fix it when it was down.

Perhaps some people are just sensitive to SSID broadcasting? ;)
I feel like Dylan is much more dynamic and OO than Julia. I don’t think there’s a way to have parameterised types (like generics in Java or C#) and a lot of the arguments for Julia’s type system are about being able to generate efficient code by being informed by the types. The parameterising complicates the subtyping relationships needed to specify how multiple dispatch works.
Maybe if the restaurant owned the building but otherwise the rent alone could chew through the profit of a restaurant or bar pretty fast. It is difficult to buy the building of a successful restaurant unless you had a right of first refusal or buyout option in the initial lease. Landlords are reluctant to sell you the building for anything reasonable if they feel you are successful as their money is fairly safe and inflation adjusted. I run two bars. One of them is five years old and very successful. I would say right now it has about eight months of rent payments until it would be a problem.
I uninstall graphics drivers if I’m switching from one vendor to another (Intel,AMD,Nvidia), under Windows. I believe there is a third party program that can do a complete uninstall of them.
Thing is, gradient descent is not really a complex algorithm.
Reminds me of WhirlyGlobe, for iOS and Android.

https://github.com/mousebird/WhirlyGlobe