skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They certainly can be.

I know multiple cases of bad managers who never clearly communicated job expectations/prioritization and then put employees on a PIP because they weren't meeting their hidden/secret expectations.

The beautiful thing about a PIP is that it forces a manger to spell out in excruciating detail what expectations are, and how meeting them will be measured.

Once an employee knows what they are concretely, it can make it really easy to meet them, and then no more PIP.

In all the cases I know, the employees went on to get "exceeds expectations" and then either left the manager or left the company, because the problem was always the manager.

Also, because many times you "game the PIP" -- to meet the explicit expectations you slack off on the stuff that you know matters more to doing a good job, but that isn't being explicitly measured. Write shitty code but deliver the features on-time, and let someone else deal with the bugs.

Of course I've heard of PIP's being intentionally vague so a manager can arbitrarily continue to say expectations weren't met no matter what -- but I've never seen that anywhere I've worked.
I probably interrupt myself more than anyone else.

But my strategy for overcoming this with long and involved investigations is to write my thinking down in a stream-of-consciousness format.

Write down all my thinking, dead ends I went down, why certain assumptions can or cannot be made, everything.

Then if I have an interruption it's much easier picking everything up again, even if I have to start over from scratch with a new set of IDs or whatever.

Think of it like frequently committing in git.
I have played with GPT3 and similar lesser models for a while, and in my opinion it doesn't understand anything. It's good at correlation (it might figure out a pikachu is a pokemon or that The Wall is a music album) which is kinda amazing but ultimately seems to be really "useless"* and it's not deterministic.

I think the current "AI" models will never understand a thing unless they become able to update their own models and have some guiding logic to them. Sure it has the context tokens so it might give a little illusion of following along, but the randomness of it all also means it will get wrong stuff that it got right before (and vice versa) and will clearly break the illusion when prodded ("pikachu is a purple dragon", "The Wall was composed by Metallica"). It's unfortunate.

GPT3 and other text models have no sense of state. You can have the same instance work with 2 (or more) different persons and text provided by user A will have no bearing on anything user B does, since it's just trying to complete the provided text in form of tokens. As computationally intensive as it is, the whole thing is a lot simpler than it seems.

It's like we managed to get the "learning" part of intelligence more or less right, but nothing else yet. I always wanted to have an AI "trusted assistant" kinda thing, but even the biggest GPT3 models don't give me much in terms of trust. Wouldn't trust it to turn a lamp on and off as it is. (I know GPT3 is just a text model but you know what I mean). And if it happens, it won't be run locally because the hardware requisites for this stuff are obscene on a good day, which opens a few cans of worms (some of which have been opened already).

*useless as in getting anywhere close to intelligence. It can become decent entertainment and might have some interesting uses to correlate datum A to datum B/C/D, recognition and so, but so far it's just fancy ELIZA. An "educated guess engine" at best.
The Red Cross, Red Crescent, and new Red Crystal are specific logos (like all trademarked logos), with the additional aspect that they are recognized in international laws, including the Geneva Conventions. Vehicles, for example, carrying the Red Cross logos are not supposed to be fired upon (https://www.haaretz.com/1.4929066), and no other vehicles are supposed to display the Red Cross logos.

If you use the IBM logo or the ATT death star in an unauthorized fashion, you get a nastygram from IBM or ATT because you are diluting their brand. Diluting the brand of the Red Cross means that there is an increased likelihood of "mistakes", and a mistake in a combat zone is a bad thing.
Kaseya delays SaaS restore to Sunday, July 11
I've never seen anyone on a PIP bounce back. The smart move is to start your job hunt immediately when you discover you're on a PIP. Otherwise it's a long and stressful road to termination.

The second the people around you don't believe you can cut it, it's already too late and best to find a gig elsewhere.
Fast Factoring Integers by SVP Algorithms (“This Destroys RSA”)
In our thought experiment, the younger people all have more years of life expectancy than the older people.
Yes, the math is already understood. :-)

Your proposal does seem to carry some weight. While I see some non-idealities in it, but then I don't have a better solution that's practical.

I'll think some more about your idea; I just need to consider various scenarios with it.

Thanks.
Presumably because persuasion is apparently necessary, as evidenced by some folk arguing against some of their reasoning or statements regarding the issue.
Until 10 to 15 years ago, all of that was completely normal, and kids did not die en masse. Consider why you think the world is drastically more dangerous than it used to be. Is it based on fact, or is it based on living in a culture of fear?
I think what is evident for all parents is the importance of cooling down the entire car, not just the driver or front passenger but all kids in the back, sometimes with a lot of stuff in the way of the vents
Earn more than a FAANG PhD? In the article they wrote about salaries of around 70£/h and that's not good at all. The average freelance programmer in Germany already makes 90€/h. Sure there are some tutors who make 250/h but those are people who are already in the upper echelons of society and have access to top clients.
Company culture always decays over time to reflect incentives. Not to denigrate Andy Jassy as a Harvard MBA turned Marketing Manager who moved up to become a CEO. But upper management always ends up with the kinds of people who tend to reach upper management in any company.

That said, Amazon’s culture is closer to the norm than most startups so in the short term things are unlikely to change much. At least until some new management fad becomes popular or they run into a significant issue.
> Any deep work suffers from interruptions, and programming isn't the only type of work that has significant mental context. This idea that programmers are uniquely vulnerable and no one else can understand doesn't help the situation.

We seem to be the only profession that cares then. It is only developers who get why you Slack people you are sitting next to.
This also applies to remote interruptions like slack and email messages. The difference is you can control these interactions better by hitting the "do not disturb" mode. Just make sure people understand why you're not responding right away.
You must not have seen a modern home cheating rig. The student read/scrolls through the entire test to read each question, as is recommended. A small camera that sees the screen transmits the questions to a team in another room. Each team member works on one question at a time. A single person then communicates the prepared answers back to the test taker via an earpiece, one small enough that it isn't detectable on the camera. Such a rig costs a few hundred dollars at most.

Another common trick: looking at your keyboard isn't cheating. Any small display secreted on your keyboard will go unnoticed. You will just look like you aren't a great typist, someone who needs to look at the keys.

Want to go real hardcore? Cut into your laptop and send the screen/keyboard/mouse signals to a different monitor. Then you can have an actor sit in front of the webcam pretending to take the test. I doubt they are correlating keypress sounds to characters appearing on the screen... yet. As any security expert would tell you: if the attacker has unfettered access to your hardware then all bets are off.
Fair, but GitHub/MS (same company now) can't afford to ignore other countries' law in their internal evaluations of whether globally* available products like Copilot are legal.

* Minus a few countries/regions targeted by US sanctions, I assume, though they've gradually broadened their services in sanctioned countries with the necessary licenses from OFAC.
Hahahah. I tried this with my wife and she said I was being an asshole and go feed the kids.

These days I have to actually look at my calendar and pay attention to where my family is and force myself to drop work at certain times. Further, I've begun not starting deep work until I know that I am not likely to be interrupted for hours at a time. I still get calls hours into that, "hey somebody else's plans changed at the last second, I need to drive 20 minutes to get somebody and then drive them home and feed them" which is basically gonna kill my productivity for 3X as long as it takes.
True, edited original comment to reflect this.
I recently worked at a company that still used PDP-11s (albeit emulated on FPGAs). Macro-11 assembly is still being actively used to this day.
ARM was originally Acorn RISC Machines, a spin-out from British computer firm Acorn, who set it up in conjunction with Apple (who wanted a low-power RISC cpu for the Newton): Acorn produced the RISC PC as a successor to the BBC Model "B" family of 8-bit 6802-based micros that were popular in the UK, but failed to compete effectively against Amiga and Atari ST or to move up into the workstation market. In the end, Acorn ended up supplying TV set-top boxes and faded out. But ARM exists to this day, and they are the folks who license the ARM instruction set to customers including Apple.

SPARC had nothing to do with ARM, but was entirely Sun's own RISC project, and an attempt to find a way off Motorola CPUs (which powered Sun's earlier workstations).
2019 (pre-covid) movies:

Men In Black, Shazam, Charlie's Angels, Jumanji, Murder Mystery, Big Time Adolescence, Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, Good Boys, Weathering With You, Doom Annihilation...
Well one of the first things we do on Mars will be to deploy a GPS constellation so our robots are able to locate themselves.
The 5-Hour Workday
My folks lives about 5m away from us so they could deal with picking them up from school in the midday , doctor visits or the unexpected illness.

Without that I don't know how we would have managed.
Boba teas are taking the world atm. I’m betting my hand that starbucks will have them at some point in time. But it’s really sweet!
This is my #1 complaint with Steam. I have 3 kids in the house on the family share thing, and if any one of them plays a game it locks everybody else out the entire library. I don't think Valve understands what a family is.

I think Valve's definition of a family is one guy who owns a whole bunch of different computers that he wants to flit between. Maybe this is what family is to a Valve employee? I don't know.

Most streaming services allow a small but reasonable number of concurrent connections. Usually around 5. Why does Valve insist on locking out my library of games that I paid for when one person has a game open? It makes no sense.

I wouldn't complain if the rule was you couldn't have more than one copy of a particular game open (maybe have an option to buy multiple copies for the library?), but if someone is playing L4D2 they shouldn't lock someone else out of playing HalfLife 2.
To be fair, most laptop battery indicators are broken.

I've never had a Li-Ion device that didn't exhibit a non-linearity in terms of power draw vs percentage estimation.

100% lasts much longer than 99%, which lasts longer than 98%, down to about 92%, after which point the draw-per-percentage seems to be fairly linear.

Anecdata, I know.
That was limited by manufacturing not logistics. If we continue scaling up manufacturing (and not diverting it to unnecessary uses like booster doses), the world can get vaccinated in a reasonable time frame.
The process is relevant to the company. So it's relevant to the employee.

The headline is correct unless Amazon policy is not telling employees about performance problems before Focus. Otherwise the discussion about Focus sounds just like the discussion they should have before Focus.

> There’s a more fundamental question - are we saying once you get hired, your job should be permanent, regardless of your performance?

I haven't seen even 1 comment even imply anything even close. I've seen many comments say employees should know where they stand.

You said you work at Amazon in another comment.[1] It would have been appropriate to say here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27786929
I think the issue is that, in a typical workplace that employs some programmers, they are in fact the only ones who will be doing deep work that requires sustained focus. The typical office does not contain, in addition to programmers, poets, painters, and mathematicians. If it did, those people would understand. Instead, aside from the programmers, you have mostly salesdroids and managers, who have absolutely no concept, because they have never done any real work.
> “What it shows is that, also in antiquity, people were creative. They had a problem, and they had to find a creative solution.”

"Creativity" isn't a modern invention. "I have a problem to solve and will use engineering!" isn't a modern invention.

They've existed since the beginning of humans, and it remains quite irritating to see people who are shocked and amazed that ancient people were able to solve problems - often in ways we don't fully understand. How long was Roman cement a mystery?

Human nature doesn't change with time, and while the things that people groups care about tends to change, it baffles me that someone studying ancient Roman ruins of what's pretty clearly an industrial facility sounds surprised that they did something less than the most obvious solution - especially when it worked better.

Wasn't like you had Twitter to distract you - engineering solutions to problems is very clearly something the Romans were good at, given how much of their infrastructure rather outlasted the nation.

Modern civilization isn't what it is because we're somehow smarter or more creative than people were 1500 or 2000 years ago - it is what it is because, about 300 years ago, we finally figured out how to make fossil fuels do something mechanically useful for us.

If the Romans had figured out a steam engine, and had cared to continue developing it (a technology without an application is just a curiosity, and history is littered with those), they certainly could have accomplished plenty of what we consider modern today.
There are still a lot of these in the former USSR in daily use. When I came to USA first I was kind of surprised to see none of them here since they were so normal there.
Because it's used generally as "health" and not "protected health worker" in video games.

I suspect the red cross would not take issue with a game using the red cross to depict untargatable aid workers.
I didn't misunderstand it. They are arguing that Google and Facebook are misusing monopoly power like you said but how exactly? It's not Google's fault that nobody can come up with better search engine. Go use Bing and Yahoo if you like it more than Google. I know barrier to enter and compete with Google is sky high but is anybody even trying? What about Facebook is fishy? You have plenty of competitors in the social networking industry like Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram, Signal etc.

My point is consumers like Google and Facebook and they are not destroying competition because competitors exist.
I've seen this issue with a lot of smaller news sites on mobile, scroll a bit further down than you're supposed to and you're suddenly on a completely different article or the home page.
> Firefox wants me to "log in with my Firefox account"

Firefox sync is absolutely wonderful, and would recommend anyone to try it out. You get automatic sharing of passwords and bookmarks between devices. I don't understand how I ever managed without it.

And they don't show ads, if that's what you're worried about.
Many things are not zero-sum, for example if I help you and you help me we will both be better off than before. Sites like stackoverflow make programmers more productive in aggregate; we would be worse off without them.

If you can't understand why someone would decide to offer their help for free then at least try to be thankful.
Can you explain why it is extremely rare if we should be using it? Is it politics? Branding?
Hydropanel: Water Made from Sunlight and Air
Yeah, I completely understand your point of view. I think if the intention of the Bill of Rights was to grant legal rights they would not have used the language they did. All the talk of "infringement" and "enumeration" make it clear they were going out of their way not to grant rights.

If people said "the constitution grants the right for our free speech not to be infringed" I'd probably ignore it. That's not how any discussion goes though.

Here's why I think this matters in this instance. By saying the 4th is "just a legal right," you are saying that the Constitution only grants it to certain people and the government can spy on anyone else. But by saying it's only a limitation, there's no qualifier on whose rights they can infringe.
I'd add Rome as perhaps a closer model to the sort of high budget, prestige television we're afforded now. First season had a budget in excess of $100 million dollars, a major increase over anything comparable (compare this to The Wire that was filming contemporaneously).
Every big corp makes such list, and measures against others, no matter what patents there are.

Nearly 20 years ago, in initial bootcamp in big-corp, there was half a day course by a patent guy, and one of the warnings he gave was "be careful where you search for your new idea" - the most wellknown patent search web site then, was owned by.. IBM.
Let me tell you about a place called Las Vegas
As a Brazilian-American I often think Fernando Pessoa is the #1 thing one misses out on by not speaking Portuguese.

These things are highly subjective but he's easily my favorite 20th century poet. So creative, incredibly deep, yet so accessible. But as these things go, there's always a loss of fidelity in translation, particularly to non-Romance languages.

If anyone wants to tap straight into Pessoa's world with two flawless poems, you can't go wrong with "Tabacaria" (Tobacco Shop — https://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/pessoa/TobaccoShop.htm...) and "Poema em Linha Reta" (Poem in a Straight Line — https://thenewloud.tumblr.com/post/11328170683/poem-in-a-str...).

"If only I could eat chocolate / with as much truth as you do!"
> For today's kids grades are only the starting point. For instance, social media presence is now very important.

Care to elaborate on this?
The suggested `adding game' in the article seems pretty smug and patronizing to me.

Surely explaining the situation to the `culprit' like an adult would do just as well without stooping to the ``I'm interrupting you! I'm interrupting you! See how annoying it is?'' solution. If someone has such little regard for you that a normal conversation won't work, I feel like that `demonstration' is likely to just garner you a reputation as an ass.
Yep. An intel engineer was proudly telling me their CEO didn't have a private office, and I asked where they sat all day taking confidential meetings, and they said they just squat in an conference room.

"So... that's his office, then?"
I don’t really get the first issue. If an algorithm doesn’t need to mutate a matrix then it will work for a mutable or immutable matrix. If it needs to mutate a matrix then how could it work for an immutable matrix? If you want a polyalgorithm that uses a mutating algorithm on mutable matrices and a non-mutating algorithm on immutable matrices, then you can just do that (and multiple dispatch makes it easy). What additional features are needed? Is there some language that “does this right”?
> Progress relies on reverse engineering and teardowns.

Progress has always relied on reverse engineering and teardowns. (Or independent reinvention.) You don't learn how anything really works be reading the patents, which tend to be deliberately obfuscated if not outright misleading. Anyone working in the industry will be instructed not to read patents anyway for fear of a willful infringement claim and trebled damages. Only in very rare cases can anything of notable value be maintained as a closely-held trade secret for longer than the duration of a patent.
I see the point (though it is not answering my original questions or at least I have not yet understood it to that level yet).

Just to make your point complete, how do you separate out performances? Is that just the presence of a large number of people? Amount of financial gain involved attributed to the said performance? I'm asking as that may be the differentiation in practice even as applied to code.
I got stomach issues after drinking Alcohol free beer.

I suspect it is because they add a lot of citric acid, and the PH value goes through the floor.
There are actually plenty of runtime tuning parameters for malloc and friends (using environment variables), and you can swap out allocators using LD_PRELOAD without recompiling anything.
There is some rationale for this, as why tip an at-risk employee off to what is essentially a foregone conclusion?

Napkin math, if your salary is $100k/year - you are necessarily delivering at least $200k in revenue/value, so if you have a rough 6-month stretch, as an asset you are under water. At that point you are a liability and unless someone else can deliver on the other part of that expected $200k value, the opportunity cost is harming the company.

The point of a PIP is to create a paper trail to protect the company from incurring further costs and liability risk, so as a purely post-decision defensive strategy, it makes sense to not disclose it. The laws make it such that everyone has to sustain the fiction that a PIP is in earnest, which creates that creepy gaslighting feeling. The supreme irony is keeping it secret could mean a more personally honest and less psychologically harmful relationship for all involved.

Reality is, performance in most organizations is secondary to relationships in them (and perhaps credentials) because the reason a (profitable/long-lived) company makes money as a business is because it can operate at scale with interchangeable parts that get along, which means the marginal value of a high or low performer is not as significant to its bottom line as downside risks from a lack of cohesion, so the main thing you need to care about in an organization is your key relationships.

If your relationship with co-workers or managers is getting dicey, all you can do is "read the room," keep your CV updated, and your recruiter contacts warm, because unless you deliver some large multiple on performance (product breakthrough they need you to execute, or land a large client, etc), opinion-wise you're done there and it's time to move on.
In comic #6, from 2010-07-27 ( https://goomics.net/6/ ) two street demonstrations -- one of Google employees -- run into each other, and the following conversation takes place:

> Hi there. Why are you demonstrating?

> They're laying off one in four workers in the hospital. You?

> They're taking away our M&Ms from building 42's microkitchen.

> Wow, that's harsh.

So apparently the author of TFA didn't think a scenario like this was all that much of a strawman... Either.

Honestly, you're really bending over backwards in defense of privilege here. Why?
New 100-qubit processor is built with atoms cooled down near to absolute zero
A great deal of effort by very clever people went into MDX. Well one clever individual anyway - Mosha Pasumansky - whom I had the pleasure of once meeting. He moved on to working on BigQuery at Google - so yeah, MDX is dead.