skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In Mexico there are a group of public state owned hospitals with the "green cross". It is the place where they take you when you get in an accident and don't have anywhere else to go. There's also the red cross, but that's the same as the one in the article.
This is very much like the notion of "politically unreliable" in the Soviet countries, and in China. Corporate governance resembles nothing so much as Soviet governance. But one important difference is that the label equivalent to "class enemy" is not hereditary.

Excellent point, though I think the only reason for the hereditary difference is that most corporations don't recruit from a multi-generational population in a fixed location. But I bet there are commercial fishing and logging firms where if the dad was a problem employee, expectations about the son will be correspondingly lowered.

Anyway, in both contexts information asymmetries inevitably exacerbate power differentials; while this is to some extent a fundamental aspect of competition, the denial or posture that such asymmetries exist aims to maximize those power differentials, perhaps allowing them to grow in accordance with power laws rather than linearly (pun semi-intentional).
This falls under the appropriate case as defined under the Geneva Conventions, because these would be used by people administering aid in armed conflict.
I have spent a lot of time on Blind where this is discussed often and I think I have an idea what is going on.

At a high level, Amazon orgs have Unregretted Attrition (URA) targets/quotas for orgs. Not every manager needs to hit the exact target but under a certain level of middle management they do. Because of this built-in churn they need to have a pipeline of low performers - because once the current set of URA targets get managed out or leave you will need to still hit that quota next quarter/half/year/whatever. So maybe your quota is 5% but you have another 5-10% extra in earlier stages of your pipeline so you can sacrifice them later.

In the later stages when you’re actively getting managed out they put you on a formal PIP. In theory it’s possible to “get out” of it but because of the quotas it’s pretty much a lost cause. So on Blind the most common suggestion for people on PIP is to do the absolute bare minimum and start interviewing elsewhere, expecting to fail the PIP.

I imagine the reason Amazon doesn’t want people to know about Focus/Dev plans is that once you know you’re in the earlier stages of the pipeline, you may come to a similar conclusion. Basically if a target is painted on your back and you know there’s a high probability you’re going to get managed in the next 6 months, it’s better to do the bare minimum at work and focus as much as possible on getting a new job. But from Amazon’s perspective that’s a lot of lost work/time/money, and they’re not even sure yet that they want to get rid of those people. And further, if employees don’t know about the performance plan there is less chance they will deliberately sandbag and may actually improve their ranking enough to move off the early stage pipeline.

In my opinion the root of all this disfunction is the quota system. If managers were not forced to manage out so many people and being on a “low performance plan” at any stage were seen as an actual opportunity to identify issues and improve performance, there would be much less incentive to sandbag by doing the bare minimum, and also much less need for secrecy about the process.

But this is Amazon, I am sure they have thought deeply about this. My guess is that they have done the math on many alternatives and this is the least-worst. For example by managing out so many people they can be less selective in hiring which may be better overall (eg an overall acceptance rate of 20% with 10% of those being false positives fills more roles than an overall acceptance rate of 10% with a 0% false positive rate). Of course managing people out also has a cost in creating an unpleasant/toxic work environment that itself increases churn, which they may or may not account for. Keep in mind due to their vesting models, a good performer burning out and quitting after 2 years is actually good for their bottom line. As long as they continue to fill roles I doubt they will be incentivized to change this model.
At least on the teams I have been on, we didn't physically interrupt people. We sent Slack and Teams messages for all of that stuff about merges and staging.
> and certainly within a single company no one has to work as deeply in their minds as the programmers do.

I sort of agree, but... I do think there are orgs where folks do deep thought work who aren't labelled 'programmers', but... they're probably doing the same 'type' of thinking, at some level, as folks doing coding.

I'm certain 'developers' aren't the only folks who do deep thinking work, but we seem to be ... the ones treated the most like we're not, at various companies. In law firms I've been in, all the lawyers get doors, and those doors are closed when they're doing 'deep work' (planning, writing, talking to clients, etc). That's ... deep work, and they're getting billed out at hundreds of dollars per hour.

20+ years ago, I was doing dev work getting billed out at $180/hr, and was stuck in a cube next to project managers who were on the phone all the time. Wearing headphones was seen as "rude" by colleagues around me, but them talking on the phone for 5+ hours per day 6 feet from me was... totally AOK.
It was very weird for me when I moved to the US as an adult, and had to explicitly open "credit lines" and actively use them to build "history". In Germany, using "credit" for anything less than a house or a new car seemed rather heavily discouraged to me.
I paid $100 for a Uber from Manhattan to JFK the other day, I was absolutely shocked. A taxi is $50. I read on internet it was the same prices, I guess the information I found was outdated.
'tip an at-risk employee'? Are we talking about a person who's not doing a good job at his job, or a suspect in murder deemed as a flight risk?

Wtf
In Germany there is something called Schufa. https://www.schufa.de/en/. Used almost everywhere by everyone. Want to rent? Buy a car? Buy a house? Have your Schufa report - score between 0 to 1000.
People have already replied to you to let you know that various major European countries use the green cross to refer to a generic pharmacy.

You already acknowledge this elsewhere, and you've also already acknowledged that there's special meaning to the red cross as opposed to merely referring to pharmacies.

I don't know what you're doing excluding Asia or the USA either, while saying

> A green cross would confuse no one.

And then following up with

> I'm sorry, but if your only example is the US then you're likely to be wrong about a lot of things.
That hell is seemingly the point.
> get fixes on a national level, but with the current Republicans in place

Er, what? You realise the federal government is currently controlled by Democrats, right?
That's a fair point and good advice, however the full quote was "Sorry, I'm in the middle of something important. Can you come back at lunch time?", which can then start being a full conversation to find a time that fits both of you. I think a good way to respect other people time is to use asynchronous means of communication as long as what you ask isn't urgent.
> These people may not need deep concentration to be successful, but that doesn't mean they don't do real work.

They didn't claim that. They claimed that the fact that these people don't do real work means that they don't need deep concentration to be successful. A implies B, not B implies A. (For example, off the top of my head, plumbers (unlike salesdroids and managers) clearly do real work, but very little if any of it involves a deep mental model that would take significant time to rebuild if interrupted.)

FWIW, I don't actually agree with that implication as such - it would imply that, eg, playing Factorio is "real work" - but the problem is less stupid than "doesn't need deep concentration => doesn't do real work".
I’ve seen this even locally in Denver. Pre-pandemic I could get a ride to a destination a mile or two away for $8-$12. Now those trips recently have cost me anywhere from $20-$35 if I elected to take them.
Not really. In Denmark the offical “bad payor” register (RKI) is not something you easily and without noticing is registered into. And you can get de-registered simply by paying off you debt as far as I know.

So, besides that, banks look at income, loans, mortage vs house valuation especially. At least, as far as we consumers know.

That means, if I want a mortage loan for a house, actual and relevant factors weigh in on what I can get approved for. To me, thats way better than some scoringsystem where my score depends on sp many different actual and historical things.
> credit cards aren't too much of a concept in Europe at all.

Yeah, no, that’s just a Germany thing.
I mean I love to work now but there have been times in my life when I was younger I could have made the stimulus money last a long time listening to mp3s and drinking natty ice or red dog.

A year easy. Maybe 2 or 3 with a little creativity and my parents not kicking me out.

I don't think this is exactly rocket science to figure out.
> it's only "labor" in the same sense that literature or painting is labor.

I can't agree with this. Programming can be like literature. It can also be like writing copy for a bad travel brochure.
I think the films were fairly enjoyable as long as you don't turn up with a film critic's hat on. But yes, missing 5 minutes probably wasn't a big deal at the end of the day.
The 22 minute (silent) film is very sweet

https://youtu.be/_6e1O_NtK24
Why do you need to give a reason? Can't you just say that you want to have a day off?
Hacker News is the proverbial “shoeshine boy”
Lumber mania is sweeping North America (May 6, 2021. 119 points)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27036557

Lumber price peaks May 7, 2021.

https://imgur.com/ynWJtwQ

source: https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/commodities/lbs

The lumber bubble burst. Here’s what comes next (June 22, 2021)

https://fortune.com/2021/06/22/lumber-prices-bubble-burst-price-of-wood-costs-building-development/
I believe that's somewhat the point of the second sentence quoted earlier. They are saying they've got people dying while serving with the Red Cross - and perhaps an implication is that dilution of the symbol is one cause.

Irrespective they are asking to be taken seriously - it's not Kleenex™ asking to not to use kleenex generically.
And when I mentioned writers, I was thinking of the work that's probably required to build the plot, even before writing it. I'm not a writer, but I would imagine it involves holding a world and timeline in their head and tweak it while making sure they're not introducing plot-holes. I imagine quite a bit of research is involved, too.
The answer is always murder...

Go away for a weekend in the summer, and come back to an abattoir on the living room rug.
Disclaimer work at Amazon.

Do you mind expanding on this a little bit on what position you were applying for?

I think it's perfectly reasonable if someone has 15 years of experience and being rejecting for an SDE I position. It's an absolutely fair question to ask why you aren't at an SDE II level already, or applying for that role with that amount of experience.

Similarly it makes sense to reject people who have years of experience but are applying for internships.

Although I doubt that's your specific case...

I'd be very surprised and extremely skeptical we have year caps on senior roles like SDE3/Principal
You know what helps:

1. Stop being passive aggressive about being interrupted.

2. Take notes.

Dealing with [1]: it is ok, to interrupt some one who starts talking to you, tell them "Hang on", "Just a minute", "Come back in an hour". You have to put your foot down if you are working, even with bosses.

Note taking[2]: early in my career I kept too much information in my head, including debugging. Life is so much better with notes. Nowadays, I work problems out on the paper and not in my head. It's harder to start doing, but once you start you have a paper trail of where you have been and where you are going. Sometimes, you do need to drop everything and go be part of the action. When that happens, notes will get you back where you were quickly.
Solar arrays you install in such an area can power useful activity elsewhere - and its not like we're at 100% renewable energy everywhere to obviate this. So The waste of energy _is_ damaging.
Call me naive but I really don't see an AI take over my (senior) software development work, there's just so much to it, including a lot of communication and creativity.

I dare posing that by the time AI takes over my job, it's gotten so advanced that I've got much more to worry about than just my job.
This combination is what Germans call a Radler, which translates to "cyclist": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shandy#Radler
They are not much of a thing in France either.
Ugh, the headline... Most interesting part got truncated

> regardless of license
When I worked at Dell they were giving out cash bonuses for people to submit patent ideas with different levels of rewards depending on how far your patent idea got in the process.

The crazy thing is, some people (mostly the Indian cohort) were flat out coming up with idea's and submitting them to the internal patent committee every week/month since the amount offered for them would be the equlivent of 6 months/1 years salary.
If it is a cloth with a cloth's texture it wouldn't be bad since it would be reflected in such a diffuse pattern. Besides getting it directly from the sun anyways, you're already getting harsher glare reflections off of water, glass buildings, and metallic surfaces (cars) all around you.
I have a Wells Fargo Home Improvement card that I took out to get a no interest loan to replace my air conditioner, which had been dying, and my furnace that suddenly died.

I paid it off without paying a cent of interest and have not used it since. I suspect a lot of their customers in this category did the same thing as me. I suppose this may slightly lower my credit score as it will lower my total available credit.

On a related note: Something is up with Wells Fargo. I looked at them to refinance my home and in the middle of the refinance process a news story went out that they were temporarily not taking on home finance loans and they cancelled my in process refianance shortly thereafter without saying a word to me. I went with another bank and got a lower rate, so I guess I should thank them.
> It's actually not a defense at all

Yes, looking at some law references I see you are correct. I also see plenty of law review articles arguing that it should be (with which I agree).
Thank you, you two, for your recommendations.
>> Merging pull requests takes longer than it used to, but it is important to realize that merges happen asynchronously in the background and so you do not need to wait for a pull request to be merged. If you navigate away, it will finish while you are doing other things. We're updating the UX to make this clear.

This is terrible, sounds like this is the new norm. If I have to merge in 10 pull requests I can't wait 5 minutes per PR to see if there are going to be any merge conflicts, etc.

Ever since this popped up I'm seriously considering migrating everything away from bitbucket because of how slow merging is.
It’s not really the subject of the article, but debating whether tutoring/teaching/education works, as a lot of posts here seem to be (without too much of a scooby what they’re talking about, if I may say so…), is really as daft as debating whether eg. computer programming works... Teaching is a real skill and, to say the least, it isn’t always easy, especially to pick up as a ‘side-hustle’. It has its own learning curve. That goes for both private tuition and teaching in schools/universities. Different teachers/teaching/learning styles suit different pupils. Trying to teach a subject soon shows up whether you really know it well, but you can really know a subject and be terrible at teaching it… I thought what was interesting about the article is that it highlights what can be a problematic power dynamic between parents/tutors, especially if you are inexperienced/unsure of yourself as a tutor/teacher (or financially precarious, as all the tutors/teachers I’ve ever known are), that is, you can end up pandering to what the parents/pupils think they want (or what a certain curriculum/bureaucracy demands), rather than working in the best, long-term interests of the pupil… But most parents/kids are brilliant and this isn’t a problem… Again, it really depends… A lot of practical/intuitive psychology/varied communication skills, patience and understanding are required to be a good teacher IMHO. and again, you get better in these respects over time… There are a heck of a lot of advantages to teaching one-on-one, especially with increasing class sizes/budget cuts in public institutions at least/vastly differing abilities/concentration levels of students… In an ideal world students would understand how lucky/privileged they were to get private tuition, though as you might imagine that’s not always the case… Being a great teacher is sometimes unavoidably about ‘teaching’ more than just the subject you are teaching, if that makes any sense, as is maybe highlighted at the beginning of the article…
Sounds like the start of The Cuckoo's Egg.
(former) computational social scientist here...

This particular bunch (I know several of the authors personally) are a bit more CS oriented, but CSS people do run the gamut from Theoretical/Computational Physicists (like yours truly) to CS and more traditional Social Science types. Essentially, and this is what brought me the field, we were doing Data Science before such a thing had a name and trying to answer behavioral/social questions using large (at least for the time) datasets along with some CS/ML skills. Check out my google scholar to see the kind of stuff we played with https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rtKaL18AAAAJ&hl=en...
Certainly not. Even the most torpid of us doesn't find the time or interest to watch all movies ever. Must likely the major cost here isn't your subscription fee, but the amount of limited leisure time and energy you can allocate. I'd be doing well too watch one movie a week if I was trying and I'd say that's not much to worse than average.
> Now, tell him to add those numbers in his head. He can look at the screen and talk/whisper/mutter to himself, but he can’t write anything down and he can’t type anything.

"Why can't I write anything down?"

"Because when I'm seven to ten levels deep in a stack of issues, I never write anything down, I need to keep it all in my head."

"But why?"

"Well... I have a whole mental model constructed. I couldn't possibly write it all down."

"But it seriously wouldn't help you to keep some notes while you work? And perhaps add to the skimpy comments in the codebase while you're doing it?"

"I seriously don't see how that would help."

"You literally just said you've written down the code '8xZ204330Kd' and now you have no idea what it was for. Did you imagine you'd be guaranteed to remember it between writing it down and finally solving the bug? Why didn't you at least write some context about what that string was?"

Seriously, just like most kids somewhere between the ages of four and ten goes from "I know I will remember this!" to "I should write this down so I don't forget," programmers could stand to recognize that sometimes taking some notes can help clear their brain when they're too many levels deep in a stack.
The list was different earlier.

Obviously I can't know about what every profession does, not even my own. But I've interacted with enough professionals of various sorts to say I don't think the intricacy is the same.

Ymmv
I would assume that was for Pride Month (June). Many companies adopt a rainbow flag representing LGBTQ for that month. If so, they've probably gone back to the old one by now.
Hacker News

Lumber mania is sweeping North America (May 6, 2021. 119 points)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27036557

Lumber price peaks May 7, 2021.

https://imgur.com/ynWJtwQ

source: https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/commodities/lbs

The lumber bubble burst. Here’s what comes next (June 22, 2021)

https://fortune.com/2021/06/22/lumber-prices-bubble-burst-pr...
> The pricing model is admittedly a bit complex, but from what I've been told it is a fairly common pricing model in this industry

Yes, but that's one of the reasons Public Clouds are thriving.
I don't particularly recall it being a thing in France and Italy either, both countries I have strong connections to, although admittedly I have never lived there as an adult, so I may have missed that aspect entirely.

It would maybe help if you could elaborate in what European countries you say credit cards are usually used for every day payments?
I mean, that's a pretty shitty view considering how many lives the CIA has ruined. How many generations they've burned. How much unnecessary suffering they've caused.

But, I mean, if the thought of people suffering brings you calm at night - go for it!

You know you're a shitty org when you have a whole wikipedia page dedicated to you being shitty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CIA_controversies
Good deal. Maybe they'll have to go back to the drawing board and quit making spinoffs of remakes, of remakes. And these lame duck "superhero" movies. Puke.
> A good sales person can make the business money

A good 419 scammer can make the business money without any product ever existing at any point in time - that doesn't mean they're doing anything useful.
> Was looking at this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triassic–Jurassic_extinction

Same problem, you're name-dropping an extinction event which has, at best, a speculative relation to climate change in general and CO2 levels in particular. Certainly you will find such events where changes in CO2 coincide with extinction, but you will also find events where they don't.

> Lots of countries are looking to go from 1950's economy to modern standards, many live in rural areas that develop etc.

That is true and I'm not ruling it out, but that then begs the question what difference (if any) the comparably small population of already developed countries could make by curbing their emissions.

> Why do you believe CO2 tends to drop?

The cycles of the past million years. After every sudden peak, CO2 levels drop... until the next peak.

> The accumulated CO2 don't follow emission drops in the graph.

For one, there have been no sustained drops in emissions. Secondly, these graphs have different smoothing functions applied to them. Still, they do track each other pretty closely. Around the time of WW2, you see several years of constant CO2 levels, despite increasing cumulative emissions.

> Humanity is driving faster downhill without any brakes.

That's the mental image you like to use. I like to use this one:

https://nolanlawson.github.io/fronteers-2016/img/discostu.jp...