skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disclaimer; I work at Atlassian as a Software Engineer.

First of all, he has this weird take at the very beginning

> Interesting fact 1: Atlassian is the only company that has words "sh*" and "f*" in their core values.

Those values are "Don't f* the customer" and "Open company no bulls**" (oh the irony). This 'take' immediately threw me off. Why would you even mention something this trivial? I'll give it a pass as his emotions were probably elevated.

> After being in the company for more than a year I had found that folks with children are less likely to get a promotion. I had no evidence, it was a feeling.

Most of the folks I've seen got promoted had children. Having no evidence to support your claim in an article like this (with a banger title) is a red flag to me.

PTO is unfortunately something that I'm unfamiliar with. The country that I live in prohibits unlimited PTO by law, so I've never had that experience. Although, using the PTO that I acquire is still subject to approval of my manager. That part of the story is what the author should have really focused on. Going after the whole company in such a vicious manner is not a good look in my opinion.

I agree with most of the top comments here. Stay low, get a lawyer, deal with this silently. Hope his wife has a fast and easy recovery. Tough times, tough challenges for the author personally. No matter how hard I try, I certainly wouldn't be able to fully empathize with him.
I've found the opposite - if I start an email discussion, people reply-all from different points in the thread (and some people accidentally hit reply instead of reply-all, and then someone will notice and reply-all just to send that message to everyone. And this all makes it hard to consolidate the conversation.

While if I start a slack discussion, the thread is in once place, and everyone sees the state in real time, so the thread is more coherent and easier to follow.
> don't have policies which, if used, would be untenable to the company.

I am ambivalent on this. Some benefits are a bit like insurance, I don't mind not using them fully but I am glad its available when I need it.

The big issue is that it has to be available when I need it and it can't just be a scam.
>>you can't do use it or lose it.

Which is why unlimited was born, because now you never "earn" any so you never "lose" any, and thus can never accrue any either
Well, if the new Texas anti-abortion law is declared legal and constitutional in the courts, there's going to be a lot more laws that deny people their constitutional rights via similar "bounty hunter" systems. And the fact that it wasn't declared unconstitutional right off the bat makes the "can not" part not apply that well since Texas can currently very much take away constitutional rights from its citizens.

Also, the "inalienable rights" in 1776 were not really inalienable since life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were afforded to a pretty select group of people.
It really irks me when someone is misrepresented when they drop dead. I’m personally fine with the parent poster’s comment because it’s exactly a fair representation of the guy’s products. They were mostly awful to some degree.
Hidemyass was the only one that has nodes in all the countries the entire world last time I checked
Playing the zero sum game, yes.

Upvoting because I think it's important to talk about this, not because I agree.

Appreciate everyone else's responses around this being a dark pattern where "bad publicity" gets paid off.

How do we incentivize companies to hire people like this? How do as I founder say "I want people like this so that our company is strong, not weak like Shitlassian?"

Is there a role for more anonymity on the internet?
Okay, if the word your girlfriend uses for "parenthesis" is "brackets" then what word does she use for what Americans call "brackets"? (Notice I use the British quotation style for interrogative sentences even though I'm American, it just makes sense). And do they use a different word for what Americans call a "brace"?

As an aside, being an old C/C++ developer I still remember being taken aback upon hearing someone pronounce #define has "hash define." (But I use the American style for declarative sentences!) I've always heard it pronounced "pound define" going back for decades.

Language, it's fun!
> For reference, Angola is better at 4.85. Bulgaria and Romania, the poorest countries in the EU, are at 1.3. France is at 1.2.

I don't know about Angola, but in most european countries it's really easy to buy guns (for hunting, sharp-shooting, etc.). When my dad retired he joined a shooting club with his friends, the gun permit being slightly harder to obtain than a fishing permit. There are gun shops everywhere where you can buy guns and ammunition if you show your permit. There are of course regulations for carrying your gun, I don't remember exactly, but you have to carry ammunition and gun separately or something like that.

I guess the problem is not about the easy availability of guns, but that the american society is more violent.
> It's not that other solutions are better either. We really gotta level up!
Source: https://rdcu.be/cxtR7

Well, showing a logarithmic graph is a deceptive way of comparing things.
I was, a man drove his car in to the crowd, when people tried to stop him he fired once out of his car. He ran past me on the way to the police line (the police hadn't abandoned the precinct yet).

So, ironically enough, I was there for a shooting that happened while the police were still holding the area.
I think that to efficiently block signals, the aluminum needs to be grounded? IE: Like a Faraday cage
I can't tell - are you praising Sinclair, or shredding him? (I'm on the wrong side of the pond to have any real knowledge of him.)
My favorite is when I see the result I want flash by and then I accidentally type the next character -- correctly -- due to momentum, and the result disappears. Then I delete the last character in an attempt to bring back the result, and then I try retyping the whole thing, but the correct result never reappears. It is gone. Only useless web results remain.
Spider-Man’s First Comic Brings $3.6M, Likely a Record
And this is exactly where I feel HN had really gone downhill. The quality of the comments keeps decreasing. There’s plenty of technical information out there on the underclocking to prevent reboot issue, and years ago I would have expected this audience to be well versed in it before commenting.

All good things just come to an end, I suppose. The question is where to go instead?
It may help if you add some contact details in your profile ;)
I believe different states have different laws, but at least in my state an employer is required to pay you for your accrued PTO when you leave the company. Therefore, they have to have (and accurately track) PTO on their accounting books.

Years ago, the company I work for switched from accrued to unlimited PTO at the end of the fiscal year in order to make the books look better. When it was announced, they basically told everyone to take the remainder of the month off. The fiscal year happened to be the same as the calendar year, so most people were taking huge chunks of time off due to the holidays anyway and didn't really care. For those who had more PTO than what was left, they were told to work with their managers to arrange for as much time off as they felt was necessary in compensation.

This only worked because it was a one-time deal and the managers were (and mostly still are) very reasonable and supportive people. A while later we were merged with another company and they switched us back to regular PTO to be in line with their own HT policies.
> Is it true that engineers with children are less likely to get a promotion?

> It was a silly question, I sure that this behavior exists in Atlassian, but nobody likes to talk about that. In Atlassian it's no surprise and my manager said "yes, it's true". Just like that, exposing the company to liability.

If there’s a casual relationship there after correcting for confounding factors, that’s obviously bad. If there’s a retrospective correlation found, it’s not clear that’s bad. Brand new grads tend not to have children. Early in career promotions tend to come more quickly and with more certainty. From this, I’d expect promotions of lead software engineers to be less frequent than entry-level SWEs and for the former group to also (and irrelevantly) be more likely to have children.
I’m asking genuinely, is this a real fear: “…when the social workers come for their children”.
I like this summary. Bend over for your overlords, and sell out the commons.
> If you are a regular reader of that food blogger

I think this assumes facts not in evidence. It certainly seems like an overwhelming number of "blogs" are not actual blogs but SEO content farms. There's no regular readers of such things because there's no actual authors, just someone that took a job on Fivver to spew out some SEO garbage. Old content gets reposted almost verbatim because new results better according to Google.

The only reason these "blogs" exist is to show ads and hopefully get someone's e-mail (and implied consent) for a marke....newsletter.
https://archive.md/rWdme
So you’re given 2-3 hours, but expected to take 2 days?
Microwave links (including point-to-point "line-of-sight" links) transmit a cigar-shaped cone of signal which raises the noise floor for all receivers within earshot of a given frequency at a given location. The absolute physical dimensions of the cone of signal are dictated by the specific frequency being transmitted, the size and shape of the antenna, and the distance from the transmitter. This makes interference (including self-interference) one of the bigger challenges to colocating many links in the same geographical area.

One of the promises of millimeter-wave radios (radios which operate at frequencies from 18Ghz-100+Ghz) is that they are less prone to interference because they operate at such high frequencies.

Presumably, one of the bigger reasons to use free space optics is that it results in an almost total elimination of interference. No interference means no coordination is necessary between operators. No coordination between operators means no licensing/regulations are necessary for maximizing use of the available spectrum. Non-regulated or lightly-regulated technologies can have much broader adoption in the marketplace.

Lots of good reasons to pursue something like this.
why? The taliban is not like a nation state army, more like a bunch or militias and tribes, each of which is a “bunch of local guys with guns”. As the war has progressed, I imagine they have got more professional, but I’m guessing around 80-90% of their strength are non ideological tribal militias who are very good at figuring out which way the wind is blowing and changing sides. That worked in the US favor in 2001-2 when the northern alliance was winning, and against US interests now, that’s why resistance collapsed so quickly back in 2001 and now.
There's no way a higher German court would rule against the US government on a major issue.
Sure, if you approach everything in bad faith then yes it's not really "unlimited". That said, calling it unlimited is much easier than saying "we offer no set number of days, use what you need. you still work here though so you can't just not actually ever come to work. act in good faith, use good judgement" every time you open your mouth about a vacation policy.
If you’re thinking of V8 isolates, I believe Cloudflare was running their edge compute product using that.
I immediately get skeptical when I hear "because" being used for something that is not clearly a proximate cause.
Any company I've worked at with an accrual vacation system has typically had an accrual max, i.e. your vacation doesn't go away but you stop accumulating more when it hits the cap which is usually something like 1.5x annual accrual.
Considering that the whole executive team at Kape is Israeli, then no one should be surprised, even if domiciled in UK. I'm a fan of ExpressVPN.
It’s worth pointing out that tobacco use is currently declining. It kills a lot of people yes, but most of the deaths are distributed towards older populations. Combine these two factors, and you’d expect tobacco deaths to slide in the next few decades as we start running out of older smokers and newer generations smoke less on average than their parents did.

On the other hand opiate addiction came out of nowhere, and surpassed vehicle related deaths before anyone noticed. It kills much more randomly, and the problem seems to be getting worse. Expecting opioid death numbers to get worse in the near future isn’t unreasonable. It wouldn’t surprise me if opioids end up killing more per capita than nicotine does in the near future.

Also, there’s a pretty stark difference between the impact on life of these two substances aside from the mortality risk. While smoking does reduce quality of life, not many people end up in jail or homeless because of their nicotine addiction.
In what regard? In being unpleasant to use? No, I believe modern Windows to be singular in its unpleasantness.

In seriousness, though, try as I might I can't seem to parse your first sentence even using my "native English speaker" plug-in.
Apologies for the content-light comment, but this is awesome. Interesting mechanism, well illustrated, and taken through completion with integration into a module, not just a single mechanism.
Genius: How to go from “the future of journalism” to a fire sale
Skype founders head to court over Starship and Wire
I believe you're quoting an irrelevant rule.

AFAICT, this was not a torts lawsuit. Wikimedia was not suing for damages, it asked the courts to declare certain government practices illegal and/or force the government to desist these practices.
Would you feel the same with 3.75?
I memorized the ZX81 (and Spectrum) manuals back to front. Around age 11 I used to write out assembly long-hand and "poke" the OpCodes into memory to write programs and drivers. I really credit what has now been a long and happy career in software development to the affordable computers Sir Clive developed. (My family was pretty poor growing up, but I convinced my Dad to spring the 80 pounds or so for one after I borrowed a friend's and took to it).

What you could do was limited enough that you could master it, and I really think that's a good thing for education and motivation. When I think about teaching my kids to program today, I effectively get "choice paralysis" from all the paths I could go down and the options within easy reach.
But if it's a question of balancing your standing then it's all about visibility. If I'm off in a corner working maintaining some legacy system as a team of one that has somehow failed to be replaced in twenty years then I could just continuously be on vacation - additionally voluntarily taking odd working hours (like working 8PM-4AM) would also make it much less obvious that you're snogging vacation... except to the management team which usually can't comment on things like that except to consider firing you.
Hypothesis (which I have given about 30 seconds' thought): buying a gun was formerly a way to feel masculine, or to feel potent, or for use in a sport such as hunting or target shooting. In these situations, women found them to have little appeal.

Recently, buying a gun is more often because of an actual concern for safety. Women are about as likely as men to feel concern about that. Hence, the numbers are now more equal.

If this is the actual underlying reason, then these new gun buyers will be less likely to buy a second, third, fourth, etc. gun. Like someone who just buys a car to get around, and thus is less likely to have an urge to get a new one every year, the new gun buyers of 2019-2021 will be more likely to only buy another gun if there is something wrong with the old one.

Again, I gave it about 30 seconds' thought, but that's my guess.
I was surprised to see some of my younger relatives using Youtube as their free music streaming service. You can find almost any song, with static images in the video. They listen with their phone in their pocket, while streaming regular YouTube. One of them had an android phone that let you disable the touchscreen with a switch, along with some way to turn off the screen.

I have to admit I do the same sometimes with podcasts on YouTube.
Doesn't #metoo prove the system is pretty badly broken?

Maybe for people of privilege this plan works. But it's at the expense of others without.
> my take away is this person was probably just difficult in general, there may have been other reasons they were not promoted.

My general impression is that it's the difficult people who use terms like "toxic" to describe those they clash with. His "Interesting fact 1" is also a red flag. Dirty words in some internal memo? I'm scandalized!

I don't like Atlassian for their slow software, but I'm sure it's a fine company to work for.
they got trolled well by Sacha Baron Cohen on This is America too
My favorite term in these agreements is the one forbidding you from even mentioning the existence of the agreement.
Where does a gang end and a militia begin?
This. Unlimited PTO is kind of a scam. Then again, I think most experienced devs know this. Come on, would a company really offer you unlimited PTO? No.

That said, I feel like I do have quite a lot of PTO and I feel free to take it. Having that confidence requires having an employer that gives you feedback on your performance and knowing that you've 'earned' the time off.

Even at companies with fixed PTO, there are still times when you just know taking the time off would be career suicide. Taking time off near a planned release date is just insulting to other team members.

There's a story I keep going back to that I think is useful here. Way back, 20 years ago, working for a newly acquired division of WindRiver, we had an informal policy where you just got your work done and could come and go as you pleased. A couple of young, new engineers weren't comfortable with the informal policy and asked for clarification during a company meeting with upper management. Of course the official answer was that you got X days off and it required managerial approval and blah blah blah. Fortunately middle-management continued to look the other way and allowed the informal system to continue. Sometimes there are unwritten rules in business. These are, unfortunately, often unfair for new engineers and under-represented groups who don't feel secure enough in their positions to take advantage of them. I'm not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I like the quid-pro-quo system but I do understand that some people, especially engineers, have trouble with vagueness.
Yes, I well remember the Sinclairs I played with. They never made the 'Apple leap', and slowly faded, but he had a lot of good ideas. With a Silicon Valley milieu in the UK, he would have done better.
I was a Silicon Valley parts rat in the late 70's.
Went there 2-3 times a year. Mike Quinn, Space Age metal products, Advanced Computer Products(Freeman Brothers), Bill Godbout and so on.
They all had surplus warehouses. The tax law in the USA allowed old parts to be written off - but if you wrote them off, you could not keep them. If you kept them = not written off. This led to huge surplus warehouse entrepreneurs who bid on the scrapped parts and then resold them. This is the way it should be. In the UK/Canada companies wrote them off and KEPT them - sitting unused = no good to man or beast.
I think that is why it was unique - US tax law.
I’ll give you a funny opposing story. I worked at oracle data cloud, a very small section of oracle. We got unlimited pto but the rest of oracle didn’t. They wouldn’t rebuild/change the hr system so we were told to just not put pto in the system and take it as needed. When I left I had taken close to two weeks, but was also paid out more than one paycheck’s worth for my “unused” pto.
You know I used to follow Windows news rabidly. The new features were incredible, I looked forward to every release. Somewhere around the time Microsoft added a lock screen to a desktop computer without going "only joking, haha", I started dreading every update.
Interestingly, after a quick look at some stats, it's not totally obvious why Germany has higher emissions per capita.

Your theory that it's France's extensive nuclear use seems unlikely though since Spain, UK, Portugal, Italy etc. all seem to be roughly on par.

My initial guess is that burning coal, or worse lignite or worse peat, seems to be the decisive factor, though high industry usage also plays a part.

If you just compare carbon intensity per KWh produced, then France has a notable lead, 6 times less than Germany, so I wonder what brings them back down into the pack. Is some of that electricity being wasted or used inefficiently?
Just some random anecdotes...

Circa 2013 I was a tech conference attended by a contingent of RapGenius engineers. They were incredibly obnoxious. Loud, arrogant, boisterous, with no regard for anyone around them. This was when RG was getting a ton of hype and these engineers at least clearly let it get to their head. I distinctly remember one of them walking around in a t-shirt with "FUCK FUCK SWAG" printed on the front in huge letters.

Years later, through my wife, I became friendly with a high-level engineering manager at what had become Genius. Totally normal, down to earth guy. I liked him a lot. From talking to him, I got the impression that the company had "grown up" a lot. It was clear that they were very aware of the perception described above and were faintly embarrassed about it.
Bojack ahead of the curve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eG0y_nb5IA
Switzerland's famous assault rifles are not kept with ammunition, and are mostly useless. (I suppose you could bludgeon a home invader with one.) Firearms are more heavily regulated there than in most of Europe.

"He shakes out the gun holster. "And we don't get bullets any more," he adds. "The Army doesn't give ammunition now - it's all kept in a central arsenal." This measure was introduced by Switzerland's Federal Council in 2007."

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21379912
Both were company founds who went pair shaped in 1985. Both were narcissists obsessed with miniaturization and small items. Both were obsessed with the physical look of their devices. Both were not engineers.
Regarding getting hired again, I went through something very similar to what he did (except my employer was highly supportive, so I had nothing complain about online) and I can't blame him for writing this.

He may have disqualified himself from employers looking for single 20-somethings with a complete devotion to work, but there are managers in the world who are going to understand what he and his wife have gone through. Especially after this last year, we're going to have to understand that some of our coworkers have publicly expressed their pain before.

Perhaps a future employer will include a non-disparagement clause but I'd be surprised if he didn't find a new role that was better suited to his new life circumstances.
> Multiple teams are fighting UI politics over WinUI, MAUI on top of WinUI, React Native with WinUI, and classical UWP is not going away (Windows 11 Store is written in it), then ASP.NET team is pushing Blazor everywhere including on Web Widgets.

Great point.

As a developer in the Windows sphere for decades, I'm used to change.

However, at this point I have no idea what I am supposed to be developing user interfaces in. Honestly, using VS Code daily as part of my stack I'm leaning towards just accepting that WebView2/Electron/etc is the future.

I have read the complaints, but VS Code is a solid piece of engineering and it "just works". If that's an example of what we can easily get cross-platform, so be it.