skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What do you do when you work for a company where you think managers are bad, and their managers are bad, but they all think they are great and they think you're the problem? How do you objectively (not subjectively) determine if a manager is bad? If 200 people in the organization are "happy enough", it's your word versus theirs on what a good manager vs a bad manager is.

If you notice you are the only one in 200 people have any issues, a reasonable question to ask yourself is if the problem is you. If you end up believing you aren't, you should at least be able to articulate why you're the only one.
It sounds like you weren't meeting the needs of the company either and this is all sour grapes.

If someone is not meeting the expectations or underperforming and it's not a character problem. I'd be open to working with them if they did some growing somewhere else. If however, you have this kind of attitude of blame-shifting and finger pointing without any substance to back it up, no one will want to work with you.

Your boss was right in warning his friends.
Something that makes tangiable improvement to the real world would be a good start
also all the other shit that’s on the chip ram etc.
> "Whether the roots were uplifted and the city had been informed" and "was Mr. Peña irresponsibly impaired" are arguments about the merits of the case.

They may also be arguments about the validity of the indemnity clause, in general, California law voids indemnity against acts known to be wrongful when done, and in many specific areas also against harms that are due to the “sole negligence“ of the indemnified party. Arguing that Peña had negligence (or worse) that contributed to the incident could thus, as well as being a merits argument, also be a an argument that the indemnity agreement is valid even if the city owes some damages (which is possible even if Peña is partially responsible.)

> The point of the article is that Bird agreed to indemnify the city (compensate the loss incurred to the other party), and Bird claims that by agreeing to the ToS, users agree to indemnify Bird. I am not a lawyer, but it seems untenable that the buck stops with the user in all circumstances.

There are generally public policy limits to indemnity clauses, and between organizations (e.g., the city and Bird) also often specific contractual limits (consumer agreements imposed by corporations generally will cover as much as the law allows.)

Those limits (on both agreements, since the absence of an obligation in Bird to defend the city would also mean, whether or not Bird is paying for the city’s defense, Peña doesn't have to pay Bird) will be addressed in the separate dispute between Bird and Pena over the indemnity clause in Peña’s contract with Bird.
This is a great reference! There is also an entry in the congressional record on declassification of the data. And 3 scientific papers. If you know more, send me a note. I worked in the area of rust spread and have always wanted to learn more about this.
I find it kind of comical anyone would be worrying about this. Maybe because I've moved TVs quite a few times - upright, screen side down, screen side up - from across town to thousands of miles away in the back of a uhaul. It's not a big deal
Makes me remember the processor in the film terminator 2: https://gndn.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/shot00332.jpg
Yes but empirically the chance of someone rescheduling is low.
I don't see why scientists would be less self-aware of their culture than other groups. In particular, that culture has got nothing to do with the things you decry (why is no one looking at old ideas, where, again, the simple problem is money).

As soon as Wheeler would have tenure today, he could switch all day long. I am not talking about Wheeler's potential either, but whether he ticks the boxes to make him likely to succeed today. And he does.

You are looking for a career that wouldn't work today? Freeman Dyson. Getting tenure at Princeton aged 29 without a doctorate, not so likely today.
Weeknumber.com – Which week is it?
Thimbleweed Park was a great game. Lots of great in-jokes, a useful help/hint system, and the classic old-school adventure game look/feel that I played as a kid and since longed for.

I’ve long awaited more stuff from Ron Gilbert since then.
I feel like author actually considered all your points, but regardless arrives at the same conclusion:

The expected value of an exit interview -for you, the individual- is near-zero or possibly negative.

At the point of your exit interview, you're done with the company. You're no longer part of the team, you're no longer in the family. Your advice and feedback is that of someone who decided to jump ship.

I suppose if you're the absolute top performer at your company and they begged for you to stay, and the VP asked for one last chat to get your advice on how to fix the company... then sure, go for it. Otherwise, just hand over your badge and wish them all the best of luck.
Are they? In my country it's Christian Protestants.
The Netherlands is a post religious country now but there was a real belief not so long ago that everyone was predestined for hell or heaven and you couldn't do anything about it.
Protestants make Catholics look sane.
I agree that "mission" is more buzzword than substance in SV. But there are certainly many people outside that bubble who work in organizations with missions that are important to them. List any number of governmental, safety-critical, or health related fields for an idea. IMO, extreme pay is a way to compensate precisely because they know it's not a purpose they really identify with.
> As a manager, if you get value from the exit interview, with all due respect, you're doing it wrong.

Well...yes. Isn't the entire point of an exit interview, from the organization's perspective, to find out what they're doing wrong?
Games must let us be proper villains again if they want us to make moral choices
I'm not sure how responsibility plays in. Being bluntly honest lowers your chance of making friends, in my experience.
And a lot of hate, and a lot of paranoia, and a lot chauvinism / imperialism, and lot of history of invading countries just because they can.
Your answer is correct. Swift & AppKit is what you should use for a native macOS app today.

Only one thing to add: Embrace the fact that Swift and Objective C are compatible! Some parts are way easier to write in Objective C, eg. anything that interfaces with C code.

Also, if your app does non-trivial amounts of text editing, those parts should probably be written in Objective C.

Working with NSTextView / NSString / NSMutableString / NSAttributedString in Swift is difficult. You always need to be super careful not to mix up Objective C characters (UTF-16) with Swift characters ("Grapheme clusters"). Even as someone who read a lot about those topics it's easy to mix them up. It's also easy to run into catastrophic performance problems, eg. checking large strings for equality is really slow in Swift, and can easily lead to UI hangs.
>I have no idea what the author is on about. The exit interview is often the best 30 minutes of a bad job!

My exit interview at a toxic job was really bad. I was given old format of exit interview form, me and my manager knew it's not going to be imported into a system and analysed, it has quite stupid questions like "would you stay for 2% more salary", or asking to blame people "is any of below a reason of you leaving: PO, SM, fellow developer/QA", while most people were leaving thanks to C-level people who didn't want to recognise their fault. If they knew employee was leaving the company for a lot more money of changing role, they were asked different questions that made the company look more positive to investors.
Yes, and it would be doubly true. Attractive men behave in the stereotypical alpha manner, very aggressive without any empathy. Society will excuse them because they are attractive and wealthy.
The device discussed in the article.

It depends on what you want to achieve. Have a better camera in Teams/Zoom? More than enough. Capture VHS too.
Would that be fun? I’m thinking of the idea here and it just sounds like such a chore to me. At least whiteboard interviews are fun.

Setting up your IDE and all that boring stuff.

But you know what, man, maybe I’m just status quo biasing and it would be better. I can’t nail down why I don’t like it after all.
And why should the employee help with that? And why at that point? There's a lot of opportunities for feedback during employment. If you're banking on exit interviews, you've already lost and you're doing it fundamentally wrong.
When I was at MSFT a little over 10 years ago the norm was that to be that if you gave notice, and said where you were going, and it was a competitor in certain industries, you would be escorted out immediately or same-day.

Our extended team was pretty collegial about this -- de facto, people could choose to work out their 2 weeks by keeping quiet, or to leave right away by naming a name. (I think this got you some extra vacation? Never quite sure how that worked out.)
Well I guess Squeaky.ai goes on the list of companies to never use.
> The "stability" argument is so insane

Geopolitics is a fluid system. Stability is always in play.

> the iraq war plunged the region into it's most unstable period

Really depends on whose instability we're talking about. Its been 'good' for some and 'bad' for others; all depends on what side of the thousand year conflict you find yourself on.

> If we ignore the destruction and death caused by the russian invasion

If you think Russia invaded Ukraine all on its own without being coaxed into doing so after years of US/UK intervention in Ukraine then you're poorly informed. Russia's arrogance, inhumanity and long-standing fears were used against it to great effect. If the risk of escalation can be managed Europe (and Ukraine) may eventually be free of Russia's stranglehold on energy.

> If we ignore the destruction and death

Strategic narcissism to think our generation can be free of war, have bloodless wars or find ourselves substantially more evolved than prior generations. Until we figure out how to prevent sociopaths from becoming leaders we are doomed to repeat history many times over.
With respect that's quite naive.

> 1) Being true to yourself is worth more than any of his purported wins

'Leaving a job that doesn't suit you' is the part where you're being true to yourself; whatever you say in the exit interview usually doesn't have a material positive effect on one's own life except possibly the chance to get some closure if things have been really bad - in such situations, however, I would say there is a less than average chance of achieving even that, otherwise maybe it would have been possible to work things out without leaving.

> 2) Be your own merit, and don't rely on others for references or goodwill

So whose name should I write down when asked for a referee? My own? As the article said, later in your career this is much less of a concern but when starting out and being an unknown quantity, every sympathetic connection is more valuable because you don't have many.

> 3) If every exit interviewee states that the CEO is a dick, that can't be ignored. She won't lose her job, but it's not going to do her any favours either

Sure it can, it happens all the time. Dick CEO will either find ways to rationalise the bad feedback, outright ignore it, or else the feedback won't make it that far up the chain as the interviewer values their own job and the CEO is a dick.

> If you get in trouble for telling the truth, that's not a company you need to be at.

Right, but... we're talking about exit interviews; by definition you won't be staying there and derive little to no benefit by being fully open even if things do change. The author of the post wasn't necessarily advocating lying unless there was no other way, just being economical with the truth.

> Also important; don't be a dick. There's a difference between telling the truth to constructive ends, and being a whiny critical negative contrarian.

Sure, that's always good advice, but it doesn't require total honesty; bland empty replies work just as well and don't trigger the kind of fragile egos that so often seem to make their way up the food chain.
I don't know man, some bosses actually do want to learn and improve.

There's this narrative in the tech blogosphere that managers are, by definition, psychopaths who want to screw you over and I'm just not seeing it.

I mean, sure, this can happen but an honest and open exit interview can also just be a nice thing you do for a boss who you're happy to help succeed, even if you're leaving them.
Just keep in mind that deserts are the easiest places for artificial temperature control. Anything you try in a desert works, there are no clouds obstructing the Sun, or humidity stopping a passive cooler; every night is cold, every day is hot; there's nothing blocking winds or passive heat emission.

Basically, everything that makes them so damn inhospitable also makes it easy to manage the temperature of a building.

You will have a much harder time on any other place.
I found a math book aimed at math grads going into official sub-college teaching positions, and was shocked about the historical context provided. Every idea had 2 or 3 variants that differed in origin. To me it would have made math 2x more fun for a lot of pupils. But none of it made it into our classrooms (lack of time ? a dusty pedagogical approach maybe ..). It's probably vital for most people that don't have their neurons naturally properly aligned to a subject to have various informations and point of views about the problems and goals.
This really needs a [2021] label.
very cool project!
I'm sorry, I'm not following. I'm assuming someone would want something because they feel like it's a solution to their problem. In this case, I'm saying I think software is the wrong "solution" because it just treats the symptom (get me out of this obligation) and not the underlying cause (provide psychological trust). Did you interpret the sentence differently?
> Of the 9 lead devs they had at the time (including me) they lost 7 over the next 8mths (I already knew three where leaving in the interview just hadn't announced it yet).

> It took them another 8mths to decide that remote might be an option, after literal decades of experience on their systems (not me I was a relatively new hire) walked out the door.

I am starting to see this happen at work. We've undergone a re-org and it has been handled very poorly. Management doesn't seem to care, or at least they won't really acknowledge the struggles that we're dealing with at the team level, and as far as I can tell there's no plan in place to prevent the more skilled and experienced folks from walking right out the front door. Pay raises for most people were subpar this year. Many people were denied promotions for bullshit reasons. Etc.

> References really aren't a think in the UK (at least no one has ever checked mine that I know off)

I don't even list references. I offer to give references up if they're requested and that is stated plainly on my resume. My references are people I have had meaningful working relationships with, so if some potential employer is going to ring these people up I like to give them a heads up. They're people who I've spent time with in the trenches and who can speak to my technical competence, ability to operate under pressure, and my technical leadership abilities. Two of them have storied careers in technology, spanning back to the 80s, and are people that could be Googled.

Anyway, in nearly 15 years in this industry, I think that I've maybe had 1 company I was interviewing with ask me for my references and I can't even recall if they used them.
"a mosaic of 25 individual images is needed to cover the entire Sun. Taken one after the other, the full image was captured over a period of more than four hours because each tile takes about 10 minutes"

I would love to hear a bit about how movement captured across tile boundaries over the course of four hours was handled when stitching the pano. AI and/or human retouching could be involved which, IMO, are both acceptable to get such an amazing image. Just curious!
Agreed. I would be wary of reaching fundamental limits set by physics although I don't think we're there yet.

"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in five years."

- attributed to von Neumann, 1949.
I have passwords and instructions.
The directions are "burn it all to the ground"
It has the highest concentration of STEM majors because the govt keeps building and recruiting there. And I would add that I agree yes - robotics labs in high school, etc. Very solid STEM.

Issue is recruiting people outside the govt network. The exceptions prove the rule, but it is a very hard sell to get people from Big Tech who aren't Eric Schmidt or the newest CS grads from MIT to move to these places. Tell me the 23 year old who all things equal to include a comparable salary will choose rural AL over SF?

As a result, it perpetrates the issue of insular govt technical hires that heavily orient around weapon systems and similar, and are out of step with the new practices, which means less talent comes in and then dicy implementations like PlatformOne are the result.

If you want govt tech to be continually dictated by the clowncar of govt contracting and general DoD grift, then Huntsville makes perfect sense as you say. Space Force is HQ'd in rural AL for similar reasons.

There is a reason why Kessel Run (USAF) is in Boston, Army Futures is in Austin, and smaller elite units have outposts in SV.

Edit - and fwiw, the fact that the defense tech startups out of SV can hire those 23 y/o or ex-Google types without a lot of issue is a good indicator to track.
Related:

What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28019659 - July 2021 (2 comments)

The Problem with Crackpot Emails from Amateur Physicists (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26590983 - March 2021 (1 comment)

What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12268362 - Aug 2016 (318 comments)
This must be a cultural thing because it's the rudest thing I could imagine! Agreeing to a plan is a commitment. The other people involved (who have also committed) rely on you doing your best to honour your commitment - who knows how their plans would have been different had you not committed in advance.
Reminds me of https://github.com/minitorch/minitorch
i've never seen a company take action from someone leaving, and any push for change has to be sustained by people still at the company.

i'd be curious if anyone has ever seen it happen
It’s not true on Reddit. Not even close. Reddit has been the only platform of the people, and it is slowly dying.
The challenge of physics is that the relationship between concept and math reverses as the further you go.

Early on, studying Newtons laws, the concepts are way easier than the math for most people. Inertia, parabolas, friction, angles.. we can see it and use it every day.

But the current state of knowledge is that we can reliably use math to calculate phenomena that seem to have no analog in the familiar concepts that govern our everyday experience. The math of dark matter is fairly straightforward but the concept is so weird that tons of people reject it out of hand (as seen in the comments whenever it comes up on HN).
I've never once in my long career seen constructive feedback from exit interviews make its way back to the leadership or management orgs.

I have seen a top engineer tell his CEO why he was leaving and everything wrong with the project (and he said this, I'm sure, very politely and with the intent of helping them). He made the critical mistake of sharing where he was going next (a FAANG). The CEO of old-company called VP of new-company, and the new company withdrew their offer. Yup, Top Engineer was then fully unemployed, his reward for being honest. Lawsuit, you say? No, my friend didn't have $500k or whatever sitting around for legal fees. He just got a new job, and is fine now. Still, lesson learned.
this thing is already more human than i am
> The point is that Bird is using an arbitration agreement between them and an end user to not have to pony up according to the terms of their indemnification agreement with the city.

No, they aren't; they are ponying up and coming after Peña to pay them back. That's kind of how indemnity agreements, in general, work.

The point is that Peña is suing the city and, if the various indemnity agreements all hold up, also paying for the city’s defense against his lawsuit and paying any damages that the city is found liable for in that suit. Which means that, if the indemnity agreement holds up, the net result will be Peña paying all the legal bills and court costs and receiving nothing, irrespective of the outcome of the main lawsuit.
> his alchemical work that didn’t.

Call me a crackpot, but didn't it?

Newton is forever remembered as [one of] the granddaddy[ies] of physical sciences.

Alchemy, from any initiated source seems to be a series of rituals designed around the refining of the self into its full potential, rather than a material goal of becoming wealthy by being able to produce gold. That is, it's metaphorical.

I haven't read anything by Newton on his alchemy, but if I were to take my rudimentary understanding of mystical thought and read it against Newton's example—I would think he were quite successful having produced such novel mathematical and scientific breakthroughs—whether he was aware of that or not.

If there was gold to be found in a human experience and work, I'd say he produced endless amounts of it...

edit: I'm not making it up. Whether or not you want to believe in whatever, this is what alchemy is to magicians like Newton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeticism#Alchemy

He didn't endeavour to just turn physical lead into physical gold. I know we shit on humanities around here, but facts still exist in that sphere.

Further, this isn't my opinion but that of Keynes - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsnr.2012.005...

> Keynes underlined the last sentence of this passage, which could easily substitute for his own assessment of Newton's use of experimentation in ‘Newton, the Man’, that ‘His experiments were always, I suspect, a means, not of discovery, but always of verifying what he knew already’.13 Keynes repeatedly referenced Newton's ‘intuition’, calling it ‘pre-eminently extraordinary’, almost to the point of relying on mathematical proof and experiment only as a matter of social convention, rather than as a means of revealing some insight that had not already occurred to him. The mathematical proofs in Principia were alleged to be ‘dressed up afterwards—they were not the instrument of discovery.’
You make it clear that it's your JOB and you need uninterrupted time. So ideally your spouse leaves you alone and is able to look after kids if you're working. Don't answer the phone. Get noise cancelling headphones. Etc...

If you don't want to or are unable to create said environment then you either go back to the office or accept interruptions.