skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Assuming the manager is actually telling the truth about why the employee was put on a PIP (maybe not a safe assumption?), then I think there are two important questions:

1) Is the quota for a number of people who need to be put on PIPs, or a number of people who need to be fired?

If it's the latter, the employee is effectively already fired; they're required to fire N people, and they're going to find a way to claim employee failed the PIP, no matter what. Obviously the employee will not be able to answer this question with any amount of certainty.

2) Are the goals that need to be achieved to pass the PIP unambiguous? That is, is it objectively obvious that the goal has been passed or failed?

If any of the goals are ambiguous, management could use that ambiguity to claim some goals haven't been achieved when the employee believes they have been, and use that to justify firing them.

Of course, the manager could also just by lying about why the employee is on a PIP. Maybe they do actually have a performance issue, but the manager is too much of a wuss to flat-out tell the employee this. I agree that it's suggestive that the manager seems to be setting the PIP's goals in such a way that they're relatively easy to achieve, but that might not be the whole story.

Either way, a company that has periodic PIP (or firing) quotas isn't a company I'd want to work at, so I'd start looking for a new job even if I'd still end up being retained after the PIP is over. Ideally I'd have a start date at a new place after the PIP is done, so I could explicitly give that reason for quitting, even though my job there would be (at least for the time being) secure.
> There are plenty of alternatives

Yeah, not for long. Go back and read the proposed changes.
> Given that [...] we're going to experience a significant global economic contraction soon.

What's with all the doomslinging in modern discourse? No, no, that's not now it works at all. There was a chip shortage just a year ago! Did that plunge us into recession? No, clearly it didn't. Then it was Inflation that was going to kill us all. And it didn't either. Now all of a sudden we're swinging the other way with chips and have a glut, and... now the doom will happen, I guess you're hoping?

No. This is a cyclic industry and it's cycling like it always has. A 10% YoY revenue drop isn't anything weird. I found a chart here: look at the bottom YoY numbers and see all the times they were in the red. Remember the unmitigated economic disaster of 2016? Me neither.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSM/taiwan-semicon...
48 degrees - the temperature record for Europe set in Greece in 1977 at least until any current records are confirmed.
Few Fortune 100 Firms List Security Pros in Their Executive Ranks
It just likes a little imoral vs illegal confusion.
If we are comparing farmers markets to grocery stores, last mile delivery to grocery stores is in semi trucks filled with a range of products not half full pickup trucks. The difference in CO2/mile is again huge. As to picking up from each, people driving out of their way to farmers markets are generally worse for the environment than any potential savings from “local” production.

PS: Home delivery often beats driving to stores because of more efficient routing, but that’s very dependent on the specifics.
Ha ha, tried a full double-sheet from a newspaper from time to time. You could "loft" it anyway.
Final Fantasy 7. It was the first story-driven game I played as a teenager and it changed how I thought about games.
Ask HN: Ex-SWEs, what are you doing now?
We all have heard of programmers who turned into woodworkers, farmers and gardeners.

I'd love to hear what happened, how it's going and what future looks like for you :).
Slow charging is ~1600w; Which is a similar power rating as a hair dryer or single burner stove (including induction), a small 120v point of use water heater, or 16 100w light bulbs.

Surely, we don't have to be cooking all night long on every connection; but surely even historically the grid can handle 16 light bulbs somewhere in the house.
It's about focus and knowing your limits, which is always going to be difficult to self-determine. I thought getting rid of streaming services would make me want to read more, but I found other ways to be distracted.

Definitely, humans are not equipped for everything technology is throwing at us. We're pushing up against the limits of our simian biology. Dunbar's number is real.

It's up to each of us to be responsible in choosing how much we expose ourselves to, because the tech companies aren't going to do it for us. Big Tech is the Big Tobacco of the 21st century and they know it.
The presentation of the data doesn't support the conclusions drawn, i.e. women have been actively impeded in songwriting - they might have been, but the data doesn't say that on its own.

Also, some credits were only there due to sampling, the songwriters did not actively sit down and write or co-write that particular song.

Given that music has been almost completely democratised with the lowest barrier to entry there has ever been, it's hard to say women are being prevented from songwriting, but breaking into the highest echelons of the hit industry (a dubious accolade) might be tougher. We don't know how many are trying.
The largest subsection of the document is spent discussing how to prevent specifically this situation, and this is called out explicitly as a non-goal.
A lot of farming indians are extremely untrustworthy of "modernization" of farming because it means near total reliance on American megacorps that already abuse american farmers, let alone people in an entirely separate country with even lower means.
I don't know, I feel like it's already pretty obvious that we're "cooked/doomed", with some caveats:

1. Even in the worst case I haven't seen any level-headed scientists argue that the Earth will be uninhabitable a la Venus. We'll get a hotter planner, sea levels will rise considerably inundating coastal areas, the current anthropocene extinction event will accelerate, storms will be a lot more intense, etc. Obviously a major set of problems, but I think it's important to be specific about what those problems will be as opposed to "we'll all be dead".

2. Whenever someone even remotely argues that we'll be able to stick to some reasonable emissions targets I like to show this graph, https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions#global-co2-emission.... That is, it's good news that global emissions have largely stabilized over the past decade, but we're still pumping out over 35 billion tons of carbon every year. We need to find a way, somehow, to bring that to near 0, and while tech may get us there eventually I don't see that happening in my lifetime (I'm middle aged).
> Obligatory counter-anecdote: by all accounts, I was a cheerful, happy little baby. My parents are wonderful people and we're a tight-knit family. And yet, I was recently diagnosed with ADHD by a doctor who, after finishing the diagnostic screening, asked "how are you not homeless?"

The doctor's question doesn't make sense given the context you've provided. Do you have a career? The fact that you're on Hacker News and can afford to care for a family indicates you've at least managed your symptoms with any number of tools or methods.

So, "why aren't you homeless?" The question answers itself, from all appearances. But if there's something you've left out that could provide missing context, I'd be curious to know.
You shouldn't. Not only is this study trying to funnel you toward a conclusion, it's not clear what "songwriter" means in this case and they never choose to elaborate.

Do they mean lyrics? In that case, they should know that the singer is often added as an afterthought so that the song sells better which could drastically change the final tally. Do they mean the actual notes of the song itself? In that case, how many women were in the industry to begin with? Perhaps women are vastly overrepresented relative to their footprint in the industry. Did they include music producers in this?

The irony in all this is that scientific and collegiate researchers have solved these (not all) issues of bad research and will readily tell you how to prepare and lay out a well-designed study. These authors couldn't even be bothered to research how to design an effective study but at least there are pretty graphics to look at.
Hmm doesn't look like I wrote it in my journal but yeah, it was pretty gross. The reason given for the ban was some swearing in the message, but to my intuition the profanity was pretty tame, well-deserved, and ultimately just an excuse.

I do remember the bug: Bose headphones have a low quality mode and a high quality mode (low quality frees bandwidth for microphone and maybe latency), and the linux bluetooth stack defaulted to the low bandwidth mode so aggressively that even if you changed the script to set high bandwidth mode it would immediately set back.

I have no idea if the bug is fixed because this happened in 2020 and I haven't thought about desktop bluetooth since 2020 because TOSLink->1Mii Bluetooth Transmitter solved all my problems with it.
Outer Wilds. I think I discovered it after reading a similar comment in a previous thread. It's a great space exploration game that has enjoyable and forgiving flight mechanics, really interesting and sometimes mind-bending environments and puzzles, and a fantastic soundtrack. You'll wish you could play it for the first time again after you finish it.
> Maybe we can lower the standard a little bit?

Lower them more you mean?

As a native English speaker having learnt a foreign language, I can tell you that we're pretty goddamn lax in comparison. The English have long since made peace with the fact that their language has been usurped. They're okay with it, and make concessions for foreign language speakers; as long as the meaning is understood, nobody bothers correcting you.

Now try speaking French in France, or German in Germany. I don't know about Japanese in Japan, but I imagine it's the same or worse (from what I've heard second hand).
> Songwriters were categorized into three groups: “women” (she/her pronouns or feminine language), “men” (he/him pronouns or masculine language), and “non-binary” (they/them pronouns, gender neutral/nonconforming language, or publicly identifies as non-binary or gender fluid). Pronouns and gendered language don’t directly map to gender, so in cases where public gender was not clear we looked for explicit statements from songwriters about how they defined their gender.

Seems quite reasonable. If they hadn't done that, then we'd be wondering if they misattributed into the wrong category and that inflated male numbers.

What would you change about this section of the methodology?
I made a post the other day about diablo being a clicker game

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36328358
I would take being disappointed over our current situation, which is effectively little to no focus on teaching the ethics at all.
Not to press the point too finely, but: you clicked on the link. If you don't care, then it's maybe worth not clicking on it. Responding to things that you don't care about with "I don't care" doesn't convey any useful or interesting information to anyone else.

I, for one, thought it was interesting. I like listening to good music too, and I wonder if I would be able to listen to more good music if more women were able to break into the professional music-making industry.
You're putting the blame on the homeowner for a problem they weren't aware was a problem. In this specific case I don't see that the guy's yard, which is actually quite tidy, credibly increases fire risk. His insurance was canceled without him receiving any option for appeal or remediation. That's BS. You'd be made if something similar happened to your business, and it's not a good basis on which to shill for your clients.
Hank Green Explains the IceCube Neutrino Observatory [video]
I feel that this article convincingly makes the case that women are vastly underrepresented in songwriting of top hits.

That said, I feel like I have little to no insight into how songwriting works as an industry. Who chooses songwriters for a headline act? How much say do the performers have? What ostensibly motivates the choices of whoever chooses?

The conclusion implicit throughout the article (made explicit at the end) is that this data is the result of bias, and I suspect that's probably right. But I'd love to hear more about where and how that actually happens.
Spotify Plans to Raise Price of Premium Plan in US to $10.99
Considering this is just data, ala lacks any analysis or opinions on why this is the case as well as any actionable insights to improve the situation, I want to just focus on the presentation of the data.

The presentation is designed beautifully, and executed well. I personally despise custom scrolling mechanics that make it near impossible to revisit earlier information cogently, but I can appreciate the aesthetics of the thing.

I feel these sorts of set ups are designed and developed because the people building them already know all of the pertinent information they contain, and so see this as a great, or at least interesting, way to view the data, but I feel that this sort of medium is incomprehensible for someone who is clicking this without previous knowledge of the dataset.

Due to the headline I was intrigued to know just what popular songs were written exclusively by women and what the ratio was for some of my own favourite popular songs was, but I had to wade through a sea of smooth animations to finally be unable to interact with the information I wanted.

Sure lists and spreadsheets are boring to some, but in my opinion they are far more effective at getting your data across.

If you're a designer, please just design a more beautiful experience of /exploring/ the dataset rather than a more beautiful /presentation/ of the dataset.
Hopefully the statute of limitations has run out, but but when I was young and stupid, I "hacked" a local telephone box in the area to route a payphone line to my house.

I grew up in a supremely rural area. We were not at all wealthy but still one of the few households that could even afford a computer. The computer came with a modem and I wanted to use it to connect to the world. The problem was that every phone call beyond a 1-mile radius or so counted as "long distance," so calling virtually anywhere cost a certain fixed rate per minute. We experimented with CompuServe and Prodigy at various points but the long distance charges alone made it not worthwhile.

I eventually got to learning how physical phone lines worked and figured out that the same telephone box next to the road served both my house and the payphone for the store nearby. Long story short, I bridged the payphone's line to an unused pair at my house and started calling BBSes around the nation that way. I was always careful not to use it during the day, when someone might actually need to use the payphone.

Of course, it only took a couple of months for the phone company to figure out something was amiss. They undid my handiwork and put a lock and seal on the box. They COULD have charged my parents with theft of service or at least delivered a stern warning but evidently they did not or I certainly would have gotten an earful over it.

About a year later, the phone company brought in local dial-up Internet to the town.

Footnote: I found a list of toll-free BBSes somewhere and there were HUNDREDS of numbers listed. I tried them all. Only maybe a dozen were actually free BBSes that you could create an account and log into, the rest were either dead, fax machines, or systems for some specific purpose. Aside from one fairly popular message board that eventually got shut down, it turns out there wasn't much to do on any of them.
What does “rarely get to write songs” mean? Is there a powerful Committee of Songwriting who determines who gets to write the pop songs?

I think a better way to look at it would be to address how song writing credits are assigned, who is getting them and why? Are male producers and session guys, forcing their way into the credits or are artists sampled or with similar previous work being preemptively added?
> and I'd suggest copyleft, alternative to emerge that's good enough to make people have to care more about license terms

I keep seeing this, but I can't understand how it would work.

Bored nerds will volunteer their time to open source, with little return. That's why I did it.

Generally, nobody will volunteer their money to open source. This is unfortunate, and a huge problem.

Training neural nets requires the money. Where does it come from?
Let Me GPT That For You! -> https://gprivate.com/65ubk
Yes; 95% was a number typically cited for trips that electric cars with <40 miles of range applied for; so i gave those without ready charging situation additional %; Along with the technology advancements in the last 30 years; like 5x+ the range.
At this point I just stopped listening to pretty much anyone regarding the economy. It has become plain as day to me that the whole field is kaput and that no one can really predict anything in this incredibly complex, multivariate chaotic system.
>It's leaking out into normal DNS.

No, it isn't. I'd never seen a .eth link anywhere on the normal web, yet I've seen plenty of Gemini:// urls, just to throw in something niche for comparison.
There are legal requirements around doing layoffs. A quota of PIPs is a stealth layoff. I’d say OP has a point.
Outer Wilds (not to be confused with Outer Worlds) is a fantastic game. It's one of those games that makes me wish I could erase my knowledge of the game to experience it again. I won't say more to avoid spoilers and not to over hype it, but if you like story-heavy and exploratory game play you should check it out.
Bloom: 23%

Burnin: Off

Static Noise: 8%

Jitter: 18%

Glow Line: 1%

Screen Curvature: 10%

Ambient Light: 42%

Flickering: 12%

Horizontal Sync: 15%

RGB Sync: Off

Font: JetBrainsMono Nerd Font Mono

Font: #0ccc68

Background: #000000

Brightness: 59%

Contrast: 72%

Margin: 78%

Frame size: 39%
Never had this issue in the 90s in Canada... We had a phone line dedicated to internet
I think it really depends on the place. I was PIP'd recently and genuinely thought I was doing something wrong, until it was clear the bar kept moving even though I was meeting all requirements. A few weeks in I discovered I wasn't the only one in that situation (4 others, all expensive senior employees) and the company had a history of using arbitrary PIPs to justify firing with cause instead of having to pay out severance (I'm in Canada)
This is true, and I can tell you that we're actually missing out on a lot of interesting Chinese research in mental disorders and therapy.
If you are concerned about arsenic in rice, then you should just wash your rice. It's quite effective
System Shock 2. The evil AI, Shodan, still pops up in my thoughts from time to time. Triply relevant today as the game was remastered, and AI is a hot topic.
I went dark and lost touch with a lot of friends and family. I was just keeping up with their life by Liking posts instead of, you know, calling them.
Yes. I mean, that's happening. Some of the CO2 automatically ends up in the ocean, which reduces the burden for the atmosphere.

But what you probably meant is if we can artificially increase the CO2 dissolved in sea water. The answer is no. The CO2 in seawater is relative to the concentration in the atmosphere. If you add more to the atmosphere, you add more to the ocean. If you remove it from the atmosphere, you reduce the amount in the ocean.
Yeah this is really the endgame. I think the issue is systemic though, this is more than just ad money. Bots and automatability of the web was always an anomaly and a flaw, as the web was and is always designed for humans. Strict human verification was always a need. One can say we did achieve this with 2FA and such, but what is technology all about? Convenience. If it's more convenient, people will prefer remote assertion every day of the week: https://gabrielsieben.tech/2022/07/29/remote-assertion-is-co...
But Montenegro has had hundreds of years of sovereign instability, i.e. it has been swallowed several times by other entities. I guess it was on .yu until the 21st century. It's probably stable for now, but nothing to say it won't get swallowed again and lose its TLD.
The most progressive way to solve it would be for more male song writers to identify as females and publish songs under theix new names.
> Intel

Note: Intel is literally obsolete in terms of Flash. Intel sold all of their SSDs to SK Hynix, who is now selling those SSD-designs under the name of "Solidigm"

So if you want a "modern Intel" SSD, look for Solidigm. Intel got out of this race in December 2021, so no "new" SSD (2022 or 2023 era) is from "Intel" branding, only "Solidigm".

--------

I'm more of a Crucial / Micron fan myself, but Samsung, Crucial, and WD (aka: Sandisk was bought out by WD) are all 2TB for under $100.

But yes, I'm talking about the big-names, with high-performance (7000MBps+ suitable for PS5). The good stuff. GPUs, CPUs, HDDs, and Motherboards have also come down in price. Its entirely across the board though the SSD market is where its most obvious.
There are many businesses that could not define a PIP because they have no idea how to define performance. You can find one of these and hide for the rest of your career. If your PIP has milestones like 'write 10 emails per day' or 'participate in 10 hours of meetings per week', maybe you already found one of those companies. If you yourself struggle to define what 'performance' means in your job, isn't that a red flag all by itself? You can use this as an opportunity to understand the expectations of your employer (or at least your employer's agents). Or you can take this as a final confirmation that you are not achieving any personal fulfillment in this job. If you have to ask strangers, I sense you are quite lost in your current job.
As a male singer/songwriter I can tell you that women songwriters tend to, for unknown reasons, write their songs around female vocal capabilities, which are objectively higher than men's in terms of range and fluidity.

Women cover male songwriters frequently, but who are the great female songwriters? Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Kate Bush, and so on. They all tend to be excellent vocalists who write stuff that the average man simply can't match. While the great male songwriters are often weak to average singers: Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Lennon/McCartney. Women kill on those songs, with barely an effort sometimes.

As for modern Top40. It sucks. Who cares?
Solving sudoku and other kinds of logical "puzzles".
BP: Formal Proofs, the Fine Print and Side Effects (2018) [pdf]
No surprise if LLMs cannot verify because they have no access to the actual game. They bet on the data being good
The Conjugate Gradient Method without the Agonizing Pain https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quake-papers/painless-conjugate-grad...

Presents a really nice conceptual/intuitive explanation of how/why it works, rather than the traditional algebra based definition/proof you get in many linear algebra courses.
I wanted to check one word via Google Translate and the tab, naturally, reloaded, so I had to start my scrolling journey anew.

The word in question was "trifling".
"hey bot, I have {foodstuffs} available, I need to make dinner for n people. Give me some options in the x style"

Probably one of my most-used prompts, and it's batting close to 1.000.

Every now and then it will make a mistake, like forgetting the salt, putting a step in the wrong order, or the like, but far less often than you'd think. If you already have even a middling amount of kitchen experience, it's a fantastic use case.
I know! This is so sad. One would hope they'd be happy to reconnect with an old customer who still remembers them from 25 years ago.