skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This story hits home pretty hard. My first gig in the industry, so to speak, was working at one of the last few independently owned dialup ISPs in midwest in 2005. I first started as a phone tech, where I did everything from help folks get connected and configure their email clients to basic computer tech support. Sometimes I'd get dispatched to do an on-site install. There was also the dirty old man customer that was constantly getting his computer infected on shady porn sites, and we eventually turned on our web filter service for him gratis, because his wife was constantly embarrassed to keep paying to bring the computer in for service.

Eventually became a Jr. Sysadmin, cut my teeth on managing Apache HTTPD, MySQL, qmail, built my first Linux server compiling Gentoo from Stage 1 on a dual 700 MHz Pentium 3 box. Learned so much from an awesome old school Linux sysadmin who, like me, got his start as a young kid at this very ISP. Oh, and I had access to 8 bonded T1s, which when the fastest consumer bandwidth I could ever dream of was a consumer cable modem with 3 Mbit down, and 256kbit up, being able to surf day in and day out on 12 Mbit of bandwidth was blazing fast.

However, like every other dialup ISP, much like the story goes in the OP, this little ISP was far too entrenched in their Dialup install. We did offer DSL service, but we were effectively a reseller to the larger ISPs in the area, so for customers that did switch over, we either offered poorer service, or they were paying more for the same service they could get direct from the bigger ISP. We were suffering from consumer attrition as the great ISP consolidation was happening, and the money was getting tight. A startup looked to be our savior - they wanted to deploy WiMAX (this was before Sprint bought up all the WiMAX spectrum for their form of 4G) to the region. What was originally pitched as a full acquisition became an acquisition of our customer list and some of our services like our shared hosting. Spoiler alert, those jokers didn't know what they were doing, people started leaving the company left and right, eventually equipment started failing and the people that knew how to fix those things took their knowledge with them, and eventually, my paychecks started bouncing, so I left.

Personally one of the most rewarding jobs I ever had. I learned so much, got paid quite well for very little "work", and it really set a course for the rest of my professional career. But hoo, the death spiral story that OP showed gave me a stark reminder of the very bad end times of that time in my life.

Also, I wonder if OP is talking about GlobalPOPS as the company that bought all the dialup ISPs that they worked for.
If you accept relocation assistance and then don't relocate it, I'd expect the lawsuit to be open and shut.
I don't follow the logic the author is using. Let's say we make all public colleges free for students. "Elite" schools will still exist, and top students will still target schools such as Ivy/MIT/Stanford/etc. One look at the people in executive offices or top political offices and you'll find a substantial portion are graduates from elite schools.
Oh man. I have SUCH good memories of my school's SP9000. It was the first machine I really got to use APL with. Thx for digging this up. Also... there were APL compilers back in the day. It wasn't exclusively interpreted.
What is or isn't "pythonic" is largely determined by the community not the language. Nothing is stopping the Python community from monkey patching everything like the Ruby community does.

The f-string changes arrived because there was a need to formalize the syntax, so other Python parsers, for CPython to move off having a special sub-parser just for f-strings, and to be able decide whether weird edge cases were bugs or features.

Once formalized it was decided not to put arbitrary limits on it just because people can write badly formatted code, people are can already do that and it's up to the Python community to choose what is or isn't "Pythonic".

FYI, one of the things I'm really looking forward to is being able to write: f"Rows: {'\n'.join(rows)}\n Done!"

Which in Python 3.11 is illegal syntax.
Can't speak for anywhere else, but it was clearly established at Amazon that any relocation assistance had to be returned (prorated) if I left before 1 year. I don't imagine that's terribly unusual, but many companies might not make it as obvious if they don't have the same high turnover rates as Amazon.
While employers can ultimately do whatever they want, people hired remote prior to covid should remain remote. I think its sad when remote hires are caught up in the return to office drag net. These individuals were typically hired due to a lack of a local skill pool so the employer hired remote to find the talent. Its simply counter productive to try and make them move local and will result in the same problem eventually and the employer will be forced to hire remote once again.

Having said all that, the author misses the point on tax incentives being the driver of this. I know of many situations where the employer could care less about tax incentives and the overall cost of the return to office mandate. If they cared about money, they would sell or tear down their corporate HQs like many have. For some, its about what the c-level believes will make them successful. You can argue they are right or wrong in their belief, I'm in the wait and see camp of what this looks like in five years to see what we learn by trying different things.
Remote "work" is fine (with pros and cons). The problem is lots of people don't "work" remotely.

Also, inevitably remote/async work flips the priority such that employee would be much more responsive to interrupts/errands of their own life than to focus their full attention on the employer's concerns.
> In fact, the other commenters were conflating these two things, which I wanted to point out. I agree that they should not be conflated.

Yes, my bad. Being poor does not mean that you are automatically immoral for having children. But I clarified further that poverty is one of the variables in that judgment. Let's not pretend that being poor have no bearing on what the children will experience.
Everyone was posting on twitter about all the "projects" and video games they were working on during the lock down, despite supposedly still having full-time remote jobs.

They also had time to move all across the country.
Supreme Court upholds Japan's ban on dual nationality
That is an interesting view, that the cycle can be broken in 1 day. I guess looking back, if I go an entire day without using the internet, it is very easy to avoid distractions the next day. I'm going to try this our, albeit in a less rabbinical way.
Encoding is fine now. Microphones are bad though. Megacorps cheap out on providing some semi-decent headphones to the employees, that's why audio can be bad.
Sure, but RTO is about… forcing the preference for in person work on everyone.
Yes, Australia is a democratic government. I don’t understand where I’m claiming it isn’t. However the airline industry is not run by the Australian government, instead it is run by a for profit capitalist company (in this case the Qatar government), who’s intensive is to maximize the profit for their shareholder. The Austrialian government doesn’t even own the majority shares of the airline in question.
And no one would care. It's been an employers market for a year and will continue that way for the foreseeable future.
Similar here, been doing part time remote since '06, full time since '11. There's ups and downs to both sides.

I get "more done" remotely, in that I can usually have more time for deep focus. But then it's harder to get high-bandwidth knowledge transfer sessions, and overhear when someone has some particularly bad ideas (or roads you've already been down, etc).

I think I still prefer the remote side, and it's probably a better deal for the biz, but I would like to spend a few days here and there with like minded people on shared problems.
Iirc, the sentence is more like 5 years in prison than death.
> Walking over and talking to someone is still far superior to any online communication.

The reason it isn't, for me, is that I'm usually answering questions about Why we do something, or How something is supposed to work. I'm usually giving a quick response, with a link to a design, or a code snippet, or a git commit, or a Code Review link, or something online. So I have to provide an online response whether you ask me in person or not.

If I'm in a 1:1, yea I totally agree I'd rather just talk about career growth and that stuff in person. But.... I mean now we are walking down the already-well-discussed path of Manager/IC and how these jobs are just different.

I don't know for sure, but I think this is the experience of many senior developers.

[edit]
> I twiddled my thumbs waiting for the required SME to come online

I mean, this isn't an RTO discussion. If your SME is slacking off that is a different problem. Assuming best intentions, you would walk up to that SME's desk and there would already be 5 people waiting with a question because the SME can only talk to 1 person at a time.

I can slack with several different folks, so long as they can just wait a second while I type. The worst people (so sorry, there are some great TAMs) are the ones who page you as soon as they need something because they don't understand you are busy with a different project.
It’s called buyback because the companies are buying back their own stock

It’s akin to the loop you describe, they sell the stock to someone else, then they buy it back

I’m aware the timing, the disclosures, the regulations, etc are different

The mechanism is still the same, they buy their own thing to make the price go up
The point of being in the office is the other people being in the office. Unfortunate, but also true.

I totally by this might be a CEO power trip, but that doesn't also mean its an individualist ("I'm a star IC nothing else matter") brain rot. Star ICs do not a functioning org make.
> everybody is replaceable

Usually at a higher cost:

1. Employees seek new employment in order to increase their compensation, usually for the same amount+type of work. The replacement will likely be negotiating higher than what the original employee achieved through regular promotions and pay raises.

2. Software - and many other cognitive industries - are not like an assembly line (another CEO fallacy). You can't just slot in a replacement and expect things to continue as normal. Deliverables will suffer, either through quality or expediency.

You might also find it difficult to find a replacement that is as talented as the employee you lost. Someone calling your ultimatum means that they are confident in their ability to get re-hired (or in this case didn't struggle to get re-hired while they towed the line). Oops, you just lost rare talent.
I was talking about the applications I personally use frequently, like Slack for example. Unlike the parent said that "this becomes a frequent issue in any app at scale", I just don't see this happening on the UI's I personally use.

Having said that: they key-optimization thing will be implemented. The more frequent issues get a higher priority. Maybe it's this one.
WFH:

No commute.

Disabled people can work.

Less micro plastics in the environment from car tires.

Potentially lower greenhouse emissions.

No office means no costs from rent, heating/cooling, cleaning, furniture, etc etc.

Spending time around your family. (Although on that last one, I really dislike kids screaming in the background of conference calls)

Edited to add: I wonder how to compare energy usage or emissions? You have less road and office use, but more home use.

I'm puzzled by the people in this thread that seem to be saying "everyone must RTO because I want to". It's great that you personally want to work in an office and I wish you every success, but why drag people to the office if they want to work from home?
> The universe is infinite.

Well that’s a completely bogus claim you’ve entirely made up and presented as fact. But I’ll bite anyways: even infinite sets can have different cardinalities. The set of natural vs real numbers, for instance.
You don’t think there can be compromise until both sides admit their faults.

Count the times you see someone arguing WFH while admitting any degree of abuse like we all know it is.

To hear people here tell it, they would never do the things we all know happen.
Free in this context (and in health care discussions) obviously just means free at the point-of-use. It's so odd that people continue to pretend not to understand that to make some other point.
Well, considering the message that the website seems to be promoting that's not that surprising. It does read pretty evangelical, but the laws themselves are something I wouldn't have known about otherwise so at least it serves as a jumping-off point for further research.
Chat’s my favorite. Leaves a record so you don’t have to take notes or immediately record whatever you talked about so you don’t forget.

Screen sharing or pairing are better remote than in person.

In person’s good for a subset of types of meetings that some folks may find themselves in a lot. Brainstorming, product ideation, that kind of thing.

> In the office I just walk over to their desk. This is from the perspective of an engineer by the way, I'm not management.

One of the best things about WFH is this doesn’t happen.
** Trunk Tools | ML Engineers | Full-Time | US REMOTE or ONSITE NYC **

Trunk Tools creates software to make construction more efficient and cost effective, we have significant revenue and are growing extremely quickly! We're a team with prior experience at SpaceX, PlanGrid, Carta, LinkedIn, Uber, etc.

We're looking for:

* Lead AI/ML Engineer [1]
* Machine Learning Engineer [2]

Feel free to email your resume and a note over to rob+oct23@trunk.tools

[1] https://trunktools.com/careers/?ashby_jid=0a5a1379-d653-4805...

[2] https://trunktools.com/careers/?ashby_jid=d4c7f0cb-533f-4520...
Tying my ability to work remotely, and thus plan and live my life accordingly, to some kind of arbitrary performance mechanism installed by Initech's latest up-and-coming executive star, will result in me immediately leaving. I have the skill to back that statement, but I won't employ it just so that some patronizing manager can get a kick out of it.
Roads don't build themselves, water treatment doesn't happen by itself.

What is society for if not to serve the common needs of the people?
> silly to assume everyone has the same preference

I don't see the OP assuming that. Not everyone enjoyed it but for those of use who did going back is not desirable.
Just a reminder, free public college was the norm for a long time, and many people benefited from it before turning around and working hard to dismantle it. It's not some foreign concept. It's very much apart of America's history. The question we need to ask is whether it's a better system now than it was in the past, and I don't see anyone arguing that it's better now.
RTO people don't want to be in an empty office by themselves.
"roll your own"

Rather not. It takes an incredible amount of work to get it right. Just stick to ICU.
If you are building a remote-first company why would you restrict your talent pool to a single metropolitan area?
No, the immune response would be systemic no matter where the antigen manifests. You don't want the antigen being produced everywhere.
I think a company is entitled to choose how much they allow wfh and so is the person working to choose if they want to stay at the company, so strong arming goes both ways if the OP is complaining
> makes me question the whole metric, or at least whether it has any bearing on how people actually drink socially.

The data is the data. Where is it claimed that it summarizes "the whole culture"? What data would you look at for that?
There will always be elite, private schools, and people will pay to go to them. If public universities are completely free, then it becomes a scarcity of resources, as each tries to stretch a dollar. This will mean those who can afford it will pay to go to elite institutions.
If they have a child care option when they are in the office, why would the same child care option not be available when working from home?
Oops, yes, this one.
Who would oversea the spending of our taxes? There's no responsibility to provide a viable product currently because people are forced to pay and can't default on the loan if the product the college sold them wasn't variable to earning money to pay back the loan for payment college requested.

Think a world where colleges have to take more responsibility in making sure the loans they demand can by paid back would result in a better system where more people who leave actually end up earning amounts that justify what they loaned to go there.
That's unrelated to unicode. The checkmark symbol just isn't in the Arial font, so Word just falls back to a font that has it - Segoe UI. You've found a bug where Word still thinks it's Arial. But this is something that would happened no matter what encoding you choose for your characters.
Turns out you can do that in an office too
I know of some workers that were hired remotely in states that dont have offices that were then required to either move to an office or quit during the return to office.
I keep thinking about this topic for a couple of years now (hence my question). I wonder if combination of new technology could be made into much more useful microwave, even if the cost was not suitable for personal use (at least initially).

The dream is a microwave with "single button" (start/stop) and a temperature scale (lukewarm, warm, hot, boiling) that consistently heats up food correctly and doing so within very short period of time (below 3 min).
> The reduction stems from an accounting adjustment that lowered personal income from mutual funds and real estate investment trusts.

There is a good methodological discussion on the merits of this change, published back in May by the BEA [0].

> "At the same time, the inclusion of capital gains dividends, which flow to households, biases upward the estimates of personal income and saving from current production for the household sector.

> Under the new treatment, BEA will remove income from capital gains from dividends paid by REITs (and, for consistency, from dividends paid by other corporate real estate businesses). This change will generally result in downward revisions to REIT dividends paid and offsetting upward revisions to undistributed profits of REITs, and thus business saving. This change will lead to similar downward revisions to dividends received by shareholders (households), to personal income, and to personal saving."

0: https://apps.bea.gov/scb/issues/2023/05-may/0523-ric-reit.ht...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x#Windows_for_Workg...
In office people don't care about just themselves being in an office, they want everyone in an office. Being in an office to take video conferences is pointless, they want that collective environment that they thrived in pre-pandemic.
"In fact in general it seems anti-immigration/foreigner stances are almost anti-proportional to the number of immigrants/foreigners a person might encounter during their day."

That is an egg-and-chicken question. "White flight" is a thing and people who moved away from ghettoizing cities/neigbourhoods into the surrounding suburbia will likely vote against further immigration.
And yet, there is a reason that Orals are not what is used to give the final assessment and grant the degree. Like I said, has a place, but not the ideal way to reach the truth. Orals serve a purpose, but that purpose is most definitely not "determine the truth, as best as we are capable, of a particular question". Also, I don't really agree that Orals are particularly similar to a "debate" at all. For one thing, there usually aren't two "positions".
The type that gets Unpack[]'d needs to inherit from TypeDict, unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean.
Yes, I do realize that, and acknowledge it in my comments

I’m not saying they are “the same thing”

I’m saying the basic mechanism and potentially motivation is the same:

They buy their own thing and make the price go up
It does have to do with the motivation for writing this in the first place.
I don't know anyone that is advocating for forcing everyone to work from home but instead "office available for anyone who wants it."

There's a mile wide difference between "my preference is to be vegetarian" where people will get out the stops to provide accommodations and "my preference is everyone must keep vegetarian."
That it did
>The universe is infinite.

Whether or not this is true, it's somewhat irrelevant, as the observable universe is finite, meaning there's a finite amount of "stuff" that can causally influence us. What happens far beyond the observable universe is not worth dwelling on, as we will never see it or be otherwise influenced by it.
The reason there's little compromise is that there's only so many profitable workplaces to go around. So how they get managed is a resource decision allocation problem like most other things.

I think for people in the Bay Area maybe this might not be the case. But other places in the world don't have the same kind of plethora of options.

For me, it's work remote, or take a massive paycut and work on far less interesting and satisfying work. But I also don't like working remote. So, yeah...
Seattle did this a few years ago, but without bothering to do much of any of the rest of the infrastructure changes. Without enforcement, the speed limits largely just get ignored. If we had enforcement, you can bet it would immediately become a selective enforcement issue.
Why didn’t you list the negatives?

And in a John Stewart Mill way, list the negatives in their most sincere and effective forms by the people that truly believe them. Not just your take that you happen to easily to refute.

Steelman RTO from the point of a company dealing with WFH abuse and I’ll think you are more serious.
It's the "Return" part of RTO that people have a problem with. Have an office if you like, but don't expect me to go there. I work from home.
I bet the percent of people working at startups is tiny though.
Unpopular opinion but people under appreciate seeing the humanity of their coworkers especially in reducing conflict.

It’s so easy especially for coders (and I imagine other knowledge workers) to get into flame wars debating things when you’re only typing things out. Video calls help a little but not everyone wants to turn on their cameras and it’s easy to eventually get used to seeing people as mere tiles in a screen. People tend to be more careful when there’s a real human in front of them.
Working in office can be good. But the question is - are you getting paid 20% more for the RTO job compared to the remote? To compensate for the 20% more time wasted in useless transit (2 more hours per day)?
Yeah, it's a seamless experience to run a program in shell-mode that invokes $EDITOR and it just pops into a new buffer. Edit, hit C-x #, and you're back at the shell.
It's telling that people aren't willing to contend with the corollary of "free education" and "free healthcare": limited capacity.

Edit: I should probably mention that I'm generally in favor of state-funded education, for a variety of reasons.
Let's also note that Google now offers ChromeOS Flex[1], which is a version of ChromsOS comparable to Debian "old stable".

I have ChromeOS Flex running on two older (but excellent) Chromebooks used by family. The hardware is good; the chipset was obsoleted by Intel. ChromeOS Flex is keeping these devices useful without my needing to install Debian. (Less work for me.)

[1] _ https://support.google.com/chromeosflex/answer/11542901?hl=e...