skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This 100%. Whether I would fire someone depends on why I thought they were underperforming. You should consider the first month on the job a work sample and if someone isn’t measuring up within the first week tell them what your expectations are and that they’re not being met. If they don’t remediate within a month let them go.

I kept someone for too long once and people on an adjacent team didn’t want to get stuck with that person during a re-org and were vocal about it. And that person bungled some important projects that set us back years on our ambitions.

Fire them and use this as an opportunity to address your interview process. The longer you keep them the worse it will be.
Poles on horseback fought Germans in WWII.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_at_Krojanty

And, volunteering is easy, especially for a group pre-disposed to defending their land. I’d be more surprised about them not volunteering.

I’d be surprised about them winning.

Then again, in ‘39, as above, the Polish cavalry charge delayed the Germans.

Charging machine-guns on horseback had the expected result in the end though.
This is very strange that you're asking HN how to handle the situation. Who are the "We" that is running your company? Of course, if you're just posting something to generate some chat on HN that's fine, but if you actually need to ask the opinion of the HN community about what to do in this situation, then you have bigger problems.
Clean data and try to get people to understand why they need to have clean data.
Agreed. The purpose of nature isn’t to fix human follies. Its habitat.
Fire their ass or downgrade the job title (and pay) to intern.
Underrated comment. At my place of work, I find this to be a huge part of the MLE job. Everyone knows R but none of the cloud tools have great R support.
> Clever people generally have low risk tolerances and stay home

Citation needed. Anecdotally speaking I have seen no correlation between smarts and risk tolerance.
From this post there's not really any indication they're a "bad employee" though. They aren't up to the needs of the team that hired them, but that was on that team to figure out before they hired them.

It's probably fine to fire them, but also everyone involved should be open about the fact that the hiring and so also the firing is the direct result of their own failure. The morale implications of this could be lot more nuanced than you're implying.
I wouldn't say that my circles are especially car enthusiast oriented. But pretty much everyone I know--including myself--chose our vehicles pretty deliberately in support of outdoor activities.

I did have a small sporty vehicle as well but that didn't make sense once I didn't have a commute any longer.

But I don't live in a city and rarely travel to one in which case my priorities might be different--though even the people I know who do live in the city pretty much all own vehicles for weekend activities.
If you’re willing to write all of this in a hacker news post, it’s clear that you take this very seriously, and it weighs heavily on your mind. Based on what you said, it’s also clear you must let this person go, but be helpful in finding them an opportunity that matches their skill level. Easier said than done!
"People buying new trucks" already restricts you to 5% of the vehicle transactions in a given year, with ~25% of purchases being new and ~20% of those being trucks. Factor in the rest of the criteria and I don't think you're really capturing the average transaction at all.
How does Europe handle it?
You fucked up, but most likely you are playing with vc money so who gives a fuck? Pay him, keep him. Chances are you will fold in a year or two so at least you make someones life a bit better for a while.

You not saving the world or anything like that, so just syphoon as much of the idiots vcs moneys to normal people lives. That is the goal with start ups right?
Does anyone know what type of contractor I could call locally that installs these things?
I did bearings on a front loader once as well. Doable, but not particularly fun, that's for sure.
I'd say a strict Content Security Policy (at least script-src 'self' WITHOUT unsafe directives) is even more important to keep the impact contained, so you'd have to put your scripts into separate files - as opposed to using inline scripts. It obviously won't help against "HTML injection" in general, but will shield your users from malicious scripts as long as you make sure that an attacker can't just upload scripts on the permitted origin(s).
ha I was reading this as well thinking shit, is this about me?
Regular indexes are not that useful for this kind of query as you need to read the entire table in most cases.
US is an exception in terms of at-will employment.

In most other countries you cannot fire people just for reasons like this.

In other countries people have to resort to backhanded ways like the parent comment mentioned if you want to get someone off the payroll.
there has been nothing like the 2017 Tubbs fire smoke covering San Fancisco in living memory.. you are right but nothing in California is "normal" in the current era
If keeping this person onboard requires the effort of training them and keeping their comp a secret, it's not worth it. It will get out that this person is getting paid senior comp for entry-level work, and that isn't going to fly for the people who are performing. Don't overthink this.

They're not fit for the role, and to boot, they misrepresented themselves. Your process screwed up, but the key is to not compound that. I'd encourage you to still be decent and give a good severance, because this is ultimately your company's fuck up, and you should take your medicine.
Yeah that’s plausible. And the text is hopefully in some nicely indexed store, a proper database, which references the repos.
Discussed at the time:

The Poor Man's 3D Camera - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15797045 - Nov 2017 (36 comments)
At Summit Station in Greenland (much smaller than Pole, Pole feels like a luxury resort comparitively), an outfall hole + usually we use the outhouses (which are just made using hot air).

Fresh water comes from the snow cave, and shoveled into the water melter.
Highly paid cleaning lady. With dirty data you get no proper results. BTW: perl is much better than python on this.

Highly paid motherboard troubleshooter, because those all those H100's really get hot, even with watercooling, and we have no dedicated HW guy.

Fighting misbehaving third-party deps, as everyone else.
Non-trained misunderstandings of the law like this are exactly what Google is trying to avoid by keeping a case like this out of the hands of the jury.
To echo everyone else's sentiment - fire them.

Also, this was HR's mistake, so give them in no uncertain terms your decision to let this person go, and let them handle the rest.
So according to this theory to accentuate romance between a man and woman, the woman needs to make sure she’s placed in the most hideous settings possible to magnify her allure to her prospective mate?

Fascinating. All those romantic restaurants and locales really have screwed up their marketing.
Holy, that’s insane praise. Thanks for sharing.
> I have seen all kinds of bizarre claims which are at odds with reality, but which, being described in a wikipedia page, are taken for gospel, and end up reproduced and sometimes embellished further.

Editing Wikipedia is fun, but sometimes it is hard to know where to edit. Here's a simple process to find correctable errors!

(1) Sneak onto your local university's campus.

(2) Sit in any operating systems lecture.

(3) Watch for nonsense in the slides.

(4) Locate the relevant Wikipedia page.

(5) Rewrite the entire two-page section around whatever was on that slide, because chances are it's all nonsense.
I never understand these situations, it took me months to get a job offer and somehow incompetent people accidentally stumble into senior roles?
Do you need to demonstrate to others this person's incompetence before you can let them go?

You could put them on a project by themselves, with expectations on par with other senior devs. Let them provide you with the evidence you need to make your case.
I can’t speak to the Wikipedia page as I have not read it but the biographical material in my Norton Critical Moby Dick and Delbanco’s Melville line up: Moby Dick was a flop and ruined his reputation in society, Pierre not selling further precipitated the crisis built from choices made while riding a high into The Whale.

Melville bought many things with debt: his farm, his rare books, clothes. I don’t find it unimaginable that he paid for the grand tour with debt spending either.
Regardless of the official title, it long ago spread far beyond statistics.
Really happy to see progress in C++ libraries. So many hardware improvements over the last decade that need a good interface to boost performance.
Don’t drag out these decisions.

It sucks to see an underperformer stick around and get lots of $$. It just tells your team that surrounding them with great people isn’t actually a priority.

It also sucks to be a person in this position feeling like you’re underperforming for the long term. Or feel on the precipice of being let go without it happening.

Gotta be OK being upfront with folks and ripping the bandaid off. It’s a day of feeling bummed on the team that’s better than months of team members feeling unmotivated.

I’ll also say this should be really rare and if it keeps happening you need to review your hiring practices, as that’s actually the root cause of people getting into your team that aren’t a good fit.
I think the belief that a 6 month bootcamp (or equivalent) is sufficient to create a competent developer even in "easy" domains like web is a big reason why most software sucks and why "impostor syndrome" is over-reported.

Most 4 year degrees aren't even sufficient, as they just teach academic knowledge and "hacking" skills (as in "hacking your grades") that produce juniors that leave a massive wake of technical debt unless checked.

But yes, 6mo could be enough to get a particular employee productive, assuming they are highly engaged (ideally not remote) and have someone available to train them every day, and so on.
> they're struggling to do even basic stuff without help and are far from helping others

Question: how does that "helping others" look like? In companies there's a planning phase with meetings, the work phase with assigned tickets - how does the helping fits in? Is it in those cases when somebody asks about features - unknown to him - in the codebase which somebody else knows about?
Referring to the parent comment, the data which NOAA isn’t able to buy is the government’s data, which is freely provided to non-government organizations. The parent comment doesn’t discuss personal data very much. I think this misunderstanding might be the root cause of your disagreement.
It's a handheld pachinko game. A real one in a plastic case, not software.
The slides from the Spark AI 2020 summit [1] helped me understand this a bit. If I get it correctly, the premise is that a specific format is used to organise information into efficient blocks where related column data "lives" closer together, enabling faster read speeds but worse write speeds.

If someone has more resources on the topic, I'd be very interested. There are many applications where sacrificing data freshness for a considerable uptick in performance is alluring.

[1]: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/the-apache-spark-file-f...
Why not? xv6 doesn't prevent you from learning about microkernels in any way. It's also a complete operating system with code that's friendly for beginners.
Weather.gov
> A good strategy would be to have them be a lead on a minor project that requires technical chops and communication. Ensure there is a daily standup and grind them on details and timelines. Get them some juniors as direct reports to expose their lack of knowledge, then have meetings with these junior devs about project performance.

> The stress alone will probably make them quit. Document as much as you can in emails and messaging systems.

My god, no. Unless you want to set a precedent for super-toxic, manipulative workplace environment. (You don't get to pick&choose when evil happens: "I learned it from watching you".) As well as expose the company to potentially an 8-figure harassment suit.
Agreed *, but (IMO) that's if you're starting with someone who has no prior experience in those topic areas.

In my experience, usually some level of existing expertise is considered a prerequisite for senior dev positions.

* Although a whole year sounds really long for a senior dev to get going in any of those topic areas.
It's important to take responsibility. HR and the company fucked up. The employee negotiated well and over-sold their skills.

I'd sit down with employee, and present options.

Start with: You're not performing at the level, technically or with leadership, that we were expecting. Some of this is our fault, for not figuring that out in the interview. So this is going to be an uncomfortable conversation...

Option A: We decide you aren't a good fit for this position, part ways, and we wish you good luck in your next opportunity.

Option B: We adjust your salary and title to fit with what we've seen of your productivity. We realize this is a hard ask. We also come up with a plan in which you have a training and responsibility plan over the next year to get you to what we'd expect for someone in your original role, at which time we'll consider you for promotion.

A lot of responses here start and end with firing, which seems kind of callous to the individual for an HR fuckup. Better to at least present the demotion option.
Nah I think it's me
Unrelated: did this manage to work its way up to the #2 spot in under an hour because everyone on HN is worried this is about them deep down?
Maybe an earlier version of Plausible analytics? They used to use postgres but now they use clickhouse
This is turning out to be Theranos level fraud.
Probation periods at the start of employment, mostly. And once the probation period is over, you need to provide robust cause to fire someone.
> The amount of times I have only confused people more by trying to explain...

That's not Feynman's fault!
You can fire people in Europe too. In a lot of cases you have a six month trial period in which the employer or the employee can cancel the employment without any notice period. After six months there is a notice period from both parts, typically one to three months.
Maybe they should create a startup teaching very talented people how to better represent themselves in interviews.
It's still working for me on the live site
Copyright and privacy rights 99%.
Trademarks certainly not.
Do you realize that at least half of the bike accidents don't involve cars? Getting rid of the cars won't get rid of the dangers of the two wheeled, unstable machines that frequently toss the riders when the brakes lock.

https://discerningcyclist.com/bicycle-accident-statistics/
Be loud then
> the candidate excelled at selling themselves and negotiating

sales / executive track
This is what probationary periods are for.
I'm not even sure it's suboptimal to shell out to grep instead of writing a bespoke search in Python. It would depend on the amount of data I'm sifting through.

Grep is very optimized for what it does.
Print news is dying because of the internet; this isn't news.

But we're talking about the most fundamental questions of journalistic ethics here.

The Murdoch media -- in particular the News Of The World -- hacked people's phones (including a missing teenager's phone, deleting voicemails and giving her family and the police false evidence she was alive), spied on people, and colluded with a series of corrupt police. And on really an epic scale.

The News Of The World was little more than a criminal enterprise, and essentially everyone in News International leadership knew it.

Even the (utterly loathsome, morally corrosive) Daily Mail is a beacon of truth by comparison.
I don't think DOS ever wrote zeroes when extending a file (except when using the FCB function "write random with zero fill"). On a single-user system, you'd only get back your own deleted data, so this at least can't be considered a security problem.

It definitely is a problem if a network server extends files that way!

NTFS has a "zero fill" flag that the OS sets for newly allocated blocks, so it doesn't actually have to fill them on disk - it can just return zeroes when an application tries to read from a part of the file that hasn't been written yet. I believe ext4 and all other modern filesystems have this optimization as well.
The entire repo is written in Rust. bc is one of 145 utils specified by POSIX.
You have changed your ideals because you’ve seen examples of one specific thing on both sides of the spectrum?
Where's the metarazor that helps us weed out what is or isn't a razor?
Yes. Do you realize how insane this is? A colleague of mine used to have a chart of staff per faculty member at MIT versus time. That figure has gone up around 20-fold on that chart.

It's almost all bloat and overhead made possible by being over capitalized.
This is why we need to have coding tasks during the recruitment process.

It helps both sides.
This is the interesting thing about this entire thread. There are a lot of opportunities for authors to make a living, even potentially become wealthy writing but they actually have to write in niches people want to read.

Instead I get the sense that the people writing these "debut novels" are really looking for fame/acceptance within the kind of social circles that value "great intellectual novels".
Nice, now I only need to move to the US.
I can't imagine why any ISP would do such absurd things when in my experience you're given sufficient resources on your first allocation. My small ISP received a /36 of IPv6 space, I couldn't imagine giving less than a /64 to a customer.
For the frying, we never have any grief on our cast iron. I usually give it a little spray of oil, but you can successfully fry an egg even if you don't. We have a couple stainless calphalons that are pretty effective at filling space inside the cupboard and that's about it.
Zomato in India started a crowd-supported weather system

https://www.weatherunion.com/
They are encouraged by regulation in Japan. Lower tax, registration fees, and insurance. Also the requirement in some areas to have off-street parking to register a car is waved.
They can already do that. Look at ActivTrak
It is expensive --- but here (the Netherlands) you can still fire or demote someone after the initial trial period. Instant dismissal without cause (for non-discriminatory reasons) is possible in the trial period, with trial period being time-limited (1 month for 12 month contract, 2-3 for permanent).

The going rate for firing without cause is about 1/3rd of a month of salary per year of employment for an employee under 55 (?) on a permanent contract. On a yearly contract this is difficult - I would recommend hiring on permanent contracts because they are even seen as a positive.

Demoting will mean that you overpay someone, but will at least clarify the new hierarchy to the team.
I don't follow (not from the US, please excuse my ignorance). I was told that, with some exceptions, in the US every job is permanently "on probation" ("at will employment"). As in, you can get fired from one day to the other, no severance and no reason needed (as long as it's not discrimination based on sex, religion, etc). Is my understanding incomplete?
This is nonsense. Nobody rewards for future (unknown) performance. What kind of logic is that?
That is the case for at least some of the articles. There are also quite a few initialized projects but with nothing inside of them. And the overall file count comes from things like saved email templates that they have sent out, etc. Node modules, and a lot of other garbage files from Terraform, Ansible, etc.
Author has a similar post on his blog, poor man's multithreading, took me down a rabbit hole for many many months getting equivalent in Qt for a multithreaded opengl renderer 8 years ago. Ended up learning a lot on profiling, memory alignment, rolled some toy stuff like a circular buffer, lightweight mutex and a serialization lib. Fun painful times but probably wouldn't do it again. Funnily enough it was also one of the first things I asked gpt when it became widely available and it laid out a decent enough example with glfw and stdlib.
I'd go down to about $2M, which is where MIT was at a quarter century ago, when it was it's prime.

Being answerable to funding sources, tuition, etc. is a good thing. Having money to soon off from is not.
If you allow him to stay, and do the learning (if he's willing to) you would be magical fairy granting wishes. There is no such work place with such an attitude
> I guess in most companies this would be a no-brainer, but we're a small outfit with a focus on personal development, intrinsic motivation, good climate, and low turnover.

Really? You want low turnover in people who lie to you in the interview and are a drag on the rest of the team?

That’s exactly how you get high turnover from the good-fit people.
> Certainly the strategy around open sourcing something like Protobuf vs. something like Chromium or Android is entirely different.

Yeah I was just speculating with a well-known project. Sometimes it doesn't matter to the company and some engineer manages to open source it, sometimes it is a strategic decision by the company, and sometimes the company does not realize it would be a benefit (I believe in my Marshall example).

> Cap'n Proto hasn't caught on much because frankly I don't care to make it a product

And that's your right, and people using it need to realize (or you can correct me if I'm wrong) that unless they make a contribution that Cloudflare cares about, it's probably not worth contributing at all.

Reminds me of this very similar criticism of Signal recently [1], where someone was frustrated because they spent time on a PR that never got reviewed. I do understand it is very frustrating and it happened to me as well (I put quite some effort in a project and it was lost because the maintainers did not care). But the lesson I learned was that I should just be wiser when I decide if I want to contribute to a project or not. And for projects that essentially belong to companies (which I understand is currently the case of Cap'n Proto, since you say that your time right now belongs to Cloudflare), then probably it's not worth it. I guess if I reported a bug that affected Cloudflare I would not even have to bother fixing it myself: someone at Cloudflare would.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40596573
I appreciate your willingness to try to salvage the situation, but the best thing for all parties in scenarios like this is to transition them out.

I liked to use GWC for all employees:
- do they "get it"?
- do they want it?
- do they have the capacity to do it?

All three must be yes for a role to be a good fit.

It's nobody's fault; perhaps they -were- at a senior level at another org, but your definition of senior might be more aligned with the market.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter. Their capabilities do not match the requirements of the business. Take the emotion out and it's an easy decision.
Don’t drag out a hopeless under-performer.

I’ve learned that peers often won’t say what needs to be said even if
it impacts the team, but they will expect leads and managers to pick-up on the problem and handle it all the same.
Was the candidate informed about the expectations before or after being hired? Has anyone communicated to them that they are not meeting those expectations?
This lecture series on columnar storage formats and querying them is great.
https://youtu.be/1hdynBJo3ew?si=5KfT_2qpUFQmy_uL
The Times has had regular summer wildfire coverage on the West Coast for as long as I can remember. All the same, it shouldn’t be that surprising that an East Coast paper puts out a headline for an unusual condition on the East Coast. What’s the beef?