skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Should I tell the founder his top employees are lazy and liars?
Hi, everyone. I know the title is blunt and the post is a little long. Please bear with me.

1. I'm an employee at a small agency (<10 of us).

2. I've been here almost a year. I've already seen a couple of raises and a promotion. I'm killing it and I sense my job is secure despite what I reveal to my employer. But who knows?

3. I discovered the most senior employee was charging a client for work that was never performed.

4. I let it go. I discovered this 6 months into the job and just wanted to play it safe. Nobody likes a snitch.

5. We ended up losing the client. I felt guilty for not speaking.

6. At almost a year in now, I've found that last month alone this individual is billing four clients for work that was also not performed. It makes me sick when I'm around this person.

7. I've recently discovered that the next most-senior employee is also charging three of their clients for work that is also not being completed.

8. In a recent private meeting with the founder, I informed him that I think people aren't doing their work. He said that was "distressing," sighed, and we continued discussing some other matters. He also said he'd like any other concerns brought to his attention whenever I felt I needed to raise them, his "door was always open," etc. I know he could sense I was wary about telling him anything too specific. I'm glad that he didn't push the matter at that time. This was about 3 weeks ago.

I have another meeting with the founder later this week. What should I say?
I'd love to know what type of standing desks they had in the video.
Whoah, falcon doors are a deal breaker for millions of potential customers? Are you sure?

They're my favorite thing about the car. I hadn't even considered the issue with putting things on the roof, because I've never put anything on a roof before. I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't need that capability.
Artist Spends 50 Years Creating Massive Map Of Imaginary Cities
But why would you want to? Even in Scala? Use Futures only when bothered with async IO, and even then be very careful about it. Options always made debugging more difficult because they defer where you get your NPE.
Well it's possible if they are switching from a leviathan sharepoint setup.
There is a crazy opportunity. But it comes with risk. Risk that it may take months for you to eventually withdraw the dollars from MtGox to your bank account (wire transfers are executed at a glacial pace as reported by users). By that time, who knows what the BTC exchange rate will be. It may not be possible anymore to then buy BTC at $100 on other exchanges.

The last withdrawal I executed from MtGox (1000 EUR in April) took 3 months to be done (saw the money hit my bank account in July). MtGox was apologetic in support ticket I filed, but did not explain why it took so long other than they had "issues".
Ask HN: What is friendship?
I'm Italian, left Italy at 30 years old, now living in San Francisco. I used to have a few VERY good, close friends. Now I feel friendship is fading away, and I'm not building new ones.
A good question I'm asking myself these days is: what is friendship? How does it change from country to country, from age to age?
> A healthy person can have a soda without negative health effects

That's simply untrue. The standard recommendation from nutritionists as to the healthy number of sodas to drink is zero. That's why I asked the question: the reality is that the difference between 'unhealthy' and 'toxic' is simply one of scale. Yes, clearly, drain cleaner is on one end of that scale, and soda is on another, and alcohol is somewhere near the middle. Trying to act as though there is a clear dichotomy, though, is misleading.

The reason that you and so many others who refer to taxation as threat of death are a pain to have discussions with is that you argue in such a way as to completely ignore reality. Yes, in your hypothetical theoretical worlds, there exists a narrative in which someone resisting taxation would proceed to foment a rebellion which would end in that person's death. That being the case has absolutely no place in a rational discussion of government, and simply serves to distract us from real practical issues that are worth discussing.
"I want to stress the importance of being young and
technical," Facebook's CEO (now 28) told a Y Combinator
Startup event at Stanford University in 2007. "Young people
are just smarter. Why are most chess masters under 30? I
don't know. Young people just have simpler lives. We may not
own a car. We may not have family. Simplicity in life allows
you to focus on what's important."

I'm on the younger end of the spectrum (31), but I just don't see how any CEO thinks you can say something like this and not open yourself up to age discrimination lawsuits. If that's his opinion as CEO, you can be sure that that attitude impacts policy either directly or indirectly.
Are you trying to start a semantic debate about what the U.S. Government is? One possible definition of government is the executive branch, and the Obama administration, currently, is (close to) the least abstract definition of the executive branch of government. Equivalence relations are not defined with respect to things like the Obama administration and the U.S. Govt.

In other words, your question is inadequately specified.
0:58 - 1:07 of the first video link... the car continues to attempt to propel itself into the wall.
The opposite. Let's say you convert USD to BTC at ~$100 at BitStamp, move the BTC to Gox and sell it at ~$120 USD. You made a 20% profit on paper, but now you have USD that you can't withdraw any time soon, possibly ever.
Frankly, I'd be surprised if the founder in such a small business wasn't aware this was already going on. If he didn't then he's incompetent, if he does then he's as dodgy as the employees you reference.

Integrity is one of the most valuable traits you can look for in people. Rather than worrying about the company so much, I'd be more concerned with yourself and how it reflects upon you being associated with this type of behaviour.

Just my 2 cents. Good luck!
This is in Australia.
Would you like to build the android of the car industry?

I am in... but I can only hit pavement running at a much further level of dev than now...
Why would anyone confide in a lawyer offered by their interrogators? How disingenuous to claim legal council was offered or available.
3 - 5 ... sounds like you've worked out for yourself one reason that keeping quiet was wrong.

What I'd do:

- Give up any idea of continuing to work for that agency; you might come out of it smelling like roses, but you might get fired as well. Accept that acting ethically might cost you your job, and act on that assumption. Also, remember that being fired for acting ethically is, in the long run, an act of mercy: you don't want to be associated with crooks.

- Put your complaint in writing, with details. Names, dates, amounts, clients, anything & everything you can remember. Give it to the founder, and explain that you'd like something done about it.

- Repeat the previous step a few times. If nothing happens, tender your resignation. Again: do you want to work for crooks?

- If resignation is necessary (or, if you're fired), then go to the clients and present them with the very same written complaint you presented to the founder. Be aware that being sued by the agency is a very real possibility should that happen.
Ah, henge pin charges, makes sense. I suppose you could just kick the doors off at that point.
No, because I might be that employee.
It is certainly possible they were yanking my chain, would not be the first time. Our CTO Greg had an issue with the 'low power' recharge situation which was fixed by a later software update. I've not manageed to get the building owner to install a charging station in our parking lot yet alas.
Not necessarily; few employees are willing to take a pay cut - that is why 5% of staff are laid off, rather than everyone in the company taking a 5% cut.

The latter would probably be more efficient for the company. However many workers would start looking for a better job.
The difference would have been that then everyone had rallied against the evil Republican. Now instead you are called a racist for even implying that Obama is an authoritarian statist. Look what happened to the rodeo clown.
Only problem with using an exploit to manipulate stock price is that the SEC would be at your doorstep in no time and put you behind bars for a significant amount of time.
You didn't mention much about the founder. Is he someone with a different background that just doesn't understand what's happening? Is he too busy with other things to see this? Does he actually think everything is going well, or does he just not know how to fix it? Or maybe he knows it's happening, but also knows money is tight?
Well, ignoring the meaningless guilt by association tactics ("fox-news-worthy neocon propaganda"), it's quite simple.

I don't care about being "forward-thinking". I care deeply about freedom. I have relatively idiosyncratic views, but I align myself largely with the libertarians except on a few social issues.

I just don't think people should be forced to do things except in very specific and limited circumstances.

I find the examples you bring up rather interesting. First, I think the right/left political system in America implied by your choice of topics is a false dichotomy. I don't think the two sides are really all that different at the core.

Pepsi in schools is a non-issue to me. My problem there is the schools themselves - this is a different argument, and I'll have it in a different comment if you want to have it. So no, I don't think it should be banned.

The immigration question is very difficult, and brings up many issues such as the real role of nations and the importance of citizenship. I haven't completely made up my mind on the issue, but I think both the major positions are wrong.

Really, I think immigration wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for the cancerous explosion of government in the first place. One of the biggest problems the Right has with immigrants (other than racism, which exists and which I eschew), is that they gain access to socialized benefits they didn't have to support. I don't think the government should be forcing people to pay for these social benefits in the first place, with a few very limited exceptions.

That said, there are many other facets to the issue, so I'm not going to take any definite stand on the issue as a whole at this point.
Log4r does feel very robust and customizable, but also feels much more verbose and heavy.

You get pretty much all of that and with less verbose configuration with the Logging gem + lograge, yet they are still relatively easy to tweak. The email notification of the Logging/Logging-rails gem in particular is really great, and you can even define message thresholds (not more than one email per minute, only if X number of errors etc)
The thing I'm struggling with, does this also apply to working for a non-profit whose mission you believe in?
You omitted the part where the previous poster described that quote as toxic.

If you see your time as much more precious than your colleagues, and default to treating them with contempt, you're going to have a hard time finding colleagues. Which you may not care about.

But what should matter to you is that it's basically a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you treat your colleagues like that, they're never going to get better, and they're going to be the ones who eventually vote to throw out all your beautiful code and go back to Java, where they at least understand what's going on and nobody condescends to them all day.
I've read that this isn't the case:

> Obesity is a major cause of morbidity and mortality and is associated with high medical expenditures. It has been suggested that obesity prevention could result in cost savings. The objective of this study was to estimate the annual and lifetime medical costs attributable to obesity, to compare those to similar costs attributable to smoking, and to discuss the implications for prevention.
….
Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained. Obesity prevention may be an important and cost-effective way of improving public health, but it is not a cure for increasing health expenditures.

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...
Yeah I'm calling BS on that.

Patriarchy in cultures is without fail about the control of women. All niceties around protecting them boil down to treating them as property, as chattel. You fundamentally don't have an equal situation when one gender is rendered property of another.

ergo misogyny
Not when you're trying to make an objective comparison with a small number of trials.
I keep fearing this guy is going to pull a John Gault on us. He's the closest thing to an Ayn Rand character I've seen in my lifetime. Too close for comfort.

Atlas Shrugged came out when I was entering high school and almost ruined me according to my dad back then (and he was a republican.) :-)
I was surprised to see a technology on the list on the up and up which I could not identify, kafka. There aren't that many posts submitted to HN on it and the few that are have almost no comments. Who's using it in production besides LinkedIn?

I was also very surprised to see that NLP had declined and that machine learning was not on the list (but Statistics was).

What were the criteria used for those included on the top ten lists?

Were the named tokens measured automatically collected or did you manually enter the tokens?
See the Red Cross forcing id Software to change the red crosses on medpacks to pills. I mean who gives a shit, on any level? But some enforcement lawyer got a bug up their butt and they are paid to do this exact thing.

One of the many reasons I don't donate to Red Cross, actually. Too much money on advertising and lawyers.
Engineers don't write code, they build bridges, aircrafts, highways, spaceships etc.
I like that it provides an extra little bit of protection from the rain when stepping outside on a rainy day into a lobby or something.
This is great. They should use these for the new Teslas.
Yes, the Twisted Deferred is a not-quite-a-monad. The API would be simpler if it was, but I guess the original developers didn't have that insight at the time they were writing it.
I remember having this same problem once upon a time. I forget how I solved it...

This[0]?

[0]: http://serverfault.com/questions/385920/disable-networked-ta...
right - objectification of women in ads is bad - boo West

You have me on that. I'm with you all the way.

Treating women as property of men. Using violence and intimidation against women to maintain the traditional order. The normalization of sexual harassment of women in a culture at large. The institutionalized discrimination against them (try getting a divorce lawyer to take your case as a professional woman in India).

All vastly, dramatically and objectively worse.
I just finished my "Reengineer our CI system" sprint task!

We now run the free version of Team City on our QA-server, so it builds our ClickOnce Deployments and uploads them and it also builds our MVC4 projects and deploys them. I'm quite happy with how it works.
You can't do arbitrage if you can't get your dollars out. If you buy Bitcoins for $100 and sell them on Mt. Gox for $120, you're making money on paper but you can't necessarily get your earnings out into your bank account. You'd quickly run out of capital, and in the end you might have your dollars seized.
How To Go Viral Using Facebook Login
Ttml
But at the same time Internet doesn't offer many games for toddlers, say < 4 years old.
You need to go back and edit your comment. You mistakenly said billions of people.

You clearly meant billions of men. The idea that the women of the world are crying out to be restricted from opportunity, to be rendered a second class status in society, and that it should all be enforced by cultural or religious traditions and authorities through the implied threat of violence, or often actual violence... yeah that's nonsense.
woah... wait a second. Paid time off = no cashing of days remaining when you leave? Is that right? Just last month by Vacation + Sick days got converted to same number of PTO and the HR email made it sound great complete with congratulations!
They are definitely putting the design talent of every other American automaker to shame.
It sure does, at least when you need the heater. In a conventional car, you'll get lots of extraneous heat from the engine, so heating is basically free. In the case of an electric car, an electric heating elements must be used with the same battery power as the electric motors. That is bound to hurt the range.
The modern equivalent of burning books?
WebSocket API draft not consistent with RFC 6455
Happy to see some .NET posts on here! Also, comments that doesn't include bashing over the evil M$ and how they will rip your startup apart.

Very nice list, i was not aware of many of these solutions. I have used Azure for my private sites before, and it is a really nice solution.

Scott Hanselman wrote an interesting article, comparing Azure Web Sites to your $5/Month Host. Read it here: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PennyPinchingInTheCloudWhenDoA...
The first amendment has nothing to do with this. That governs the relationship between the government and "the people" and until incorporation via the 14th amendment it didn't even apply to states and their citizens. It has nothing to do with the employer / employee relationship. Secondly I didn't see anything wildly puritanical about the statement. A lot of people aren't comfortable with that type of content and that fact could have affected the CEO's decision to fire the OP; because he didn't feel comfortable presenting the OP as the face of the company, which as the sales guy he was.
You've never seen doors cut off? You must not have seen much then.. happens all the time. Google jaws of life.

BTW here is the Tesla first responder training video that shows how to cut off a door(!) and move the dash without electrocuting yourself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntK3rvVl2Qw

It's a pretty cool video, I expect most people on this thread would enjoy watching it. I sure did.. although I'm not sure I'd want to be stuck bleeding in a Tesla while they figure it out.

Also a little concerned about a short happening during an accident and electrifying passengers.. would like to know more about the risks there.
understood, thank you and touche.
Yes, BSA believes this while ignoring things like this: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/ex-cop-s...

This was in my hometown.

This fat fucking sack of subhuman dogshit was also a resource officer at the school and the interim chief of police. When he was the resource officer at my high school, everyone called him "Baby Huey."

The reference, for those that aren't over the age of 60 in the US: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkkTbOs6pmA
Or is it just complying because of the stupidity of the request? Because nothing was actually lost and nothing was deleted as such. A copy got wrecked, so what?
Thank you for the questions! These are great. Unfortunately due to the, understandable, character limit of a post I cut out a handful of text which addressed a couple of these.

The founder is fortunately technically versed enough that he should be capable of an audit of the work conducted by his employees. However, I think he's clueless to what's going on at the moment. He's an awesome guy and his heart is in the right place, but he's much more sales-oriented and concerned with bringing in business than he is with auditing the performance of his employees. Unfortunately. I believe he is indeed too busy with with other things to see this and I think he thinks everything is going well in terms of operations (despite my vague alert). That said, business was booming several months ago and he was not concerned at all about money then. These past couple months have been poor though.
Absolutely agreed. It's like the author has never seen a magazine. Flat design has been around since color print became common.
I think this is one of the sources of abrasion between lawyers and hackers on HN -- the distinction between "legal" and "ethical" is not always made clear. Sometimes you'll see a hacker post that things must be one way, while a lawyer replies that, no, in fact, they are completely the opposite (the hacker invariably reads "you imbecile" after this, even though it's not actually typed ;-) ).

In reality, the hacker may have a perfect understanding of the current law, but disagree with it vehemently, while the lawyer's personal philosophy is actually in agreement with the hacker's statement.
I had barely been in the office (working offsite) so I didn't even really feel any attachment at all, so it was all quite surreal.

Starbucks came to Australia... and failed hard. In the news following the closure of three-quarters of its stores, they interviewed one young man who was absolutely distraught, devastated at the loss of his 'family'. He was 18, and had worked there for a whole three months. Welcome to the world, lad.
Dirty jokes and all from an old book
>Well, ignoring the meaningless guilt by association tactics ("fox-news-worthy neocon propaganda")

this tactic was unintended. can you please elaborate more on how this is that?

>Pepsi in schools is a non-issue to me. My problem there is the schools themselves - this is a different argument, and I'll have it in a different comment if you want to have it. So no, I don't think it should be banned.

i agree that the problem is the schools themselves (however I am interested in your thoughts/opinions there) but i do think extremely unhealthy drinks that impede normal child growth should be banned from publicly funded institutions.

>First, I think the right/left political system in America implied by your choice of topics is a false dichotomy

agreed. i recognize this now. please see the edit to my post.

thank you.
CSS3 Named Colors - Sortable
Bootstrap 3 Grid Introduction
Thank you for your well wishes.

While not incompetent, I do believe he's neglected his responsibility to properly evaluate the performance of his employees more closely.
They are becoming the new Apple.
Is it too far fetched to say he benefited from SpaceX research ? if so, this kind of gene transfer reminds me of Apple years when the iPhone benefited from iPod and Mac hard and software knowledge to leapfrog the competition, and then later helped the MBA do it again.
Any kind of forum is fine.
How is it clear? It's quite possible the author measured a naive implementation and found bottlenecks there to optimize. If method parsing was a bottleneck, I could see the overhead of string comparison being quite significant. Single character equality is one instruction vs. a dozen or two (including a loop) for string equality.
I saw this.

http://www.sideprojectors.com/project/project/74

Not sure if it helps.
Genuine question - are you talking to male friends or female friends, and did the women spend much time alone?
CBS, Time Warner Cable, and the Disruption of TV
Mailvelope — Open Source OpenPGP encryption with Webmail
Thank you very much for your response. I appreciate it.
> any civil engineer could do the calculations in their sleep

This sentence of Dr. Drang's article refers to FEA analysis of "applying a 1 g lateral acceleration to the three-pillar model and plotting out various stresses in the pillars". It's located directly below those plots and after his criticism of vibration analysis has finished. I agree that vibration analysis would be very hard without FEA, but applying a constant 1g lateral force to a cantilever beam could be easily done by paper and pen (well, maybe also a calculator) and is an overkill for FEA.