electricslpnsld

> The bathrooms

At my first job they were so crunched for space my desk in the open office was about ten feet from the entrance to the men’s bathroom. I got to quickly know everyone’s schedule, and knew I just had to leave my desk at certain times during the day due to certain coworkers… my manager was not happy when I cited that as my reason for quitting a few months in!

The old lady who runs our neighborhood Polish grocery store would smack me upside the head if I tried to order Pączkis!

And this is at a company that supposedly prioritizes constant feedback, we even have multiple mandatory training sessions per year on providing fast feedback. Go figure...

I wish I had that kind of insight into my ‘performance’ pre-review! I’m at a FAANG right now and given my interactions with my manager alone, I figured I was bombing performance-wise (constant complaints about my work, refuses to acknowledge any accomplishments, super angry at me during one on ones, assigns piles of work that ‘need’ to be done by Monday on Friday at 6pm and then doesn’t even acknowledge the completion of the work next week, ...). Come performance review time on the other hand I’ve had awesome peer reviews, performance ratings, stock refreshes, etc for the past four biannual performance cycles. Given the complete mismatch here between how I feel I’m doing and how my manager treats me, I’m actually pretty happy we have this performance review system in place. Probably just need a new manager...

Because I liked the people in my department doing research in my niche! Unfortunately federal funding in the US disappeared almost overnight for my slice of CS, so I'm currently operating and publishing in a cross-disciplinary fashion in an industry research scientist position. I'm considering leaving the US for a faculty position to get back to the research I really enjoy... so don't do what I did. :)

> But I wonder why?

Publicity for Space Jam 2?

Our apartment building in Manhattan had one of these, it was super fun to fill! We also had a garbage chute... guess which one was more likely to get clogged when it was 98 degrees and 90% humidity mid August

Possibly Native Americans/First Peoples, Pacific Islanders, or individuals who self-identify by ethnicity rather than race on these types of reports.

> Claiming residence in SF or NYC during the hiring process, then starting working somewhere else...

It would be a bit of a cat and mouse game. Companies can trace where you are working from VPN logins. I suppose you could VPN through San Francisco then VPN into your corporation’s network, but they probably monitor for use of common VPN providers. Plus during your meetings, etc, you coworkers would notice if you moved.

I'm as much Stop Building Ugly Condos as the next resident in my reviv(ing) corner of the rust belt... but honestly, with the exception of maybe one photo, none of these are horribly objectionable or out of step with the existing architecture. Crying wolf anyone?

Depends on the state and the public/private designation of the university. There is also the (mostly unanswered in the courts) question of whether private university graduate students are primarily employees or students. Read up on the kerfuffles at NYU and Columbia University to see how gnarly this all gets.

I used to be in the "Triangle Linux Users Group" in the early 2000s -- it seems they are still active! https://trilug.org

Back when running Linux on the desktop was a full time job, it was really cool to have an in person network to talk to when your latest kernel compilation bricked your system or whatever. It was also cool since RedHat is based in the Triangle we'd get people from RedHat coming to the user group all the time and could get all the dirt on them.

Shell’s new US-based plant [1] is expected to pump half a million cars worth of CO2 exhaust into the air a year. I haven’t seen any data suggesting that plastics production reduces the net amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/business/energy-environme...

> The cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it were added to the cost of plastic.

The cost isn’t just disposal, it’s also production. Plastic production (‘ethylene cracking’ specifically) is really environmentally gnarly. Communities across the US and internationally will be way better off once we move away from disposable consumer plastics.

> There were exactly zero write-ups of this in the local papers.

A few miles across the border it’s been all over the Pittsburgh news —- the mayor here has even been tweeting about it!

Compensation from stock grants is significantly more volatile than base salary or bonus targets, but otherwise I don’t see a major difference.

Facebook also has a FAIR office in addition to Oculus in Pittsburgh.

> Where do all the young urban types come from? Not from downtown.

Queens or the Upper West Side!

Pixar in a Box was so cool! It's a shame Disney pulled funding for the program :(

This might have been true a few years ago, but even in my middle of the road rust belt city you can get a huge variety of beers now. There are entire breweries dedicated to sours alone! Even within the IPA genre the crazy hopped to death west coast IPAs from the early 2010s seem to be getting pushed out by New England IPAs, milkshake IPAs, and a smattering of super weird stouts.

> If you mean the metropolitan metro area, than SF is a nightmare without a car.

Really depends where in the bay you are -- there are definitely areas outside of San Francisco you can do without a car. I lived in Berkeley and later Oakland without a car (probably four years total), and honestly it was pretty damn nice not having to deal with one. Menlo Park on the other hand? You'll probably need a car.

Did the MPM simulator get used in practice for Frozen? I talked to a few sim TDs (or whatever the equivalent Disney title is) and they said it was too slow at the start for practical use!

So in my last job my desk was positioned about 6 feet from the men’s restroom, which didn’t have a door but instead one of those twisty airport paths to block line of sight. Needless to say the sounds were not pleasant, especially when the office lunches were more on the lentil-like side of things

Ugh in my current open office the team next to me has entered a machismo fueled arms race for who can find the loudest clacky keyboard possible... even with the biggest and baddest noise cancelling cans I could find twelve hours of my day are just clack clack clack, I’m going slowly insane!

The countryside can have some bad environmental problems too (expansion of fracking in the rural Midwest of America, etc).

> Rotation matrices are hermitian

Is that the case? Consider

|a -b|

|b a|

with Eigenvalues lambda = a +/- i b

a = cos theta and b = sin theta gives a rotation, so the Eigenvalues are complex.

> The identity applies to “Hermitian” matrices, which transform eigenvectors by real amounts (as opposed to those that involve imaginary numbers), and which thus apply in real-world situations.

This is a weird characterization of Hermitian matrices — this implies that rotations are not ‘real-world’.

Is there any hope of Apple including an Nvidia card in a future laptop or has that ship completely sailed?

> Apart from the US, British spelling differences are mostly followed by other countries where English is the main language too.

Canadian English is a funny case here — it adheres to British (Zed) and American (tire with an i) customs by equal measure, but by and large Canadians sound closer to ‘mainstream’ Americans than they do to Brits. This is of course ignoring Quebec...

I thought this was going to be about differential inclusions and deep learning which sounds pretty rad! Is anyone out there working in this direction ?