Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Machine Fired Me

idiallo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 578 posts

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#511

Post by msisk6 »

zerr wrote: post #242
msisk6 wrote: post #138

I had a similar experience but in reverse. About six months ago I left my long-time enterprise-y employer for a startup in another city. So we sold our house, packed up the family, bought a new house and moved in. After 3 months it became obvious I had made a terrible mistake, so we sold the new house, packed up the family again, and bought another new house in the same city we had just left 3 months ago so I could r…

Maybe next time just try out things at first? i.e. rent, move the family into the rented home after 2-3 months without selling the original house for some time.

Yeah, my wife would agree. ;) This is probably the most epic failure of my career. I thought I did proper due diligence but obviously I didn't. A learning experience for sure.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#512

Post by msisk6 »

lainga wrote: post #480
msisk6 wrote: post #138

I had a similar experience but in reverse. About six months ago I left my long-time enterprise-y employer for a startup in another city. So we sold our house, packed up the family, bought a new house and moved in. After 3 months it became obvious I had made a terrible mistake, so we sold the new house, packed up the family again, and bought another new house in the same city we had just left 3 months ago so I could r…

Your company's self-image must be either very high or very low: "nobody who quits us will work for us again!"

I think it's just a failure of imagination. Granted, very few folks leave here and no one can remember anyone leaving and coming back. But the team that runs the machine now knows of this edge case and are addressing it.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#513

Post by xaedes »

mozumder wrote: post #482
jexah wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, it's not always the case, but in that format the second sentence is usually a justification of the first. Also, Black Mirror is not a comedy.

Every time I watch it I'm laughing my ass off. It's definitely not serious, or even satirical. Most sci-fi has the problem of trying to model a situation with limited social scope. The fact that they never turn out true is because society has social safeguards to prevent it from happening that the writers don't model. 1984 is also a comedy.

We call it a comedy when it _intends_ to make people laugh. Just because _you_ laugh about it, doesn't mean that it also intends this. I know you could now say that they actually intend it. But I doubt that. (X)

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#514

Post by rspeer »

probably_wrong wrote: post #290
rspeer wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this just wishful thinking that, if something went wrong with your paycheck, the world would be just and there would be an easy legal remedy waiting for you? From what I understand, you can only sue for $1000 or less in small claims court. An IT contractor who is making $1000 or less per week has bigger problems.

I have good news for you: the small claims limit varies by state and, according to data from this website[1], the average upper limit is $8K (median is $6K, with the lowest being $2.5K). [1] https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/small-claims-suits-h...

Thanks, I stand corrected.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#515

Post by e40 »

vvanders wrote: post #194
bonyt wrote: post #161

This is literally an episode of Better Off Ted.[1] In it, the titular Ted is inadvertenly deleted from the company system when trying to correct a misspelling of his last name. Eventually, he is forced to interview for his own job as the system had already put out an ad for his replacement. I think the most striking part of it, and of the true story from the post, is the human factor - the idea that the humans involv…

That show was incredibly on the mark, if Black Mirror was a comedy it would have been that show. The episode about the black engineer who isn't detected by the motion sensors is basically straight out of HP's webcam fiasco[1](although the show takes it to the logical and hilarious extreme). [1] http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/race/2009/12/hp-webcam-c...

I loved that show so damn much. I was crushed when it was canceled.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#516

Post by a1369209993 »

pimeys wrote: post #411
daxelrod wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“How are you?” “Good” Tons of people have this exchange out of politeness. The person asking “How are you?” doesn’t really want to know details. The person answering is expected to be brief and positive. It’s only among friends that the same question is expected to get an honest and detailed answer.

As a Finn I typically answer what I really feel at that moment. It creates funny situations, but in general I think if you ask me a question I should give a truthful answer. Why would you ask if you don't want to know...

I tried this and it worked poorly; people tended to get annoyed at me for answering the stupid question that they asked. Now I just go with "not too bad" in various tones of voice.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#517

Post by daotoad »

local_yokel wrote: post #466
pc86 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not racism, that's laziness. Or perhaps just being a bad engineer, if you want to be more cynical about it. It's not that hard to find both conscious and subconscious examples of systemic or individual racism. Engineers taking the easy path with webcam facial recognition is probably not a good one and serves only to give more fuel to those who claim people jump to the racism cry too quickly.

I agree. It's a well known problem where the training set isn't representative of the underlying population. While it can certainly be argued that the engineers should have recognized this deficiency and taken corrective action, I really don't understand why all the respondents to your post are so quick to assert racist intent based on clickbait headlines from Forbes.

It's not an active racism on the part of the engineers. It's way more subtle than that.

There could be a hidden assumption on the part of the engineering team that light-skin is "normal" and anything else is a special case. Nobody is saying "I hate black people" or anything of the kind.

Or, as happened with a voice recognition system a former employer used, it was tested on the engineering staff, who happened to be all male. As a result it didn't work well for most women who tried to use it. There was no intentional exclusion of women from the test data, and I'd argue, no intentional exclusion of women from the engineering teams. But it is reasonable to say that systemic sexism that excludes women from engineering careers helped this system fail.

These kinds of problems are difficult to solve, because they aren't active decisions on anyone's part. They evolve out of pervasive conditions, and unconscious biases. At root, the source is still racism, or sexism (or another form of discrimination).

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#518

Post by lostlogin »

eythian wrote: post #365
pbh101 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve inferred that the newer ATMs I’ve encountered use chips: the card stays in the machine for the entire transaction and is released to you right before the cash is dispensed.

I don't think I've ever used an ATM that doesn't do this since I started using them some time in the late 90's, even when the cards had magstripe and the chip was a twinkle in a beach's eye.

Pbh101 and eythian - where in the world are you? I’m in New Zealand usually and France currently and I’ll pay attention in the U.K. next week. I’d love the strip to be redundant.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#519

Post by DoctorOetker »

vinceguidry wrote: post #405
DoctorOetker wrote: post #164

This is the problem of imperative/functional programming languages, instead of using provers/verifiers. Edit: In "The Count of MonteCristo" by Alexandre Dumas, the protagonist was accused of aiding Bonaparte, and in the French island prison meets the priest who was accused (under Bonaparte) of aiding royalty. (I may have switched that around, it's been a while since reading). So even though switches in power occur, o…

I believe it became custom in many parts of Europe around that time to clean out the prisons whenever a new monarch took office, obviously that wouldn't have always happened, but at least they saw it as a problem and took steps to rectify it. It did, after all, cost some amount of money to house them, and obviously the new king would have wanted room to house prisoners of his own. It wasn't until modern times that pr…

There is a difference between a new monarch 1) letting a symbolic but insignificant fraction free to gain popularity / manufacture consent for the governance of the new monarch 2) clearing out all the prisoners.

Symbolically different alliances/parties fight each other, but within one such party/team the partners are competition too! Why liberate an old partner, if that increases your commpetition? Often the strategic value of this partner was low as the prisoner has been out of the loop, destabilized, broken. Automagically everyone agrees that "agitators are agitators" and a large fraction of the populace already believes whatever the political prisoner was accused of by the previous government.

Regarding petty criminals and the "expense" of housing prisoners, that story really gets old very fast to be honest. Although seldom depicted in caricatural movies, we know historically there were no dedicated mental institutions. In the past they locked them up with normal criminals, no distinction. And they did forced labour like textile industry, like proto-factories. From the perspective of government thats an income, not an expense!!

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#520

Post by CamTin »

rectang wrote: post #503
s73v3r_ wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're not being paid, then yes, the worker should abandon the company.

Do you seriously think I'm suggesting that they stay indefinitely without pay? Or, if you are saying that they shouldn't stay even for a day, even in the face of an emergency, then I disagree. Even if they don't have a legal obligation to do so, I respect those who would, like this worker. And I would prefer to work along such people as colleagues, trusting that if they could help it, they wouldn't leave their team i…

There's no moral obligation to work without pay, even for one day, even if you've gotten "promises" that you'll be made whole. An ethical company would send him home if they didn't know they could pay him or not, whatever the reason. If they need him to work THAT DAY because of some corporate "emergency", they should pay him cash on the barrelhead or make a similar arrangement, until they can get his regular paychecks going again.

As advice to a worker in this situation, it certainly makes sense to gut it out and take the risk of doing work without pay. It's, for most people, probably a much smaller risk than risking getting "really" fired without first having another job lined up.

Post reply on HN