jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
As a small nonprofit with a tech team consisting of mostly volunteers, a few interns, and a small % of our paid staff time, this was a big concern for us.

Things are always fine when you're starting, but if you don't understand the system it's hard to troubleshoot when it breaks. Understanding Kubernetes is hard. Obviously there are ways to outsource cluster management, but we don't have the budget of a VC funded startup.

We ended up choosing Hashicorp's products -- Nomad for orchestration, Consul for service discovery, and Vault for secret management. Each one is just a binary with a <20 line config file, and it takes ~two days to read and understand the docs well enough that we have been able to troubleshoot issues quickly.
Tell that to Twilio :(

For Twilio accounts, there is an option to add a TOTP secret, and use it when logging in. But, they don't support disabling the default SMS method, and using TOTP exclusively. When you authenticate using TOTP, you still have a fallback option to receive a SMS code.

So, in the case of Twilio, the TOTP feature only improves convenience, not security. At least that was the case when I looked a couple months back. I opened a support ticket about this, and they acknowledged the problem, and that was it.
It’s an insidious racket at worst, and at best a case of an emperor with no clothes.

Mass advertising needs to die off already. Just hold better search and filtering tools and empower people to discover what they want instead of telling them what they should want.
That's a great way to think about it: two different types (at least) of working styles. Different engineers are better suited for different companies. (I've worked at very bigcos where I was assigned tickets and it wasn't my jam.)

But I think Mike's point was if you ask for autonomy, you need to own responsibility, and part of that is problem definition.

To be fair, his company isn't big (< 10 folks, I think), and smaller companies tend to benefit from generalists who can tackle many aspects of a problem, rather than specialists who can knock certain problems out of the park.
Here’s a career ladder from Mozilla that’s been posted a few times:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DoWyoObUcAERDNk.jpg

In my experience, you start out on your team and you learn the ropes. At some point you notice your code base is a mess, application is designed poorly, your team lacks any standards, there’s no tests, bugs get shipped and outages happen, and you start speaking up. Hopefully you do this in a productive way where you have a plan for gradual improvements (ie don’t just suggest rewriting everything in Clojure), you prioritize effectively, people listen, and things improve. At some point a greenfield project comes your way and you use your past experience to make sure these issues are addressed from the get go and build a solid application with appropriate tradeoffs. Above all you need to get shit done because that’s what the business is going to care about. Hopefully you work at a place where you get at least 5 of these greenfields in different technology stacks and build some intuition on what the big tradeoffs are to be made and how they affect the bottom line. At this point you have some experience and become more valuable in discussions other people are having about their designs because you’ve been around the block a few times and know what issues they might run into. You might start designs and pass them off to be worked on. Then you might get to the point where you’re able to design a group of systems and the interfaces between them. At this point there’s usually a crossover between management and engineering because you need to have soft skills, but you also need your technical skills to be as broad as possible and sharp as hell. Otherwise people are going to notice your incompetence and you’ll get shitcanned or demoted. I’ve been on calls that got escalated to the VP of Engineering level and it just blew me away how skilled they were at stuff they probably haven’t touched in years. Hopefully you get to experience that some time and see the kind of level you need to get to. In the day to day it’s a lot of that, jumping in where needed, coding prototypes and breaking things down for junior people.

A real factor in your progress is going to be your manager and organizational structure. If you have a good manager they are going to get you more opportunities. Otherwise you’ll end up walled in on your team and your aspirations will be unfulfilled. If you feel like you haven’t progressed in a while, it’s time to look around for other opportunities.
Now I'm picturing a fat tungsten scrollwheel with a lot of inertia, that keeps spinning after you roll it.
I wonder if Rand Paul has anything to weigh in about this. The Fountainhead is all about an architect inveighing against pretend-Greek-temples so that he can build buildings his way.
> It smells like few people here are mathematicians, and yet they're speaking with reddit levels of hubris, attributing simpletons' logical fallacies to a published astrophysicist.

I fully understand the need of respecting the authority of experts, but it doesn't automatically mean they are always right or are immune to logical fallacies.

Prime example is a persona of Linus Pauling - a Nobel Prize winner, who despite being called one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time, was the one behind a huge popularity of pseudoscience around vitamin C.

And funny how you mentioned Reddit, because I have a PhD biology researcher who spammed his research paper on several unrelated subreddits and had audacity to talk back when called out for it. Heck, he was upset with moderators of r/eli5 [sic!], because his post (academic paper!) was removed. You can see my argument with him here: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/lezh2o
Unfortunately I think this is just the price of being an early adopter.
I lost my Mom to cancer in September. Cancer is a nightmare. My heart goes out to you.

They didn't catch my Mom's cancer until it was already Stage 4 and the size of an orange to grapefruit. She developed massive ascites which caused her to gain 30+lbs of fluid. People don't know how bad cancer is until you live it first-hand.

I was my Mom's full-time caregiver. It was hard. But now that I can look back, I feel privileged to have been able to be with her.

Do you know what the word "diaper" is spelled the other way around? Repaid.
I think this is generally decent advice about the mechanics of fundraising if you aren't an "in-demand" startup. However, this does gloss over the major fact that this is a bad situation to find yourself in, and you are much better off spending energy getting yourself into a good situation than you are swimming upstream in a bad one. And while I'm sure being in YC does help with fundraising (extra social proof), you certainly don't need to be in YC to raise money successfully.

If you don't think you will be good at fundraising (because you don't know a lot of rich people, you are a first-timer, you aren't good at pitching, etc), then you should be operating your business in a way where you don't need to fundraise. Be incredibly incredibly lean, generate revenue from day 1, figure out how to incrementally achieve ambitious goals, etc. There are a lot more ways to run a successful business than there are to run a successful fundraising --- investors are all looking for the same thing, and they could all be wrong. But if you grow fast enough or make enough money they'll come around.

There isn't too much reason to get into more details because pg wrote the canonical piece on fundraising, which certainly applies to non-YC companies as well: http://paulgraham.com/fr.html

But generally, the premise of this whole article is flawed. Most startups fail. If you want to successfully raise money, you should be in the 1% (or 5% or 10%, but some suitably small number) of top startups. And if you aren't, then you should be spending your time getting there instead of raising money.
Linux and Windows builds?? WHEN?? this month??
Private companies big enough to warrant a proper GApps account or their own mail server (or many).
And more importantly, we created it in the first place.
I didn't read the parent post as justifying so much as explaining. Evolutionary or physiological explanations for behavior are useful in understanding the behavior. Some evolutionarily advantageous behaviors are morally positive, while some are morally negative (such as the examples you listed). With a proper understanding of the origins of desirable and undesirable behaviors (and, perhaps the reasons why they are considered desirable or undesirable), a society can better encourage and enforce the essential moral values that unite the society and allow it to function.
The site is offline for a few minutes while Linode finishes doing maintenance. Poor timing, sorry. Check back in a few...
Well this is embarrassing. Looks like I need to spend time looking at memory requirements.
> Back in those days, you needed specialized equipment to get a perfect copy, so you had no choice but to buy the legit game. Therefore, it did, in fact, increase sales.

There was almost never a point in time where you needed more than perseverance. A debugger was usually enough, given enough time and determination, to strip any copy restrictions - and while the time constants have changed, it is mostly the same today.

And whether or not it increased or decreased sales (even back then) is not so easy to decide. A penniless 10 year old would pirate everything but buy nothing even if it was successfully copy restricted -- due to lack of applicable resources.

A gainfully employed person with something to lose would rather pay a reasonable amount than face the hassle and potential lawsuits -- although that is often predicated on getting a "taste", which an unrestricted copy (whether DRM broken or demo from download or a magazine cover) provides.

Personally, I buy all music I have copies of. If I wouldn't pay money for it, I don't waste space on my hard drive.
It's an amusing thought, but I imagine that most of these people realise homelessness isn't really a problem you can simply fix by following some set of procedures. Ultimately it's a game to be played for entertainment, and if you can get some people to think about social issues as they play it that's wonderful, but it's still supposed to be enjoyable. Clearly homeless people in the game are impeding some peoples enjoyment and it's a problem that is not obvious to solve.

Some games that offer more freedom let you solve problems like these in more interesting ways, for example when I played Dwarf Fortress (years ago now), a common strategy was to make the nobledwarfs accommodation floodable with lava, so if they got too uppity with their demands (sometimes nobles would insist that you make certain items or not sell a certain items or they'd get furious and make everybody else unhappy) they could be dispatched. I think it'd be funny if Sim City offered a similar option.
yeah i mean the point of Bitcoin is that it's decentralized…on a technical level that's not going to change. also another huge point is that it's natively digital which enables tons of shit. whatever, coinbase is awesome
It's a totally made-up analogy with no supporting facts. What does it even mean that "the real America operates according to a video game logic"? Does France operate that way? How about Morocco or Mongolia? It's nonsense.
Yep, that's the video I submitted.

Well, at least now 1 person got to watch it
+1 gold.
> I'm still not sure why Mt. Gox existed in the first place. Isn't the whole point of bitcoin that it is decentralized?

Insofar as the second sentence is true at all, it is in that the issuance and transaction verification of bitcoin and bitcoin transactions is decentralized.

That has nothing to do with the role of a centralized exchange in facilitating markets for people exchanging bitcoin for other commodities, like USD.
>Windows has had support for resolution independence where DPI is configurable across a continuum (rather than only available as 1x or 2x scale like on the Mac) for quite some time - the issue is that with a huge legacy application base, a giant morass of drawing technologies, and no shipped "HiDPI" or "Retina" Windows hardware until recently, there's been no real incentive for app developers to support it.

The same was true for even longer (IIRC) on the Mac. You could enable it with a hidden preference, but lack of app support, compatibility with existing stuff and lack of hidpi displays at the time made it take the back seat. And vector drawed apps only go that far, you need pixel assets at some point or another.

The 2x scale was just the solution finally used by Apple because of the same kind of issues as you describe for Windows.
that is a remarkably novel use of such a valuable domain name.
It just sort of underlines the lack of self discipline that you talk about in your blog post. People are always looking for the quick fix for their lack of self control. Instead of creating and sticking to their own improvement plan, they want to believe that by buying this bracelet they're going to actually improve themselves.

Instead the bracelet will be taken off, or forgotten, or ignored. These sorts of tools have existed in many forms since the advent of everything. If any of them really worked, they'd be household staples. Instead they're ankhs for the uninitiated.

One good side I see to this is that it forces people to embrace or at least acknowledge their own lack of discipline, but I don't think the solution will have any real permanence.
I have cats and a bird. So far so good...
It's not just the noting of series of number plates at one location, - it's at many locations simultaneously, and because it's always happening the system that "notices" that vehicle AB123CDE that passed point A at 10:26:32 must have been speeding (or jumping red lights - also under surveillance) to pass point B at 10:29:41 can flag up the relevant series of videos for a humans attention.
That seems reasonable. I have accounts at several different banks and I access at least one account per week, if not more.
I've been amazed at how many pitches I've seen that were missing the 'next steps' aka "the point of this."

One of the things that has always helped me is realizing that people listening to something I'm pitching are doing their job. Which is to say this is work for them too, they are here because they think spending 15 minutes or an hour listening to me will have some economic benefit for them down the road. The absolutely best thing I can do for them is to help them work better and more efficiently by helping them extract as clear an understanding as to what I have to offer in the shortest possible time so that as a group we can see which, if any, of the next steps are appropriate.

I realize that sometimes I'm helping them figure out if the topic du jour is just a fad or a real trend (which won't directly help me) but by helping them I leave a good impression and an opportunity to come back.

Nice writeup swombat.
This reminds me of various people who talk about the sense when they are "Buddhas", then there is a sense that all people around them are "Buddhas". A lot of beliefs in mysticism comes from hacking the brain through learning to change one's perspectives.
In the U.S., interns of for-profit companies are subject to minimum wage laws unless the job is primarily for the educational benefit of the intern (i.e., the company doesn't get any useful labor). It's pretty clear that this company wants to hire a person who already knows their dev stack to do useful work for them. So the employee would need to be paid at least minimum wage.
What is wrong with virtualenv?
The price war on Elance is real, but sticking to project based pricing and being in a not too competitive field may help.
I made a simple dataviz of the top elance skills in the programming field:
http://www.datamaplab.com/posts/the-top-itprogramming-skills...
It is impressive to see how competitive some skills are with hundreds of freelancers for a listed skill per corresponding open jobs.
I really wish we had the money to hire all the Groovy / Grails developers here. I'd do it in a heartbeat. Almost all of our products are built primarily with Groovy + Grails, and I'd hate to see the project(s) lose substantial momentum.

OTOH, I expect both projects to remain alive, even without corporate backing, although perhaps not moving quite as quickly (which would still be a loss).
NK is not an enemy in the same way Iran might be. NK is a Stalinist regime in 2015.

>Right, in US, the government will never force anyone to perform unethical work. That's an interesting assumption.

I think it's a reasonable assumption. You can't be forced to join the military (unless there's a draft) or an intelligence agency, and if you work for one, you can't be forced to do something you don't want to do; you can just quit. They can threaten you with prosecution if you leak anything, but they can't make you do something you don't want to.

In NK you can both be forced to work for an organization and you can be forced to do specific tasks you may not want to do, at risk of torture or death.

>What if "ethics" simply depends on your country of origin?

That is true of course. And no doubt there are going to be NK programmers who are ethical and do nothing but help their populace. Obviously many US programmers are performing unethical tasks daily as well. But again, in the US these will almost always be voluntary actions.

I think educating NK citizens is a perfectly good idea, just there are certain topics that perhaps they should not be taught, due to their oppressive and Machiavellian regime.
I use one of two responses depending on where in the interview process I am.

1) Early in the interview process I respond with: "I’m sure we’ll find a number that works for both of us, but for now, I want to make sure it’s a good fit."[1]

2) If it is during a final round or they are offering the job, I like to turn the question on the interviewer and ask: "What is the salary range you have in mind for this position?"

1. http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/on-refusing-to-dis...
Do you have similar numbers that are adjusted for "amount of money in the acquisition / IPO" ? (genuinely curious)
http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Samsung-Wave/

That doesn't look all that much like the iPhone, to be honest.
> jitsi-powered Work Adventure http://workadventu.re

Getting a 404 - "Could not load map."
The source isn't that big, I just downloaded 2.21 source and it is one directory with about ~45 files, and the majority of bytes are for /doc/dvi binaries, only 5 c files and a post Yacc'd tab file for parsing the units definitions file. Surprisingly simple now that I look at it.

Heck... I was going ask you to write it, but now I'm thinking this could be a fun weekend project.

I can see one function in that library:

bool convert(const char *from, const char *to, double input, double *output);

No need to make it more complex for starters. If you want to make an .hxx Boost-like class around it, that's outta my league!

EDIT: markdown help

EDIT: added a status return instead of val return to check for conversion correctness (bool is newer C)
Your claim that WiFi "can barely reach through 2-3 rooms and 1 floor, with no nearby stations to blame for interference" is simply not believable, when it's easily demonstrated that WiFi can cover a whole house and a good sized yard in a truly quiet RF environment. Without interference, covering a single apartment is no trouble at all unless the building materials for interior walls were maliciously chosen.

I think you're simply misidentifying the cause of your connectivity issues, and blaming low transmit power when your real issue is that you have far more competing traffic on the 2.4GHz band than you think, and thus a shortage of quiet airtime. And lowering transmit power of everything (preferably done automatically and adaptively on a per-device basis) is the solution to the latter problem, while using higher transmit powers on everything can only make the latter problem much worse.
I think it’ll be viewed with anger.

The type of blatant despotism and extreme, ubiquitous human rights violations will lead to tensions. Especially in light of something like coronavirus where they’ve been frantically secretive.
>Hemingway - I read just The Old Man and the Sea (or actually was forced in school to read it) - and this was a short novel about basically nothing, boring as it can be

I'm not sure why schools tend to fixate on that particular work. Hemingway may not be to your taste anyway but I much prefer A Farewell to Arms, A Moveable Feast, many of his short stories, etc.
> Seriously?

> That's your retort?

> My grammatical structure?

I never mentioned your grammar; you misinterpreted "structure" here. If you read past the first sentence, it's clear I'm referencing your logical structure.

GPT-2 actually produces decent grammar, but not any context-aware logical structure to the text it produces. Just a bunch of disjointed sentences with keywords that all generally lie on the same semantic vector.

More importantly, you are ignoring the entire rest of my argument. Thank you for posting some source links, those make two of your initial assertions more credible. What about the rest?
I have heard similar comments from multiple FAANG employees.
You have presented an interesting challenge. I am going to chew on this and see what can be done. Good question.
How was your overall experience through all of the rounds?
That all makes sense for hiring people to work on big existing systems, but many of these large companies are also trying to innovate and build new products with smaller, more agile teams.

Sure, you’ll still need to integrate with established APIs and focus more on scalability than you would at a startup, but the kind of people who excel in each type of role will have very different personalities and skillsets. Grading them on the same curve in interviews seems like a pretty bad idea.
People seem to love coming into the Rust community and then saying - hey, I did this micro benchmark after just learning rust - and XYZ language is faster!

Anyone who's been writing rust for a little bit will notice the String clone like a sore thumb. The "go-to-perf-guide" also very explicitly states than clones on String/Vec/Box etc will cause an allocation and slow down your code.

https://gist.github.com/jFransham/369a86eff00e5f280ed2512145...

In every one of these micro benchmarks, the comments will then show that by removing the alloc, the Rust version ends up much much faster.

String cloning is one of those things you learn to avoid early on, and any time you type "clone" it should be obvious that there's a better way to write your algorithm.
> I think personally I have a capacity of 55-60 focused hours, and some people might have more, maintainable indefinitely.

Some people also have a life out of the office and "work" in this out of work life.
In the vast majority of companies at some level (generally the project or department) there is a fixed pool that managers get to spend on things including salaries.

Your position was either not at all that of a programmer, or the structure of your company was exceptional.
Great, so their conclusion is "we should make this less obvious and creepy", not "we should probably stop doing this".
"oops, our dirty secret is out. But we won't do it again, guv!"
While it's not a choice, there are things that influence appetite; for example, going for high calorie but poorly filling food and drink (e.g. soda), or the (I'm handwaving here) "moreish" foods.
Thats 2mg, the study was made with 2.4mg so that's at least that price weekly...
I really like the taste of good food. I would hate to lose my interest.

I'd rather try to eat less really good food, than have 'enough' of something I quit caring about?