skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The idea of selling to people based on their needs assumes that everyone has needs/insecurities which, if correctly targeted, will result in a successful sale.

To this extent, we're fully aligned. Take a step back. To the theory of needs, one of the earliest and best known variants of which was proposed by Maslow. (There have been numerous updates to Maslow over the years [1]. A common theme in all variants of the theory of motivation/needs is the concept of self-actualization.)

If individuals' needs are the foundation of selling to them, someone motivated by love and belongingness needs ought to be motivated by things that will help him feel closer to others. Indeed, this is the base of the couple of examples we discussed (pretty girl selling snake oil, and the supermarket with good looking sales girls). Similar arguments can easily be put forward for each and every kind of need - doesn't matter what the actual product is, what matters is what the buyer thinks/believes it will help him achieve, ergo, what need(s) will it is perceived to fulfill.

The crux of my counter-argument is based on the exceptions - the self-actualized individuals, who admittedly form a very small fraction of the population. You're right in the general case, of course. I'm saying there is a proper subset which is an exception to the rule. Going by the theories of motivation/needs, the self actualized people are driven solely by what they believe their "purpose" in life to be. It is also supposed, in these theories, that self actualized individuals either do not have needs (what you rightly phrased as insecurities), or aren't driven/motivated by them.

In the general case: As long as there is an illusion that need x will be met by a product y, people who are motivated by x can be sold y. In the case of self-actualized individuals, it is harder to sell an illusion - which won't be sustained in the face a logical/rational analysis. Since there is no underlying need/insecurity to target, all that remains is a factual analysis of what material benefits the product confers vis-a-vis what the self-actualized individual's goals are.

So I guess it boils down to: what's your take on the theories of motivation and the notion of self-actualized individuals?

[1] I found a good summary + a new approach at a Medium blog post, which seems reasonably well researched and presented. https://medium.com/@faracrosstherubicon/rethinking-maslow-a-...
I don't quite understand if "Majoring" means completed degrees or not.

In my old University, women were common in the first year of Comp Sci, as it was the easiest department to gain entry to for them as females because of quotas or whatever positive discrimination is called.

However in the second year, they would typically transfer out to another department they were more keen on, but probably wouldn't have won a place at initially.
Most Fortune 100/500 companies are incompetent at managing the efficiency of their infrastructure for many reasons and there's a revolving door of CIOs trying to make them more efficient. DoD before cited "environment standardization" as their primary reason for buying a ton of VMware licenses rather than the usual themes of DC consolidation and business agility, which completely boggles a lot of peoples' minds even at VMware.

I've been writing IT operations automation software for about a decade now and people still are having trouble with a basic "open a ticket when something breaks" workflow and having humans do things is very common. Even into 2014 I was hearing of $500k+ contracts to spend a month in meetings to wind up with a SOAP / XML-RPC call with about 40 lines of XML just to open a new ticket in some custom ticketing system... that will then be triaged by people because they have focused so little upon thinking about making their IT systems usable for their own staff.

My primary concern is that if these same organizations that are that incompetent at managing their IT business in the first place go into the cloud, what's keeping them from screwing it up there too? All it takes is for someone to push an AWS access key to a Git repo and half of the US could be getting their identities stolen. I think this is what the conversation really means when people say that enterprises are still scared of cloud security a decade into the cloud IaaS movement. In reality, they're scared of their own organizations' competence to handle the power of cloud systems.
Very interesting. You wouldn't even need the thing you are manipulating to be attached to you. In the future you could go beyond Dr. Octopus, to pseudo-telekinesis, manipulating a mass of nanorobots.
If that turns out to be true, then that's a huge finding. That's especially considering the fact that modern psychology/therapy is generally recommending positive reinforcement (treats) as opposed to negative reinforcement (penalties) for teaching/conditioning behavior. This could lead us to revise commonplace methods for teaching children, training pets, and for managing individuals and groups in general.
been seeing this trigger on equally safe / intentional / non-commercial endpoints. as a developer, it's almost an imperative to run with ad-blocking enabled.

makes me wonder, has anyone come up with headless ad-blocking for integration testing?
I use ack! http://beyondgrep.com/
Why would advertisers be so incredibly aggressive as to pollute anything they can with spam is the real issue here.
It's not even about the lack of women in undesirable male dominated jobs.

What about the lack of women in relatively high paying skilled trades like electrician or elevator repair?

I think you'd get more bang for your buck by funding programs to help working class women move into skilled trades, than by trying to move middle class women who are already going to college from one major to another.
The amount of "creative" writing on our site is very limited. Each post in our system has to follow a particular format, and we have a feedback loop so that the writer can improve their posts, based on those formats. For example a movie post is formatted in a very specific way [1].

I found no difference at all between the output of minorities and white writers. A bigger and more rigorous sample would have given more insight. It's interesting because Wikipedia is known for its gender gap: 90% of its writers are young, white, highly educated males. So therefore most people think that Wikipedia-like content can only created by those kind of people. Instead, I found I could create almost exactly the same content by restricting the format and the users actions, irrespective of the class of person adding the information. In fact, as the site stands it was created maybe 70% by women.

[1] http://help.newslines.org/knowledge-base/add-a-movie-post/
Once you put it online w/ public access I think it's fair game.

I'm more in the camp of: don't put things you don't want other to share / look at online (yes, pictures of your kids especially)
SEEKING WORK - Remote

Location: Warsaw, Poland

Remote: yes (eager to go on-site for a while)

willing to relocate: no

technologies: Spark, Hadoop, HBase, Hive, Giraph, Kafka, Avro, Camel, Java, Scala, R

linkedIn: https://pl.linkedin.com/in/wojciechindyk

I have a practical experience (5 years at large companies, like Samsung Inc, Orange Inc, Agora Inc, Kruk Inc) and theoretical knowledge (8 papers on scientific journals, 2 speeches on technical conferences). I worked on machine learning and recommendation systems as well on data integration and cleaning.

I'm looking for a job (contract/full-time) on large scale machine learning. Graphs processing is a plus. E.g. I designed and developed a scalable graph-based recommendation algorithm. I would like to continue work on classification and recommendations on large-scale. I have 5 years experience in Java development, and recently started to use Scala. I also use R to data analysis and data mining.
Oh, it's very easy:

<img src="/an_existing_image.jpg?&ad_box_" onerror="alert('You are using adblock')">

How it's made:

1. Look into the most popular filter's used by adblock extensions:
https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt

2. Choose for example a querystring rule from the beginning (from the "General advert blocking filters")

3. Append it to the url of an existing image

4. Use the onerror event to detect if it wasn't loaded
It's hardly clear to me that ethnic diversity helps in any way for most companies. Several people at my current company told me they were excited that I'd be providing diversity. I asked them what they thought that would bring them, and after pressing the issue I realized they had no clue.

I have no clue either. Some unique perspectives I bring: I favor rigid APIs over close team communication, I favor Bayesian statistics over frequentist, and I'm working on convincing folks that the JVM is actually a great platform to deploy code on. Are these technical matters something that a certain ethnic group (different from mine) is uniquely single minded about?

I've been the bringer of diversity for most of my career. And I can't think of a time when it's actually mattered.
As a user, I could not care less about a website that is so incompetently written, that it doesn't degrade gracefully enough when accessed with javascript is disabled. If someone chooses to cobble up such a site, it is almost certain they'll have the same attitude about their content (or service, if it is peddling something), so it is quite likely I don't want to be there in the first place. So, I don't whine as well, I just don't bother with it.
There's a large-work-at-home community on the web, with sites that list sites, as well as forums and review sites. Search under "work at home". We also got good word-of-mouth because the pay was reasonable, and the payouts were fast, although you continuously have to reassure people that it's not a scam :-(
A Culture Against Dropouts, Deviants and Troubled Young Adults
As a physician, I don't think any of us have the perception that programming is lower status. Our in-jokes are usually about how we can't find housing on our salaries because the former computer science majors are driving up the prices.
Yes - for the most part improvements in those memory games improve... performance on those memory games. There is a paper showing that Luminosity specifically doesn't help.[0]

Our brains are really good at learning to optimize for a very specific task.

edit: reference

[0] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131514...
I have a friend at Wikipedia who was looking into writing some their PHP extensions in Rust, so hipster away. :P
my IRC client had s/wrong phrase/correct phrase/ for quite a while before Skype was a thought in the KaZaA developer's head.
Young children walking to school is common here in Australia. It is not considered the slightest bit newsworthy.

I live opposite a primary school. Everyday I see children who must be 6 or 7 years old walk to it.

I guess that it is all to do with the level of criminality in the general community. The USA does have a homicide rate and a violent crime rate that is significantly higher than than of many other rich nations.
For anyone else struggling to read this article on mobile, here's the Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N844AA
We'll build you a prototype web app for $4242 in two weeks
Not totally convinced that this post was your best move in any way whatsoever. I would be calling that number if I were you, I don't think this is a decoy unless you have more evidence that suggests it might be outside of general paranoia.
I don't see how that statement would be inherently contradictory?

"X is a Y Z, with a greater W than most" I think would generally be interpreted as "X is a Y Z with a greater W than most Y Zs"

So, X would have a more than 50th percentile ranking in Y Zs, when ranking by W.

I don't see why it would be impossible for a standard mainstream news organization to have a greater than 50 percentile ranking when ordering standard mainstream news organizations be journalistic standards.
Well I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

$ ./skod -s "mirrors.digipower.vn" --download "/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-7"
:: Error Failed to get '/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-7' size.

This works:

$ curl ftp://mirrors.digipower.vn/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-7
Oh ok. I remain always curious about the benefit of diversity in these projects then. It is constantly touted as a good and it makes intuitive sense to me that it would be, but I was wondering if that manifested in the content they produced in particular.
Yup.

This is one of our few remaining unsharded databases (legacy problems...), so we can't easily canary a fraction of serving capacity. However, one clear remediation we can implement easily is to have our tooling change a replica first, failover to it as primary, and, if problems are detected, quickly fail back to the healthy former primary.

Lesson learned. We'll be doing a review of all of our database tooling to make sure changes are always canaried or easily reversible.
I don't want or need a picture nor a resume.

I have a task I need done, a value that it's worth to me to have it done, and all I need to know is "can you do it?" and "are you willing to do it for what it's worth to me?"
>Gap gets this right.

I did consulting for them and they hired aforementioned retail consultants for this job. I will admit I initially thought it was stupid, having been a wise retail manager at the age of 17 at one point in my life (and did a lot of level-1 tracking of sales and A/B testing, even back then!). But when these retail consultants showed me their data and how it was formatted... it was unbelievable. Most of what I experienced in retail were these nebulous and stupid ideas that were conjured from the ether from my direct managers and general managers and the like. While I'm sure not all the information I saw trickled down to employees, it was truly enlightening and gave me zero room to argue particulars with how they were studying and implementing retail flow, checkout, and return procedures.
Wait... What is wrong with FTP?
Anecdotally, it seemed like all of the ladies in my CS department wound up actually majoring in Cognitive Science, which was part of the CS department technically, but about half psyche and pre-med, really.
Well, one thing I know is that the less you talk to law enforcement, the less you incriminate yourself. So calling is out. And we all have secrets, e.g. downloading illegal IP for sure...
I use both J and Dyalog APL. It is my understanding that Arthur Whitney, Roger Hui and Ken Iverson himself worked on J. The goal was not just to address the difficulty of using non-ASCII character, but to add funtional programming, hook and fork, easier tacit programming and fix certain other issues that even Ken Iverson himself acknowledged [1][2].

PS: I use Dyalog APL because I do personally like the once-alien-to-me characters!

[1] http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/APLPersonalView.htm
[2] http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/autobio.htm
The second. Because "always reliable" isn't. So when something goes down and there is nothing being communicated, that's truly infuriating.
These things don't pay though. People care about diversity only where it pays.

If comp sci. was still seen as a thing for nerds with skin issues that don't get a lot of money you can bet there would be no "diversity" thing going on.

There should be no such thing. Instead of trying to bend ethics I'd rather make sure any one, from any skin color, gender, place of birth, etc. can do anything they want. THAT would be diversity.

The truth is that today what you can do with your life depends a LOT more on your place of birth than your skin color or gender.
Thanks for explaining. I guess people are still wary since The Bell Curve.
>If any individual on Mechanical Turk is averaging even 1/3rd federal minimum wage, I'd be shocked.

Look at the transcriptions / translations for Farsi and languages from the Middle East. People are making plenty of money.
Try contacting the CFRB
Oddly accurate, I guess bay area rent is indeed pay in about 2 weeks with current salaries.

Source: my rent is about 2 weeks of pay (which sucks and doesn't feel very sustainable, mind you)
This is not "Written in pure C, without any external library" : just see skod.h it depends on socket.h

https://github.com/Hypsurus/skod/blob/master/src/skod.h
I largely agree, though perhaps not with the twist at the end.

In my opinion, someone with a contrarian view has an added responsibility: the responsibility of one who possesses more truth than others, since that is what having a minority view feels like (and maybe is). One has a duty to consider others' difficulty in hearing that truth. If you use the truth as a weapon, you trigger resistance and discredit it, which deprives others of it for longer. This harms them and sets back the cause of the truth, even while expressing it. The greater the truth, the more harm in that case.

When one knows one's view is unpopular there's a temptation to be pre-emptively defensive. One laces comments with snark, ridicules the conventional, and so on, as a way to flip the dullards the bird in advance, since you know they will reject your truth anyhow. It's like a Dostoevsky character who can't help tweaking the nose of the person he's talking to. Some even cultivate the art of packing as much snark into their language as possible, having given up on persuasion. I think it's fear of being rejected that causes it, plus a desire to show off: see what a contrarian I am.

What happens of course is that people react badly to being provoked, except for a few who identify with your side and join in the provoking. To us this feels like the dullards rejecting the truth; to them it feels like we're fanatics and assholes. Then we get a loop of anger and noise. Such discussions are all the same and learning is no longer possible.

The principle that the one who sees more (or thinks he does) has more responsibility is a way of keeping open a discussion in which people can still learn things and figure the truth out together. When one isn't up to this responsibility, maybe one should be silent until one is, not as a matter of censorship but of continence.
Well, philosophy more or less stakes its claim to value as an undergraduate program solely on that premise. Whether it actually teaches one to think, what exactly that means, and whether it's possible to teach someone to think who hitherto didn't know how to think, are of course questions that trouble it, but they're all distinct and seemingly empirical issues.
The only time I think it makes fiscal sense to ignore a sizable portion of your potential user-base is when you're already making so much money that the potential income from those users would be negligible.

It seems that the average number of page-views for all sites that are ad-blocked is something like 9% (and on some sites up to 50%)[1].

would you really want to sacrifice a 9-50% of possible revenue?

[1]https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-percentage-of-Internet-use...
https://youtu.be/MJu9dL7a3ZI?t=210
I generally agree with you. When I was growing up we weren't this (over?)-protective. Culturally, it was a completely different world from today. :)

Anyway, in the United States, most school districts operate their own bus systems and, in most areas, these buses pick up and drop off the children very near to their house, if not right in front of their house.

Still, many children are driven directly to/from school each day by a parent. Most people that I know who do this have work schedules that are flexible enough to accommodate this.
Interesting story that kept my attention to the end, despite the intrusive multimedia elements (I'm reading this very late at night, with people asleep nearby, and one of the videos started auto-playing and wouldn't let me pause it).

I would say all parties involved, from bus driver Poland to the 911 operator, the FBI and the local sheriff, behaved admirably and at times heroically. For those men to jump down that hole and take bullets to rescue the boy, notably the fellow who located the kid in the dark and shielded him with his body, prepared to take bullets from the kidnapper to save the boy--incredible stuff.

This guy Dykes was a tragic kind of figure, the kind of ticking time bomb that we need to identify earlier on to prevent the kinds of mass shootings that occur with all too much regularity in our country.

I'm not sure what you can do with someone who stays just this side of the law but is clearly deranged and unstable, but there's got to be something beyond just ignoring him and letting him fester.
Codifying a 45-50 hour work week really doesn't help.
Bromium has one of the best security platforms out there and one of the worst sales/marketing teams in the industry. More people should know they are out there.
"Citylab is a project of the Atlantic"

Didn't know that - was surprised the author would have rights to resell his work, and in such a short timespan. That explains!
Having dealt with APL in the past, I've always been a bit skeptical of the "Blub Paradox" and other forms of Lisp triumphalism. APL is clearly far more powerful that any other language in some respects and far more limited in others.

On that note - http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?JoelMosesOnAplAndLisp
No, it could also be the immediate, continuous feedback. Or that they're actually more mentally demanding. Or that they require lots of different parts to work well together, rather than trying to focus on just one thing.
The problem is that the end user who has an ad blocker installed doesn't see a big "THIS FEATURE OF THE WEB SITE IS BROKEN BECAUSE YOU HAVE AN AD BLOCKER INSTALLED" message when things don't work. They just see things not work. Maybe a few of the more tech-savvy users will guess that their ad blocker caused the problem, but most users will just assume that your site is crappy.

If your site is monetized through something other than ads (e.g. purchases), it might be in your financial interest to make sure that your site works correctly even in the presence of a poorly-written ad blocker. Of course this depends on how many of your users are affected by the problem.

Now if your site is free, with no ads, then I can see how your philosophy could make sense.
OTOH, at least they put it in public. Now people know not to apply.
What creates the requirement to send data to multiple analytics services? Wouldn't you want to send it to one capture and analytics service and then funnel that into whatever line-of-business applications you need?
I think it's great to see increased transparency in company procedures, and I will probably steal some aspects of it. OTOH, the implementation is slightly disappointing. No remote work plus "we expect full-time employees to be at the Clef office between 45 and 50 hours a week" is definitely decreasing the pool of potential employees. As a parent there is NFW I would sign up to 10 hour days, but I'm glad the company is open about it's expectations, and they have the right to create the kind of company they want (within the limits of the law).
You might find freelancing more appealing than these kinds of full time jobs as you describe.
I'm actually on your side, i think it's ridiculous as well.

The logic is that a free market with lean and fat years would result in wild price fluxuations. When yields were really good, prices would drop and some farmers would end up out of business. The cartel brings stability to prices. Each farmer agrees to produce X and in return has confidence they will get Y price.

The system undoubtably results in higher prices than a completely free market.
The theory is to ensure a consistent supply - if a bunch of dairy farmers can't afford to stay in business then it will lead to shortages and higher prices.
Except voluntarily purchasing an inexpensive product nohow "limits your freedoms." I purchase a lousy cup of coffee from a vending machine; am I a slave if it's inferior to Starbucks? Reductio ad absurdum.
Very well written source code! Great job. I didn't think an FTP client could be so cleanly written.
Password sent in the clear.