skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But businesses hate doing that since then you cannot micro-manage!

PS - But seriously, it boils down to "how do you measure programmer's productivity" which is still an open question.
>They're going to cure heart disease, not write the next snapchat.

Are you suggesting that curing heart disease is an easier and cheaper endeavor than building a mobile app for sharing photos?
"It asks its customers for digital links to their bank, credit card and retirement and investment accounts, and information on all their loans."

Yikes, that's a bit scary. The dark side of me wonders if there is anything untoward that happens here, in that they can pull money from any of these accounts? That's a LOT of information to be handing over, more than when I applied for my mortgage (especially compounded by the fact that this sounds like an on-going monitoring of these accounts), and I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable with it.

They would know everywhere I've shopped, every single bill I have, every cash withdrawal. I don't know that I want any entity knowing the totality of my finances like that, regardless of whether I'd want a couple of percentage points off of interest (especially considering the historic lows of interest rates right now).
Statins alone are a >$10b annual market, down from $20b annually before Lipitor's patent expired. Pharma companies have proven that curative treatments can be priced near the net present value of all future disease management costs, making cures the most lucrative area of pharma (a good thing if it leads to more of them). There are billions of private dollars being sunk into heart disease annually. I'm not sure exactly what Google is after here but $50m is not going to move the needle from a funding or incentive perspective.
Then start your next pomodoro immediately. That's what I do. If you can do that and not get burned out, that's ideal, especially if you're in the zone. It's also better than increasing your pomodoro time IMO. Since I don't take a break 2-3 sessions at a time sometimes, looking at 10 minutes to go is spurring; when I experimented with 40-minute sessions I hated looking at 35 minutes left on the clock.
I expect him to say that his company is "doing great," but he doesn't address why Fidelity cut its outlook on Zenefits (especially if everything is rainbows and butterflies).
Yes, the $$ amount is unrealistic for any true cure. But won't it be great if they fund non-traditional (i.e., silicon valley) people who maybe get even a single advancement in cardiac care? Certainly that's money well spent. I hope they do well.
Pinterest is kind of like delicious, reddit is kind of like forums, facebook is kind of like myspace, twitter is kind of like irc. There's nothing new. Iteration on a good idea is not a bad thing.
Darn, too bad I already named my kids.
Right now, you’re probably thinking, "Twenty-five minutes of work? That’s nothing! This is gonna be easy!"

Actually as someone who mostly formed my study/focus skills during the age of distraction (Facebook, SMS, YouTube), I don't think this is trivial at all.

If I were to go all in on the Pomodoro Technique, I'm pretty sure have to start training myself from just 10 minute undistracted work sessions.
But that wasn't true either at the time of Go 1.1, nor ever I believe. It was the _default_ behavior to have a single core running at a time, but you could just tweak that with the [GOMAXPROCS](https://godoc.org/runtime#GOMAXPROCS) variable, documented everywhere. (That's what changed in Go 1.5; now the default for GOMAXPROCS is the number of cores in the machine.)
Well, where's the boundary between cryptography that hides itself and stenography? Is there one?

If you include stenography, yes, it's certainly not easily recognizable. I don't think good stenography can be recognized at all, but that's not my area and I've got people contradict me at this (without further info), thus I'm not sure.
There is something to said about the only suggestion there being about the Google's Analytics code.
I'd like to add this scenario actually happened during the Cold War. Soviets were reusing one time pads and the US army decrypted some of the messages, among other things this lead to discovery of Soviet spies targeting the US nuclear weapon program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project
There were a few, but none worked reliably at all. I do use a external service that converts twitter to RSS (something they dropped a while back), but also have to redo those every year or so as the various services break or stop functioning.

The thing about RSS is that it is a good match for providing a feed. By Google not providing that sort of thing, you have to use their user interface. Others can't try experiments, cater to certain usage styles, or introduce new ways of using the service. You'll note that twitter had that vibrant experimentation and growth, until they decided to cut that possibility in 2011 - http://fortune.com/2015/10/21/twitter-jack-dorsey-apology/
> it would probably look relatively similar to what it does today.

So, speculatively, even without the US supporting the mujahideen in the 80s, the Soviets would have eventually left, Taliban or something similar would have kind-of-won the civil war, and Afghanistan would be about the same chaos as it is now. So why is US blamed for "destabilizing Afghanistan" and "unintended consequences", if the area would probably be similarly unstable even in this alternate timeline? And if bin Laden and such are anti-American in our universe, even after having received American support in the 80s, they surely would be anti-American in the alternate timeline, too?

So if the US meddling didn't change anything for the worse, why all the blame?
It sounds like the implication is that the politicians are smart enough to know that the backdoors are ultimately not going to happen but that calling for them is a way to appease voters who haven't followed this through to its logical conclusion.

edit: "not going to happen" could be read as "not going to be effective." I wouldn't actually be surprised if the US ended up passing some law restricting crypto to an approved list of backdoored schemes (surprised: no, dismayed: yes), forcing people into hiding their crypto in deniable ways. What some people don't seem to grasp is that no matter how much you outlaw certain math operations, whether or not the end users comply with those laws is ultimately up to them, and the terrorists simply won't comply.
Erowid is more like a library for banned books than it is a pub, because Erowid has a lot of useful information about psychedelics that is especially hard to come by in this era of prohibition. The dosage information alone has probably saved lives, and at the very least prevented people from becoming very ill or having a bad trip.
Why do all of these read like every internet scam ever? When all you do is hype and tease a specific piece of information (what is the pelko method?), only revealing it at the last second, all you do is insult the reader. Why link an entire article when quoting the last sentence would have sufficed?
The chances that my seatbelt kills me are probably higher than me dying or being harmed by mass surveillance. And I'm married to an Afghan.

Then again I'd probably guess that my seat-belt is significantly more effective at saving my life.

Plus most of the ability for abuse exists even without a system in place. If the government wants to discredit me they can make up evidence and get a warrant. Or they can just do warrantless wiretapping.

The ability to spy on all citizens exist whether it's used or not. That goes triple for metadata that companies keep anyway. As long as Google is spying, that information is ripe for being taken by government.

There is still a risk that a non-rouge part of government could use mass surveillance for shitty purposes. Like hunting down jews, homosexuals, civil rights activists, etc. But the whole government would have to break bad. And they could reinstate a mass surveillance apparatus in a couple months anyway.

I'm not really convinced that using the NSA to spy on suspected terrorists, spies, and drug cartels is really an significant risk to our freedom and safety in general.
I see your point and I think you and me may have different ideas of what growth means. To my credit, wrt "growth" I was referring to GP's comment "Endless growth is impossible" which doesn't mean GDP inherently, and the statement is true as far as "if a system is growing, it needs growing resources to support itself."

Sure, if we convert to solar and maintain our population, then we can sustain ourselves until the sun explodes, but that is not growth no matter what our GDP says.

My point is that if GDP, as a measure, somehow indicates that economic growth can be sustained indefinitely (barring acts of God of course) then it is flawed.
3. You get great at estimating work in 25-minute chunks. Being able to exert that level of control is cool.
4. It directly taps into several other productivity systems like the X Method.
> People do care about it, they just don't think about it that often, or only think about people seeing their tamest online behaviour.

There's also a big difference between not caring and caring, but feeling powerless to actually do anything about it.

For any of these larger privacy issues, most people are powerless to make significant changes. I can't prevent Google from driving its Street View cars by my house. I can't prevent Facebook from making shadow profiles about me. I can't prevent the NSA from conducting mass surveillance, etc.
> You can pretty trivially expand the question as to why woman are choosing their careers over children.

The problem is that it's not just one problem. Almost everything is set up to economically discourage two-income families from having more children. After everything you've mentioned, the second income financially disqualifies you from many childcare and other benefits available to single-income families while progressive taxation, sold as targeting the wealthy, instead swallows the money a middle income family could have used to pay for those things out of pocket.

And after the government has laid claim to most of the second income, what's left becomes the baseline for the cost of living. More families now have two incomes so it takes two incomes to afford a home in a good school district.

It seems what is needed but not present is a strong lobby for middle class families. Everyone pays lip service because they're a large voting block, but where is the equivalent of the AARP or NRA for families with children?
That looks worse than some call centers I've seen. I'm not sure how they expect engineers to get any work done in those situations. That looks like "open office" taken to it's worst possible conclusion.
This used to be a bigger timesuck for me because I didn't always have a good interrupt to tell me that whatever process (e.g. compile) had finished.

I've since added a bash alias that helps: `alias beep="echo -e '\a'"`

`burkemw3@laptop$ compile ; beep` makes sure I don't have that excuse anymore.
China’s Tianhe-2 Supercomputer Maintains Top Spot on List of World’s TOP500
By simply clicking a link, you have not made any agreement with a given website you're visiting. It is not stealing when you click a random link from a friend. Sure, by "continuing to use this site," (usual EU privacy popup message) your continued browsing could be constituted as acceptance of their policies. But until that happens, there is no implicit agreement. Any tracking they attempt is outside of any agreement, and it is your duty to protect yourself and your privacy.
Why would they need federal approval for that? They aren't, afaik, federal student loans.

And there are lots of reasons not to refi federal loans to private loans to save a bit of interest, particularly IBR and pay-earn plans. Though private loans would be dischargeable in bankruptcy, so they have that going for them.
Bad analogy. The sites I help run are often receiving 10k attacks per minute with fuzzers and known exploits. The internet provides anonymity unlike some guy standing at your front door. I have yet to have an army of bad guys trying to pick my lock 10k time per minute on my house. Backdoors into things are economy is based on SSL etc. are just plain irresponsible.
Are you really active in Gmail? It could be lots of people you correspond with clicking through to your profile, from the link that typically shows up in the right sidebar.
Good point, but by itself restarting the timer isn't much of a deterrent (at least to me). It makes me wonder if a better incentive might exist so that you can pause the timer but with a weightier tradeoff.
I was trying it, and clicking the sidebar Profile link caused Firefox to go "Not responding", and I had to use "End task" to kill the browser.

One of my main complaints about the Google+ interface is how heavy it is. It feels like it was designed by a huge corporation, under many thick layers.

I like fast baremetal sites, not heavy JS apps that feel like running an emulated Adobe Photoshop in a web browser.
"deep and meaningful connections or friendships"

You mean a wife or husband? Or a dog? Maybe find a church you like?
Apparently motherfuckingwebsite would score 100 if they took out the google analytics tracker.
Four modifications for Raft consensus… [pdf]
That would be nice, but is there a hardware supply chain that can support enterprises? Dell & HP seem to have given up on making money from endpoints. OEMs like Quanta and Foxconn would need middlemen to support customers. Secure OS software like Qubes struggles to find OEMs who care about integration.
Googlers and Linux users!

Quite a few photographers there as well, though I haven't looked for a year or two...
I don't understand the point of this research. We already cured heart disease: take grains (including corn and soy), refined sugars, legumes, and seed oils out of your diet, increase red meat, healthy fat, and vegetable intake, and do regular exercise.

For those that already have heart disease, increase Omega 3 (triglyceride or phospholipid bound, not ethyl ester), CoQ10, and PQQ supplementation to help repair the damage.

When the media talks about "curing heart disease", they really mean "curing it without eating healthy, which is the only known cure". Why doesn't everyone just learn to eat healthy instead? It fixes everything.

Edit: Down-voting me without actually commenting why you disagree doesn't really help. Why do you think eating strange diets that have only really been recently developed since the end of WW2 are healthy or medically necessary? Especially since the rise of heart disease, diabetes, and chronic obesity have only become a problem during the same time period, even after accounting for better detection and diagnosis rates.
On-Demand Darwinism: Survival of the Fastest
It was an odd anecdote. You should set it on fire then quickly blow it out and wolf it down.

Done is better than perfect.
There's lots of good advice here on meeting people. But in my experience the hard part has been moving from acquaintance or casual friend to good friend. It was always easy to meet people through hobbies, but those relationships tended to end up focused exclusively on the shared activity -- I'm not very outgoing so I wouldn't really talk about anything else with those people, or spend time with them outside that activity.

But a couple years ago I joined a very close-knit martial arts group and have finally made some good friends that way. I think the big difference is that this group does public demos and attends competitions together. That often means spending most of a weekend together, including some less-structured time that encourages more casual conversation. Competitions can also be very intense experiences, and supporting each other through that helps to form stronger bonds.

As it turns out, the last time I made a lot of close friends it was through my college fencing club, which had a lot of the same characteristics.

I guess that doesn't help much unless you're interested in martial arts or other competitive activities. But it worked for me.
Very much this. Fast is very important for usability, but it doesn't matter if it doesn't work correctly. Time and time again in my consulting engagements it proves far easier to get it right first, and then refine and optimize later.
I am glad to hear this. Erowid probably saves a lot of lives due to their encyclopedic coverage of "research chemicals" alone. If medical professionals can use Erowid as a step-off point for treatment, people could really be helped at the bleeding edge of drug use/abuse.
Walk around. If you have a floor that lets you slide around while socked, do a few hallway sprint-slides to get your circulation going.
Or my favourite: 60-second plank to start every break. Pomodoro six-pack plugin.
I once looked at software jobs at Indiana University a few years ago. Take a look at their current published salary docs.

Level descriptions: http://www.indiana.edu/~uhrs/salary/level_guides/LG-IT-systd...

Salary ranges: http://www.indiana.edu/~uhrs/salary/pa-ranges-201516.html

If you prefer not to click, I'll summarize:

Entry level: $41-53k/yr
Junior: $53-69k/yr
Senior: $69-90k/yr
Tech Manager: $90-117k/yr
Tech Executive: $103-134k/yr

I would literally need to be the manager of an entire department to earn more there than I do now, as a lowly worker peon. In Alabama.

Every last person working there now must have already explicitly decided, "I am never, ever, ever moving anywhere else." I politely extricated myself from the interview process, offering the feedback that their salary ranges are not competitive.

The talent is available. But it just isn't going to sell itself to the lowest bidder.
Another way of saying this : a lot of B and C players are really A players working for the wrong person. A lot of how productive and successful engineers are has to do with the environment they are working in.
Keyboard accessibility is missing.
Earnest Raises $275m to help students refinance loans
Erowid is great, and I've made use of it many times in the past. I think the real strength of Erowid is in the "experience vaults" where you can really get a lot of high-quality subjective information that can help guide your choices.

The safety and legality information is useful also, of course.
The suggestion says to cache the js file for the analytics tracker, not to remove it.
Pomodoro saved my butt in college one time, when simply "working hard with breaks" wouldn't have. I had to read a 200 page monograph in a single night and then write a book report on it.

With Pomodoro, I assigned each chapter one "pomodoro" (25-minute time period). At the end of that time, the chapter was done, whether I'd finished it or not. As the timer ticked down, I'd see it out of the corner of my eye and read faster, eventually just skimming the first sentence of each paragraph and maybe soaking in one or two details every couple paragraphs. When each chapter was done, I'd have a rough idea of what the main thrust was, and a fistful of details as well. I'm pretty sure I got a B+ on that book report, but I was just amazed I got it in on time at all.

So in this case, I found it useful as a way to complete a large, boring, segmented task in a quick-and-dirty-but-effective way. I wouldn't recommned it as a cure-all, but it's a good tool to have in your belt for certain kinds of tasks.
JEugene (YC S15) Is Hiring Engineer #0 in NYC
I hadn't heard of him before I came across him in a novel (http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Affair-Spring-Swinburne-Advent...), and after that I had to read up on him. Quite a remarkable fellow.
> why is US blamed for "destabilizing Afghanistan" and "unintended consequences", if the area would probably be similarly unstable even in this alternate timeline? if the US meddling didn't change anything for the worse, why all the blame?

Well, first, I didn't say that the US "didn't change anything for the worse". I just said that it wouldn't have resulted in a more stable regime, ceteris paribus. Stability is not the only axis on which to evaluate whether the result would have been better or worse[0].

And we're just talking about the US's actions. The US and the USSR are both responsible for the current situation; the "blame" doesn't have to be assigned unilaterally to one single entity.

[0] I'm also deliberately not defining "stability", because that's already an incredibly hefty topic when discussing middle eastern history and politics.
West Africa is full of fighting and has been for thousands of years. The transition to democracy (and stability) is made more difficult by the arbitrary borders drawn by Europeans. For example, Ghana has 71 languages and three major cultural divisions. It should probably be at least 3 countries (including parts of neighboring Ivory Coast and Togo). The square borders do not match where the people live. For example, the Adele people live on the border between Ghana and Togo. They enjoy half the political representation they deserve in both countries.
Hey dayjah, thanks for support! Vicilog does not have implemented option to revert changelog into readable form of the log but we are writing this on our TODO list.

Yes, I agree on that, although we just started working on this project so we will implement this feature in future. Keep up the good contribution! cheers.
A "don't be evil kind of Facebook" could've been appealing. Unfortunately they're decidedly not that, with their real name policy, forced integration with other services, public profiles, etc.
I actually gave up using Google search on mobile a few weeks ago because of basically this. The information density had got to the point where it was basically useless - and this was search, their main product! (On the positive side, all the extra whitespace pushed the non-sponsored links way off the bottom of the screen. That must be profitable for them.)
Graduate loan rates not too long ago were 6.8% for Stafford and 8.5% for Grad PLUS, regardless of the underlying interest rate environment. But starting in the September 2014 school year the law was changed to charge a fixed margin over the 10 year rate -- 3.6% for graduate Stafford loans and 4.6% for graduate PLUS loans. I don't know what rate Earnest is borrowing at, but AA rated 10 year corporates are yielding just about 3%. That leaves somewhere between 60 and 160 basis points to make their profit. Even if their underwriting is near perfect, there are still servicing costs.

Certainly that's enough of a spread to make money, but it doesn't seem like some huge opportunity. FWIW I scratch my head for the same reason about mortgages given the narrow spreads, but there companies don't actually plan on holding the loans on their books (most end up on some set of government books in recent years). So that's more of a services volume business than it is an underwriting one.

Edit: I just re-read this and I made a mistake. The 3.6 and 4.6 are above the 10 year treasury which is around 2.3. So the spread between the AA rate and the loan is 290 to 390 bps not 60 to 160. A considerably better situation.
Not long ago there've been an article here at HN about how the existence of A, B, and C players is a consequence of bosses labeling them, not of the actual players.

It claimed exactly this mentality, where, for example, A players are allowed to manage their worload and avoid burnout, B players have little liberty, and C players had none.

Not that I don't think everybody is as capable, but the environment's influence is so great that, except for a really small amout of obviously incompetent people, you won't have a good idea of who is who.