skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 1. Instructions: Uber does not instruct drivers about ... how to drive

Whatever gave you that impression? Uber has strict rules about how drivers should behave with customers, or about the maintenance of their car. For example drivers are not allowed to be aggressive in traffic (like taxi drivers), they are not allowed to talk with the client unless the client shows interest in talking, they can't smoke in their car and they are not allowed to reject orders, otherwise they'll suffer a pay cut.

I've talked with multiple drivers that confirmed the above. I also once complained to Uber about a driver that called me to convince me to cancel my order and they replied that the driver was scolded. I have the response in my email to prove it.

As a disclaimer, I'm talking about Uber from Romania, not from the US, but it's the same story, drivers being hired as contractors.
Well yeah, if that's what Uber tells them, that's probably how they would see it.
>Can you say with certainty that the US government is not controlled by the media corporations either?

With certainty? No.

US Government is a collection of individuals theoretically bound by a (very-large) shared text, or program, if you will. Do media corporations have some measure of influence on some of those individuals? Undoubtedly.

I am fairly certain that the individuals who make up the US Government are not all on media corporation payrolls.

>Judging by the political "activism" regularly displayed by Fox and CNN, I think it's fair to say that the media exerts a lot of control over the executive and legislative branches.

This makes sense. US Government is structured such that it arises from the people it is governing. If that structure is to be used, it requires public communication (ie. media).
Dow High class of '89, then majored in ChE at U of M, class of '93. Any overlap?
Honestly, it was because the mandate came when CFLs were still a bit buzzy (or otherwise immature technologically), so it seemed like a quality sacrifice. (no longer of course; we can probably discuss infinitely whether the mandate helped or hindered the tech).
Have you tried table salt? It's cheap, non-toxic, a very good astringent and washes away with enough water. Use it all the time when my hands are covered in grease.
Quality assurance is important whether you do that via humans or code, but the thing that always bothered me about Q&A was that the ones I worked with were mindless people simply looking at the feature request and the functionality on the page and comparing the two without any thought towards the actual product, business, or user.

And in that system, the developer is completely removed from the product and is just another factory worker. The closer engineers can be to users (with design to translate obviously) the better for everyone.
> Which is not shocking at all: does anybody really think a human can run through 800 test cases better than a computer can?

I think this rather misses the point; it's the bug that doesn't have a test case where QA helps.
Once upon a time, the city of Los Angeles asked hard drive sellers not to use the "master/slave" terminology because someone made a discrimination complaint.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/11/26/master.term.reut/
Well, in this case visit their website :-)
How I couldn't learn Meteor.js and what I decided to do?
I have been learning meteor.js for last few months. Once you build few simple apps, you start to struggle. Everything that was simple at the beginning starts to be impossible to accomplish when you scale up. Connecting domains with DNS, setting up email for domains, deploying, backing up my database it all started to be just too much for me. I spent hundreds of hours trying to learn, but I realised it was just an inefficient waste of time.

I decided to find the solution. Two tutors and a group of entrepreneurial intermediate meteor developers. Let's go to the exotic place, let's spend there 7 days without external world's disruptions and let's learn as much as we can. This is my plan, you can find it here: http://meteorinflipflops.com.
What is your plan to not to lose time?
Based noise gA web machine to recreate a unique working environment at home
My Personal Story: Why I became a software engineer
Well, no one cares what goes on inside the building I suppose. Most people – even clients – never enter them anyway. The most impressive office I've ever seen was an office in Chicago. Non-descript building, really couldn't point it out in a line up, but the interior was just amazing. Not the Google Disneyland oh-look-there's-cotton-candy kind of amazing; i.e. not so much novelty as it was just.. Classy I guess.
When I was reviewing CV's recently (not specifically for new grads) I notice that some people list about more than ten languages and frameworks. For me that was slightly offputting as it shows shallow knowledge on lots of them, rtaher than deep knowledge in any of them.
Oh they're not alone in that absurdity. See for example symmetric BS in Django:

https://github.com/django/django/pull/2692

Welcome to the "fear of offence" culture. Should coin a term for that - offendiphobic?

Edit: I'd like to point out to the silent downvoters here that there's legitimate concerns being raised in this subthread about money being wasted on political correctness, which are not being addressed by any of you. If you are unable to give a counterpoint, you should rethink your position instead of downvoting based on emotions.
Electrostatic Vibration – enhancing touch interfaces with tactile sensations
That doesn't seem to be the case: https://github.com/mitsuhiko/flask/graphs/contributors. The owner seems to be fairly active, but it is surprising that there hasn't been a release in two years. It is a micro-framework though so how much can they really add, and the apps and ecosystem around it hasn't stagnated at all.
I'd be interested in reading this. You keep writing as if LW/Yudkowsky is very harmful,but you won't elaborate on what the danger is aside from "think wrong".

Like if people were donating all their money to A.I because of the Basilisk, or killing themselves while gambling because they've taken many worlds too far, or something I could see why you would be so urgent to warn people away from Yudkowsky. What is you are so concerned with?
But you're talking about QA as a general process, not QA as is meant in the article:

> Software engineers at Yahoo are no longer permitted to hand off their completed code to another team for cross checking.

Dev Team A was giving a batch of code to Dev Team B to review.

I agree that the business user/product owner/whatever should be reviewing everything in test prior to approval and in production after but I'm not sure that's the article means by QA.
> What did the CPG companies think was going to happen when they dumped a billion tiny little pieces of plastic directly down the drain?

I'm willing to put part of the blame on the cities for this one. In many cities, wastewater treatment has not been given the necessary investments to properly filter the water before piping it into the lake. Plastic's not the only problem, unfortunately.

http://greatlakes.org/CSOs
This is basically my experience. I think the ideal situation is having development and QA cultures that both prioritize quality and automation. Development cultures sometimes fail to prioritize quality ("not our problem"), and QA teams sometimes fail to prioritize automation ("not how we do things"), but those are problems with those specific cultures, not with the entire concepts of development and QA.
I have 5 years of experience and a BS and MS degree in Electrical Engineering from a top school in the US. How easy is for me to get an EB2 visa if a company is willing to do the process?
Perhaps. I used to collect bugs in a jar (then release them later) on my parents' farm, but never brought them inside. However, can't speak for all children though.

My brother on the other hand, I could see him doing something like what you described when he was a kid though.
> Acetone is more environmentally friendly

But but chemicals!
It is not always enough. For example, recently I have found several ways to spoof the URL and HTTPS lock on Google Chrome. So phishing seems to be a concern.
Eat right. Exercise. Good sleep hygiene. Etc.

I have a medical condition. So looking to my physical health has long played an important role in being able to focus. When I can't focus, it often means I am dehydrated, hungry, running a fever or something like that. I strongly suspect that when other people complain they just can't concentrate, it suggests they have some kind of minor health issue, such as an unrecognized allergy or poor sleep quality for some reason.

When I was in really poor health and had a corporate job, I took a break every hour on the hour to have a snack, a drink and a bathroom break and try to get myself pulled together enough to focus. I need less of that these days, but I still have days when an afternoon break and snack and drink and some caffeine can help get me going again when I am flagging.
How does the process work. If I (a Canadian) get a job in the US, what is the timeline for me to be onsite working? What kind of help settling (finding a place to live etc) is there?
Products like Gojo, traditionaly at least, used crushed pumice or sometimes walnut shells.
What is the Surface 3 Pro lacking that you still have a z3 ? (waterproof ?)
I had no idea Yahoo had a QA department! Ever try to use flickr?
If I come over from Canada and work somewhere, is it easy to change my job to another company if things don't work out? Do I have to leave and come back? Is there a deadline in finding a new job?
Mysterious Detour While Driving? It Could Be Due to the Curvature of the Earth
I'm not sure why this entire conversation revolves around ASP.NET when they're are many other alternatives but thanks for the info.
I wish they add support for sending money internationally. That would be a killer feature for Google Wallet!
How to disable  speaker in my htcm8?
I have HTC m8 I don't want speaker in my phone.cuz I'm using it in work and I'm using headphones always so I don't want speakers.
1) Does the company work in the Tech that I know (at the time I was Java, C, SQL, JS, and R mainly)

2a) Did the company recently have any bad press? (Smaller companies were harder to judge on this, but larger ones are easy. i.e. JP Morgan Chase was not on my list, However Capital One was.)

2b) (This was only used if I was unsure after 2a) If I knew someone in the company over my professional network, or a frined of a friend, etc. I would reach out and ask them about the company. Most people responded to me which was nice. Come to find out we would talk about our mutual relation and then I could ask them about what they do. I also got some good general advice as well.

3) Does the company 'smell bad'. This was something I didn't really use until I was applying/in the process of getting hired. I would keep my nose out for bad signs. (looking at you Cerner (Great Engineers I chatted with, but their recruiting was a nightmare to deal with, but that may of just been me)).

If you can't tell, I did my best to logically choose and look at data in a very organized fashion. This was due to the amount of data that I knew I was going to manually be mulling over. I needed a way to figure out to to translate my research/feelings of one company to the research/feelings of another.

(Also, you have no reason to believe me, but I did get to last round interviews with Google. I never even applied with them. They reached out to me via LinkedIn. At first I was like 'This must be spam trying to phish me or something', nope real deal. I was keeping a Blog on Blogger about Software Engineering, School, and other semi-professional things. I blame that for them reaching out to me.)
The Szilassi polyhedron
Hi Peter! Thanks for doing this AMA.

I had a question about H1Bs. My F1 OPT expired Feb 2015 and I had a grace period of 180 days to apply for STEM extension. But in the meanwhile (April 2015), I heard that my H1B got picked in the lottery. So I googled it and read someplace that I wouldn't have to worry about the OPT STEM extension anymore, so I didn't go forward with my STEM extension application.

Is this something I have to be worried about going into my visa interview in my home country?
Frankly many other countries already have the equivalent of this service.
Clearly you've forgotten that doing anything one doesn't want to do, even if it's still software and absolutely part of their job, is "being forced to do it for no extra pay."
Thanks I've heard similar things.
It's not really taxes, although the fees for filing corporate documents. The franchise taxes are lower, but the numbers for large companies are so tiny it's inconsequential ($800 in California compared to $150 in Delaware).

My understanding is that Delaware has strong corporate law with well defined protections for corporations and lots of case law to back it up from their Chancery Court. The huge history of case law is really what makes the big deal from what I've read because it makes contracts enforced there (which all shareholder contracts would be) much more predictable in terms of what's allowed.
Which gives them what? A monopoly on self driving passenger transport? I find it unlikely (and without that, they will deal with relentless competition).
Let's Encrypt – 100K Certs so far and Growing
Probably helps that the UK doesn't allow guns.
3k calories is exactly where i was before i started paying attention, and on my cheat days (i do sensible low-carb with periods of keto to get back on track when i regress a bit) that's exactly where i end up. i log everything i eat on MFP.

i think 3k is where most people in the US eat at. it's basically the pointless snacks and carby/sugary crap that make the difference between 2k and 3k. that extra 1k calories is easy to eat, and hard to cut.

quite honestly it's amazing i didn't weigh 300 pounds... a lot of people do weigh 300+. being overweight (and i still am over by about 15 lbs, slowly losing the rest) gave me a serious appreciation for the bad psychological state one must be in to really let it get that bad.
...triumph of continuous integration and staged rollout.

This makes sense to me. The fact that this wouldn't have worked at the old-style "enterprisey" places we used to work at doesn't say much in general. (It may not work at Y! either, but it seems possible...)
TL;DR: QA is changing - just like everything else.

The article makes the assumption that QA == manual QA which as a quality professional is false. Quality is about measuring risk across the development process. Immature team need manual QA while mature (in a process/quality sense) teams need much less (or none).

Quality professionals who want a sustained career needs to learn development processes, opts, documentation & monitoring. We make teams better.
Scientists tend to superspecialize – but there are ways they can change
When measuring the effectiveness via reduction of issues, how do you account the natural stability introduced by reducing the updates/week each developer ships? When devs are tasked with code reviews and/or QA, this is time that could have been spent on their own features. In other words, if the product is stable today, and everyone's on vacation (no new updates), the product will generally remain stable save for unforeseen usage patterns.
+ 1 for relaxed scuba diving. If you're swimming hard, you're doing it wrong.
Updated TL;DR: QA is changing - just like everything else.

The article makes the assumption that QA == manual QA which as a quality professional is false. Quality is about measuring risk across the development process. Immature team need manual QA while mature (in a process/quality sense) teams need much less (or none).

Quality professionals who want a sustained career needs to learn development processes, opts, documentation & monitoring. We make teams better.
Yeah, I recieved similar counsel, but I didn't get through the H-1B lottery last year, so I'm wondering if there are other ways.
I have worked in small companies before where there were no janitorial services, so we emptied our trash cans once a week, and took turns taking the larger bags to the dumpster outside. What's the big deal? And that's not a rhetorical question. I truthfully want to know why you think something like that is silly.
How about the right version:

They fired the QA team to force the devs to do a better job of designing for testability. When you have to write and plough through your own tests, you integrate tests earlier, and you modularize your code better to support that testing. There's a lot in the early phases of engineering that the initial devs can do that QA cannot. QA is handed a black box; dev gets to change the box.

It's a very similar big-picture realization as the move from "system administration" to SREs/devOps. Having a bunch of people throwing #@*( over the wall that other people then have to make work is a poor model for optimizing the big picture.

This is a good move. It's Mayer taking another play from the Google playbook and trying to improve the process at Yahoo.
The Right Way to Think About Semantic Versioning
Please don't lie about your GPA. Having read hundreds of resumes, I won't freak out when I see 3.2, as long as you have interesting projects. Anything that shows initiative beyond class work. If you didn't do any internship, didn't write any open source code (even the tiniest of code), I'm more likely to pass on your resume.
Pharmaceuticals are another such issue. Maybe we ought to be designing for inactive metabolites. But getting drugs that work well and are safe enough is a huge challenge already, I admit. Externalities are a bitch.
Exactly. And having the computer run through 800 checks means a skilled tester can do what they are good at - finding bugs.
I would say start looking from Canada. I did that late 2013 and by January 2014 I was in California working at a startup with TN status.
I've found myself wondering at times, has there been any new development/thought put into Egan's Dust theory which you mention? As I take it a more rigorous but very close formulation is articulated in Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...)
Gotcha. Sorry, I've only used it once and don't remember creating an account, but apparently I did.
Please let me tip a name for that: "Volkswagening" - assigning the quality check to the production team.
What about a couple or a family though?
CFLs are still a quality sacrifice if you care about ease of responsible disposal and the quality of the light. It's fascinating to me to see the divide between people who think fluorescent light is fine and people who are repelled by it.
Given that LEDs were inevitably rolling out right about now anyway, helping CFL tech seems totally unnecessary and probably corrupt.
No what needs to be fixed is the need for money to pay for advertising. Remove this need and politicians won't be wasting their time raising money.
How does grammar carry over from non-Chinese languages to Mandarin script? It feels like it could feel stilted if the grammar was sufficiently different.
Not many replies unfortunately :( . Maybe you can resubmit the question later.
Well, email, which is comparatively easy to intercept has worked for PayPal and others for over a decade.
Apricot pits are my favorite.
I speak reasonably fluent Greek (family language), and took a course in Classical Greek when I was in school. My professor explained that the pronunciations used in mathematics (tau, beta, mu...) differ from the Modern Greek versions (taf, veeta, mee...) because the former are the (conjectured) pronunciations used in the classical language. A large source of evidence for the pronunciation of Classical Greek is the transliteration of Greek words in to other languages during that period, especially into Latin. The whole language is pronounced very differently, not just the alphabet.

As a side note, that class was absurdly easy because I already knew almost all the vocabulary. The classical grammar is quite different though, and more complicated.
Would you prefer r.haps0dy?
I agree with this advice. University is a great place to find other people who share your interests, and professors can make great mentors too.
If you found a way to have the address bar show an HTTPS lock on a Google domain despite actually being on one, then you've found a big hole and you could make a lot of money by reproducing/reporting this security flaw.

The fact that you have found "several ways" is intriguing. You are either mistaken, or you're one of the greatest security researchers out there.
I worked at Yahoo before and during this period, first as a QA contractor and then as a full-time developer.

Before the switch, our team (advertising pipeline on Hadoop) used the waterfall method with these gigantic, monolithic releases; we probably released a handful of times a year. Almost without exception, QA was done manually and was painfully slow. I started to automate a lot of the testing after I arrived, but believe you me when I say that it was a tall order.

Soon after I moved into development, QA engineers without coding chops were let go, while the others were integrated into the development teams. The team switched over to agile, and a lot of effort was made to automate testing wherever possible. Despite some initial setbacks, we got down to a bi-weekly release cycle with better quality control than before.

Around the time I left, the company was mandating continuous delivery for all teams, as well as moving from internal tools to industry-standard ones like Chef. I left before it was completed, but at least as far as the data pipeline teams were concerned, the whole endeavor made the job a lot more fun, increased release quality, and weeded out a lot of the "that's not my job" types that made life hell for everyone else.
Just the two hours of flight time actually. Otherwise you're driving, waiting in line, walking, getting luggage, etc
Would you recommend a Canadian wishing to work (remote, from Canada) for a US employer to get a TN visa. The work may require short (2-3 days) onsite visits several times a year.
I think C, it will help you learn all the rest. It also allows you to see how much some stuff like concatenating strings really cost in terms of performance. I think just knowing that as a fact will help you in writing in higher level languages.
> ... so how much can they really add

They add tons. There are many commits, bug fixes, etc. It's just that there A) hasn't been a release to PyPi, B) is an inordinate quantity of unmerged pull requests, C) are many undocumented changes, and D) issues like https://github.com/mitsuhiko/flask/issues/1272 that are over a year old (I left a comment https://github.com/mitsuhiko/flask/issues/1575#issuecomment-... explaining the vicious circle that I believe is created by not releasing to PyPi). I commit to Django (and donate), but I would never commit to Flask when it makes no attempt at Industry Standards™ like PyPi releases.

I shouldn't have said it's "abandoned", because that's an insult to the parts of the community that are very active.
Fan Offers New Way to Pay College Athletes: Crowdfunding
> If you don't mind lying, most companies will never check your GPA past the transcript you hand over (if you do that at all). So you want to embellish that 3.2 GPA to be a 3.5+ go ahead.

That's potentially a criminal offence in the UK, and probably the US.

(Fraud act 2006 in UK)

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3bbd58ec-6df3-11e1-b98d-00144feab4...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10941476/...