skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are you paid to write hard code, or are you paid to solve a problem? If solving that problem involves things that aren't challenging or "up to your skill level", will you still do them?

I'm a software developer. But, a few weeks ago, the Most Important Thing for me to do was get some art made and printed onto foam-core. Traditionally, that is not my job, and it doesn't match my skillset, but it needed to be done and I was the person best positioned to do it.

This is definitely situation-dependent. I work for the services part of our organization, where it is more important that you do what is needed than what you enjoy or are good at. However, for the pure engineering part of our organization, I want to hire you to do the thing you're good at and I don't expect you to do anything else.

So it depends. Do I need you to be excellent at a rigid set of things, or do I need you to be excellent at seeing something through to completion, whatever that means?
Vinyl version even of the same album is often mastered with less of the Loudness War.
Obama Tears Up in Emotional Gun Control Announcement
Bring intelligence to the way you pay with Plastc Card
Export Any Webpage to a Word Processing Document in ASP.NET MVC Website Projects
Why Magic+ instead of Operator?
Feeding the output of a job into a variable is a common enough task. One example I worked on recently was to use the results of one find(1) command as an array of arguments to another. Perhaps this was a very ugly way of comparing two directories, but it worked.

This is why it surprised me when I realized (without having thought about it) that variables can't contain null bytes. It made my quick id3 tag parsing script a bit trickier to write, since I could no longer just use read(1P).
This is pretty indisputable. Yes, recent and popular movies are still being shot on film, which very well reflects the fact that old habits die hard, and that creatives, producers and investors easily let their own biases and "shibboleths" get in the way of hard data.

I suppose one argument might be that the additional hurdles of the traditional workflow can be a constraint that boosts creativity.
Others have covered some of the enterprisey and ecosystem reasons around SQL Server. I'll add a few thoughts, but try not to reiterate too much. Note that I am speaking about Enterprise Edition which is ~$14K/2cores (sold in 2 core units) (other editions offer subsets of these features). This is all off the top of my head.

Ecosystem

As mentioned, you get core SQL Server, along with a number of integrated tools that range from adequate to best in class:

* SSIS for ETL

* SSRS for reporting - includes traditional paginated reports, Power View for visual analysis and exploration (in 2016 gets native mobile apps and major overhaul)

* SSAS - Multidimensional for traditional OLAP, data mining; Tabular for in-memory columnstore

* CLR - everything has access to CLR languages for customizability and scripting

* Azure - easy transition from on-prem to cloud either with IaaS and pre-configured DB VMs or Azure SQL and Azure DW for SaaS with syntax and feature compatibility; very strong hybrid infrastructure story

Features All of these are native

* In-memory OLTP - memory optimized tables, optionally transactionally persisted to disk or not, with sprocs compiled to native code

* Columnstore index - optionally memory-optimized tables with clustered columnstore for hybrid OLTP / OLAP workload

* HA groups for native replication and failover story

* Native R integration (coming SQL Server 2016)

* Integrated row-level security

* Encryption for data at rest and in transit (more of an Azure SQL piece)

* Native master data and data quality services

I don't know if you care much (but CIOs and IT directors of large organizations do), but SQL Server 2014 is the absolute leader in Gartner's magic quadrant for mission-critical application development, and Microsoft is in a leadership position for BI as well.

Believe it or not, TCO is one of the largest talking points for Microsoft data platform account executives and solution sellers. Especially when placed against Oracle that story is strong. We have customers (we being the company I work for - BI and analytics consultancy) coming to SQL Server from every platform you can imagine. There are also many customers leaving SQL Server for every other platform. At this point in time Microsoft is doing a pretty good job of making sure that first number is larger than the second by a healthy margin.
If you're bullish on this area, why did you sell?
How to convert video to iPhone 6
Another service for the 1%. This one will go the way of homejoy. These kids don't understand how tight the household budget is for nearly all Americans.

You can smell the elitism dripping in their examples on the site. Private helicoptors, $31 grocery delivery... most people will pay a little extra for convenience, but this is ridiculous.
Murder is highly correlated with urban and minority populations - the murder rate for blacks is about 8x that of whites.[1] The root of this is clearly socioeconomic, and I believe rooted in the drug war[2], which drives black market violence both by creating a lucrative ungoverned market and by removing constructive inter-generational alternatives through mass incarceration - i.e. if your father is in prison for a non-violent drug crime, you as a child lose both a role model and a bread-winner, which makes you more likely to fall into gangs for social and economic reasons.

If that's accurate, it's a vicious, massively destructive cycle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...

[2] e.g. outlier city "Baltimore’s City Police Commissioner Anthony Batts says that 80 percent are drug-related." http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/01/the-year-in...

"Eighty percent of the homicides were gang-related, [Chicago Police Commissioner Garry McCarthy] said" http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/29/chicago-homicide-ra...

New Orleans Police Department: "29% of all murders in #NOLA this year involved a gang member. That's down from 42% this same time last year." https://twitter.com/nopdnews/status/618864980364898305

And in some California cities "gang homicides only accounted for 29 percent of the total for the period under consideration (2003-2008)" I question the use of "only" here. :P
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evan-defilippis/do-we-have-a-g...

On the other hand, The National Gang Center says (based on survey data): "These estimates suggest that gang-related homicides typically accounted for around 13 percent of all homicides annually." https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/measuring...
the law of good-enough will strike again.
Well I'll admit my acquaintance with the equipment is dated by a few years since it turned out programming was more fun and paid more :P I imagine it still gets you a different quality and a different set of possibilities, even if digital has taken the rational and technical upper hand in many situations.

More on-topic, it also occurs to me that the Kodak cameras mentioned here will produce an image that the average film student or hobbyist (I guess that's the market?) with a canon or red wouldn't likely be able to reproduce convincingly, so that's interesting.

Anyway what I'd really like to see resurrected is 3-strip technicolor! That'd be retro
Also worth pointing out is Australians still have access to firearms, to many peoples misconception.

Hunting type weapons (bolt actions and shotguns) only require a simple firearm safety test plus the requirement firearms must be kept in a safe. Handguns are available but you must be a regular shooter (6 times a year I believe), plus member of a club and you cant take a handgun home for the first year of your licence/club membership. Semi-autos are available if you have a professional need for them such as a farmer who has problems with feral animals, or a farmer hire you as someone that supports their pest eradication.

None of this difficult if you want a gun, but it seems to do the trick in keeping firearms out of the hands of crazies thus far.
However, they do claim to distribute in a market perfect way most of the time. They claim to be prophets of value.
North Korea Announces That It Has Detonated First Hydrogen Bomb
What I have found amazing, is how rare mass shootings are in the United States. There are an overwhelming number of states where it would simply be the matter of $500 and a trip to Walmart/Craigslist for a disgruntled person or a potential terrorist to fully legally equip themselves to go on a murder-suicide spree.
From first contact to hire, I think we're probably vastly more efficient with candidates' time than most companies. It's exceedingly rare to get as good of glimpse into what you'd be doing at a given job as you see from one of our sample projects. People who aren't great fits (either for desire or skill level reasons) can decide that very quickly. AND if they take it on, it's entirely on their own schedule, no coordination shenanigans.

From there, we do roughly what you'd do if you flew to a company for an interview (or drove, I guess). Rather than running someone through 3-5 different people, we organize it more as a full day project with the appropriate people around.

For most people, I suspect we spend more time pitching the value of the company than we do getting them to do work for us.

It's sustainable, provided companies act like us. :D We do a lot to explain what's going to happen, what we think makes people successful in our org, etc. My guess is most people who apply and make it through the process aren't out talking to 10-20 companies, they're specifically interested in companies like ours.

Based on feedback we've gotten from candidates, even people we passed on, the process is much more relaxing than what they're used to. We've had it called "more human", which is a little ridiculous, but based on how awful most hiring setups are it makes sense. Getting a job sucks and we really want our process to minimize the awfulness.
I think I managed to unfollow everyone except for a handful of "friends" on Facebook. End of 2015 I finally unfollowed Facebook by deactivating my account. It really did not provide anything useful for me in retrospect, so it had to go.
if OPTi had written the drivers, sure, I might have paid. Just to show that linux support is appreciated.

In fact, this is a decent driver model, if companies actually wanted to make us put our money where our mouth is.

However, 4front held people for _ransom_ on a free operating system. that's way different. that's Bitkeeper-made-git-happen levels of different.
Facebook Has Been Intentionally Crashing Its Android App on Users
I really enjoy twitter for searching hashtags of current events. If there is some sort of live situation happening I always search twitter first for people near area etc. I almost always find news details on twitter faster than anywhere else. Example would be someone heard the police mention name on scanner and tweeted it long before news broke of persons name. After twitter I find every news source slow.
Huh? It's totally transparent AND you can get a better deal if you pick up the phone and negotiate. They'll ask you to sign a commitment and (unenforceable) exclusivity clause.

Some people even take that "confidential" offer letter for volume pricing and shop it around to other cloud providers. Shocker!
How to get the attention of important people
> but it seems to do the trick in keeping firearms out of the hands of crazies thus far.

Yes you wouldn't think this change would be enough - because if you want to get a gun you can but for some reason it has.
We've actually been doing this for two years already! It's much more sophisticated now, but even the naive version of what we're doing has been tremendously successful.
Why wouldn't Magic+ have a relationship with Comcast where they can bypass the queues? Seems like a natural relationship to have.
I speculate that there is latent demand for it between older people that miss it and younger people that are tired of pure digital and want something more organic and different.

Personally though, I would rather have something similar to analog that doesn't require the cost and time/complexity. I wonder how many folks will buy these to go with them:
http://nofilmschool.com/2013/12/nolab-digital-super-8-cartri...
Beat me to it! Haha! Here are some previous HN discussions on that topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10545626
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10600338
The large portfolio comes with a large list of references. I could also show them the code for every project. I've never been asked to produce either of those in an interview. No one has ever looked at my github account either.

I never said I don't want to learn new things. Quite the contrary. I stay up to date on the latest web tech and have been frequently contracted for that exact expertise. However, I do find it frustratingly annoying that I need to learn a multitude of "interview puzzles" that I'll never use in real life.
Debian.
The name of the company was 4th Wave, it was basically one guy with an EE PhD and a couple of young helpers (that was me for a couple years).

I don't know if he is still in business; this is still basically the same crappy website I built for him in 2002:

http://fourthwave.com/
> - This is part of the reason that we created Magic+. We wanted to be able to hold a very high bar for top-tier service and guarantee that you would have it at all times, no matter what.

This is really not addressing the issue in my opinion, it would go a long way if you offered more details on what steps has been taken to improve the service, the process, the monitoring and the reliability of the service.

Saying "Well we know we dropped the ball so we are going to make it more expensive in hopes less people use it is really not an strategy that inspires confidence"
I don't think it makes sense to base a hiring process on outliers. Still, if he were interested, he'd go through the same process as everyone else. There's a fairly good chance most of our positions require more than being a good hacker, be it some UI skills, or operations work, or even "ability to talk to an angry customer".
You have very poor reading comprehension skills, or else you appended your comment to the wrong post. Almost no part of what you're saying corresponds to anything that I said.

PS:
Giving some solid advice to public-facing startups looking for funding. Definitely take the autistic high-ground on every issue. Investors don't care about bad PR, they only care about abstract principles of truth as you understand them.
After reading this comment, I Googled "pico iyer full of crap" and this comment was the second result.

I was hoping to get some insight into why you guys have such a negative reaction to this guy. Instead I found out that Google has gotten scary fast at indexing.
Oculus Rift Game ADR1FT Launches Q1 2016 – Trailer
Should freedom of unpopular speech and the right to be free of unreasonable searches be decided by popular vote? Or is it understood that constitutional rights all have the risk of making us less safe and making the government's job harder, and that removing them is hard for a reason?
Would it be possible/difficult to reverse the direction of the lean if the card is 'grabbed' on the bottom half?
Hey magic, can we get a UK version of magic?
It is trying to let you know that you are not quite human.
A storage server and network to put those drives into which would give similar functionality to EBS would have significant costs and require some degree of management.
YMMV, the machines are very consistent, it takes some serious discipline to match that consistency at home, and you can get color casts accidentally. The C-41 chemicals are also a bit more unfriendly and more difficult to dispose of properly (not sure about positive). So these days I only do non-chromogenic film at home, but I might have made a different choice in the 1990s.

Speaking of which, Kodak doesn't even make E-6 film any more.
Shaving 5 or 10s off average handle time with smarter tooling is absolutely technology. In fact, it's probably the most widely used technology on the planet.

As someone who works in that space, helping people do similar things with greater accurately and quickness delivers a surprising amount of value... when you're talking about deploying that across 250+ desks.

The target isn't to throw technology at 99% of all requests, but to deploy it on the smaller portion of the process it's suited to. The only thing faster than 100% machine is 99% machine + 1% human.
I'm with this guy.... get over it.
I grew up near Detroit, and I am completely for more gun control then even what this administration has proposed. Those who argue that they need there guns to protect themselves and there families just don't get it. If you are ever attacked without notice, you are not gonna be prepared enough to grab your gun and prepare yourself. And honestly, if everyone has guns and everyones fires, no one is winning. Everyone having a weapon doesn't help anyone. I know some people argue that we can't trust the government to be the only ones to have guns, but realistically if a tyrannical leader ever came into power, they already have more firepower than any average american with a shotgun can protect against. Mike Huckabees comment is hilarious. You can tell he doesn't even believe in his own words. The government needs soldiers, and if you trust the soldiers of this country to protect, then trust them not to enslave you. There should be a complete ban on guns except for practical uses like hunting and for police...maybe
Came across a tweet about the Sony MiniDisc Recorder/Player going for hundreds and even thousands of dollars on Ebay. Nostalgia apparently sells.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2050601.m5...
>I guess a hard-line frequentist (if such a person exists) would counter that you can't assign probabilities to hypotheses or fixed parameters. Then Bayes's theorem (and every other statement about probability) is true only when applied to statements about how often a certain event will occur.

If you model "thinking" and "believing" as sampling in probabilistic programs (which they do in some schools of cognitive science), then Bayes' Theorem becomes a theorem about how often certain execution traces occur when the sampling program is run with fresh randomness. You then need none of the weird metaphysics associated with "subjective Bayesianism".
I don't really see what good a contract would do. It's probably worthless in a Chinese court where it would matter.
And of course your concern is pure as new fallen snow and you have no other motives.
Have you thought about having a separate privacy policy for your Magic+ customers? Specifically regarding the potential for you to sell data to "Other companies whose products or services may be of interest to you" which is a pretty broad spectrum.

I do understand how the software layer plus having multiple assistants working on a single person makes it "safer" than the SPOF of a traditional assistant (and I'm sure you've already thought of ways to have the software handle all PII while the assistants just support with the bits that require manual labor)

However, I feel like the killer feature of this kind of product should be Trust. That's worth paying for.

That plus the minimalist website copy and secrecy around operations makes it seem a bit niche for the startup crowd. And that sucks, because I want the AI assistant winner to be a newcomer, and not the usual suspects :)
This is the third time they've had a critical breach in the past 5 or so years, and that's excluding all the DDoS downtime they've had in that time span. I stopped using them after their second breach, and frankly am glad I did. I'm very happy with Digital Ocean.
Or analogous to renting time from from a fleet of at-will drivers vs owning a car. ;)
magic*, exploiting labor so you don't have to!
Go see Carol (shot on 16mm)
David Heinemeier Hansson on the Future of Rails
When a Competitor Raises Money
What is the actual answer?
From HBO's Silicon Valley -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5zQpN28xa4 -- I'll take the downvotes I deserve for trolling.

Though for the record, I'm fairly certain the hunters and wild animals analogy isn't intended as a complaint that he feels "hunted" or that he thinks people are out to hunt or kill startup founders in any literal or figurative sense [1].

The point of that anecdote in PG's essay is just that the counterparty to the argument doesn't have a clear objective. The Rick Webb open letter obviously uses it out of context to make PG look as if he's whining about being rich.

[1] fun aside: yay those 2 words mean the same
thing anyways now apparently anyways.
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/22/according_to_the_dictionary_literally_now_also_means_figuratively_newscred/
The 1% is likely to be a fairly large market.

With Homejoy, you could avoid the middle-man and go straight to the person doing the work. Here, you don't meet the person doing the work and the middle-man is where your time is saved.
Again, I think you are _dramatically_ underestimating the size of these networks.
Ask HN: What is the best way to adopt beta users?
Getting ready to launch a closed beta, however, I have never done this before. Does anyone have suggestions on the best way to adopt beta testers?
Fitbit lost me as a customer a while ago with how locked down their data is. Why buy this instead of a Pebble, an Android Wear device, or an Apple Watch, all of which have a comparable feature set and price, longer track record, and better data portability?
We are highly focused on software that automates and/or makes parts of Magic and Magic+ more efficient. Most of the founding team are engineers, including myself. At this time we can't say much about our specific technical approach, other than that it is a very difficult problem, we have a novel approach, and we are making progress.
Yeah it's not like ColdFusion powered web sites enabling billions of dollars in commerce and what with all other web development tools being free of security vulnerabilities and all.
thats just git with access controls
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
Well, for one, it is ubiquitous, you can ask for task in NYC or SF without paying fly tickets or waiting for it to land.
Sure, Korea and China both had their cultural influence on Japan, but neither is comparable to the influence of Roman conquest in the West.
How Insurers Plan to Track Your Every Turn
You signed an NDA and have done a full analysis of their code? Cool.
10+ comments from earlier this week:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10824665
I agree liquidity is a weakness.

However it's a classic disruptive technology scenario. Bitcoin is weaker than other currencies in almost every way, but it has its few very special advantages.

For now the only users are people for whom those advantages are paramount. That small group of dedicated users will use it dedicatedly and slowly the ecosystem builds up around it until other limitations are mitigated.

At that point we'll need to reassess its competitiveness.
Six or twelve egg boxes are still prevalent in most shops and supermarkets in the UK. Bulk deliveries are usually on 30 egg or 40 egg trays.
how does this differ from say using git, with access controls, where each commit is a transaction.

to me blockchain implies proof of work.
I was subscribed to Lumosity for 2 years.