skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having been a seasonal employee on several occasions, this article does a good job of portraying the casual attitude large companies seem to take with expendible labor forces. I've seen it first-hand even in smaller situations (ex: an indie movie theater for summer staffing), and while most were a bit better organized (better forms, personalised off-site testing), it's still pretty understandable. If Amazon isn't sympathetic to the transportation plight of the workers, I don't think I can fault them - that's pretty common for most jobs in my experience.

It's definitely a personal thing, but after all sorts of job roles, I'd probably think the quiet, repetitve tasks and 'timing' aspect of the hourly job actually kind of okay. Gives me time in my head without having to make small talk. Or deal with bad customers. I guess what I'm saying is that I'd still rather take the Amazon job than one where I had to work directly with customers in service or retail. Especially if said customers trend toward elderly...sure, moving boxes in a hurry can be stressful, but I'd prefer that to trying to explain/sell to a confused, sometimes impatiently angry monied elderly person, because boxes lack emotional outbursts.
This is really an awesome app. Keep up the good work. It still feels a bit clunky, but it has a lot of potential. Already using it :)
I currently work in this industry and the only thing I see that's drastically out of line with the real world is this:

>All the cars you see on the lot? They are owned by the dealership itself.

This, at least for the dealerships I work with, is almost never the case. For independent dealerships the only cars on the lot that they actually own are previous trade-ins. The majority are bought at auctions on credit (called "floor planning" in the industry). These are short term lines of credit that usually mature in 90 or 180 days. If the lot is productive, the unit will be long sold by then and the line of credit paid off, only to be used again. Depending on the number of sales made in the past year, the credit line with the floor plan company fluctuates.

Often, the same company (like Manheim in the US) owns the auction AND the floor plan financier. Cox Enterprises (Manheim's parent company) and KAR Auction Services in particular seem to be buying up smaller businesses in the industry left and right not unlike your big players in Silicon Valley. My company has fielded offers from both in the past, but our owner won't budge.

But I digress...the only other thing in the article that seems off to me is the emphasis on Certified Pre-Owned vehicles. Almost every dealer I work with will budge on that price. Making the sale is more important than a few extra dollars, in most cases. Plus, independent dealerships have a harder time with even getting vehicles certified, as opposed to the franchise stores that already have certified mechanics on site.
If we create true generic AI (i.e. can learn like a human does from just interacting with it's environment), then it will be much more human then we might want.

If you want to know how true AI might develop, then think about how a human child develops. We train/teach children what is right and wrong. But we also teach them the value of work (making money).

We have history to tell us what happens when you take a group of humans a treat them like slaves. How do we expect to create true AI that wouldn't see the injustice of working without some compensation? Just because AI's brain is digital and not biological doesn't mean it will not be able to develop a want for something.
As a professional, I tend to think a distinct coding style is bad. You should try to write a code that is plain and unsurprising and reproducible. To me, this study gives us another reason that we need a more uniform/standardized methodology and good education for the software industry.
Their profit margins are tiny by design. They put all of their profits into technology investment, and have been doing it intentionally for a long time. See: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520801/no-stores-no-sal...
Guilty.

This has caused all kinds of pain for us this weekend. We use WPEngine to host some sites, who in turn host everything on Linode.

Honestly WPEngine has some real nerve charging people big bucks for a failover plan that apparently doesn't exist. This is just another of a half-dozen or so Linode failures that took us and loads of other of their customers down completely. We're lucky that we planned for this ahead of time, but we weren't 100% ready to go live on a competing service either. A lot of folks are working on their vacations right now.

I think the two questions I'll be asking every host now and into the future are:

1) Do you host your services on Linode.
2) If you do, do you failover to another provider?

A yes to the first question and a no to the second is a non-starter in my experience.
Running `strip` on the binary decreased classification accuracy by 12%. They quite correctly point out that this isn't a large drop, but strip is really the lowest of the low hanging fruit when it comes to code obfuscation. I'd expect much bigger drops from anything that's trying to make code harder to fingerprint.
Sounds like an excellent idea for a honeypot. Are you building it?
https://i.imgur.com/Q6j2Jmp.png
If the code is open-source there likely is a history of contributions. But this research is about "De-anonymizing programmers from executable binaries" anyway, so really not an OSS scenario.
Agreed on all counts (I figured it was an untenable PT gig but wasn't sure). I just meant that while the average is comparatively low to tech (if still slightly above the US average personal income), it's possible but uncommon to get into the range of upper-middle, with a considerable amount of skill/work/luck.
If you reduced their bill from $11k to $600, I'm betting AWS was not the main problem.
police departments do not keep these kinds of statistics

That is a big part of the problem itself.

What about brandishing a weapon or charging the officer, or attempting to assault the officer? We don't know because this kind of evidence is never taken into account

.. and a number of recent high-profile cases involve the police claiming these things happened while the video footage showed they didn't.

The UK system is supposed to regard every death by police firearm as an incident that is fully investigated by the independent police complaints commission. (Does America even have one of those?) The system is not perfect (e.g. Mark Duggan, Jean Charles de Menezes) but it works reasonably well.

The Mark Duggan fiasco concerns me in that I think some of the bad relations between US police and the black public are "leaking" into UK culture.
Not a big fan of design patents either, but...

1. Not sure if something trivial (e.g. an empty circle for a button) would be eligible even for a design patent.

2. The solid and dotted lines are just to indicate the claimed design vs the rest of the product respectively. Potentially the dotted lines in one patent maybe claimed as solid lines in a separate design patent.
Studying during a commute is a thing, right?
Everyone knows you should hire a rockstar.
For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions
I'm a coder, how can I learn and gain experience as a Marketer?
I'm not disputing legality. There are plenty of unjust but valid laws that uphold a non-meritocratic society.
Playing with the tails make all kind of mistakes possible, but that seems like a criticism that would apply to any attempt to identify a distribution based on sample.
Comments from people seem to indicate their anti DDoS was "we blackhole you if you draw an attack". Has that changed?
Writing code that is plain, unsurprising, and reproducible not only is, itself, a style but also still leaves a lot of room for creativity/individuality.
"avoid cleaning bird" was in my fake list. I don't know whether it looks disturbing or nonsensical.
What What Wrong at Porter Ranch
The spider-like hallucinations are classic alcohol-withdrawl symptoms not directly associated with dementia or alzheimer's.

This story is on a number of sites, so it comes up in google searches, as the same report from the same guy.
a Sinatra for Crystal. Wonderful. Now if there is a Sequel equivalent… I'll be sold.
That sounds like he was job training to be a manager/owner later.

I strongly doubt a fluent, well educated westerner in China was going to be stuck with working on the factory floor as a career plan.
If we are going to be cynical about it, let's really be cynical and figure that they can best limit their losses by using a recovery well. If it was cheaper and feasible to light it, I think they'd do that over keeping pride.
Humans have to parse the syntax as well...
As a marketer who codes, I think that it is tougher to find organizations that encourage or reward this behavior. I've found that being able to code can isolate me from the rest of the marketing organization and warp perceptions in ways that are not conducive to promotion or new opportunities.
I don't think business people care enough about privilege to pay the salaries of software engineers. Software engineers are paid on leverage, their leverage on company profits.

The lens of deservance is not productive.
That's not a proof that no Proof of Stake system can work. It's a list of possible attacks, at least some of which are mitigated by recent Proof of Stake designs. See Vitalik's post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/3y0ysi/understand...

A fairly detailed description of that system is here: https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/12/28/understanding-serenity-...
Totally agree, in the paper they only look at competitive programming contests. Ideally, it would be interesting if the same could be applied to a larger code base with more authors and if it's possible to find a particular author in such a code base.
Heard of nullroutes?

(Edit: how is it that perfectly valid technical solutions get downvoted?)
I always wonder what causes people to be the people they are. It almost always ends up being "industry standard" practices.

Time for disruption?
Introducing Charrua – a DHCP implementation
I'm a pretty proficient programmer, but I would never have gotten there if I had to study after working 12.5 hour shifts all week - I'd still be working in the warehouse today. That's why I recognize I had privilege growing up in a country with paid-for higher education and parents who encouraged me to attend.

I also support such social measures for others as I feel it would be economically inefficient if I was still working a menial job instead of what I do now just because I don't have enough desire and ambition to work that much on top of studies.
> The main reason DDOS attacks exist is poor security and lack of cooperation between ISPs. Lack of adequate security on desktops (usually Windows) makes it possible to build large bot networks.

These days it's the hundreds of thousands of misconfigured NTP servers, recursive DNS servers, and various other protocols being abused for reflection attacks.

Granted, it still requires that the attacker have the ability to spoof packets, but preventing that requires even more time investment and has very little benefit to the ISP.
“30 Quotes for the Daily Motivation”
It is fair however to keep in mind that employees, or potential recruits, who forget to keep meeting times or fail to show up could have a very different outcome.
Multicellular organisms have to control the replication and renewal of their cells constantly. In a simplified view, cancer is a loss of that control.
Car salesmen don't make great livings, and their income is very volatile. However, dealership owners always have the largest house in town. They also like to take advantage of unsuspecting customers. I have no sympathy for car dealers.
Ability is a privilege.
I fail to see the significance of the main character's gender, unless it relates directly to the story in some way (i.e., being male/female affects their social standing).
It strikes me as silly that so many people raise hell over a detail that should be meaningless.
What became apparent over my time there was that, whatever the dramatisation of previous investigations, working at Amazon is just shit – but no more shit than any other mundane, badly-paid job.

Since there have been bosses and profits there have always been shit jobs, and until we're replaced by more efficient robots, they'll still be there for us to complain about.

This sums it all up nicely.
Is this view unique towards programmers or do you extend it to artists and writers as well?
> It's not their business, it doesn't make them money.

They used to think this. They got such bad press for a buggy, exploitable OS that it cost them quite a lot.

> They don't need to be competitive.

The OS needs to be competitive, and I think you're mistaken if you think the AV team at MS doesn't work tightly with the OS team, if they're in fact different.

> They just don't invest that much in it and as a result the protection is on a different level when compared to other major AVs.

At a different level because they don't put a bunch of crap on top of the OS which in most cases is really just a placebo? MS running a traditional AV division would be the height of stupidity. They are the OS vendors. Their fixes should be structural, not scaffolding.
AIs don't have genes, and are not vehicles for genes. That's one good reason to think AIs won't have human-like or even animal-like drives.

If we get AIs, we will probably discover a lot about the difference between an intelligence on a machine substrate and an intelligent animal. That is, we will learn what is essential to intelligence and what isn't.
I think I've probably been approached by Amazon recruiters about 20 times, each time asking them not to do so again. They still keep emailing me on linked in though.
> "Without license."

"Without license" is implied by "limit" -- that's the limitation.

> Right, because the hundreds of thousands of patents on various aspects of smartphones are consistently making them more and more expensive as time goes on.

Nobody said anything about "more and more expensive as time goes on." As soon as there is one necessary patent the seller can charge the monopoly price. Adding more patents doesn't change the monopoly price (though it does add transaction overhead that comes out of everyone's margins).

You can't claim that the monopoly price is not higher than the competitive price would be in the absence of patents.

> Sure, they can ask for arbitrarily large shares of profits, but that's when you move to a lawsuit, where there are more concrete limits on what can be demanded as royalties. However, lawsuits are highly expensive and risky to both parties (even patent trolls risk having their patents invalidated), so there is a strong incentive to find a middle ground.

The damages a court would award isn't a lower bound because the patentee can request an injunction that prevents you from selling the product until you pay them whatever they demand.

What are you even trying to argue anyway? That lawsuits and license fees don't cost money? That having to pay money isn't a disincentive to do something? That limiting competition doesn't increase prices?
DDoSes are easy because ISPs don't want to filter traffic (BCP 38). If ISPs did this, then it wouldn't be so easy to spoof source IPs and much easier to block or track down offenders. I don't see how CISA is gonna change this. If the USG wanted to stop this stuff, they'd create a policy forcing ISPs to filter. Same as VoIP and fake caller ID. If the FCC really cared, they'd start fining.
It's silly to disregard a companies previous actions when determining what they might do. In theory Google may be amoral but in reality they have shown themselves to act morally in certain situations. Disregarding that historical data means your assumptions are poor.
Programming Jobs Face Potential Decline by 2024
It is hard to study while driving across Kentucky.
Omaha Angling to Become Heart of Silicon Prairie
To reduce that a bit farther, it doesn't have to be desired control. Anomalous behavior in the form of bugs can have the same undesirable effects, and simpler systems have fewer bugs.

How many bugs are there in my 1960s vintage toaster? How many bugs are there in an ICBM's control circuitry? How many bugs are there in a modern kernel?

You make lethal devices "smarter", you'd better make sure you know what they do. This isn't impossible, but it's not easy or quick either (something which I think we can all agree drives a lot of systems design). Given that a lot of machine intelligence is predicated on statistical methods and eventual convergence... maybe not the best combination?
Yes. This hasn’t been true for a long time. OVH runs a huge network and they invested in tools to mitigate and neutralize DDoS attacks[1]. Of course an attack can still saturate your servers’ NICs but they won’t drop you anymore.

At their scale they are basically forced to handle big attacks on regular basis. The fact that they offer this protection in their basic package is what makes them a great host[2].

They don’t get a fraction of the love Cloudflare gets, but they should.

[1] https://www.ovh.com/us/anti-ddos/hoovering-up.xml

[2] https://www.ovh.com/us/news/articles/a1171.protection-anti-d...
This is bologna. Scott Aaronson does a great job of explaining why here: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799
OS.js – A JavaScript web desktop implementation for your browser
I agree that banks and other high value targets still assume that attackers somehow "play by the rules". I got a call not too long (maybe a year ago) from someone claiming to be with my bank. Their first line was, "To verify your identity, what's the last 4 of your SSN?" My response, "You called me, how do I know you're actually with (bank)?" The rep was flabbergasted at the response and didn't know what to say.

Finally he gave me a number and suggested I call him back at it. Same problem. He gave me the number. It's a random phone number. I ended up looking up the number and confirming it was associated with the bank and then calling him back on it. Not ideal, but the whole security model is completely broken.
Robots, yes. But not flying drones. It's hard for a drone to pull a bin off a shelf and pick up one item.
Hmm I like that idea! I'll have to try it out next time a company asks for a word doc.
Nice summary. I think it's worth noting that all of these criticisms generalize from the K-S test to any kind of Null Hypothesis Significance Test.
There is no cancer which affects "the old" predominantly. The chances stay pretty much the same (with some exceptions). Also, at some age beyond 60, cancer stops being the main medical cause of death, being replaced by infections.

I also don't subscribe to the theory that individuals have to procreate to boost the survival of their genes. In reality it's a bit more complex than that, and even very old people can and do contribute to the survival of their children or their close relatives.
From what I can tell, their general "workflow" is to shove the Word document into a parser that grabs your name, address, experience, education, etc. and puts it into a searchable format so that can filter on certain keywords. The reason they need to Word doc is because it's the only format their parser accepts...
Introducing JavaScript Tips – A JavaScript Tip per Day
Yes, Flipkart's force-pushing of the app is the final (and weighty) straw the pretty much stopped me from using them at all. Pretty stupid decision at a time when competition is only getting fiercer.
One of the major differences is that the Pharo VM is crossplatform (Linux, Windows and OSX), while the Dolphin VM only runs on Windows.
Microsoft's Xiaoice AI becomes the first live TV weather host
Wasm.news: Spreading the News about WebAssembly since 2015
Wishing won't make it so.
I agree- unfortunately, sometimes I am desperate and end up taking the job for lack of other options :(
Then why aren't more people killed by police in some of the drug infested UK neighbourhoods?
Like most startups, it's not going to be easy to profit from...
Nothing says Christmas like another Flash exploit
I didn't downvote, but I can tell you almost certainly it was because of the snark.
Tips for Deploying Single Page Apps
In the debate over the continued utility of human labor in the face of automation, I suspect gene editing (and/or embryo selection) is the most ignored countervailing factor.
Or setting up tableaux of famous paintings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSV_Sleeper_Service
Amazon makes workers constantly work faster. It isn't relaxing.
IT Recruiters and Linkedin
Show HN: BestWritten – Books of 2015 lists
Arg, the Paperclip Argument doesn't make sense. If an AI is intelligent enough to plan, set short term and long term goals and come up with creative solutions to problems, then it would have to be capable of understanding instructions in context. If it isn't smart enough to see that "don't turn humans into paperclips" is part of the context of "make more paperclips", then it won't be intelligent enough to turn all the matter in the universe into paperclips anyway.

This idea, and many of Bostrom's other scenarios, boil down to "computers take everything literally", which is a rather cartoonish understanding of the concept of intelligence. It's possible that ASI will be programmed to have a hyperliteral view of all instructions, or will not be able to change its own utility function. But that seems like such a remote possibility, the exception rather than the rule. While superintelligent computers may pose many dangers, blindly executing instructions doesn't seem like the highest priority of them.
How I explain tech debt to product
It is less of privilege and more that the developer market is broad and growing so a decent developer has an opportunity to be choosy. On the contrary, a Amazon warehouse worker probably has few alternatives so they tolerate the situation.
TLS Fingerprinting
How the Internet of Things Can Help Against Global Warming