skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can you suggest a use case, assuming modern best practices, where this would improve readability/understandability and ease of testing? That kind of control flow looks a bit scary to me.
Rust is very exciting but the ecosystem needs to grow before it'll be as useful as C++. Fantastic language, thoughtfully designed.
Salary information is public knowledge in several countries, and even in the US, government salaries are public.

That experience shows that this information does not cause a big distraction.

Public salary helps level the power imbalance between the employer (who has more experience in negotiation and more knowledge about what people are willing to accept) and the employee, and makes it harder to hide systemic wage discrimination.
Link to the actual brief: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11221178.
> I thought RAID and SSD were a terrible combination

Well there are different RAID settings. My product is an indexing engine (indexes Git repositories) and I've personally found RAID 0 reduces indexing time by about 30% compared to a single drive. I have a machine that has 4 SSDs running RAID 0 and I've found the performance gain after 3 SSDs is negligible.

It seems like 3 SSDs running RAID 0 is the best combination given my very limited sampling size.
It may not be perfect, but policy real average data are probably better than policies based on ideology without average data?
I think that's what he is implying here. They were so effective at this, that _even_ a savvy Warren Buffet fell for it.
It's still less dense than 200GB MicroSD cards.

(which are only $79.50 on Amazon)
Location: San Francisco, CA / Bay Area

Remote: Yes

Willing to Relocate: Maybe

Technologies: Node.js, React, Redux, Python, Scala, JavaScript

Résumé/CV: http://resume.sjlee.me

Email: seungjulee@wustl.edu

I am a recent EECS grad from Washington University in St. Louis with 5 years of experience in Software Engineering. I a product-driven engineer who enjoys building a system that lasts long and helps people in their lives.

Last week at Launch Hackathon, my team won the 1st place prize from Google, the 2nd place prize from Uber, and the 3rd place prize from Lyft. We worked on an app that helps Uber drivers to predict Uber Surge price by analyzing and visualizing events data. I contributed to my team on the backend of the app, which integrated external APIs into the predictive engine.

Previously, I've won a $50k hackathon, and worked at Groupon, United Nations, LG and big data startups.
In summary:

Snap to grid

Snap to grid

Snap to grid
Customer Support Is the Last Mile for B2C SaaS Companies
Microsoft has been very active in the standards efforts. Valgrind missing is painful, but there are windows-specific memory validation tools as well. I'm a Linux developer though so I don't feel that pain much.
U.S. Navy sends carrier strike group to confront China
I don't think it's fair to say that "we" are represented by a few hugely controversial companies.

It's not "High-tech employees get jobs," it's "high-tech employees willing to work for companies that participate in murder and empire get jobs."
I had a similar experience with Bluemix. One of the biggest turn offs though was the ridiculously convoluted website for IBM's cloud services. Some serious streamlining is in order there. I had no idea where to go or what to do to get the information I needed for simple things like straightforward API pricing, etc.
How I recovered your private key or why small keys are bad
Check out Cushion App: http://cushionapp.com/. I don't use it, but I follow his blog and he has some very thoughtful posts on design.
Oculus CEO says no Mac support until Apple makes'good' system withbetter graphics
No, it wasn't misguided. It worked great, and made writing web applications so much better and easier than it had been.

But Javascript has come a looong way in the last 15 years, and sophisticated web applications do a lot more client-side processing these days. That leads to different architectures, where continuations aren't as advantageous as they had been.

Hacker News is notable in that it doesn't use much client-side code and sticks to an old-school links-and-forms UI. Closures still make a lot of sense for that architecture.
Seems very arbitrary. There's a very similar card game in Spain called Truco (and in Italy called Briscola). Truco accepts communication and even bluffing as a core component. There are very standard system for hidden communication, like a wink representating a particular strong card and pursing the lips means another. Because these are so well known, its common to either wait for the right moment to share info, or intentionally share incorrect values to confuse your opponent. At the end of the round, there's an opportunity to bluff and call "BS", increasing the stakes at every hand. Its a very similar game, but accepting implicit communication changes it completely.
Not sure where you live but there's FMLA in the USA for up to 12 weeks:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_and_Medical_Leave_Act_o...
I was trying to say that it is not that they tricked him because they are so sly. They might have tricked themselves just as well. So it is not that had some secret great vision to take his money. They made mistake and they didn't see them and neither did Buffett.
Here's what I don't get... If you have any options at all, why stay at a company with sub-par technology that abuses their workers? They've been stuck in low 3 Glassdoor [0] range for a while. It's layoff after layoff as they slowly dismantle the company. Why stay? Geographic limitations? Narrow skillsets?

[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/IBM-Reviews-E354.htm#trend...
Software RAID or a host-based controller is the way to go with SSDs. Otherwise the raid controller becomes your bottleneck as whatever onboard ASIC or RAID-on-a-chip hits its throughput limit (and potentially overheats and dies if it's some crappy product designed for HDDs).

TRIM is well supported by modern host-based controllers designed for SSDs.
Why do you think H1B employees are paid lower salaries? And what long-term liabilities are you referring to?
I doubt any legal scholar would argue that a pre-schooler is able to sign a contract obliging them to pay back a student loan, so how can you say any given person owes society for their public school education?
Yeah, this is undefined behaviour and should not be expected to work, 100% agreed.

Wouldn't it be faster to remove that costly ternary conditional operator by zeroing out the first bit? Well, there's one degenerate case, for minvalue of int, but that is degenerate either way.
They'll have the same lifespan, but they won't fail at exactly the same time. Also, a lot of RAID now is done in software, and most software raid types support TRIM.
Another ex-Yelp worker is calling the company out
A company is it's employees. If IBM still has cheese slicer designers in 2016, it's because they failed to train them. The discussion we're having here is because there seem to be no repercussions to their failure.
Swift 3 API Guidelines Review
I'm just a crummy engineer that writes a fair amount of embedded firmware. When this subject comes up I've found mainstream programmers attitude towards these sorts of concerns to be actually hostile. A lot of programmers think when specification gives the compile maintainers a choice between making the code do something platform specific or something silently malicious, to do the malicious thing in order to 'teach the programmer a lesson'

I'm with you. These guys aren't helping us, our customers or the people that pay the bills.
I would be interested to see what HN thinks about this.

Who's name are the stocks kept in?
A timestamp authority is trusted in the same way that a certificate signing authority is, so you'd have to compromise a timestamp authority as well as the private keys paired with the certificate. A self-timestamped file would have the same level of trust as a file signed with a self-signed certificate.
Reading through the documentation I was trying to get the naming conventions or the tongue in cheek humor (which I presume is there).

Please make the emojis in the documentation code snippets clickable else it is really hard to follow.
Yes, but now try passing a spelling test in elementary school when "word" looks like "worb"
We can [partly] solve this in the tech field. (Startup idea.)

A cheap (very cheap!) device to detect lead in paint. It would have to cost under $50, and better under $30.

If you can detect it you can work on it because you can see the problem.

The only way I know to detect lead with a device (as opposed to chemically) is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_fluorescence

So, how to make a cheap enough device? You don't need great accuracy - 20% accuracy is fine for this. You need very high sensitivity in the detector because you don't want to generate a lot of x-ray energy in a device hold for household use.

To be practical the device would have to emit so little energy as to be basically harmless even if used on a person. (Low power, but also short duration.)
Design is best when you don't notice it. Maybe that applies here.

edit: I actually share the sentiment sometimes, but a couple of subtle changes can make a big difference overall. We are just looking at a small change and the example before seems heavier on the eyes. The lines have less whitespace, more "ink" and thus are overall darker. it's not enough to be unreadable and could probably be countered with a different font, but then the individual character is too light again. As with everything, there might be an optimal ratio of proportions.

We are rational people after all. On the other hand, we'd be pretty irrational if we'd willingly let content be distracted by the layout.

The changes are subtle. That's why it's called fine art, I guess.
I've read a couple write ups on this situation and I still haven't figured out how they picked the 100 studies. Was it random? It must have been right?
I actually think this is a mirror image of "companies don't hire women / because there aren't enough qualified women!" discussion.

I think there is healthy demand from women to marry a stay at home father, but not enough supply of men who prepared to be a stay at home father from a young age, dreaming about it, excellent at cooking and homemaking, etc. Pipeline needs to be fixed before stay at home fathers can be common.
The equivalent in widget selling is time-wasting leads. When you are advertising a job you are looking for leads and unqualified people are just bad leads.

Having said this there is little you can do about this problem since any well advertised position will attract the unqualified since the cost is so low to just mass-blast your cv.

I have always wanted to have a fee (say $500) to apply for a position and refunded $1000 to the candidates that actually have the skills they claim and which match the job requirements. Real candidates would be rewarded for applying (easy $500) paid for by all the time wasters and dunning-kruger types. While this appeals to me I doubt this idea would be viable in the real world :)
I see people repeat this but it's not true. The stock market heavily rewards investing in R&D if investors think the research is going somewhere. Biotech companies are a good example.
Anti-Harassment Procedures at the IETF
> It seems to me like IBM is in perpetual layoff mode.

Any large technology company has to be.

> It's that it's grinding down into irrelevance

Maybe? Who knows. They hung for 100 some years. As an entity they've done some things right for that to happen.
Redefining the way you listen to new local music
That's the stereotype. As a former H1B holder myself I can say that I never experienced it.

That said, if your employer sponsors you for a green card while you're on an H1B you are quite trapped in your job, and I wouldn't be surprised if people found their wages not rising as much as they would have otherwise.
The claims of the original study, the one that found problems with reproducibility, are being overstated. From the news report at the time:

Strictly on the basis of significance — a statistical measure of how likely it is that a result did not occur by chance — 35 of the studies held up, and 62 did not. (Three were excluded because their significance was not clear.) The overall “effect size,” a measure of the strength of a finding, dropped by about half across all of the studies. Yet very few of the redone studies contradicted the original ones; their results were simply weaker.

Also: The only factor that did [affect the likelihood of successful reproduction] was the strength of the original effect — that is, the most robust findings tended to remain easily detectable, if not necessarily as strong.

Here's the HN discussion of the study:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10131387
What do you make of studies that show monkeys and humans have a similar gender-biased breakdown of toy preferences and juvenile activities?
No, actually a company is its shareholders. Literally. Employees are the hired help.
Oookay, so to dig into it:

> They can provide severance packages, extra benefits maybe. Try to re-train some people perhaps. But can't keep everyone till retirement just to provide jobs (That is what Uncle Sam does).

Right, but they cut their severance packages. So clearly they're trying to contain costs. So yes, that's also a good sign for IBM the corporation, less good for their employees.

> Services was bringing a huge amount of money during late 90s early to mid 2000s. It just doesn't anymore

Now we have to step into the realm of the possible. Would it have been possible for IBM to look at their services backlog and contract timeframes, churn/retention rates and a few years ago say, "Shit, these contracts don't work out from an economic perspective, and maybe we should start to attrition out these deals because they're not going to work out long term?"

Maybe someone did (in fact, I'm almost certain someone did somewhere). But I'd also bet that some execs somewhere decided to keep going, keep signing money-losing contracts, that everyone started to live a lie so that they can get promoted, keep their bonuses, etc.

And now that they've now decided it was a mistake- the company doesn't pay the price (reduced severance), it's the workers who do.

> We are posting on HN right. This startup land. Every 9 out of 10 startups will die. Are you holding them just as responsible? Or is there some implicit assumption that if you work for IBM then you'll be good till retirement.

So, I've had to lay people off at a startup. It's terrible. We went out of our way to take care of them, including offering long severance packages, and cutting salaries and bonuses at an exec level to mitigate the layoffs. It sucks, but that was our obligation.

And I do hold startups somewhat responsible, but its also a different scenario - early stage startups are a known risk.

The big point I want to highlight is that I believe employers have an obligation to look after their employees, and when as a corporation they made a bet that didnt' work out, or had a profitable business that is no longer profitable, the ethical obligation is on them to look after those employees.

> How about this, what would you do if you ran IBM and you ended up with 50000 employees trained to do something that just doesn't bring profit anymore?

Treat them with dignity. Pay them a lot of money based on their time of service. Recognize that we should see this as a failure as an organization. Never refer to it as a "good thing"

EDIT: I also would have tried to "get out in front of it" - 50,000 people's jobs don't become redundant overnight other than through wishful thinking on leadership's part.
I agree, IBM's revenues are down down down every year, and they "make up for it" by replacing long-term their first-world workforce with a cheaper offshore workforce (showing more profit on less revenue).

This is all financial engineering and next year---I predict---their revenue will be down again, but they will show still more profit.
>I don't understand why, as an application developer, we wouldn't want to offload some of the computational load to clients instead of our own servers. That is a resource that scales far better with the number of users.

Because obviously your goal is not to lighten your web servers, but to make your webpage faster to load and hence more appealing.

If offloading to the client is at odds with the page being faster (and at least in the previous years that had been the case with mobile and JS-heavy pages), then you should don't.

And whether this offloading to the client scales better with the number of users is besides the point it -- as you need to please each particular user.
I had the same question at the time and never found an answer.
Disney initially 'got away with it' because they kept the whole thing at an arms length by outsourcing to Cognizant. "Oh that's what you did, hire H1B? Yeah that wasn't us... We just outsourced to Cognizant so you should ask them about what's going on".

Super shady, but it was a fleeting attempt at plausible deniability on behalf of Disney execs.
But the places where that depends are places where PC-ness isn't much of a thing. In Papua new guinea PC isn't on the consciousness of people.
It makes people like Darwin, Einstein, etc., whose results have held up for over a century, look even more impressive.
inthebitcoin.com – store message in the blockchain
IBM's strategy for some years now can be more or less summarized as "offshoring". That's one reason the layoffs are only going a little at a time in waves, because you can't offshore the whole company in one fell swoop. Instead they're trying to do a ship-of-Theseus type thing where they piece-by-piece replace all the American staff with cheaper offshore staff, hoping they can pull it off while the ownership and business stays (mostly) in place.
Paying your dues is just the finance industry version of the "apprentice" phase in the traditional "novice, apprentice, journeyman, master" trade progression that has persisted in various forms for centuries now.
I'm finding it hard to understand how the current situation differs from that situation.

Like so many other big corps, IBM did some questionable things because of bad management and got into avoidable trouble.

Now the innocent employees - the ones who didn't get a chance to steer the ship - are being thrown into the ocean.

In a sane world, those employees would sue the board for some of its decisions. Those decisions may have been good for the short term interests of the shareholders, but clearly they weren't good for the long term interests of the company, or of patient shareholders who took the long view.

Bad management is a plague in tech. We've seen a long succession of big corps make the most incredibly surreal, bizarre, dysfunctional decisions, and then show wide-eyed "Who? Us?" surprise when layoffs become necessary because the corps crash into the rocks.

The usual justification that "shareholders win" is bullshit. They don't. No one does, except sometimes - in the short term only - the bad management itself.
Hi

We've developed a simple app to store messages in the bitcoin blockchain.

https://inthebitcoin.com

We are looking for any kind of feedback from bitcoin users.
The app encourages users to store a short message in the blockchain about a particular
day/occasion. First theme is St. Patrick's Day.

What do you think about the idea, what other features people might be looking for,
feedback about the design, the price, anything.

Thanks
inthebitcoin team
What I don't understand is why the most literal translation into English, which is equally succinct, doesn't "work" somehow. Namely the translation: "hurry slowly".

It's just so awkward. Yet the grammar isn't bad; there is nothing wrong with "walk slowly" or "eat slowly".

"Ponáhľaj sa pomaly" is perfectly euphonic to the Slovak ear, while "hurry slowly" seems clumsy somehow. We need to make it more sophisticated somehow, like "make slow haste", or "slow haste makes faster" or whatever.

What is the reason ...

I suppose; if everyone said "hurry slowly!" it might wear into usage.
I do agree with the point that the executives often don't appear to suffer the pain of failure, but if the layoffs are of the scope mentioned, the number of jobs that could be saved with $50,000,000 is somewhere on the order of a rounding error.
I worked for IBM during the 80s at the height of IBM's power. It was the golden ticket. 400,000 employees and everyone was convinced it was going to hit $100B market cap. When I quit to form my own business, my 2nd line manager said "Why would anyone want to quit IBM?". Long time ago.
Schemes like this have been tried, though from memory it was more at the level of the candidate paying $5 to apply, no refunds.

But as you can imagine, legit companies don't really want to do it, since their reputation can be besmirched. And shyster companies/recruitment agencies anecdotally played the system for profit.

Something like this does exist though in schemes like Amway and Tupperware. With Tupperware, to join, I read that you need to shell out $2500 for your own set of the product. Then, if you don't make the grade, you don't get that money back. Not quite the same, since you always get the job.
Concretopia: Searching for the secret meaning of the suburbs in eastern Europe
I'm glad this is being implemented and not just considered.
PDsurF: a PDF viewer that manages PDFs as they are being viewed
You can try downloading a virtual keyboard in Russian that works better. Many free resources on the net.
Correction, "We know one way to deal with this: War. But we know this isn't a smart idea, so we would like to find and use another option instead."
I probably do. Thanks to my partial understanding of how the software works, I can guess that `mds_` is Spotlight trying to index my music player, but I wouldn't want to try to explain it to my dad. Software that responds to "eject this" with "no, because f* you" because it is busy creating meta-data is user-hostile.
> A company is it's employees

But they are not the same group of employees though ;-) that's the point.

> The discussion we're having here is because there seem to be no repercussions to their failure.

Ok and how should we punishing all the failed startups though? Who is holding them responsible for their failure?

> it's because they failed to train them

We should try. But in general this is like the idea of "Why don't we just retrain all the coal miners to write web apps?" The reality is that you can't retrain everyone.

Some of the programming stuff seems easy to programmers for example, because well, we forgot the time when we didn't know it yet. But it is not something you can take a few night classes and read a book or two and get to writing back-end services.
Fear of the unknown? Atrophy of key interviewing skills? Comfort with their position? There are a lot of reasons that people stay, even when a position or company is not optimal.
Oculus will consider Mac support if Apple 'ever releases a good computer'
Meanwhile, IBM's CEO Ginny Rometty not only pocketed a salary of $1.6M in 2015, but also took a bonus of $4.6M. Not bad for 16 straight quarters of shrinking sales, evaporating profits and a falling stock price.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-ibm-s-ceo-w...
It's really, really hard to sell someone on a non-standard implementation of a popular language like C. For example, I've had customers beg me to add an extension to C. I implement it, and present it to them. They refuse to use it - because then their code would be dependent on a non-Standard feature.

The solution (for me, anyway) was to create an entirely new language. The changes that nobody wanted in C (not because they were bad, but because they were non-Standard) found plenty of traction and users in D.
>How is one supposed to take seriously web infrastructure software that exhibits such a basic failure of understanding core web standards?

How? Probably based on the fact that otherwise it's a frigging great app that powers like 15% of the web, including some of the biggest sites out there.