skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Far better off investing the money? No, because sometimes young people do get sick and need insurance, so you can't just invest your early payments, keep the returns for yourself, and skip the insurance, because then you're bankrupt if you lose the "lottery" and get sick at a young age.

Most young people will eventually become old people. It's by definition not a "pyramid scheme" if average total lifetime benefits are designed to equal average total lifetime cost. It seems like you are upset that an insurance policy is acting like an insurance policy should by spreading cost over time and averaging costs across members of the pool?

That medical costs have positive feedback (better more expensive therapies allow patients to go on to have more, better, more expensive therapies) is definitely a huge fiscal challenge. But it's also why young people are more likely to be underpaying now for future benefits they will receive, not overpaying.
Yesterday, I stopped during my run and watched 5 deer grazing in the woods. It was great to be outside and in nature.
Contractors go back to permanent jobs for lots of reasons.
Re-locations, change in family status, social reasons (sure does get lonely working from home), aiming for managerial roles, a more stable income (even though less per hour) being able to focus on programming(without having to hunt for new contracts after each project is finished).
I love being cashless honestly, but I see the benefits of using cash for transactions.

My problem is that I usually do things online and plus I'm always feel much more secure knowing my Amex would be fully protected vs cash. Day to day I'm not worried I'll get robbed, but in the off chance I'm somewhere where I might I'm much happier carrying no cash and just my Amex.
And replace those cashiers with people who have other job titles to manage inventory shrinkage. There's no getting around the fact that you need eyes near the doors to make sure that everything gets paid for, and you need enough eyes to monitor the traffic: more parallel traffic, more eyes needed. (Anecdotally, I see more staff at self-serve checkouts than at cash registers in stores that have both, yet the cashier lines move more quickly than the "more convenient" kiosks.) I'm sure there's an ideal world living in some people's minds, but it's not part of the external reality and probably never will be.
> Would you feel the same way about someone who is currently doing .Net but has experience with other technologies in the past, and still learns and uses non-MS technology outside of their current job?

No, certainly not. But I've reviewed resumes of folks who were clearly just cogs in the Microsoft machine (without any indication that they were doing things with Unix & free software in their free time). I really am concerned about bringing in someone like that.

I like your breadth of experience, particularly your usage of Python. Many of my concerns about .Net are applicable to iOS, and I have other concerns about Java, and still other ones about PHP, but anyone who uses Python is probably a good egg.
>It is amazing to me that almost nobody does this, but: almost nobody does this.

There isn't enough feedback when someone has a bad idea on hiring. People will very quickly tell you if your code sucks though (this is a good thing), which might be the kind of feedback needed to get hiring changed.
Local shops all accept contactless payment though, which is faster than anything involving a smart phone could ever be. You literally just hover your debit card near the terminal and you're done, no pin, no signing[* ], it's quicker than unlocking a phone.

[* ] I've only once in my life ever had to sign for a transaction, it's not a common method, I just mention it here because I know some countries still use it.
Ask HN: Any Lua language meetups in the Amsterdam area?
Meetup.com says no, and I'm having some difficulty find in-person events for Lua. It's easy with other languages. Thought I'd reach out here in case anyone knows.
Silicon Valley May Want MBAs More Than Wall Street Does
.NET runtime and framework with Dev Studio are very very good. If you haven't tried for a long time, you owe it to yourself to take a look.

To me my stereotype - if you're in a corporate world and want developers that like users and spend a lot of time on complicated business problems - you're likely to see lots of "windows developers".

If you want some to write apps with lots of technical complexity and simple business logic, you're better off with "unix developers".
In the UK at least, there are lots of free bank accounts with no fees for withdrawing cash or using your debit card. I understand it isn't like this everywhere though (especially in the US).
The most comprehensive machine learning engine
>I seriously doubt marijuana consumers tolerate harmful chemical additives.

Why would they be any different from tobacco consumers?

>I expect marijuana businesses to behave about as badly as the average business, but I doubt they'll manage to be as hideously evil as the tobacco companies.

Don't most of the factors that make tobacco different from the average business apply equally to cannabis?

>And what do you mean they're used under similar circumstances?

They seem to serve a similar social function. Indeed don't people frequently smoke a mix of the two?
But this is required for the hiring staff to give the appearance of being important and needed within the company. If managers really understood how effectively non-management engineers can find and hire acceptable candidates when you remove the bullshit from the process, they would be confronted with the cognitive dissonance of their choice to staff up an army of HR and recruiters and talk all day about "ZOMG how hard it is to hire a good engineer!" and "look out for the toxic worker" and other such drivel.
GDC -- the conference -- is NOT a Microsoft event. During the day, many exhibitors have "booth babes" running around exhibits and demo'ing games. [1]

Were you not aware of that?

[1] http://icanwritefunny.blogspot.com/2012/03/gdc-2012-booth-ba...
Goo Create is built on top of the Goo Engine which is fully open source: https://goocreate.com

Goo engine repository: https://github.com/GooTechnologies/goojs
I used one of these counterfeit chargers during 2 years then one day a flame came out of it. That was the end of it too.
Pretty sure he meant that he gets messages from two groups of people, startups and engineers, replies to both, receives responses from neither.
Grammatical and logical issues aside with, "we only hire the best," once you make it into TrendyCo or BigCo you're faced with the dilemma of Plato's cave. Here is a code base written by a group of average people with big egos whose reality is limited. Your perspective as an outsider to the cave are not going to be valued. Even in very open-minded teams I've found that once the way is established people will struggle to keep it that way forever.

As a developer, trendy or otherwise, you take a big risk sitting down at the back of that cave and joining in the group.
It's unfortunately inevitable. We're making it in our own image, just like we made God back in the day.
I don't understand this argument that people feel safer storing cash than keeping it in a bank. The cash is just as ephemeral as bank credit. With the exception that it's controlled by your central bank instead of the commercial banks.

Cash can be made useless centrally just as easily (if not easier because of its central nature) and there have been instances of this in the past in cash-only societies.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_leu#Second_leu:_1947-...
Best part of that discussion was the dude saying that the dancers were dressed like schoolgirls because dancing is hard work and that was just athletic wear. Like, if they wore turtlenecks, they'd get all sweaty!
I worked with them through 2014 and saw the NYE firing. Pretty brutal.

But at that point the 'agile' team hadn't delivered in over a year. Badly mismanaged...
Everyone has their own risk profile. For some people "$50k + moderate chance of $100k" would be better than either "$80k" or "small chance of $1m".
I hope you realize the error of your thinking soon.

Money is important. It may not be as important as your health, but it comes close. Money buys freedom from the slavery of having to work. Until you have enough money to never have to work again, you are not free.

When you do, you can spend all your time working on and doing whatever you like, pursuing whatever passions you wish. If your current passions are valuable to employers, get the most money possible you can out of it. You are not a charity.

Even if if you feel this way now, you're screwing over your future self (and possibly family) by not building a solid financial foundation.
To be fair, if I pay you in cash - and you don't declare your income: I'm not the one evading or avoiding taxes.

We're all responsible for our own actions.

That said, I like having and using cash - it gives me a greater sense and overview of how much I spend and I find it convenient in general.
Many EU governments consider cashless to be a treat since it moves control of money away from the state and has social costs.
KNOW (Minneapolis/St Paul) have been pushing "Sustaining Membership" for a few years now. While it hasn't eliminated the need for the member drives it has reduced the number of days they run them for.
If Facebook uses your picture for advertisement purposes it generally falls under "using your likeness" and is covered under their terms of service about advertising. They are not impersonating you because they are not claiming to be you, they are instead using your likeness to promote either themselves or their clients.

This is similar to agreements you might sign with an employer, photographer or other third party so they can use your photo in an ad or as part of marketing material. And from what I understand (IANAL) the requirements vary from state to state in the US and obviously outside the US. Although there are blanket terms that cover it from what I have seen.

BTW -- Anytime you have professional photos done, this is something you should always look for and make sure you are comfortable with the terms they lay out in their "Agreement". Many have boiler plate in their agreements that states they can use your likeness without paying you for it and without prior written consent. I just went through this when looking for a professional photographer when we had some family photos done as I don't want anyone using images of my family or kids.
Their "Migration Guide" [1] contains a list of improvements. They should probably add a date to their pages, but reading their mailing list the release is at most a few days old.

[1]: http://pdfbox.apache.org/2.0/migration.html
If used wisely, at-home coding tests should be far better than the average mess of a technical interview.

The problem is in the hands of TrendCo, they can be used crudely to find the trendy hire who has the exact same ideas about engineering as the hiring person. Because giving the test costs TrendCo nothing, they are happy to throw people at it until they randomly find someone who is exactly what they are looking for.

Anecdotally, I and 2 people I later befriended applied for the same role. We each spent 4 hours on the task, all 3 of us strong coders who made a solution that would be suitable for any startup, all 3 taking different approaches based on our styles. We were all rejected, because none of the 3 of us hit upon the exact approach the company was hoping for, but didn't ask for. There was no opportunity to ask for this feedback either. And it took them nearly a month to bother looking at my code (even after I called).

Since then, I won't take these kind of tests unless I have reason to believe they are being given in good faith as a way to determine if a programmer is capable, not as a way to find their perfect ideal of a programmer.
Wow, my friend's TV just failed. We cracked it open this past weekend and we found a busted cap that looks just like those. Manufacture date would be mid-2000s, probably 2006-ish. I wonder if they were from one of those bad batches. Crazy coincidence to learn about this now.

Edit: Hm, maybe not: """With a typically shortened life span of about 1.5 to 3 years for the failing capacitors, from mid-2003 up to mid-2006, the last of the bad capacitors should have failed by 2007. Commentators on the Internet often predicted the year 2007 would be the end point for "bad capacitors"."""
14 years .NET developer here. Oh, I regularly am involved in LAMP and other uncool stacks, but I'm still labeled .NET developer.

After all these years, I still am mystified by the whole technology/stack religion that pervades software engineering. I come from a mechanical engineering background. There's many ideologies on how to solve mechanical problems, but I would never hear "oh I see you have AutoCAD on your resume...we are looking for more of a life-cycle-engineering type of engineer" during an interview. A discussion like that would not even make sense.

The whole .NET/LAMP/XAMPP/GemStone/whatever solution stack you use does not define who you are.

I still consider myself a Mechanical Engineer who happens to be in the software engineering field who happens to choose .NET to solve problems since I'm highly productive on that platform.
Catacombs music was scary as hell to me when I was a teenager especially when a horde of champion goatmen were hiding in a room ready to snipe me with their archers.
> I think we're starting to see the need for 'laborer' programmers.

The mass offshoring effort in the US through the 00s was exactly this. The problem that many companies discovered is that you really get what you paid for. If you spec something out to a 'T'[1], you'd get exactly what you ask for - warts and all. If you don't provide enough detail to do that, you get to go back-and-forth until you do. And if you want anyone to troubleshoot a mildly complex issue... well, good luck. Maybe one in ten of the people who wrote the code from your spec have that ability.

Some equilibrium has returned, but not before the damage was done - causing a lot of unfortunate misconceptions about the abilities or lack thereof for entire demographics of people.

> code school

For the most part, these are an attempt to create the same thing without the offshoring - 'teaching code' of that sort has been relatively common in offshore markets I've worked with in past jobs. I don't think that's their intention, but it does appear to be the end result.

[1] To the point where you're more or less pseudo-coding the solution
If I authorize you to kill someone, you're still on hook for committing the murder.
> How else would you describe 21st century RFID using 1st century vocabulary?

Why did it need to use 1st Century vocabulary?

I am a practising Christian, and in my heart, I suspect Jesus would say something like "don't worry about how you pay for physical stuff".
Here's a good rule of thumb for adjudicating whether dancers at professional events are in-bounds ---

--- ok, first, a good rule of thumb for dancers at professional events is, don't have dancers, but, anyways ---

--- if you HAVE TO ASK whether they're strippers, even if on a message board the answer seems straightforward, then, no, not a good idea.

See? Not too much to figure out.
I think part of the reason people how those like themselves of that that's the only area where they have any confidence in their ability to assess skill. It's easy to say that this person is just like me, only a few years behind (or ahead!). But someone with a vastly different style and background is much harder to assess. Even with the same questions - as they're often kinda bullshit - it's hard to interpret the responses.
No, but at least you hold the reigns. Failure is your own, not someone else's. Taking a bet on yourself is an honest gamble. Taking a bet on someone else is a huge unknown.

If you're gonna take a bet, you might as well hold all the cards.
Probably because it's not murder, it's suicide. Assisted suicide is generally not asking another person to kill you, it's asking another person to set up some situation so you can more easily kill yourself. And though suicide is illegal, such laws further define that assisting another person to commit suicide is also illegal.
I propose "Silicon League" to refer to {Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, CalTech, ...?}.
What's the compensation like for 10+ hours of work?
This isn't hypocrisy but rather a genuine question, I do agree that (family circumstances, disability) can be limiting. But at a certain level it does seems counter-productive to proclaim that you are being oppressed by an imaginary different class "suits". It drives an emotional response but offers very little in terms of actual solutions. Finally at "Hacker" News ran by an investment firm, how should not this hacker spirit be a prevailing opinion?

Mortgage/Debt/Lack of savings can be overcome. Regarding being good executor and not being great businessman, you won't really find out before actually having a business.
The whole cash less payment industry is in trouble, once people realise that they can withdraw more than 50 [USD|EUR|GBP|..] at once..

Just kidding.

Well almost, since it was what did it for me. I started withdrawing larger amounts, 500 or 1000 Euros, each time, after ending up with no cash too often.

And I didn't feel the need to use another payment method since. YMMV (obviously).
It's so, so, so important to get paid for your work. Your work is valuable. You are not a charity.

"Fuck you, pay me" is my personal, internal montra when it comes to business and especially doing contract work. I'd highly recommend Mike Monteiro's talk on this, it will save you from a lot of the pitfalls you will run into working as a creative/developer - https://creativemornings.com/talks/mike-monteiro--2/1
Five Offensive Cyber War Events and What Might Follow
Just wanted to tell you that you're not alone in Sweden with using and liking to use cash. There's at least one more - Hi!

I haven't encountered a single grocery store that refuses cash and only accepts electronic/card payments yet. Was this a chain supermarket?
Early in the article he references his machine tool start-up [1] as an example of people taking advantage of you because you're really interested in the technology. I've been through that ringer twice, so perhaps I don't learn as fast as Jacques.

What's funniest to me is that one of those companies [2] was selling stepper motor based machine conversion kits (I started with them in 1983) and had the same lack of feedback as Jacques machines. That company learned from its mistakes and is actually still in business though . I was just a kid and what impressed me most is that the technical guys who started the business, learned to run the business in the same manner as you'd debug any hardware or software project.

[1] http://jacquesmattheij.com/the-start-up-from-hell

[2] http://www.centroidcnc.com/index.html
Running repeated passes of lossy compression.
Hence buying 100k of the same car.
Bad legacy firmware, same answer as always.
> then I know that I'm not working on the final, final version, and I can allow the paragraph to be, temporarily at least, imperfect.

Absolutely. This is so important. The writing and editing process should be decoupled– trying to do both at once typically leads to frustrating contortions.
Ah, good. Had me worried there for a moment !

It is true that depending on how statistical mechanics is taught, it can be difficult to connect to other statistical reasoning (the distributions are "nice", you have a gazillion measurements, and your population sampling doesn't tend to have bias issues, etc.)
> Cash can be made useless centrally just as easily

Most monetary economists would disagree. The zero bound on interest rates exists on cash, not bank deposits. From a central location, one can interrupt electronic funds transfers to and from certain persons or looking like this or that. You can't prohibit Iran from holding dollars in cash, though. To do so means threatening the systemic value of the currency. Cash forces an all-or-nothing constraint on the powers that be.
Heh, this is my problem. I love my job(work at a huge games studio, I'm part of a fantastic team working on game that is and will be enjoyed by millions) but I make terrible money, especially for a C++ programmer. On one hand, compensation is shit, on the other, I do something that I absolutely love.
Contractors get paid way more in the US especially on the East Coast because they usually have to take care of their own benefits and taxes
"Booth babes" used to be a staple at every conference. Over the last 10 years, they've become sharply disfavored, because staffing your trade show booth with scantily-clad women with no connection to your company is a fucking creepy thing to do.

People still do it, but by this time 5 years from now, everyone who does will be a pariah, trading on shock value. Those people/companies will always exist. Their existence isn't evidence that what they're doing is OK.
I don't think restricting the flow of information because you don't trust people to interpret it correctly is morally okay. People have been influenced by other people since the dawn of language. Deciding by whom they can be influenced shouldn't be the state's concern.
I avoid self checkout - slow and inconvenient. But it's just a matter of improving the technology: we'll get there eventually.
Abstracting the storage/object model of a program as in Cap'N Proto is the new advance, though Cap'N Proto's security model isn't fully innovative -- it's based on object capabilities which have been around since the 70s and this particular model since the 90s in the E programming language. The isolation properties of capabilities have been well understood for quite some time.

Sandstorm just took this well understood security model and the innovative storage abstraction and applied it to any language with Cap'N Proto bindings. Pretty cool.

The reason most people aren't doing it is beacuse most people don't really understand capability security, despite its simplicity. They've been raised and trained in the access control list model and it's deeply ingrained at this point.
I think a lot of small companies does this in the beginning if the task is hard to implement and you have other critical tasks to finish first.
I never knew it had a term, fun to know "Mechanical Turk"

"Manual automation" could be another term :)
I had a meeting with their sales people back in 2013 or so, a few year anyway, and I remember thinking after the hour long pitch that the claims where entirely delusional and pumped up. It was "just" a QR code with an app behind it and ultimately nothing at all fancy but they spoke about it like it was a total paradigm shift in buying. I never got how they lasted so long, reading the glassdoor reviews over the past year it was clearly a sinking ship years ago.

I honestly can't understand how they got nearly $100m in funding.