skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can't upvote this enough.

It is very important to recognize that "comfort zone" also means you must have room to fail, which is actually tough for companies to hire for because most companies are actually super risk averse when it comes to hiring. Why else would they want to hire people that know as much about their stack as a filter before asking questions about their potential?

I went (foolishly, in hindsight) into areas on the thesis that a lot of organizations simply need some motivation from one or two highly capable people to raise the standards for everyone and that this form of leadership would be a good career path because people are oftentimes rewarded quite well for saving failing / ailing companies. Instead, I was beaten severely for trying to do create too much change for people that just wanted to a 9-to-5 job or (more importantly) given no projects with any risk or even much value even if it succeeded.

I've come to realize that organizations without risk or without any sense of leaving their comfort zones are the same thing as people - these are beginner-expert organizations. These are companies who implement a working Hadoop cluster in production and give themselves a big pat on the back... in 2015. These are companies that implement some CMDB... in 2014. These are companies that are rolling out SOAP services seriously on a roadmap... for 2018. The aversion to risk leads inevitably to worse results than if you had accepted some failures, but this only makes sense anyway when your organization is capable of speed. And this becomes the ultimate chicken and the egg problem with large companies. My answer is that you must break your egg to create a new chicken - if you do not sacrifice something, you will lose everything for sure.
I guess that depends on whether RAM can be hoarded away for a later greater need, where I might find the need/want to use hundreds of GB of RAM, or I might need 32GB of ram when there's none available.

If you're having trouble making sense of that, it's because the way money and RAM function are fundamentally different, so it makes for a poor metaphor.
> require receipts for all transactions, allow consumers to report business who do not give receipts

You incentivize compliance through monetary awards for reporting offenders.
The characterizations of the framework author as "evil" and "dickish" seem a bit extreme, and unfair.

Otherwise, it's nice to see credit given where it's due.
There's quite a lot of activity on http://github.com/thinkaurelius/titan for a dead project. Admittedly, the issues are piling up, but the code seems to be actively worked on.
"Good hiring" is fundamentally an altruistic ideal with all the attendant difficulties of idealistic practices in the modern workplace.

This may seem ridiculous given competition for talent and cutthroat markets involved in startups and tech companies...

But from the perspective of low-level hiring, where someone you hire will possibly replace or eclipse you, or where you may empower a team with more resources, or there is budgetary envy (or kill-or-be-killed cuts to funding), or easily masked discriminations aplenty (dotNET vs Java, Stanford vs Berkeley, Indian vs Pakistani, Georgia vs Alabama), conflicting management directives (we will hire the best but only pay for mediocre) or just sheer resistance to change... there are many reasons to resist transparency, hire mediocre, submarine good candidates, backstab rivals, all from obscure chaos of middle management and its wannabe Machiavellis.

Management can put their smiley faces as they impose conflicting priorities and try to parse data that is fundamentally enshrouded by the multiple agendas from actors with highly variant priorities in a complex game theory all they want, but idealism is hard in cutthroat capitalism.

Oh, did I mention that all candidates are lying to some degree of mendaciousness? Oh yeah, that.
The bike that breaks all the rules
The project is actively seeking contributors, especially to work on mono support.
I imagine the march of technological progress and America's shifts in employment mean it is a lot less prevalent than it was a generation or so ago - a lot fewer children following their parent into manufacturing jobs.

That said, my Dad worked in computing - not as a coder, just as a manager, but it meant that we had an early proto-PC, a 2,400 baud modem and a CompuServe connection. It was probably inevitable that I would end up doing something with computers...
It was the first time I worked for a bank; I just assumed it's "how things are done" :)

I'm going to be more careful next time. :D
Hmm I don't remember receiving many receipts in China. I spent 3 months there over two occasions a couple years ago. Taiwan's implementation appears more successful to me. Fapiao means receipt, so that makes sense. There is some required hardware or software but doesn't seem any more cumbersome than a credit card machine and printer. Nearly every shop has them in TW.

Edit: reading further I see China is rolling out their lottery in more areas the last few years
New MSFT, same as the old MSFT.
Same effect, different reason.

Once it's in my wallet, it's already spent by my spouse.

I might actually spend as much as 10% of my cash withdrawals myself. I can reliably keep a single $10 bill in there, as the "didn't want to clean you out"-based guilt prevents the very last note in there from being taken.

Of course, now the spouse just takes the debit card from my wallet instead, so I might have to start keeping more cash in there, in case I go to pay for something one day and it's not there.
I've wanted a Tesla for a while, but being someone who repairs and maintains their own car, I can't see myself ever buying one as they seem heavily opposed to allowing anyone but themselves to work on their cars.
"In most Professional positions I have held, maybe 1 in 50 people programmed outside of work and maybe 1 in 20 chose to learn beyond the minimum required to get by."

Double signed. Barely anyone is using his free time to learn more than needed at the workplace (which means the employees are stuck at the "minimum knowledge level"). And this is not just true for the IT branch.
Style is also still in business:

http://www.stylecncmachines.com/

They got sold in a panic right after I left (asset sale iirc). The software looks pretty much the way it did back in the day but it's been completely re-written behind the scenes from what I can see.
Getting money from VCs is usually difficult, how do idiots like this guy scam $200M from people? Makes the VCs look equally stupid.
A lot of people treat employment status and credentials as measures of the inherent worth of individuals. But a large component of these markers of success, not to mention success itself, is luck.

This is one of the most accurate lines I've seen on a technical blog.
As I get older (I am currently thirty), this is something that terrifies me, mainly because it is something that I have experienced from both sides. I got a B.S. from a major CS university, then started on a Ph.D. in Astronomy. Due to my dissatisfaction with that program, the fact that programming is my passion, and various life events, I decided to leave after obtaining a M.S. and began to look for work.

I attended my university's CS job fair, only to find that I had become almost completely unemployable to tech companies (granted, I only had a 3.3 GPA in CS; damn you, WoW!). I ended up taking a tech support job with a scientific computing software company after I was promised a quick transition into development. However, that too evaporated, ironically due to the stigma of working in tech support.

After about 8 months, I interviewed for a developer position at a Midwest branch of a major tech company, but was again turned down. Luckily, I was instead hired to be a QA contractor on a different team, whereupon I quickly transitioned into a non-contracted developer on the original team that didn't hire me about a month before the company's new CEO announced that we would not take anyone with lower than a 3.5 GPA. I took the opportunity to mention this fact at every opportunity to one of my co-workers who had originally voted not to hire me.

After about a year, I started interviewing new candidates at this company. You would think that, given my prior experiences, I would be more forgiving than my peers in looking at past experience. While I didn't make any judgments based on school or GPA (in fact, those were filtered out before the resumes ever made it into my hands), I did turn down several candidates who were "too enterprisey", i.e. did not have experience or interest in whatever tech was trendy at the time. Granted, these candidates also had trouble understanding and debugging simple perl scripts I showed them, so I was already not on board, but when those candidates were borderline hires/no-hires, that was something that swayed me in the "no-hire" direction.

Now, as a married thirty-year-old with two kids and several non-coding hobbies, I have neither the time nor inclination to use my free time to learn today's trendy languages and frameworks. My work keeps me relevant for now, but if that ever changes and I need to look for work, I'm terrified that my experience and ability to learn quickly will be irrelevant to prospective employers, who will just want to see the right technologies appear on my resume.
Wouldn't it make more sense for non-Tesla owners to get priority in the queue? Seems like a better way to get more people driving EVs.
"With age comes experience and also comes a strengthening of biases. Older people, so the stereotype goes, are inflexible and set in their ways, if very experienced in those ways."

Like most stereotypes, it might be true in some cases but far from universal. The literal two best developers I know, both over 50, are FAR from set in their ways. They are both constantly seeking new ways of doing things, exploring new languages and technologies, sometimes playing with low level projects (like making lights blink in interesting ways on breadboards), sometimes playing with high level projects (spawning hundreds or thousands of cloud instances to see how it works), but always looking for new things.

They might SEEM set in their ways when they shoot down bad ideas from expert beginners, but that's only because the expert beginner is confusing wisdom for lack of flexibility.
IRIX (at least circa 6.5, that's the earliest I can remember) was primarily used for graphics. I'm not sure what specifically made the architecture so graphics-friendly (maybe a co-processor daughter board?) but it could render 3d protein fold simulations from PDB files circa 1995 with little difficulty compared to the other gear in his lab. I also remember IRIX being used heavily for CGI in major motion pictures. (I want to say Lightwave or Maya was originally SGI only, due to architectural limitations on every other platform.)

AFAIK NeXT didn't even come close to putting out any hardware that came close to allowing that sort of rendering capabilities. Xerox PARC's platform is probably the closest analogue.[1] Basically all of our modern day GUI paradigms are based off of what they did in the late 70s. @pjmlp will jump in with more detail if he sees this.

[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/tracing-the-origins-of-the-macintos...
Hm. I understood that freeway (one of the most expensive roads in the world) was $1000 per foot. $5M per mile. I would expect asphalt to be much less.

Here's a link: http://www.dot.state.fl.us/planning/policy/costs/costs-D7.pd...

Florida says 2-lane roadway is $3.3M per mile. So a few hundred feed, costing millions? Nonsense.
Somewhat off-topic to your point of "the used car market might not exist like that," but isn't this the direction automobiles have been going since they were invented? In fact, this trend has existed in every piece of technology.

It's a tautology: as technology becomes more complex to build, it becomes more complex to rebuild. Of course, a portion of the advancement of a technology should be dedicated to reducing that growth in difficulty – the constant self-inspection being one example.

Even if it seems a bit presumptive or shocking now, do we have any reason to believe that this isn't the inevitable future of hyperadvanced cars?
Ask HN: Good Employee Onboarding Tax Form Automation Software Options?
Our business is looking for a good solution to automate our employee on-boarding paperwork (forms w-4, i-9, etc). I know Zenefits offers a free option, and many start up employers use DocuSign or HelloSign, or their API, to take care of this administrative work electronically. I was wondering if there are other options available that I'm not aware of. Each of these choices gets me ~80% of what I need, but I feel like there must be something better. I am curious what others are doing. To share a little more about our use case: we hire 50-100 employees temporarily during the summer, so the administrative load can get quite high. I'd also, if possible, like to integrate everything with our software so new hires only have to log in to one new system before starting work. Many thanks!
It's sattire for sure. Everything has a phase of being a buzzword. Buzzwords annoy the crap out of me but I've also been using the word microservices before it was a thing, back when just Netflix was blogging about it. I could say SOA or distributed systems but I say microservices because it encapsulates what I'm trying to say, "looseley coupled service oriented architecture with a bounded context", Adrian Cockroft's words.
Without an integrated framework, it's just an OO mechanism hung off the side of vanilla C. And while that mechanism does have some sweet features, it's also slow and really weird looking for someone who's used to C, and seeing it in the middle of C code is like in a Bollywood movie where they suddenly break out into song.
I think this is a symptom of SV not pursuing "hard" tech. They dont want or even need greybeards to build most of the products they make.
5 steps to a better A/B testing process
This is an extremely important post. Thanks for writing it. Lots of learnings I wish the 22 year old me would have read. :)
Rspamd 1.2: Fast, free and open-source spam filtering system
I liken "Everyone should learn to code" with "Everyone should learn to write." Neither of these statements claims that by learning the skill you are suddenly a qualified industry professional. It's about having a basic working knowledge.

Simply put, knowing how to write (in, say, English) won't make you a published author in the same way that knowing how to code (in, say, Javascript) won't make you a software engineer.

Or, another way of looking at it, by knowing the basics of a programming language you unlock the same kinds of jobs that were historically available to people proficient with Excel. Sure, you're no programmer, but at least you can hack an analysis together with a few basic tools and pass your findings around via email. These skills are not the focus of your job, but they do help you get your job done.
well, even that would be OK of it was the company/owner desire. the crux here is that it was a government project, paid by your money, without your representation, and that it completely backfired.
So who provides them if the government does not without falling into the tragedy of the commons and/or cutting off the poor from access to such services?
Taiwanese confirmed here. Basically we use a lot of cash in our daily lives. The "hidden economy" still exists in some places, like some outdoor vendors or night markets.
> That's not true - there's heurystic analysis techniques, generic signature detection etc. Of course they may not meet your definition of "reliably"

The only reliable things in security are the things that an attacker cannot bypass even when knowing that they in use (e.g. RSA). The premise of the article being discussed is that heuristics are trivial to bypass.
I'm very certain the phrase you're looking for is "wizard of oz". That's what Eric Ries called these types of MVPs in The Lean Startup.
Yes, let's indeed keep in mind that we're talking about Italy here.

http://www.voxeu.org/article/public-sector-inefficiency-and-...
Machine Learning: An In-Depth, Non-Technical Guide – Part 5
That seems to be the fate of most every consumer goods, isn't it?
California Proposed Bill AB-1681 – Smartphones
The beauty of this (for them!) is that this seems to take away all the negotiation about pricing, terms and taking used cars in.

But aren't they leaving money on the table with such a long wait list? (Granted - creating artificial shortages can work if you have a monopoly)
The NetBSD project celebrates its 23rd birthday
Microlino: 15 kW electric mini car
Awesome, thanks for the clarification on US only, I was not aware of that part.
It reminds me of The Crimson Permanent Assurance short video by Monty Python, I think on the release for The Meaning of Life.
There is a way to avoid it but I think software development is unique in that we haven't been able, so far, to establish what the state of the art is. And so it seems like, as you say, every company is in its own cave and the only way to have the freedom to have your own ideas is to start your own cave.

It's a little bit backwards in my opinion. Instead of it being commonly accepted that we should be checking mathematical models of our systems we have "senior engineers," debating whether unit tests are a waste of time. We have developers either being trendy or forcing others to pretend they are. And trendy changes in each ecosystem (BigCo vs TrendyCo).

Companies can, and should, change. The AWS teams managed to see the formal specifications are a good idea and have been better for it since. You can be sure there were highly experienced senior developers who resisted their introduction with the best arguments they could muster. Even very smart people want to stay in the cave and watch the shadows.
NeXT (with a bunch of Mac baggage) is basically the current OS X
Many engineering/science-oriented schools have the same issue. Urbana Champaign, Ann Arbor, even CMU. If you are not from a STEM background, you tend to only "recognize" the Ivy League schools and MIT/Caltech/Berkeley/....
Silicon valley ruined technology. This is why only bad technologies persist.
How about other countries?
I've done this, and used them for Google Authenticator.
Is this game-able by buying lots of things for a penny each from your own store, that kind of thing?
'Everyone' is a lot of people. I've taught youth (Boy Scouts) for 20 years. There are more than one kind of people. Some are not ever going to program. Smart, well-adjusted, ambitious, but a different kind of mind and not at all suited to programming.

Its obvious really. Some people like dominoes and word games and tetris. Others would rather die than play those games. People are very very different.
The problem with "good cultural fit" is that you need to ask some really hard questions about what you mean by that phrase. In many companies it seems to boil down to "people I'm comfortable hanging out with."

Very strong engineering teams are not necessary comfortable places, because they have members with different but complementary viewpoints. The cultural fit in this case is to be able to debate vigorously but also to be able to accept decisions and move on together. It's not that important to be friends outside of work.
Mac developer survey
Average web page weight increased another 16% in 2015
Reading the fine print of the reservations, I am a little surprised to see how non-binding the $1000 reservations are. A few tidbits: It can be canceled by you (this is a good thing) or Tesla (not great...), it might be an input to your "order on the list", but the final order is only decided by Tesla, etc. If it can be canceled by anyone at any time for any reason, and doesn't necessarily bind your "place in line", what is the point of the $1000 reservation?
Employment is not permanent and many people who stay in a job for long enough find themselves in a situation where they cannot leave.
>>it's crappy strain relief and thin cables.

Same experience here; the chargers are electronically long-lived, but cables fail for me within 2-3 years. Most recently, the rubber insulation disintegrated, and it wasn't due to strain. It just crumbled away.

I bought a replacement cable from Amazon for around $7 delivered and soldered it in place -- a 15 minute job. Only difficult part was cracking open the charger case.

Search (online retailer) for "magsafe 1|2 cable". Here's a link to the one I bought: http://www.amazon.com/ElementDigital-Lovely-Adapter-Connecto...

tl;dr If you can solder, replace the cable yourself. Heck, you could buy a solder station AND a replacement cable and still be ahead by a few dollars.
I seem to recall that different areas in Japan walk on different sides of the sidewalk. So it's not a national thing but a regional thing irrespective of the road direction.
HTTP mode is not yet available in our Android version; it's iOS only at the moment, but we hope to have HTTP mode on Android soon.
Startups are twice as likely to show pricing than enterprise SaaS companies
The people I know that have fallen into this trap tend to have a lot of hubris and arrogance. They probably couldn't even fathom the notion that the label might be applicable. If you're even asking the question, I'd say there's a good chance that you're safe.

More practically: As stated above, if you think you're the most competent person in the room, start looking for other rooms. You don't necessarily have to find new employment to do this—attending meetups and conferences, doing a side project with others, etc. can provide a barometer of where you stand among a wider community.
We outsourced this to DocRaptor (http://docraptor.com) - we just call an API with our HTML and CSS, get back pretty invoices.
So I guess I'm curious about how Italy's system works then? It's an empirical question, how much money would I have to be offered to turn on a system of convenience and perhaps monetary discounts? (I'm not considering the downside of off the book transactions as a consumer, I realize).
Well, I'm still passionate about my work. But now I know what it's worth.

So no faking passion, putting hours on someone else's products or github projects because I couldn't care less about recruiters.

I'm not sure what the 'serves you right' is about, but fwiw it took me 10 years to wake up to this give or take a couple, and I'm terribly sorry if that caused others to not be able to charge their market value but it's not as if I was doing that on purpose, it's just that nobody took the hour or so that it took me to write this blog post and pass the message.
The rubber cable jacket on mine split open after 3 months of owning it. I always wrap it very carefully, making sure not to strain it at the ends of the cable. These things are truly defective by design.
So Google did something good for once?
One thing that has helped me in the past is writing shitty first drafts:

https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%20First%...

Editors block is much less prevalent.
Because the map might change in the future. You can keep the link the same, but update the content.
Heheh. I have one of these in a box at my parents' house. I had forgotten entirely about it.
Taplytics (YC W14) Is Hiring Mobile and Full-Stack Engineers
From Millennials to Technophobes: Managing Personalities at Work
What Does Resolution Mean in 3D Printing?