skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been a sys admin and/or coder professionally since 1996. I've been a manager and an individual contributor. I've worked for big companies (HP, Yahoo), and small (in the first dozen employees). I've been through a company growing from 100 employees to nearly 1000 and back down to 100 again. I've been through two acquisitions, and probably a dozen layoffs.

I've never been let go. No doubt I've been lucky. But there's a saying: luck favors the prepared. I consistently get shit done, and have a reputation for doing so.

Do your job. Do your job well. Make sure you're not invisible. The rest is out of your control, but it's worked for me.

Knock on wood.
I don't think it did fail.

Microsoft held up a mirror to (self-selected) Twitterers.

It showed them what they are.

(some people tihnk it failed as in poor PR for Microsoft, but I think that is also an ignorant and arrogant opinion)
This isn't absolutely true, if ideas are worthless without execution then corporations would never spend millions and millions inside their R&D departments creating inventions which may or may not come to market.

The assumption that ideas are always trivial isn't correct, sometimes the inventor spends years and years perfecting a design in his own garage, but doesn't have the means to bring it to market. Should the inventor not get rewarded for his work? Nothing is wrong with the final invention nor is it from the lack of trying to bring it to market, he just doesn't have the financing necessary to pull it off.
That's like one "stop" of light in photographic terms (each stop is half the light at the previous one).

It might sound too much of a difference, but it's not that apparent (you can try changing an f-stop on a camera for comparison).

(Probably there's some logarithmic sensing involved).
I agree. I've been part of teams in which the person who was clearly most productive and most critical to the team's short-term and medium-term success was laid off. The organization was going through a "restructuring" which just meant that anyone making over a certain threshold in salary was fired and "replaced" with someone half as expensive but a thousand times less capable.

The bosses probably didn't enjoy doing this (the ones who had to actually break the news) but they also didn't care too much either. If firing the most experienced people really had an impact on productivity, then the team would just be reassigned to do different work, clients would be cut, budgets would shrink, whatever it required to ensure that whichever personnel you happened to have were acceptable for whatever work your team did.

I think a lot of people don't realize this. The company exists solely to service and enhance the lifestyle of executives. If the executives see a way to maintain the same lifestyle for less business cost, even if it means terminating an entire business line and upsetting many happy customers & laying people off who are doing great at their jobs, so be it.

They utterly don't care. It has literally nothing to do with productivity except as a totally unintended side effect of how to service the lifestyle of some executive.

As companies succeed and grow, they start investing in wargaming scenarios for effectively having total bargaining power over their staff. When HR types meet with executives in these kinds of firms to talk about strategies for hiring, a high priority is how to structure the business so that it is never "dependent" on employees.

If it means ending an otherwise profitable business line, so be it. It just depends on whether ending that business line is going to have any serious impact on the lifestyles of executives or not.

You see a lot of job advice that advocates working really hard to "become necessary" to your employer. It's just wishful thinking, though. Rule number one is: no employee is necessary. If we ever discover that an employee is necessary, then we simply restructure the business, changing as much as is needed, to make sure that property is no longer true.

The best you can hope for is to be "necessary" for a short period of time as the business recognizes that this is the case and immediately begins plotting about how to restructure so as to ensure no one in your position can possibly be necessary.
Sometimes, it's clear what minimum window size they've assumed. I know of one (bank login) which doesn't work well on a netbook due to this.

I tried to report the problem via the site feedback link which they helpfully provide in most of their page footers. It fails in Firefox but works fine in Chromium; I ended up reporting two problems reported instead of one.
Now I just need to find someone who will sell a 3:2 aspect ratio machine with 16GB ram to me.

If the computer industry hadn't dropped the ball so badly on laptops I don't think developers would even bother looking at Chromebooks. Ironically written by a part-time dev on a Chromebook.
Related to this... Maybe as we become more and more advanced in tech, we will spend less and less.
Let's see some examples : uber, usually cheaper than normal taxis,great economy of scale. So transportantion in general should decrease in absolute value.
Same thing with airbnb, we improve the usage of rooms in the City,and make it cheaper. So, it should make it decrease too.
And other start-ups in tech space make this. We optimize things to a lower cost. And this is good. But in macroeconomics, it can reduce the gdp of a country.

Just a tought I have sometimes. Sometime in the future we will need to think another way to measure economic improvement.
Or the whole location. But having someone of questionable competence helps my friend's peace of mind. Don't know how much it slows down the team, though.
My first impression of this was that it was posted about 6 days too early. Would have made a great April Fool's joke, but it's ringing too many Poe's Law bells for me to take it seriously.
People making mistakes, of one type or another. In these post mortems though, they rarely attribute mistakes to any individual, or even team.
1- I don't like using the 1 in a billion for examples. It is way too easy to draw really bad conclusions. Even if everything he tells us is true, do you really want to set taxes for the top 1% based on 20 obscenely wealthy people in the US? There's a lot of other reasons Buffet in particular is a bad example of anything basically.

2- A lot of these legal tax avoidance systems are a result of known breaks put in place for one intended use, but wind up being useful is so many many more ways. It is kind a game with many numerous complex rules where the winner winds up being the person with can find the most effective way of getting around those rules. To me this says the rules need to be made simpler and many tax breaks reconsidered, but obviously that isn't politically easy. Politicians tend to favor the group that makes the most noise, and when you try to take away a favorite tax break, those people will make a hell of a lot of noise. I think if pols made the decision to actually go against that, the electorate as a whole would support them, even some of the vocal few.

3- If he's being really truthful, I think its pretty bad. One of the big issues how you count payroll taxes for Social Security. When trying to analyze tax fairness, I don't think you should include them. After all, they are retirement program that comes back to you, and when you do retire, the more you paid in the lower your rate of return, so saying they are a regressive tax is completely discounting the nature of the tax. You should also then include everybody's retirement savings too (not possible I know).

I favor progressivity in taxes, but the way some people go about doing the accounting, they seem to be very disingenuous and really want to just soak "the rich" as a matter of principle regardless of how it affects the entire economy. They would give up 20% of everybody's wealth as long as they could bring down the wealthy by 50%.
OMG my apologies bro, I was agreeing with you with that lol :-)... I appreciate your feedback and comments...
So, here is what were we thinking:
If I'm traveling I have to pay for a room; what if I can pay for a room and get an additional value!!
AirBnB does promise you the value, but there is no way to know for sure if you would get it?
With us, you actually buy the experience and get the room on the side, if you don't want it you can negotiate with the host etc...
Plz. try register and make an offer ?
Tell me what do you think?
> The answer is not just "var" because you have now completely dismissed local variable immutability (something C# does not have)

It is something that C# does have. It just doesn't allow immutable variables to be implicitly typed, i.e. you can't write something like "const var x = 0;" This lack of let or val in C# is a reminder that "var" was introduced in the language not just to reduce visual clutter, but to support anonymous types, which were in turn introduced to greatly enhance LINQ experience allowing for such nifty feature as "let" clauses in query expressions...
This is unfortunately nigh unreadable for me.

This is the original: http://imgur.com/5FWqZ73

This is a version without "font-family" CSS: http://imgur.com/P9dFKb1

(I'm on Chromium on Linux if it matters.)
The way I've seen it play out time and time again is the most expensive staff are let go first when money starts to run low. If you've never been let go, have you considered you simply might be undercharging?
But they still have the concept of one very highly skilled and expensive doctor in front of every patient. It is a form of craft industry. It hasn't moved on to the industrial area, where you only need very skilled workers to create and prototype, but that scale well by not putting these expensive workers in front of every customer. Even banks have done that.

I am not saying it is easy, and perhaps the technology doesn't allow it yet, but undoubtfully this is a next step in the medical profession.
Most of the "experimental" features we whine about are supported by all vendors, save for Apple (Firefox, Chrome, Opera and freaking IE). It's a definite pattern: Safari is last to implement features, if at all.
Having 50% less light getting to the retina is not necessarily that it looks 50% dimmer subjectively.

E.g. it's not like having a dimmer for your room lights at 100% and 50%.

I guess it's more like a 1-stop difference in photography (where again, half as much light hits the film/sensor from one stop to the next).

Here's an example with half the 50% less light hitting the sensor between the two pictures. It's not as dramatic as you expect (except in the "depth of field", e.g. how focused stuff is):

http://www.adammoroz.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Untitled...
I'm new to all this, but it seems like redux addresses a lot of these concerns, no?
Using Card-Based Design to Enhance UX
I would love to be able to see that data, if you don't mind.
Hey Guys, thanks for your all the comments;-) I agree with both of you... But, Co-living is a way to have a focused environment to achieve your goals, here are some examples: Do you wanna finish that code you've been planning to write since a year? Well, let's say that i'm a programmer and I live in a different city, and if you move with me for a week or two, I'll help you to write it and discuss it, and focus on it while enjoying a different environment etc. Example2: Wanna lose weight? Well, I'm a trainer... Live with me and I'll give you a focused sessions combined with the proper food diet... Example 3: Coming to NYC for business, and looking for a place to stay? Live with me, and I'll introduce you to the right people... ETC... So, It's BnB + Value I had so many bad experiences on AirBnB.. Because, People are usually busy, and they won't spend the time they've promised with you, and you end up with just a cheap room with a note: "leave the key under the mat when u leave" !! And That's why we've started InspireBnB.com , where we focus on the experince and not the room... Tell me what do you think?
*major mode
What do I do? Would it be unethical to even the scales...perhaps we could all get day-jobs which we work on during work hours?

How is that an option if "Just quit and get a different job" isn't?
They're talking about consumption not standard of living. It's possible to imagine a future where everybody will get that superior standard of living but with far less consumption required to support it - innovation and creativity (and fewer wasteful wars) will deliver that future.
Rgxg: command-line tool to generate (extended) regular expressions
Author:

In some ways, yes. But the ranking is really where I slide various browsers in terms of ease of getting an app working well, and I think it's important to note that I generally find desktop Chrome more troublesome than Mobile Safari.

The article is primarily about mobile Chrome vs mobile Safari, but the issue is only partially Android's fault. Chrome performs just as bad in JS and render benchmarks on desktop as it does on mobile, and it's memory leaks are present in both; but this matters less on desktop because powerful machines mask this for us.
Sorry, we are working to improve the landing page, but this project is similar to Google Analytics, and the reason to use Meteor is because this framework is very productive to build prototypes and it's provides realtime resources which will be used in the main dashboard.
Very nice idea
I still remember suggesting code reviews to my dev manager in 2003-ish. He didn't know what they were, and scheduled a meeting where he could review my performance, instead. Awkward.
I do have an idea. I first got involved in AI in the early 1980s, and worked on it on-and-off (mostly on) well into the 1990s. Some of the non-AI stuff I did back then is now, for reasons I can't quote fathom, classified as AI.

A certain amount of common-sense, and basic political knowledge, should have been included in the Tay. I don't think there's any way of avoiding it. I'm skeptical of general application of the recent "free lunch" approach to AI, and for higher-level AI prefer Doug Lenat's approach with Cyc.

Alternatively, if they wanted to avoid the effort of doing that, they could have just put up a souped-up Eliza variant. That wouldn't have impressed many people, but neither did Tay, and it wouldn't have offended anyone.
Yes it is: Germany controls the ECB.
Los Angeles DJ and producer Pumpkin dies in car accident
Pretty far down - got key knowledge and experience on a key project. Definitely replaceable but would be painful for the company so I'm betting they'd rather not. My employer doesn't really do layoffs anyway or rather something pretty cataclysmic would have to happen to trigger it.

Its also not a big deal for me - employers are replaceable too. ;)
So sad... RIP Pumpkin.
Imagine how awful it would be if a debt collector set their own prices. And debts were racked up with extremely-vague terms from people you never met.
TLDR: just a list of human psychology traits. Hubris, optimism, hindsight, attribution bias, and confirmation bias.
Nothing new.
I prefer having my own private space at the end of the day, so Couchsurfing isn't quite for me.

But during the day or evenings I'd be happy to show people some cool spots I like (which they will probably like).
Note he didn't provide a solution to scaling companies domestically other than taxing offshore products.

That type of protectionism may work domestically but it means that American companies cannot compete overseas if they are being undercut on price.

It looks like technology will fix the problem in time. American companies will start manufacturing in the US but there will be no jobs, just automation.

The focus should really be: how can we increase the intelligence of the average worker so they can compete in the new economy and not just "live life on basic income" or "get an overseas job waiting to be automated".
What happens if you get fired?
But when you saw the headlines, "Internet broken due to Kik package dispute" it is reasonable to expect confusion with the trademarked company and software.
WW II didn't cause that, it was the effects of the war including the subsequent dismantling of the British Empire and its trade barriers. In other words, a precursor to globalization.
I wish but gotta keep the outsourcing in there atleast give it a hint haha
Unit testing makes a lot of sense for game engine code, but less so for game-logic code, which tends to be highly volatile and specified only qualitatively.
That is why you have the choice to be explicit. You choose between shorter and less redundant code and full control over the type of the variable. What is the point of typing out the same type in a single line twice?

HashMap<String, AtomicReference<Foo>> fooMap = new HashMap<String, AtomicReference<Foo>>();

What is the disadvantage of using var?

var fooMap = new HashMap<String, AtomicReference<Foo>>();

It's less redundant, easier to read, does not clutter the code and has exactly the same information content. And if you really want the variable to be of type Map<,> nobody stops you.
Which is to say, if you use the layoff list as a measure of "value received" and you the company gets some value from keeping you employed, and you get some value by being employed. Then being at the top of the layoff list means you are getting way more value out of being employed than the company is, and being at the bottom of the list means the company is getting way more value out of you being employed. So if you are aggressive shoot for the top, if you are defensive shoot for the bottom :-)
I've definitely heard complaints along the lines of, "those prisoners get 3 squares [meals] a day; that's better than what a lot of people outside get..."
Is this a good about me page?
Hetzner: NVMe SSD servers
or does it have like a Dr. Evil look to it?
The mystery at the center of all this is "Why is it so astronomically cheap to do the x in Asia vs the U.S?". Not just cheap as in low wage, but cheap as in finished goods costing less than the cost of materials delivered to the American factory. It's not just manufacturing.

In Thailand you can live in a high rise condo with a gym and maid service and eat out every day and do some traveling for $2000/month. That life style is 8x more expensive in San Francisco. In Argentina before the 2002 crash, the country was very expensive, but it wasn't some luxurious paradise, so it's not just that it's a developing country. AFter the 2002 crash the prices were absurdly cheap. Something just doesn't make sense, and there's an enormous amount of denial that anything's amiss. Prices are a mystical sacred phenomenon it would seem. American companies don't care why prices are cheap, they just build stuff where the prices are cheap and sell it where they are high. They couldn't care less about the mystery, neither could the politicians. It's just the magical mysterious market.

Health care prices are also a mystical sacred phenomenon. Why are they 10x in the U.S what they are in other countries? Other people get sick and die there and are willing to pay whatever money they have to get better. Prices don't necessarily scale with income per capita either. I am sick of pat answers to this question and "just-so" stories. Someone should take some cost accountants and figure out where all the money is actually going for these kinds of things and write some journal articles. It would probably reveal a lot of bizarre and interesting rough edges on the economy and maybe a fair amount of business opportunity.

Some researcher should go look at the cost to build an Intel fab in Taiwan vs the U.S and start asking why. Start with why is it 1/5 the price to build the fab in Taiwan: 1. Because the construction company charges that much. Why? 2. Because the labor is 1/2 and the materials are 1/3. Why? Because the labor's rent is 1/5? Why? Because the land for the apartment building was 1/10 the price? Why? Because there are no mortgages and the land had to be bought with savings from an export business, etc, and follow it all the way down for everything. Depth first search! Piles of fascinating economic nuggets are just sitting there untouched.
You posit an interesting question about human nature, and about motivations in open source software.

If someone gave you an half-written instruction manual and a toolkit that could turn an ordinary goose into a golden goose,

(1) Would you have a go at it?

(2) Would you share or hoard the golden eggs if you figured out the rest of the instructions?

(3) If you did share them, would the sum of the contributions compound and create more profit for everyone? Would the global markets for golden eggs come crashing down due to increased supply? And if so, how soon until that happens?

I do not presume to know the answer, but the undergraduate anthropology minor in me says that watching the 'pull requests' tab of this repo will yield some interesting clues.
What would the Apple Car look like?
A callback-oriented kernel call mechanism. Hmm. The callback-oriented framework people should love this. It looks like you have to keep polling the shared page to see when your system call is done, though.

It's painful to realize that, after a context switch, modern CPUs can need 11,000 cycles to get back to full speed, with the right stuff in the caches and pipelines. Maybe we need CPUs which handle context switches better.
Please comment on this thread and I will notify you when it is posted. https://github.com/owocki/pytrader/issues/2
I understand completely but what i am saying is... they set out as far as i know to create a social media chat bot that sounds like a teenage girl who is immersed in her social media environment. it didnt fail this in any way as far as i can tell. its just that...

a teenage girl who speaks the language of her social media environment is going to say a lot of dumb outlandish stuff. even if hypothetically this were some deeper than NLP true AI breakthrough it was always going to say outlandish crazy offensive things because that's the influence that's feeding into it.

its similar to how to a degree that recent bipedal robot that was in the videos got some backlash because its human like motion was offputting... the robot didnt fail in anyway...

its more a question of why would you spend all this money rolling out these experiments if you didnt want the very forseeable output. its a no brainer that a chat bot that learns from social media is going to say fucked up shit.
And I never understood the "fun" part. It's "fun" for the 10 seconds it takes to check the numbers, maybe. You'd get a lot more entertainment taking 10 singles and tossing them over a railing at the mall and watching the resulting show.
I rememver using Amiga to circa 1993 when the problems for Commodore was quickly getting apparent. Switching to PC was weird. It felt like I moved from a platform with good sound and graphics to PC speaker and barely VGA. I quickly had to adjust to the new world of essential expansion cards. Not a world I particularly enjoyed. I kept being puzzled why they didn't just put in awesome miltimedia hardware and custom designed the whole system for it.
I just wrote a follow-up post giving more evidence: http://exploringpossibilityspace.blogspot.com/2016/03/micros...

I call it "poor software QA" because, generally, the software QA process is supposed to detect and prevent defects from 1) being introduced in the first place; and 2) from being propagated into "production" versions. As my most recent post shows, the "repeat after me" rule was a legacy of a software library (ALICE) they used to implement rule-based behavior. Some sort of QA process should have been done on the rule set they reused and modified.

Also, when I say "QA" I am not referring only to people with QA in their job title. I'm referring to the process.
No but it does tend to take a fairly dedicated effort to be stupid about your economy.
This also holds for the (time+effort+financial) investments in our own startups.