skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I went into consulting and have found the very same things. Before consulting, I was never burned out, and loved my job a lot. I could imagine doing it forever.

Now, I can't wait for it to end, am in a consistent state of burnt out. I have to work infinite hours to keep up.

I didn't really understand this before I took the job, would have been good reading as I tried to decide what was next in my career.

At the same time, I've learned a lot from consulting, and am much more effective now. So good lessons, but not worth the overall cost.
The Social Network, Middle Men, Silicon Valley(series), Halt and Catch Fire(series), Blow(non-traditional), First 20 Million Is Always the Hardest, How To Make It In America(series), Startup.com, Pirates of Silicon Valley
With or without WebUSB, browsers can already talk to USB devices, and so if you can exploit the browser to run your own code, you can too.
What It Means to Be “Wavy” Max B, Kanye West and Paul Graham
You acknowledge that in NY land owners were previously allowed to obtain a drilling permit after following the proper procedure, and this freedom has been taken away?
Amazing photos. There's a good documentary on this too called Fires of Kuwait. The firefighting companies like Red Adair, Boot and Coots, and Safety Boss did a really impressive job and learned a lot about extinguishing fires in the process.
This reads like an advertisement.
Overly doomsday. Easy to say these things for just about anything in tech these days.

I'm working on Vanadium (by Google) [1], which will allow all this stuff to be server-less and secure (by default). Once this or things like it are adopted there's less a need for revenue to pay for the backend, nor the ability/need for companies going out of business to brick their devices.

[1] http://v.io
> You suggested in another comment that you had some prior background in this area, are you involved in the development of this new web API?

Justin Schuh is a Chrome security engineer and is one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet when it comes to browser security. He knows what he's talking about more than virtually anyone else in this thread.
How GCHQ was called in to keep Harry Potter under wraps
Getting this explanation requires familiarity with Kanye West's recent album anti-release, "The Life of Pablo," which includes an interlude voicemail from hip hop artist, Max B.
The Writer Automaton, Switzerland
Any advice for someone that really enjoys the work, but has been at the same place 5 years and is underpaid?
I have OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). Where a normal person may have a fleeting thought about something and discard it, my brain can get "stuck" on that thought.

I view it as the check mechanism NOT kicking in as it should.

I have found that acetaminophen helps to put the check mechanism back in place. It can slow down or stop the runaway train.
Ask for a raise then quit
This is actually a good point that I never considered. I'm trying to think of a historical counterpoint, but the best I can come up with is the pseudo-middle class of ancient Greece. All the other long-term civilizations seem to have been composed of a royalty-level class and everyone else, from ancient Egypt through Rome and the Middle Ages.
Dude :)

(was touching)
(1) Looks cool: it looks modern and attractive. (2) ROI-positive: many owners report that the device pays for itself with reduced energy consumption within a year or two. (Maybe not in California with fairly moderate HVAC energy consumption, but lots of other climates spend a lot more.)

Not many products can claim to be ROI-positive to the consumer. When the payback period is short enough, that's pretty exciting for the analytical part of consumer thinking. Paired with the "looks good on my wall" and the "burns less fossil fuels" triggers on the emotional side, that's pretty appealing to a bunch of people. (Same basic feelings but much cheaper than buying a Tesla.)

No excuse for being buggy though.
This was my immediate thought, as well. Stop. Just stop.
"What’s going on here? Why is Postgres wasting its time, continuing to search even though it’s already found the data we’re looking for?"

Because Postgres has not already found what we are looking for. The query is

select *
from users
where name = 'Capitain Nemo'
order by id asc
limit 1;

Only after Postgres has found all users with the name 'Capitain Nemo' it can sort them by their 'id' attribute and limit the result set to the first one in the sorted relation.

Otherwise very nice post though.
Rest until you will want to code again.
All of this is caused by too many humans. Too much livestock, overfishing, pollution from energy, cars etc... Root cause, us.
Is the first part about sex tourism or smth??
This article was also discussed before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8449329

Pat Shaughnessy has 3 other similar articles about Postgres internals. He does a great job of combining high level explanations, visual aids, and gritty details.

Discovering the Computer Science Behind Postgres Indexes
http://patshaughnessy.net/2014/11/11/discovering-the-compute...

A Look at How Postgres Executes a Tiny Join
http://patshaughnessy.net/2015/11/24/a-look-at-how-postgres-...

Is Your Postgres Query Starved for Memory?
http://patshaughnessy.net/2016/1/22/is-your-postgres-query-s...
A year investing in European startups
Still smaller that an 2016 app favicon.
> What harm are they doing?

You mean using their relative advantage as capital owners to manipulate commodity markets that literally causes millions of people to starve? That's just one example. But besides literally depriving people of life, what harm are they doing?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/the-real-hu...
I can think of a few issues which make that solution more murky.

Why put more work onto the local law enforcement, who now have to deal with people from well outside their jurisdiction?

There are currently people who go to point X to complain or threaten. In your model, some will arrive at point X to find out it's a law enforcement facility. Many fewer will try to go to X if it's in the middle of a body of water, because it's more obviously not a place where people live. Placing X in the water means less time is wasted on a wild goose chase.

There are corrupt law enforcement officers. Isn't there the chance that, say, the state police will come to investigate small-town Mayberry with a single sheriff and deputy?

Law enforcement facilities do move. Who is in charge of updating the coordinates when the sheriff's office moves a few blocks away and another business moves into the old facility?
The Dark Meaning Behind the Word ‘Robot’
Sushi should not to be in the word cloud.
This comment is very one-sided and there are a couple of problems with it.

1) What if you just don't have that much to risk? What if a failed business startup means you're on the street and have literally no one to turn to? You sound as though you've either never been in that situation or you were in that situation and just didn't realize it. And that would make you dumb, not smart.

2) What if people just aren't turned on by competition? Running a successful business in the US means you have to compete fiercely in the market for customers. You have to adopt a certain kind of aggressive attitude that doesn't appeal to everyone (nor should it). Also, I propose that this kind of winner-take-all environment does not help when trying to do certain kinds of work (e.g. basic scientific research). What of all the scientifically-minded people who prefer a more open, less result-driven approach to problem solving? Are they just part of a "victim" culture?
Non Google link to the app: https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=wikipedia&fd...
The freedom to drill wells both for fossil fuels and for water is regulated for legitimate reasons, and can sometimes be taken away when new concerns arise. (E.g. fracking fluid mishandling incidents, bad well casings, earthquakes, et cetera.)

Again, try to explain why this turns our country into an authoritarian hellhole, and try to do it in a fashion that passes the giggle test.
I'm not saying I disagree, but this reeks of argument from authority. Plenty of knowledgeable people make mistakes—because they're all fallible.
I didn't see it mentioned, but I wonder if Audacity inverts the RIAA equalization curve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization
Congratulations, You’ve Been Fired
Entirely up to if you'd like to understand it that way. The climate is guaranteed to change, whether by man's action or not. Let's treat it less like the act of a vengeful god, and more like a fact of life.
If they do layoffs, they must publically announce them.

Replacing 36 yr old women with 23 year old men requires no such disclosure
A soup is binary salty/not salty.

5 characteristics measured - openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism

5! = 120.

So are you arguing 2 === 120 or are you arguing 2 === 5, but whichever one it is, you're missing the point.

Do you know why adverts have 'when 80 women were asked 73% agreed pantene makes my hair shinier'? Because it's not scientifically significant, so can't be held as a clinical trial, therefore the product doesn't need regulating.

And that's for a binary, shiny/not shiny (salty/not salty). Not for a possibly open, sloppy, introverted, agreeable neurotic. Or a closed, conscientious, introverted, agreeable non-neurotic.
Comic sans is a bit less readable but not that much for short passages. It's certainly not enough to justify hatred.

Design is a way of demonstrating social class. Its rules don't have to make sense as long as they're useful for showing that you're a member of the class that cares about design and thinks that certain designs are good. They also don't need to be consciously understood. Font choice demonstrates social class whether or not the audience understands how it works. It's one of the reasons why it's important in business to hire a good designer.

So while certain font choices may be more legible and designers may use legibility to rationalize them, that's less important than demonstrating that you're one of those people who gets design. This causes subtle differences to be magnified since it's about showing allegiance.

So when someone chooses comic sans they may be ignorant, but what are they ignorant about? A well-known social rule. They may also be using it either deliberately or unconsciously as a way of demonstrating they're not a member of the social classes that "get" good design.

So, personally, I've learned to be more forgiving of "bad" design, and also "bad" spelling and grammar, even though I try to get it right myself. I don't want to be that judgmental about social class.
The burnout I'm struggle with is cognitive fatigue. I love programming but find my mind can only handle so many hours. Answer is simple, take some time off and exercise but easier said than done.

I always thought this is what people referred to when they spoke about burnout?
YayText: A text styling tool for Facebook, Twitter, etc.
I am saying what I am saying for good reason. Back when I was active in chess (a decade or so ago), I read all kinds of articles and books about the great heroes of the game. There was general agreement in the chess community about who the dozen or so greatest players were, but no particular agreement on who was the very best. In a typical discussion, the cults of Fischer and Kasparov would always make themselves heard, but there were also advocates of Lasker and Capablanca, and some oddball who would insist on Morphy.

But perhaps things have changed. Got a pointer to a solid writeup on the issue?
You mention you worked"at one job(unpaid overtime,[...]", and this is a variation of the very first point, but as I'm coming to see it's really not a question of unpaid or paid overtime.

I am currently with a company that pays overtime at 1.5 and commensurately accelerates vacation accruals during overtime hours.

But the problem is that now we're working overtime at a higher rate. To put it another way, imagine a higher salary but with unpaid overtime. It's the equivalent of a job with unpaid overtime and better vacation accrual except that if you don't work overtime your salary gets docked.

So the problem with overtime is not the pay but that you don't have time to live your life, and this is particularly a problem if the management has been given carte blanche to pay overtime to its employees. (That is, management has no disincentive to pay its workers overtime.)
The way I see it, the appeal is to our love of gadgets and our desire for technology to make our lives better. Clever marketing of these products can also go a long way towards convincing us of their potential, while in practice we're now seeing a lot of problems people may have not considered when first purchasing these products.

Personally, I do have interest in a thermostat that can learn how to be more energy efficient for the sake of saving me money. But I don't think that requires Internet connectivity at all.

And it is beyond me why anyone would want or need an Internet connected toaster or coffee maker as well.
While I agree that people should get on their bikes more, this is not mere "cycle sport". I bought a BMX bike at about 35, after a decade or more of "only" riding mountain bikes, mostly on streets and well-maintained trails but occasionally going off-road. Within a week of getting back into doing the old freestyle tricks I used to do regularly, I took a fall and damned near broke my ass; and we're definitely not talking about tricks on the scale or level of someone like Mirra, here. It was weeks before I could sit comfortably again. I had to work lying down or standing for at least two weeks.

The type and magnitude of injury one can sustain from BMX freestyle riding, particularly vert riding, is just not in the same category as the kinds of injury you'd sustain cycling in the traditional sense (short of getting hit by a car, which is also probably more likely for freestyle riders).

So, yes, get on your bike (or kayak, or running shoes, or whatever) and get daily exercise. That's a great idea. But, "extreme" sports are called that for a reason, and they do subject your body to much more significant risk of injury, possibly even serious injury. There is already good science linking repeated concussions to depression and other mental illness; and it's not crazy to suggest these folks are getting more concussions than the general populace (when I was involved in these kinds of sports, I had friends who joked about how many concussions they'd had while skating or biking).

I'm agreeing with everybody in this thread, I think, but the notion that "doing sports" is what Mirra was doing is sort of like saying a hurricane is "some wind", and that it's a healthy lifestyle is misleading. He was fit, obviously, but had also suffered numerous major injuries throughout his life, many of which likely still caused him pain and reduced mobility, even years after they'd healed. Concussions were almost certainly among the injuries he sustained.
Huh. It would be a great irony if the realization became that capitalism and socialism need each other to thrive.
Ask HN: What is a fair incentive plan?
Hi all.

I am looking for some advice. Here is my current situation:

- I am 20 years old and a self taught front-end developer

- I am at a small company (11 employees, $2mil annual revenue)

- I have spent the past 6 months working directly with the CEO to develop a new division of the business (we have four developers working full time on the new product including myself, but my role has taken on more of "product manager", "stakeholder manager", and developer)

- The CEO has asked me if I am interested in running this division because he thinks he will be too busy operating the current business

- I am happy and want to run this new division

- The CEO has brought up offering me incentivized stock options, or phantom stock

- I anticipate we will generate $100,000 in revenue this year (remaining 8 months) from this department

- Best case scenario: this department accounts for $10mil revenue in 5 years

- Worst case scenario: this department is a money pit and doesn't exist in 5 years

Based off of the above information, what do you think is a fair incentive plan?

My current thoughts are:

- 33% phantom stock in the new department
- value the "stock" based off of a multiple of revenue
- claim distributions annually

Any and all advice is welcome... Thanks.
Yeah, I found a bottle with 3mg pills that i just cut down to ~1mg or less size. seems to work fine when I really need to get to sleep.
I think that visually most representative is the population graph provided here http://visualizingeconomics.com/blog/2007/12/09/comparing-po...

It does not include all the world regions, I understand that for example Eastern-Europe and most countries in Asia are missing, but I think that it communicates the bigger picture.
One of my favorite Professors once made the point that in Soviet Russia you could replace ''political power'' with ''wealth'' and it became a very similar system to the West. By law no Russians owned any personal property but the 1% ruling class (and really the 1% of the 1%) had more political power than everyone else combined. It was a capitalist system that used political power as its currency instead of dollars, which meant it was much less efficient (and personally cruel in many cases), but still tended towards extreme inequality.

As far as America today, aren't we ever just one election away from massive wealth redistribution?

As the ranks of the ''educated poor'' swell at the expense of the middle class, and we transition from an ownership economy to a sharing economy (wherein the average person now rents a condo forever and uses on-demand transpo and other services and owns very few material possessions), and access to the polls is increased as voter suppression is decreased and the impact of social media is fully realized (inevitable at some point), then we are in for some interesting times.
"lots of records that never made it to CD" is a great phrase! Of course we're still stuck using the lingo created at the start of the recording industry boom of the twentieth century, much as we're likely to continue saying "disk drive" although we've already moved away from spinning rust.

Many records are still never released on anything apart from vinyl. Many subcultures in music have returned to/continued releasing on that medium for aesthetic or commercial reasons: most often it's either to encourage physical DJing, the relationship with the music as an artefact, or because exclusivity makes business sense.
Admittedly pedantic nitpick: you shouldn't use spaces after hyphens.

Edit: Except for the obvious use case where you are using more than one compound in a row (e.g., high- and low-level).
The story talks about the point used as the default location for "the US". How is the small town police station in Kansas going to be able to file a useful police report for the entire country?

Similarly, if the default location for the state of New York is the Oriskany Falls, NY police station, then how are they going to file a useful police report for something that happened in New York City?
The first real hype phase was back in about 2005: Adam Curry, the death of radio, etc. [1] A lot of it was "Look at me. I'm podcasting. And I don't even need a studio!"

With smartphones it became a lot easier to sync content from NPR and the like which removed a big hurdle to routinely listening to podcasts as a matter of course. But, anecdotally, it certainly feels as if the population of quality content has gotten significantly broader. (And obviously there have been the breakout hits like Serial which have helped create a lot of mainstream awareness.)

[1] http://www.wired.com/2005/03/curry/
I'd like to add that my premise in supporting basic income is to expand coverage so there is no means testing.

As far as infants and children under five go, I think we should go ahead and eliminate the qualification process for WIC. I'd also want to see expanded school lunch program so every kid gets to eat lunch at school.

Thank you for explaining this though. Overall, I couldn't have explained my position better myself.
Usually people are talking about this stuff instead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupational_burnout
And lately I see a lot of special editions and "bonus" tracks only on vinyl.
of duck backs, water, and bridges bygone

> deterministically achievable in sub polynomial time

it's already been stated that 'sub polynomial' was a typo, the original sentence discussed subexp state of the art but i changed it to discuss my research instead and failed to remove the 'sub'

'deterministic' can also be appropriately called out as redundant when used with polynomial time because it is implied in the latter but i wanted to be explicit

> my intended inference

inference is defined as 'a conclusion reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning'

this is a word structure i use in place of faith based assumptions: i think, i believe, etc; to establish a respect for evidence based conclusions

part of my research's aim is interested in a polynomial time algo for integer factorisation, but before i am to conclude that there is such a thing i require evidence, hence it being the intended inference of my research stead a direct inference

> 'it's hard for me it must be impossible for you'

this is what you will hear very often from many in the know if you tell them you have interest in a poly factorisation algo, even in spite of the problem being open

except in the case of one of the people that fanned all this interest

Richard Karp: (Berkeley, unsure, P=/=NP) My intuitive belief is that P is unequal to NP,
but the only supporting arguments I can offer are the failure of all efforts to place specific
NP-complete problems in P by constructing polynomial-time algorithms.
I believe that the traditional proof techniques will not suffice. Something entirely novel will
be required.
My hunch is that the problem will be solved by a young researcher who is not encumbered
by too much conventional wisdom about how to attack the problem. (o)

:p

(o) http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/papers/poll.pdf
They don't impact the ability of the reader to eventually understand the message, but they do decrease the speed at which you can do so if you read any faster than purely phonetically. When your reading begins to involve visual pattern recognition at the word level as well as some degree of pattern recognition of higher-level structures, an error like that is an annoying distraction.

For writing where more time is spent reading it than typing it, it indicates inconsiderateness not to apply the necessary amount of spelling and grammar checking if the writer is unable to produce well-formed writing without specifically attending to its well-formedness. (Although it could also be a status signal to be able to make errors.)

(It's the same reason for code formatting and style rules - they standardize the low level details so readers can focus on the higher-level meaning.)

Any native English speaker who reads much at all (not to mention writes!) and has above a certain level of innate linguistic intelligence will also automatically develop perfect grammar and perfect or near-perfect spelling, so making frequent errors also indicates a certain semi-literacy.
don't tell gaben.
There are also other relatively compelling reasons around quality.

And I'm not referring to the idea that vinyl is an inherently better quality format than CD, but rather that many[0] actual pressings have been mastered in higher quality in practice.

[0] http://dr.loudness-war.info/