skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So many people have these really bizarre and outdated (by not just years but centuries) notions about how knowledge work gets done. They want to squish it into the model of factory work, but it just doesn't work that way. Knowledge work is typically creative, the right model is an art studio, a movie set, or a band. This makes hiring very difficult, which is exacerbated by the fact that engineers are innately bad at hiring other engineers without a lot of training or carefully focused self-improvement.

Knowledge workers aren't cogs, they're part of a team. You shouldn't expect that you can easily find replacement people with exactly the same skillset and propensity as someone else to make up the gap that an absence makes in a team. Nor should you expect that the proper way to grow a team is by cloning the skills of some other existing member of the team. A team works cooperatively, and their skills, talents, experience play off one another to gel together into some sort of mechanism that is capable of doing stuff. But if you change the parts, you get a different team that does different stuff, or maybe doesn't even work at all. One of the big factors here is that if you think you can replace one person with just another person you're often wrong. Best case scenario you end up with something else (maybe better), worst case scenario is you can't replace the unique factors that made the previous person successful in that role (and realistically you need a team with a different breakdown of skills, different mechanisms of interconnectedness, etc. in order to have something functional).

The band analogy really helps here a lot. Realistically when you change members of a team you don't end up with something like Steve Perry stepping into the lead singer role of Journey. What you end up with is something more like Fleetwood Mac being transformed by merging with Buckingham Nicks or Genesis changing after Peter Gabriel left. You end up with a very different thing doing very different stuff. And the higher caliber the people the bigger the difference is.

What knowledge workers actually do day to day and what it says on their job description they do are often very different things, and you ignore that at your peril. Hiring based on the idea that knowledge workers are automatons with certain functionality modules installed is one of the easiest and most common ways to completely sabotage productivity and execution.
Hook, like and sinker: Facebook serves up its own phish
I'm not the greatest; I'm the double greatest. Not only do I knock 'em out, I pick the round
My only regret is that I have but one upvote to give. You really nailed that on the head.

As a computer programmer and an open source software enthusiast, believe me when I say that I would love to contribute every line of code I write to open source. Not because of any moral imperative, but simply because I'd love for my work to be widely distributed and used. Unfortunately, it's incredibly difficult for a company of one to pull that off (but not impossible -- see Mike Pall, for example, though I have no idea how much money he actually makes (made?) via LuaJIT). If I could work on nothing but my open source software without needing to sacrifice my (already rather modest, really) quality of life, I would tender my letter of resignation in the morning. People don't even want to pay for software when it's not available for free: I have a very hard time imagining that they'd be willing to pay for software that is free.

I just don't see any way I can make it work, at least not right now. Maybe once I've got more of a financial safety net set up, I'll give it a shot or two, but for now I'm content to develop proprietary software for The Man™ in exchange for a monetary salary. I do try to squeeze in bits of open source development wherever/whenever I can, and that'll have to be good enough.
> Rarely can a society coordinate strongly enough to have its collective will affect the market on purpose (if it could, soccer players and movie stars wouldn't be making that much money).

This is just wrong. Soccer players, movie stars, and the organizations that front them make money based upon ticket sales. If you don't want them to make as much money you don't buy the ticket. Buying the ticket is making a choice to give them that money.

The problem is that it is easy for people to dissociate from the choices that they make with their purchasing. Not everyone is this deluded. Some people boycott things they disagree with. What you are arguing is that mechanisms like boycott, i.e., voting with your dollars don't always work in the sense of producing outcomes that an observer might consider better for everyone. The same case could be made about democracy for exactly the same reasons. That is a different argument than the one outlined here, that markets do not represent the direct choice of their participants. They certainly do, even when the participants refuse to acknowledge that they are making those choices.
The Science of Cycology
Doctimer – eHealth appointments in Austria
Healthcare should be an online experience soon!

Ever have been disapointed by makeing calls for an appointment at your local doctor over and over again.
doctimer should change the way we do that. Simple, easy and online.

Watch out!

https://doctimer.at
A lot of the original discussion can be chalked up to HN's unfortunate habit of treating all front page material the same, regardless of whether it's an article proving Fermat's Last Theorem or a spur-of-the-moment blog post from some random dude.

But you should expect that on a website primarily populated by INTP users.
Littergram: Cleaning Britain one picture at a time
So he has to post apologising for being self important to a bunch of HN posters who were being self important? Says sad things about the state of HN these days. Am I the only one thinking HN has become an echo-chamber of negativity any time a story has any of an author's personality in it?
Railroads are doomed anyway (except maybe cargo, though self-driving trucks can change that), when London to Paris plane ticket can bought for £30. Lost cause.

This is possible because railroads are hierarchical, and all other means of travel are point-to-point. Networks always win against hierarchies.
Learning from Your Bugs
I really appreciate this article. It feels like envy has become a major driver over the last few years in the US--it's obviously always been around, but now it feels like both an obsession and something that is broadly socially acceptable to indulge in.

Thinking about the good and what to be grateful for sounds like a much better recipe for happiness than things like the share-my-salary movement. (I'm not opposed to the latter. It may result in modest comp bumps but I doubt it leads to lasting happiness bumps).
The first part is major changes, like the addition of GADTs in 3.12 -> 4.00.

The second number is also kinda major features, but not as large. Kinda similar to the Python release cycle. New features get introduced here, so things like multicore, flambda, effects, modular implicits would land here. It has a rather long release cycle but I heard there are plans to shorten the release cycle to something like roughly 6 months. These are 2 digits zero-padded for no real reason except maybe easier string sorting, so 4.03 would translate to 4.3 and 3.10 would be 3.10 and not 3.1.

Then the last digit is for patches and regression fixes that do not introduce new features.
Captive DNS Server Example
Google Reveals Its Cloud Computing Vision
Wikipedia categorises Jogging as “Activities by jihadist groups”
So if emerging markets are going to outcompete western companies then... invest in emerging markets?
Those lucky enough to find the winners will be rewarded an order of magnitude better than the previous generation, it's just that those big wins will be much less common than before where a few companies could share the market.

Think about the market opportunity for companies that achieve a winner-take-all success on a global scale, it's hard to underestimate.
You're right, fixed. Thank you. What I was thinking of was this:

1) File provisional

2) Publicly disclose

3) Provisional expires

At this point, your public disclosure counts as prior art.
Top 5 Samsung Gear VR Apps to Fuel Your VR Fantasies
Yup. The annoying thing is that there are always people on the other side of the fence yelling at you that you're doing it wrong, no matter what you're doing, and for reasons that can be entirely unrelated to you and your context.

The fantasy is that work should be engaging, fulfilling, fun, and yet only moderately challenging, doesn't take too many hours, has you surrounded by ideal colleagues, with policies that fit you perfectly... you get the idea.

Reality doesn't work like that and it's so silly that people keep pretending otherwise.
That story would have been better if it had a real mistake.
Inpainting images by Context Encoders
Do you not try to be friends with your colleagues?

You spend about a third of your life at work, it seems to me that you should try to make it as enjoyable as possible.
Try "-fno-strict-overflow -fno-strict-aliasing -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks" and then see if your program gets slower.

That won't nearly get everything, but loop optimization in C relies on undefined behavior a lot of the time, so you'll get to see how much you need it.
The Golden Ratio: Design's Bigggest Myth
many possible sources - "daddy isues" are on one way or another responsible for more messed up people I've ever met than anything else. it grows on men too, just in different way than ladies - unhealthy competitiveness, never-good-enough syndrome inwards and outwards, never happy with what you have/achieve even if you have billions and fame and recognition. abandoning stable relationships etc...

and then there are true extroverts, who just need the feeling of being hot topic, controversial, whatever. to be polite i don't like these so much.

of course i don't know him personally, could be different reason but probably somewhere along those lines.
> "Never trust the client" is good advice for every kind of application. Clients are filthy liars.

It's true that you can't trust clients not to lie. However, in some situations, it's the correct decision to accept a constrained number of lies if that brings you benefits.

Like so many other absolute statements in software, in reality it's a trade off, and you need to consider the business context to make the right decision.
I think it's about machines learning how to do things and improve at them rather than the decision parameters being hard coded. Most process automation is completely deterministic, the computer isn't being smart itself because all the smarts were pre-determined by humans.

Neural nets and learning algorithms that are trained to do things are different and can cope with decision spaces involving a numerous variables where deterministically working out all the possible values and corresponding expected outputs isn't viable.
Are you predicting that the next US fighter after F35 will be powered by Python? Because that's what US institutions like MIT now teach.
I'm incredibly fortunate then, as that has never been my experience. Working in infrastructure engineering, I've been referred by devs for most of my jobs and in each instance the referral has been a positive. I've also referred a number of devs despite not being one myself, who have also benefited.
No, I used a reasonable approximation. Sqrt(2^128) is roughly in the ballpark of what is needed to have 50% of a collision, in fact it is slightly lower than the actual number. Incidently sqrt(2^128) is 2^64, which is the number I used.
Drunk driving laws are really addressing the problem indirectly. The whole point is that EtOH affects stuff like reaction time, motor control, situational awareness, and risk assessment. The source doesn't matter, if you are not able to meet a minimum ability in those skills, then driving is a going to be dangerous. The source of the problem doesn't matter.

Instead of the breathalyzer (or other tests for EtOH) we should be testing for ability. I suspect this shouldn't be hard or expensive, for example, to make a portable device that implemented objective tests[1] of ability. Obviously some research would be needed to determine which skills need to be tested and to calibrate the minimum-ability cutoffs.

[1] like this reaction time test: https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/java/redgreen.html
Not Wikipedia does, a user named Bipandboppop does

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jogging&diff=6611...
> "A coming collapse in investment returns"

And yet McKinley are writing research about it, rather than liquidating the company to take short positions, which should tell you something about the pinch of salt required.
> I want them to prepare for something they're not going to use normally

I think this pretty much sums up what is wrong with hiring.
Note that the require mechanism is quite flakey, and they are discussing a new release or even reverting
https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/3402#issuecomment-2151...
Nice questions. if we had 'teams' of programmers and each team competes for new members, that is where 'the baseball like draft' analogy from. The programmers would be earning an income from their team so I am not about turning developers into contract workers. Just to clarify a team could be a co-op( or whatever structure).

Making more money doesn't have to come from wage inflation. it can be derived from cost saving. Just like if you are a member of housing co-op, you still pay rent but the benefits you derive are incomparable if you just paid directly to a landlord.

For a capitalistic business, the two options are either pay a fixed monthly wage and keep most of the profit or have no upfront wage costs and share your profits(royalties).It all comes down to preferences and what position each party wants/can negotiate.

It is not perfection I seek but less options that I seek to avoid. About Egos that where the "xprize' esque comes in, business pay for explicit specific outcomes(think of it as a service level agreement).
Good post! I completely agree that programming is very creative. Fred Brooks said it really well in "The Mythical Man-Month" I think:

The delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of imagination. Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself.
Rather than spreading "meta" hype about AI being hyped. I highly recommend reading up on recent advances due to Deep Learning and ideas of Neural Processing. To summarize briefly, a lot of core problems in applied machine learning, such as image recognition/segmentation/understanding, Natural Language Processing saw a significant improvement in performance over last five years, often bringing them to near human performance. This improvement was possible due to new approaches that were rooted in empiricism, availability of large datasets, powerful GPUs and algorithms such as Deep Convolutional & Recurrent Neural Networks. Combined with the advances in Drones, Batteries, Cloud computing & Smartphones a lot of application which previously would have been impossible to deploy can now be quickly deployed.

Here is a good article that goes over the topic: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel...
> The current step change in our AI capabilities could throw a spanner in all attempts at making any reliable predictions.

On the other hand, vastly improved AI capabilities could mean that future prediction systems are more reliable.

At some point in the future, all further predictions may become roughly accurate. Maybe these AI sytems are clever enough in make only predictions which are self-fulfilling prophecies. In other words, that they are able to calculate their own influence to the world into their predictions, which is especially important for economic predictions made by influential institutes.
Few months. But we all know a lot has happened in the last few months.

The f8 conference has happened since plus all these windows announcements.

Did you install on a windows 7 machine?
Perhaps this is true if you 'can relocate to SF' + is american/won the h1b lottery, end up working in a company with 6 hours/day policies, 20% time and plenty of money to burn.

All other mortals are in a way or another struggling. Pulling all nighters(because it's expected), having long periods of stress + burnout.

The advantages I see are that the money is good and that people(me included) love programming. Having a job doing something you love is definitely a blessing. The biggest of them.
The current step change in our AI capabilities could throw a spanner in all attempts at making any reliable predictions.
That was my first thought seeing the topic.
Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy: shifting investments should cause a shift in financial success?
I'd point out the poor validity and unreliability of Myers-Briggs, but it would perhaps prove your larger point.
> The reason that this could be really cool is that you could hypothetically hash these MIRs and store these hashes in a public database of open-source code.

Sounds similar to what Joe Armstrong described at the end of "The Mess We're In" (StrangeLoop 2014): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4
> Functions like memcpy or malloc cannot legally be written in C without breaking this behavior

> Also not true.

You cannot implement malloc in C because malloc always returns a pointer that's not a part of an existing allocation. The malloc in libc has special dispensation from the compiler to do this (GCC "malloc" attribute).

Similarly you can't implement pthread mutexes in C because they imply optimization barriers (all global memory might change) that a C function with a visible implementation wouldn't have.
...and fixed within a minute.
BAHRAIN'S CRIMINAL COURT JAILS EIGHT FOR LIFE OVER TERRORISM CHARGES
I think not actually having a boss and being picky about who to hire or work with turns it to 75% good and 25% tolerable for me over a period of 25 years prof software dev.
The most beneficial course of action for our generation would be to just write off our national debt and reboot our currency. But of course that would never happen.
>Of course to generalise about an entire generation people is egregiously pointless. //

You consider statistics to be pointless? What do you propose instead?
Yeah, it wasn't too distracting in this article, and it was so well written that it's actually hard to notice.
This is incorrect. Haskell and OCaml both support parametric polymorphism, but Haskell also supports ad-hoc polymorphism, whereas OCaml does not. Modular implicits, it seems, are OCaml's solution to the problem of reducing the set of valid types in a polymorphic function.

Haskell: concat :: [a] -> [a] -> [a]

OCaml: val concat : 'a list -> 'a list -> 'a list = <fun>

Both are parametrically polymorphic. However, in Haskell, I can use a type class to support ad-hoc polymorphism:

concat :: (Num a) => [a] -> [a] -> [a]

Now concat works forall a, as long as a is an instance of Num. This is important for arithmetic operators:

(+) :: (Num a) => a -> a -> a

Now I can have (+) be defined in a meaningful way, since Int, Integer, Float, etc. are all instances of Num, and implement (+). An easy way to think of this (since it's all it is, really) is operator/method overloading. In Haskell, (+) is overloaded for every type that you would want it to work for (the details of this are actually probably different, but are not important for learning).

In OCaml, if I have

val (+) : 'a -> 'a -> 'a = <fun>

There is actually only two implementations of that function:

let (+) a b = a

or

let (+) a b = b

Since I cannot restrict the set of types to the function, I can't do anything with the arguments. I don't know what the types are! Ad-hoc polymorphism allows for restricting the set of types, which allows for Haskell to use + for any Num-like thing.
I couldn't agree more. Choose a job you love, and you'll never work a day in your life!
SETL.io
To be fair, from when it was posted here. Counting from when it was changed, it stayed for almost a year.
I don't think they're claiming that prices will collapse (which is what you would want to short on), but rather that returns will collapse. That over time, the return of say, the S&P 500 will be half of what it has been over the previous 20 years.
The Shame and Glory of Yahoo’s China Adventure
Being friends with colleagues can lead to less enjoyable work situations, not to mention less focused work.

Being friendly should suffice, not all of us want to get too personal with the same people we might need to have professional arguments with.

We're all different.
It's not just the WSJ: http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/08/13/2137334/this-is-tesla-...
Could be simply that his need to promote his products (i.e. marketing) create a need to self-promote.
South Summit Startup Competition 2016
X Prizes (and their ilk) are great, but they have limited application. So much of what developers do is not directly measurable. For example, how do you measure the value of a scalable, modular, and extensible platform that will serve as a basis for growth over the next 5-10 years? By only rewarding what you can measure now, you risk running up a lot of technical debt in pursuit of those metrics.
Sorry this is taking your comment on a tangent, but it is not exactly peace time for the USA, nor has it been since the 1960's or arguably since WW2 if you take the cold war into account. The USA has been involved in one or another war for literally decades now...or does minor wars not count?
I remember first seeing such a proof-of-work in the network protocol layer of the game Tribes 2. They opened up the source code for that, named OpenTNL (seems abandoned now) where you could see how it's done. Here's the part that verifies a puzzle:

https://github.com/kocubinski/opentnl/blob/master/tnl/client...
This is a good start and I hope it will encourage additional studies into the chilling effect of mass surveillance. The only previous study that I have read is from Germany, and it looked at the effect from the then new Data Retention Directive. That survey showed that people would start refraining from calling help-lines, lawyers, doctors and priests as a direct result of mass surveillance.
So all interviewers are male, white upper-middle-class with a fondness for beer?

Good to know.
I'd assume you're right. Some evidence would be good to see - strikes me that instead of prosperity shifting to less developed nations it could instead be shifting to the already wealthy capitalists?
No they don't. I had interviews with both Amazon and Google and nobody told me that.

After two years Amazon called be back for a second interview. I told them that I am not interested if they still have that kind of questions. They said they don't.

I flew to a different country for that second interview and guess what! They still asked those kind of questions.
I fully agree that enterprise version would be in high demand. I work in a business org at a large tech company. Everybody is an excel user, most are sort of familiar with SQL but aren't great at setting up ETL jobs. This product is amazing.
I completely agree. It seems like it's fashionable to immediately jump on any new Wolfram article and slate it. His tone and personality might not be to everyone's taste but he's brilliant and has achieved a huge amount.

This is the most comprehensive article I've read about the Ramanujan (and I've read a few before, I've always been interested in his story). I especially liked the parts about Hardy, who always seems to be overlooked. The comments about Mathematica aren't really as shoe-horned in as people are making out anyway, Ramanujan's method was very experimental so it fits well.