skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Noam Chomsky, that rabid right-wing libertarian:

What’s called the capitalist system is very far from any model of capitalism or market. Take the fossil fuels industries: there was a recent study by the IMF which tried to estimate the subsidy that energy corporations get from governments. The total was colossal. I think it was around $5 trillion annually. That’s got nothing to do with markets and capitalism.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/noam-chomsky-bernie-sande...

--

The problem is that capitalists use the language of free markets, but are not actually proponents of its wide application, just where it benefits them. Or to put it more pithily: capitalists don't like capitalism. So you get localized deregulations and strong regulations (example [1]) where it benefits them. But we should distinguish the cases.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/trade-groups-for-chemical-firms-...
I've been working for over a decade. There is ONE and ONLY ONE rule i've seen universally followed by HR -- your pay rises with the # of people reporting to you. Regardless of whatever managers say about running a lean shop or budget or whatever -- the more people you hire and manager, the more money you make. If you can do the work in six months, tell them 18 and hire two others. If you can do the work with 4 FTEs, tell them 12 FTEs and get a nice promotion. Increase employment, get great documentation and unit tests, and play to the foolish HR policies HR has cooked up. When people get paid for productivity, then switch to lean. Until then, play to the metric they set.
>we have no interest in trying to sucker someone into working with us if money is their primary motivation.

If money is not your primary motivator, why can't you pay more?
Humor's fine, it's just that the bar is higher. Most internet humor is lame, and that stuff grows like crabgrass. scott_s expressed this well a long time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289.

By the way, if there's a clique we personally invite you and everyone else to be part of it.
So relevant info - I used to work at a Vista Equity owned company, one that was eventually sold to Oracle. Vista was run by a bunch of MBAs that believed that had the best insight on how a to run a software company, including what technology to use.

We were evaluating better tools for version control as we had been using Subversion. We were seriously considering Git, Jira, and Github. Then Vista decided they knew what was best for all of their companies and decided it was Microsoft Team Foundation and Foundation Server. :/

I know Vista has had a lot of success but it certainly is not related to their ability to make technical decisions for the companies they own. They are succeeding in spite of this kind of decision making, not because of it.
using the name standard is just harmful when your linter doesn't follow a rule (yes semicolons) that 90% of the codebases use.
Full article: http://science.sciencemag.org.sci-hub.cc/content/352/6290/11...

These lenses are designed for a specific wavelength, and if I am reading the paper properly, only work with circularly polarised light. Essentially, for a given design wavelength and focal length there is a desired phase shift at each point on the lens. This phase shift is caused by the titanium dioxide "nanofins" which rotate the circularly polarised light to produce the desired phase shift. The phase shift is determined by the angle at which each fin is rotated. This produces a pattern of fins rotated relative to one another, which can be seen in the images of the BBC article.

While the lenses are designed for a target wavelength, they're not entirely useless at other wavelengths, they just have terrible chromatic aberration. In all other respects they seem to be excellent (especially for their size), but this makes them useless for most commercial applications.

To manufacture the lenses, they start with a substrate of silicon dioxide; not actually glass as said in the article, but quartz, like sand. This is coated by a resist, which is patterned by electron-beam lithography. The resist is "positive", meaning that the exposed part is removed when developed. A thin layer of titanium dioxide is deposited using atomic layer deposition. This is a type of thin film deposition technique that allows the deposition of a single atomic layer at a time. This is accomplished by introducing two different precursors one at a time alternately in sequence, the number of cycles determines the number of layers. With this they can essentially deposit just enough TiO2 to fill the holes left in the resist, though it also deposited on top of the unexposed resist.

The TiO2 remaining on top of the undeveloped resist is etched off and the undeveloped resist is removed, leaving just the nanofins. The nanofins have a high "aspect ratio", meaning height-to-width, which makes them challenging to produce using most semiconductor fabrication techniques. They are however quite large compared to modern semiconductors, on the order of hundreds of nanometers, which makes most things easier. Semiconductor fabrication uses photolithography, this used electron-beam lithography. While electron-beam lithography can in principle produce smaller feature sizes than photolithography (due to the smaller wavelength of electrons), that was not needed for this application; rather electron-beam lithography does not require the creation of a photomask and is consequently much more useful for small scale prototyping.

Commercially producing these lenses at scale could potentially be done with photolithography, though there would be a large upfront cost due to the need to fabricate photomasks. Monocrystalline silicon substrates are standard and silicon-dioxide-on-silicon is extremely common; I suspect the lenses could be fabricated on such a SiO2-Si substrate and the silicon on the back face removed, leaving optically transparent lenses.
Jacob Appelbaum Leaves the Tor Project
I can't find the study, but a South American government(I forgot which country) had the same fears. They wanted better employees and they were afraid if they paid them too much they would get people primarily interested in the money and not the job. But they decided to try it anyway, and lo and behold they were surprised to find the higher played employees were not only better employees but also more motivated intrinsically by the job. I would be curious to find any evidence to the contrary.

I try to be very suspicious when my views about how the world works line up with some way that I'm benefited monetarily. For instance it's very hard for me to have a clear and accurate opinion of oursourcing and h1-b's.
I don't think you disputed my point.

> In this case the therapy is not useless or a sham

More precisely, in this case you believe there is enough evidence that the therapy is effective, but the FDA does not yet agree that has been established. Then, in congruence with its policy on unproven medical procedures, the FDA has severely constrained stem cell procedures.

> and it is autologous which has traditionally been an exempt area in this respect.

It's clear that there was little/no enforcement in this area previously, but now they have announced clarification that it is to be enforced. You may call that a change in the regulatory environment, but it doesn't appear to be a change in general policy.

The situation is very similar to 23andMe. 23andMe was flying under the radar and, when the FDA cracked down on them, they experienced a changed in their effective regulatory environment, but this is not reasonably interpreted as the FDA changing its tune (or overturning history or precedent or whatever).

Again, I wish the FDA allowed more of these things to proceed (including 23andMe and stem cells) but I don't think this is change.
I've been following OwnCloud for years, and the one thing that has kept me from using it is the lack of delta sync. This fork has piqued my curiosity again. Is delta sync going to be a priority for NextCloud?
Sure I've used IRC. That's a long way from programming against it.

I asked the question because I believe there are many professional developers who have a similar knowledge gap despite having vastly more programming experience than me.

That seems to often be the case with older technologies internet technologies. I mean it's probably easier to point to resources for writing Slack bots than an IRC bot.
Tesla and SpaceX are both massive exceptions to the rule, not examples of the norm.

You are not Tesla or SpaceX.
I wrote quite a bit here in other comments, then I read some more and looked closer at the Kalkis-Research site. Please if you are a journalist and are going to link to this article, take a closer look at the writers.

Is this even a real site?

a) Only the 3 posts about Google are free. The other articles have very short descriptions and say you can buy them for €10,000. The thumbnail image accompanying the buy link is the same in all. They may not even exist.

b) For all the details and charts in the Google pieces, they say "BEARISH -70%" but have absolutely no math or estimation about how they came to that conclusion.

c) The authors are pointing out fraud largely outside of Google's traffic ecosystem -- ad exchanges, content recommendation ad networks -- but some how Google is the company that will lose half of its value. They couldn't be bothered to look at other public adtech companies?

e) What they outline definitely with regards to worthless ads being sold is definitely real, occurring, and I'm not contesting that.
Schedule. Schedule. Schedule.

It's very important that you allocate some time to each area - upto 2 hr blocks of time for coding and architecture, 20 minutes for management tasks and a block of time for firefighting/reacting.

Also schedule in time for exercise, sleep, and just general downtime. All of which are very important.

Lastly, drop anything that's not important and delegate whatever you can. From your description it looks like you will be getting new hires to help you out soon. Just ride it out until you get support and make sure you don't burn out along the way. All the best!
While the VP is asking you to hire, the question is: why is your title not aligned with your responsibilities? Though you do not mention this, I have seen people in similar situations who send signals about not wanting "Manager" in their title. They are vocal about what they do not want to become in spite of what they are already bringing to the table, which can hinder professional growth.

Since you are directly reporting to someone who would otherwise be your skip level manager, you will need to fill in for your manager and ask for the correct job title to begin with. This will ensure two things:

1. Your responsibilities will be algined with your title; and

2. You will have better access to information and authority you need to build the right team, in addition to doing the right thing for people who already report into you.
Well, at the end of the article he shows this technique used along with gzip. He however does not show a comparison of the original vs his 90deg compression with gzip; so the difference there may be negligible.
I get it and I agree. What happens when the "I have a boyfriend" response stops working? Then what? People should just learn to stop harassing people.
Some Quantum Physics research has started yielding results that I think would show up if you were using wholly wrong abstractions/tools/techniques to understand something.
How to track customer traffic to a merchant location
Hi All,

I am working on a social app that allows merchants to post deals and special offers. These deals and special offers are most post paid unlike Groupon. I am facing a critical problem when I am not sure how to track if users have redeemed the deal and how much was the bill amount. I looked a APIs like Cardsprings that let you track that but I wanted to reach out to the community to see if there is another approach to solve this problem. Looking forward to your replies.
Whenever I am negotiating a salary, even if I have to reveal what I make now, I will end that statement with "But based on my experience and value that I bring to the table, I am expecting at least xyz for my new role otherwise it is not worth it for me to quit my current job".

This way, you make the whole "current salary" irrelevant. The point is that any good employer will NEVER let go of a candidate who is an excellent fit for their role but they had a huge gap in current vs desired. They only let go of candidates who either are not a good fit OR are asking for a very very high number that is literally out of the budget assigned (more applicable to larger corps.). But then again, it has nothing to do with current salary crap.
I don't think "teaching women to negotiate" is practical. Is Google or Facebook supposed to send candidates to negotiation classes before offer negotiation time? Is there evidence that a training class can overcome whatever combination of nature and nurture causes the discrepancy?

Let the market drive the compensation level. If "the compensation for the position - take it or leave it" is too low, then the company won't be able to hire anyone, and they will have to alter it over time.

If it's "take it or leave it" from the employee, you wind up underpaying people with humility, and overpay people who are overconfident.

Note: I'm not at one of the large companies that have been in these lawsuits, and lost an internal fight to move to the "one price" policy that I'm advocating for. I'm doing my best to implement it in my part of the organization, and even there it doesn't always work.
Nobody is arguing for deregulation. We just want government regulation that doesn't overtly protect the wealth of the ruling class.

Stop perpetuating false dichotomies that preclude valid criticism of current policies.
Wow. That’s pretty crazy.
Eh. I can't say I've done formal comparison shopping but Walmart groceries don't strike me as being systematically a lot cheaper than other grocery chains on an, ahem, apples to apples basis. Personally, given other options, I'm not sure why I would use Walmart for grocery delivery given that I'd be paying for delivery in some form and their selection and, often, quality are inferior to other stores.
A truly free market has a price for contract killings--including, for instance, the current CEO of Bank of America, or the current chairman of the Fed, or someone like Bernie Madoff.

If the wealthy make a figurative "killing" abusing the poor, the poor turn around and make a literal killing. An unethical executive would have to hole up in a fortified compound and surround it with hired guns, just like a Mexican drug lord. That places limits on how much money you can make from antisocial behavior, simply because people stop voluntarily doing business with you.

All big business ends up being a variant of the Mafia, but there has to be some honor among thieves, otherwise gang wars break out and ruin the regular revenue streams for everyone.

Few people would actually be comfortable with a completely free market.
The fact that you might have misunderstood is a good reason to try for compassion even when the other party doesn't seem to be.
Obligatory

https://xkcd.com/743/
If you install an otherwise-compatible Greasemonkey user script in Chrome without appropriately adjusting the metadata, it will default to requesting access to all domains. I think these were more commonly used in the earlier days of Chrome, and contributed to this misunderstanding.
I have the opposite experience when it comes to software development. 9 times out of 10 the Linux/Unix instructions for compiling some software from github will be short and concise, then you look at the windows instructions and they want you to set a whole bunch of environment variables, link that here, move that there, and the documentation for everything highly technical is sparse. Then when something doesn't work it's sometimes very hard to find out how to get it to work. You search on stackoverflow, and all you find are the answers from people on Linux and they don't apply to your Windows system.

Also, IME almost every new language targets Linux/Unix before it targets Windows unless it's some proprietary language/made by Microsoft. Example: for a long time you couldn't even get 64bit versions of Rust for Windows while they were available on other platforms for a while.

It's getting harder to deny: Even MS has added a Linux ABI to attract developers (I'm not interested though). Lots of people on Windows (and OS X) even go through the trouble of running Linux virtual machines just for a dev environment.
I just come right out and basically say the latter to inquiries and it's fairly prominent on my resume as well.

I enjoy both what I do and the company I'm at, which puts a clear floor on what I'll entertain. If I can't get confidence early in the process, it leads to a lot of wasted time. In practical terms, that means I invest less than an hour before figuring that out. ("I'm pretty happy here and my current comp starts with an X" often cuts the conversation off right then, which is ultimately best for both sides. It's just business.)

I won't say that I'd never consider a pay cut to change roles, but I work for money, for me and my family, and I'm going to try to maximize my and my family's happiness (financial security included).
Money is the primary motivation to work. Would you be upset at an employee for working on their own project or for a different company during business hours? If you would not allow this then money is your primary motivation. You are giving money to the employee for ONE reason, you are buying their time to produce something of value for your company. Saying you aren't interested in people who are primarily motivated by money in a job comes across as disrespectful of the time of the employee.
How philosophy came to disdain the wisdom of oral cultures
Yes, they're frequently just looking for butts to put in chairs. Getting the numbers out of the way first helps to avoid wastes of time. But the other side is true also for more junior or underpaid developers. They need to use tactics like these to get themselves to the right side of the bell curve. Once you've developed the experience and skills and had the good luck necessary to move you into the upper range of compensation, it helps to tell them right away to avoid wasting time with employers who aren't interested in paying up for senior talent. Again, though, if you know the potential employer has paid rates / compensation in the range you are looking for in the past, it is also safe to delay because you may get a better offer even coming from an already high compensation.
It seems perfectly in line with every other announcement from Microsoft over the past 20 years. Every time they start an exciting new project, they astroturf the snot out of the announcement, in the press and online, to make it seem like it's more production-ready than it is, and then it takes longer than anyone predicted, and the things that made the announcement interesting (like getting away from MSBuild) wind up getting scrapped. I don't know why this pattern surprises anyone any more. I'm still waiting for Bash on Windows to support RVM and bootstrapping a Rails environment, but, then, I'm still waiting for the filesystem improvements promised in Cairo.
Strange thing.

I'm talking to women all the time and only the one I hit on really assume I'm hitting on them. And I wouldn't call myself a rather introverted person, I think.
Excellent read, thanks for the link. Like the comments at the bottom, it is not clear if this is a personal story or fiction. Do you have any insight?
They can if you increase the object alignment, but that's generally not advisable and should only be done when measurements show a benefit.
He's not implying anything. The sad truth that I've seen play out over and over again is that men won't respect a women saying no, but they'll respect another man's "claim" on her.
For me, a European amateur sociologist who's never actually been to the USA, Stephen King was a great introduction to the American working class, especially as portrayed in the 1980s.
> You say I'm worth $X. I go get a job offer for $Y. If $Y > $X, you were mistaken.

Here's the disconnect. In this scenario, I'm not saying, "you're worth X". I'm saying, "I'm willing to pay someone $x to do this job." If someone else is willing to pay you more for the same job (all else being equal), I'd advise you to take the other job.

If I can't find anyone qualified to take the job for $x within a reasonable period of time, then I'm below market and should adjust.

The beauty of that analysis is that it ties to current employee compensation as well. If my offers are below-market, then I have a much larger people problem: either my current team members are below market skills (bad) or are at risk of being poached (also bad).

As a candidate, I might look at that and value the culture it represents: transparency, fairness, likely diversity, people-centric...

The "we like people who care about more than money" (the passion gambit) can be a a giant warning sign. And is at the root of the "why would I accept less money from you than my market rate, so that you, the founder, can make more money" concern.

But it assumes that the owner, is in fact, making more profit "off your back". This might be false. The owner might instead care about investing back into people and the working environment: an indirect "perk", if you will.

Everything's a trade-off. No one is forcing you, as a candidate, to act against your best interests. There are just different kinds of interests.
Bison is a great tool for parsing grammars.

However, I'm more looking for a tool that, on its own, can be used as a full compiler, with the added ability to put myself in the middle of the front and back end.

LLVM has a similar ability where you can develop a pass over the IR and manipulate it.
Right. "They ruining the web" for us but apparently they are providing value to someone else.
Somewhat tangentially, I wonder if the kind of misrepresentation* present in this article is going to get better or worse in the future.

The fact that, in a lot of cases, it's trivial to go read the source [0] makes me feel that it should dwindle. However, it seems that, with the substantial increase in content available, having more strident views is required to be heard.

* by misrepresentation I mean that the article was by no means a denial of "neo-liberalism". It was generally very positive about free market economics but looked at 2 niche areas and concluded that 1) short term capital controls may sometimes be worth doing and 2) deficit reduction isn't that valuable in very prosperous countries but is in weaker economies. Not quite what Mr Chakrabortty said it said.

[0] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/ostry.htm
King does his best when limited to the constraints of a short story. He tends to ramble otherwise--look at the later Dark Tower books for an example.

His "Nightmares & Dreamscapes" anthology is a solid introduction.
> those are mostly gone today as well
Interesting perspective. This is what happens when the internet comes in to play, even news paper readership has gone down aswell due to the rise of many digital mediums for people to get their news from. I was also listening to a radio program about the evening news and the big 4 networs (ABC/CBS/NBC) trying to stay relevant because the news they report is something that has already hit the internet. What do you think of this ?
The art of the obituary
>> after taxes, expenses, and his agent's cut that he made about as much as he would as a plumber

Plumbers don't do too bad. And he's doing what he loves to do. I'd say that's a win.