skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Same tired, cliche replies as usual ... you're probably also assuming that my opinions aren't based on job experience, yet they are based on several years of experience in many positions, where I did the 40-hour grind, delivered business solutions for months-long and years-long projects, etc.

I'm not talking about academic overqualification. I'm talking about someone hiring you, talking at length about how you are being hired specifically to do X because it matters to the company's bottom line, and then after you're hired they switch it and say actually you're going to do Y but you're going to be a political mouthpiece for X.

One common set of values is

Y = statistically invalid model fitting that actively causes the business to lose money but which is easier to reduce to pliable metrics for political jockeying

X = (deep) machine learning and/or Bayesian stats

It's not at all about academic overqualification. The actual business need, for reals, can benefit from the pragmatic and cost-effective use of the tools, and the person is actually skilled in using to do exactly that.

Yet, they are prevented politically.

As for starting a company, I think I would guess that's one of the least plausible ways of doing important or useful work. You'll only get funding if it is a trite variation on consumer bullshit -- even though consumers themselves don't want that and would rather that your labor is allocated to solving more fundamentally important social problems that there just isn't money for solving. Plus, you'll be so burnt out over all the auxiliary stuff like HR, marketing, sales, that you won't actually do any of the underlying quant work that was the whole reason for starting the company in the first place.

It kills me how people here seem to think that "start your own company" is some kind of "put up or shut up" gauntlet to throw down to challenge someone who is lamenting the shitty state that things are in.

"Start your own company" is not some venerated challenge-call for those brave few who want to change the world. Starting your own company is just a different format of the same bullshit phenomenon.

Fixing what's broken inside of companies and organizations that already have huge leverage and capital to positively impact fundamentally important problems -- that is perhaps worthwhile, if you can manage to deal with the political fighting without getting too burned out.
If only we can get Iran and Israel to play ball because from everything I've read most of the trouble is between Saudi Arabia and Iran trying to get a friendly govt in Iraq.
Once when I was in college, I could get Pepsi from the nearby vending machine but no coke. I figured, "pepsi and coke are basically the same, this will be fine!" and proceeded to pour some bourbon into my pepsi.

It turns out that they are not the same, and there's a reason lots of people order whiskey and coke and nobody orders whiskey and pepsi.
They bought StatusPage so could manually alter HipChat's downtime history. I jest.
I'm sorry you are being downvoted for merely quoting PG. The article is from 2002; I wonder if he still believes what he wrote? In any case, PG is almost certainly in the wrong.

> Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes.

Sure, but that's not why practically everyone in academic music/art say it, or refuse to make value judgments about art.

> You feel this when you start to design things.

My experience has been exactly the opposite - I have a degree in music though I work as a programmer.

> Football players like to win games. CEOs like to increase earnings.

Both of which have well defined, internal metrics (higher numbers are better).

> It's a matter of pride, and a real pleasure, to get better at your job.

It may be for some people for some jobs, but this does not relate to generalizing personal taste to universal truth in any way.

> But if your job is to design things, and there is no such thing as beauty, then there is no way to get better at your job.

It does not follow that iff beauty is in the eye of the beholder then designers can not improve. Cultures share values. Improving design (in a professional setting) is something closer to optimizing in the eyes of the target market... to click a button. Of course, the solution space is both practically infinite and time dependent. Neither beauty nor taste need be intrinsic or universal, we just need to agree upon a shared language (social convention).
Well that is depressing.
That job setup uses a language called JCL. And while COBOL reads more or less like english statements, to the point that anyone who has ever programmed procedurally could follow it, JCL is quite inscrutable. One old joke was that nobody ever writes JCL from scratch, they just take what worked last time and change the dataset names.

http://www.jargon.net/jargon/jargonfile/j/JCL.html
What Do Contested Conventions Look Like? Ask Hollywood and Sinclair Lewis
Can't you make an id in the database that translates to the hash? Then you can generate short URL's.
The world's first venture capital fund powered entirely by AI
Isn't it illegal to "zero-rate" a service in the US?
Be aware that plenty of ISPs sadly MITM example.com. I ran into this when our test suite that curl'ed example.com and checked its output failed when we ran our binary on a new provider.
Doesn't everybody just get a business credit card so their business expenses are in the card system? Why does Expensify need arrangements with hotel and transportation services, except to steer customers to them?

Now a really neat system would be one that looked at your messaging, location, and credit card data, figured out why you were expensing something, and annotated the expenses with "why", with zero user involvement.
Wish it were a bit more like HyperCard in its scope.
Hm, again I haven't tried it - I don't have an iOS device that can run it - does it actually use Swift syntax? This is only anecdotal (anecdata) but both my friend and partner (both 27) are learning to program for the first time using Racket, who both barely know what a 'web browser' is and they're both finding it really easy to pick up, and even have started 'thinking in lists'. It also was my first programming language..

But anyways, I'm excited to give this app a try - I'm always glad to see more tools to help people get started.
any cost they would save on cooling would be lost on the incredibly expensive repairs process of getting the pods out of water or getting someone down there to fix it.
Thats your decision to put this costly housing in your basket. And your not alone making this decision, but a) its a trend and b) the aforementioned 70% of western workers aren't necessarily repeating your choice.
Oh right, thanks for asking. Issue tracking and Kanban mostly
This is probably in respect to a few things. 1)There's no need to constantly update your version of the language and framework unlike with say Ruby and Ruby on Rails. 2) COBOL is battletested so most of the failure modes are well-known unlike with adapting the latest and greatest 3)I doubt that mainframes suffer from as many distributed computing problems
There are, no exaggeration, probably thousands of alternatives. People are very subjective in what they want out of a task tracker, so I'd start by making a list of what you think you need and in what format, then go from there.
That's not her ISFP, she got much nicer colors! That's an image I found of an ISFP.
Both Clinton and Trump Talk 'Pokemon Go'
Did anyone else notice the irony that this proud announcement is served over insecure HTTP?
Microsoft Wins Major Privacy Victory for Data Held Overseas
Not faster research, more scope. Things that we neglect today. Hell, form a paper review branch whose sole purpose is review/reproduction of results.

We're not out of work to be done
True. Although I prefer cubicles any day but communication is hard - 've seen some have this way of treating as if u've invaded private space. I guess for open office - a good noise cancelling headphone which one of my colleague used to use is a need
I agree with your criticism of the war on drugs, but I'm surprised at this hyperbole:

> Sellers of drugs, will ALWAYS sell drugs, both illegal and legal.

Are you saying that 3,000 years from now, neohumans will be using addictive chemicals that damage their body in order to modify their brain chemistry and induce related experiences?

Can't we illustrate the uselessness of the war on drugs without resorting to statements so sweeping and absolute as to be absurd when taken literally?
LOL I'm trying
Rocket: Slack-style emoji everywhere on your Mac
Ensuring Quora's Resilience to Disaster
Is this your actual experience? I have talked with few friends about this and all of them pretty much said: "I don't want to destroy my life"
I wasn't really directing all of what I said to you, but just commenting about Playgrounds versus other resources in general.

And yes, it uses real Swift syntax which is its main goal, according to the "Platforms State of the Union"[1] talk at WWDC this year.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/102/
>I can only imagine the fat paycheck a 20-year old mainframe programmer would get though, because your age in this case would be invaluable.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this is not the case. Companies that want top talent and are willing to pay for it are not shy about that fact. Seeing a legit job posting for a position that pays double your current salary is a solid incentive to apply.

I'm guessing that the subject of this interview probably makes a less-than-competitive salary. Programmer pay has handily out-paced inflation for decades now. She probably started at around $30,000/yr in 1991, if she managed to get a 3% raise every year, that would only bring her to like $63,000/yr.

Naturally, I'd love to be wrong about this. This woman has a demanding and important job and deserves a generous salary for it.
From a covert historical standpoint there has been cooperation between Israel and Iran, e.g. Marc Rich. I'm not sure what is currently occurring and likely few public parties know.
ahh burn!
New role found for the immune system: Controlling social interaction
Addiction is a personal psychological problem. How can the government intervene? The government cannot make you happy.

Look at obesity rates.

People get addicted because their life sucks. How can the government make their life not suck?
May be because there is plenty of opportunity for upselling StatusPage to the existing and new customers of Atlassian?
Yes it has.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_productivity_and_...
While I'm not a huge fan of college football, at many schools the football teams are effectively profit centers due to media rights and merchandising.
This is why over time, even more important than your ability to hire, is your discipline to identify those who are driving up the exponential overhead curve — single-handedly draining more productivity from the organization than they contribute themselves — and let them go.

In other words, "Going through a $LIFEISSUE? We don't tolerate that here!"

What an awful sounding fear based culture...
The thing is we could double the science budget in most industrialised nations without really noticing. Compared to all the other very low ROI work being done by government spending and the almost free cost of borrowing it's probably something we should do.

Throw enough tenure against the wall and eventually something will stick
Is this meant to be a fresh new take on hiring designed to get people to be excited about working there?

Or some clever lead in to the next script for "Silicon Valley"?

As I read it I was envisaging a background advertisement for working at Expensify with upbeat music, groovy offices, quick cut shots, smiling faces, people enthusing at a whiteboard over some software diagram, snap the camera to screens full of code and concentrating people, and then a big Donald Trump at the end pointing down the barrel of the camera "YOU'RE FIRED!" Then a sad person leaving the office with their head hung low because they were only 8X

The truth about software development is that you absolutely need to fire problem team members ASAP, but this is not something to build into your hiring strategy as a positive. In fact if you need to do that then your hiring strategy is not working in the first place.

This sounds alot like stack ranking which was popular at places like Microsoft and has been shown to be a disaster.

Usually hiring and :-) FIRING! strategies like this have been concocted by non technical or less technical people.

Expensify would be well advised to take down this post and rethink.

And have a guess what link every staff member at Expensify is emailing to each other right now?
This reminds me of the Line6 Helix Challenge[1], where you have to decided between the Real amp vs Simulated amp.

Sure they made it to promote their product and I guess there is no money involved. But in the end they show your scores and the % of all tests. If you take out the "don't know" it is near 50/50.

[1] http://line6.com/helix/sound.html/
As a happy StatusPage user, I am worried about this acquisition. Been more and more frustrated with Atlassian and recently we had to move away from HipChat due to multiple issues (constant downtimes).

What are the good alternatives to StatusPage?
(Author here.) Yes, maybe "How a technical cofounder spends his time" would be a more accurate title.
It's a custom build of iTerm.
You can download it here https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ogqyltkbx47kd9b/AAA2uuxIlVFVzQwCH...

…or get a similar one https://github.com/jaredculp/iterm2-borderless-padding
I can see they've only enabled Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral and RSA key exchange cipher suites. That means users will either use ECDHE and get forward secrecy, or old clients will just use "RSA" (which means the client sends a "pre-key" back to the server encrypted with the server's public key) which works but doesn't give you forward secrecy.

What they HAVEN'T enabled is Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral suites, which give older clients forward secrecy at a big CPU hit.

So this is an example of performance-tuning your TLS settings. There's also stuff to do with session tickets, session resumption, and eventually they'd also be served using ECDSA certs, once all clients support it, or there is at least a great way to only show the older RSA cert to old clients.
The COBOL programmer shortage is solvable if they simply pay people enough money. COBOL programmers do not make SV salaries, far from it. Yet the code they write generally is handling more critical tasks than most of the stuff SV startups are producing (bank balances, payroll, insurance claims, etc.)

Though I found it to be stifling, I would work with mainframes again if the price was right.
Right... why use a throwaway if it's so true?
JetBrains YouTrack would be my suggestion.
Is PokemonGo Illegal?
Software Testing – Is It Time to Fire Your QA Team?
When my son was around 12 years old we gave him the book "Hello World: Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners." It teaches programming with Python and targets making games and was perfect for him. Five years later now, he's really a great programmer, proficient with many languages and techniques. Here's his github site: https://github.com/zyedidia
They survived, dude -- sorry to frustrate your ghoulish glee.
God... I friggin' LOVE the name and logo of this project.

"HammerSpoon"

It perfectly conveys what an elegant kludge it is.
The Hardest Part About Microservices: Your Data
Just a hair under $5 a month, but unless you have a reason to deal with AWS complexity, you're probably better off with something like Digitalocean or Vultr for the same price and less surprises.
I've been hobby-trying to learn swift on Udemy for a few months. I'm going to try this out. (I'm 35!).
Change any Uber user's password – Account Takeover (critical)
Administration and facilities.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administr...

The interesting thing about this is that nobody complains about it.
HN Digest up for sale on Flippa
I don't see why people thing HTTPS is difficult to implement. Pre Let's Encrypt it only took me a few minutes to setup an SSL cert for 9 bucks (cheaper than the domain renewal). With LE, it's now so simple, it's my default process.
On Being a Black Man [in Tech]
I extremely uncomfortable with a car company that gets all car data sent to it and then uses it for PR. Evidence during an investigation shouldn't be treated this way.
Yeah you're probably right, that was just me asking the question to myself more or less.

I've been raised to not ask what people make, that it's considered rude - so I have no clue what she makes.
I've heard that Safari (10) on upcoming iOS 10 supports webp. Don't know about Safari 10 on macOS Sierra.
That was my experience too with the whole mainframe ecosystem. There are a few hotshot consultants that work for Sirius/mainline/etc that make the bucks, but the guys working for the banks/airlines/etc mostly seem to be underpaid relative to the shrinking knowledge base/talent pool and how critical their jobs are.

Makes you wonder what would happen if the entire mainframe tech organization at one of these banks demanded to be paid on par with the traders working on the investment side of the bank.
I really love the execution. Neat, slick and they even had the luxury to be open about it in their blog.
They attacked a simple-to-understand but real problem, on a niche, making something people wanted to have and not wanted to do. They built the right integrations...making money since the beginning, increasing revenue per user and overall revenue...
They probably made lots of mistakes , but according to public information and taking the time to analyze it with some prospective, they did (almost) everything right.
Following their traction and revenue, they must have sold for a good price as Atlassian really needs such products to renew their platform and they have the portfolio of customers Statuspage would have tried to acquire.
Great story.
> Falsifying them, however, doesn't falsify Secular Materialism.

That depends on how they are falsified. If your "new physics" is just a minor tweak to the Standard Model -- a new particle, say -- then you're right. But if you can demonstrate something observable that isn't made of matter then that would falsify secular materialism.

Dark matter and dark energy could potentially do this. Notwithstanding that we're calling them "matter" and "energy" the truth is we have no freakin' clue what they are.

> > Sure, but that as-yet-unknown cause could be (say) a deity.

> Not in any non-physical sense.

Sorry, I have no idea what that means.

> Science does not admit any entity that cannot be reduced to physical mechanism

Not true. It just happens to be the case that everything we observe appears to be reducible to a physical mechanism. But that's not an a priori assumption, it is an a posteriori observation. And it's also a pretty recent development. For example, whether or not life could be reduced to a physical mechanism was an open question until Darwin. Whether altruism could be reduced to a physical mechanism was an open question until Dawkins and Axelrod. The jury is still out on abiogenesis, but again, I'll give you long odds that that, too, will turn out to be physical.

> it doesn't concern itself with anything other than such [predictable] relationships

Again, not true. A phenomenon does not have to be predictable to be amenable to scientific inquiry. There are hard limits on our ability to predict, say, the weather. That does not mean that weather is beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. Quite the contrary, it is because of science that we know that there are fundamental limits on our ability to predict the weather.

BTW, weather presents the perfect example of how secular materialism could be falsified: if tornadoes, all else being equal (i.e. controlling for things like geographic location and construction quality), selectively destroyed the houses of worship of one denomination over another.
I bought a HDD from Amazon.de, cost around 150 Euros, but it is a fake one.
https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0152T3NFM/ref=cm_cr_ryp_prd_ttl_so...

It is a German seller instead of Chinese seller, so it is a widespread problem. Amazon should take care of such problem.

I will try to sue them.
Learn your IDE shortcuts.
The article (and the person you're replying to) is referring to lossless compression. Converting to H264 and AAC may maintain a high quality at a lower bitrate but they're definitely not lossless.
I'm fine with open office as long as you still have a dedicated desk. Otherwise it's annoying and difficult to find people.
Very cool! Is there an equivalent for those of us in the Windows world?
There is such a thing as so cheap it's not worth cancelling. These status pages are a perfect example.
I assume he'd want it to be lossless, as is the case with Lepton.
It's fun to be snarky, but maybe leave it alone for a day, or a comment thread? Can't we just be happy for Atlassian and StatusPage today and gripe later? There are certainly lots of employees at both places reading this comment section.

I'm also sure HipChat knows about, and is embarrassed about, outages. Shaming them accomplishes nothing.
US Senator Shares Personal Stories as a Black Man of 'Frustration' with Cops
You're not wrong. COBOL programmers aren't paid well AT ALL.
I've been using it for a while. I couldn't tolerate osx without it.
Have you considered that these laws are still in place simply because it's the status quo?

It's more than that. The biggest opponents to the legal pot movement in CA this year are the police and prison guard unions.

And the ads those orgs are running are just FUD. In some cases, they are outright lies. Actually, in most cases, they are outright lies.

Those lies are seen by a lot of people are are the basis of Americans not supporting drug legalization.
In the ideal world of the massless pulley and frictionless plane, that's what would happen. The reality is, the professoriate we have now is better at playing the game. Smartest people I know are in industry. While tenure was supposed to encourage risk taking, the way it's given out these days it seems to have the opposite effect.
F# doesn't even have modules. Not really in the SML spirit—it's like if you combined Classic/LCF ML from the 1970s with C#.
A User’s Guide to FiveThirtyEight’s 2016 General Election Forecast
An open letter from technology sector leaders on Donald Trump
>However, it creates many thousands of very well paid jobs for police, lawyers, prison employees, etc

Not to mention customs officials. In Australia recently 300 customs officials were under investigation for corruption, getting paid to allow drugs into the country.
Interesting tidbit: I'm currently replacing a product that IBM refuses to licenses any longer. The company I work for would have gladly gone on paying $2MM a year in licensing fees, but IBM is literally refusing to take their money. They offer no replacement either.
Nice blatant ageism

Building a 10x Team

At Expensify, we’re betting it is possible, and that it can be accomplished with two main tactics. The first tactic involves identifying superstars * early in their career, and then backing them to the hilt.
The first thing this reminds me of is http://tvtropes.org/. The subject matter may be a little different, but the idea is the same: cataloging and indexing conceptual information that is relevant to humans.
> Most of us can only dream of ever achieving that kind of job security.

Work on something that nobody else wants to do for 50% of what you could make doing something more fashionable.
Multiple Bugs in OpenBSD Kernel
But are self-driving cars better drivers than some identifiable other group of people than you? E.g. Legal but elderly drivers with poor sight.

Are the algorithms a useful helper for some drivers?

I really really want all our rental vehicles to remind the drivers if they are on the wrong side of the road (we get multiple deaths every year from Americans and Europeans driving incorrectly in our small country).