skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have lost interest in what I love: tech. I don't care. Am I burnt out?
Hi

I've recently got to a point in my career where I'm fed up with it. I find myself literally not caring aside from the occasional moment where I have a conversation/debate or something spikes my interest but even that normally expires quickly and I don't want to finish that thing of.

I'm tired of daily issues at work. I'm tired of hearing the same things and as a result I'm grumpy, not happy and even unwilling to help others. I'm also tired of it. I feel tired and mentally drained.

I used to be interested and motivated in doing home projects, home lab etc and writing some code. But I can't even be bothered with that any more.

I wanted to ask HN for advice and to see if anyone else is experiencing this.

It's effecting my productivity because I literally can't bring myself todo any work, the thought of it just bores me and I've literally no interest. whatsoever.

I've got some savings and have decided to quit work for a couple months to see if that helps and maybe try and rekindle my interest in IT and maybe do some small projects at home. I'm not a developer but I can write enough code to get me by.

Thoughts?
Should I Refactor?
> but how does releasing the images help the lender? (as in, the lender probably won't receive the money anyway - once the image is released).

It prevents other borrowers from doing the same. The people that have their nudes released are a done deal and the lenders know it. But if they don't do that, the whole concept is off.
Discrimination is far more nuanced than it first appears.

We accept that younger drivers pay more for car insurance. And that disabled people pay more for their health insurance. And that the government (in the UK) has a special business grants scheme for ethnic minority entrepreneurs.

Obviously discrimination depends on context. If a car insurance firm had a special policy for ethnic minorities, people would (rightly) be outraged. But in the context of a government intervention, based on the evidenced disadvantages that ethnic minorities face, discrimination is accepted.
I'm guessing you live in the US? In more modern parts of the world (:)) you usually buy your phone separately from the phone service, so the carrier wouldn't directly know you've bought a new phone. Sure you can buy phones from the carrier, but why would you want to?
No one is immune: how a new breed of DDoS attack is affecting security experts
This should be a good one.
Like the line in Fight Club [1] about recalls it is a simple formula:

Only if the cost * probability of a PR disaster outweighs the cost of a poor credit risk model, is a bank economically incentivized to not discriminate.

Then again, even if you take care to not directly discriminate, you will probably indirectly discriminate. For instance, in your credit risk model, remove the `gender` column from the features, and use the remaining features to try to predict it. If performance is better than random guessing, you are using proxy features (like `income`) to discriminate on `gender`. You will find that nearly every feature you use is correlated with `race`. Now what? Throw away all these features and let your competition eat your lunch?

Along the lines of what Pedro Domingos said [2], you can not solve the problem of discrimination by making poorer performing machine learning models that adhere to your view of what is ideal. Discrimination won't disappear because you made a model that makes you feel good. Want no discrimination of women? Work on closing the wage gap. Don't cripple your statistically correct ML models or sweep the discrimination under the rug, covered by correlated variables.

It is not so much carelessness, as it is the nature of the beast. And banks remain in business by how much they can trust their customers first and foremost, trustworthiness by customers is a second (and customer trust is very much malleable: It is the perception of trust, not objective trust like "can we trust this customer to pay back their loan").

It also depends on how you (mathematically) define "fairness" [3]. You can define fairness in ways that still allow you to discriminate.

[1] A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=furfdqtdAvc

[3] https://algorithmicfairness.wordpress.com/2016/09/26/on-the-... https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.07236
Not taking steps to prevent emergent discrimination or malfeasance is careless. Do you think the board of directors wants to find out that the CEO intentionally ignored calls to the ethics hotline? That he didn't take steps to ensure whistleblowers weren't punished?

The consequences of these things are very bad for stock prices! This is doubly true for banks which take reputational risk far more seriously than most businesses.
> There is a lot of study on the idea that the main value of education is not what you actually learn but much more signal that you are dedicated, motivated and have the ability to learn.

A signal, I can agree with that. But isn't that only because someone is unable to signal that (s)he can be a valuable asset in other ways? The type of person to only rely on their degree is probably a person that isn't creative enough to find more effective ways to market themself.

I think education is great and learning new things is massively important in life. I just personally don't believe in the degree fetish that a lot of people have. Just look at the quality of the average graduate in a lot of universities and/or colleges in the US and Europe.

To me, at best, a degree is an inefficient way to differentiate yourself from a group of similar people with similar skills. Maybe not a bad thing if you're at the start of your career. But at worst, it has zero additional value.
I created my own service a while ago, use https://github.com/longsleep/mydyns as pointers if you want to roll your own. I am certain there are plenty of similar solutions to run your own dynamic DNS.
So (assuming males are more costly to insure) either (a) females pay more than they should and are effectively subsidizing males or (b) males pay less than they should and the insurance companies will go broke..
What about https://schema.org/APIReference ? Doesn't seem to be widely used, but exists.
The only value provided by education is certainly not contribution to career. The question is should certain types of education be more directly subsidized by taxpayers than others.

The underlying theory of subsidizing tuition is that a college degree increases lifetime earnings, which increases GDP and the tax base, ultimately paying for itself. Generally speaking, investments which do not pay for themselves are considered bad ones.

Taxpayers don't want to make bad investments in subsidizing college education. Clearly this is happening at a massive scale, but I think liberal arts degrees are just the scapegoat. The reality is that $1.3 trillion in mostly unpayable and undischargable debt is a problem much bigger than earning the wrong degree.

With the housing bubble and subsequent crash [1], the truth is that not everyone should have a mortgage, and pushing the homeownership rate above 64% was not sustainable. But college degree rates are on a much longer term and steady rise, and there's not clearly a bubble [2] but maybe I'm looking at the wrong data.

If $1.3 trillion in student debt didn't actually result in significantly more people getting degrees than otherwise would have, then we are talking about a completely failed policy which is merely padding school endowments. Literally nothing to do with choice of degree.

Imagine an alternative policy; making a $1.3 trillion investment in building and endowing 5,000 public universities. Significantly increase the supply of college education to drive down the cost. Would that have worked better?

[1] - http://cdn.tradingeconomics.com/embed/?s=unitedstahomownrat&...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
One of the major issues with XML-RPC functionality in WP is that it's enabled by default and opens up a wide target for brute force attacks[1]. I'm assuming this will not change with their REST API. Let's face it, how many WP sites out there really need POST/PUT/DELETE endpoints to be enabled for their family blog?

[1] https://blog.sucuri.net/2015/10/brute-force-amplification-at...
Displays, wireless routers, next headless macs?
Ask HN: Linkedin doesn't let me delete my account, what can I do?
When I tried to delete my LinkedIn account, I encountered an error saying that it is a premium account and I have to change it to basic account first.

But the problem is, my account is already a basic one.

Contacted their support and got a reply saying they are aware of this issue but they cannot give an estimate when they'll fix this issue.

Requested them to manually delete the account from their end but received the same reply like they don't even understand my second message.

What can I do at this point, other than hoping they'll fix this issue soon.
Yoyoyoyo its ya boo trump
Perhaps my final statement was a bit glib, but personally I feel we are born into this world with a whole ton of obligations. We are nurtured, educated, protected. In many parts of the world, we are assigned inalienable rights just through the fact of being human beings. Whatever we do is founded on the hard work and achievements of others, but in most countries in the modern era very few claims are made on us in return.

In past ages we were expected, or even required to die or at least kill and risk death in defense of our society. Nowadays you can be brought up, educated to a decent standard, benefit from all of society's resources and benefits to the age of adulthood and then swan off to some other part of the world for the rest of our lives, obligation free. That's a pretty amazing deal, by historical or really any standards.
Welcome to astroturfing 101. And they rely on people like you to keep the doubt alive.

But you have to be incredibly naive to think social media manipulation isn't a core part of companies marketing strategies today.
Watch out, Locky ransomware spread via SVG images on Facebook Messenger
> We need more citizen, less consumers.

Ads are not a public service. Ads are for consumers. Advertisers pay for them to be placed in the hopes that consumers will give them money as a result.

Advertisers are wasting money if they're trying to show adverts to people who are sufficiently disinterested in seeing them that they've installed an ad blocker.

Any website which knowingly wastes an advertiser's money on aggressive attempts to display adverts to those who have clearly indicated they don't want to see them is essentially engaging in fraud.
98% of sites on Cloudflare now use IPv6
Processing yesterday or the day just gone is not always a good idea, especially if you had a bad day. This used to happen to me, I'd mull over things I should have said or done and basically torture myself for an hour until I made it home. Fuck that.
Well, "theoretically" you're right

In practice, the first variables to be used for classification are the ones that have a biggest effect. Then you're going to use them (from order of importance) as eliminatory or classificatory

> because if this is applied then your race (group) would determine your credit score threshold which feels discriminatory to me.

But the opposite is also discriminatory, which is what the article is showing. Because then you're using the same ruler to evaluate different groups, and of course the minority person with 2 jobs can't match the credit score of an Ivy-League educated WASP
Apache Kafka and Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Is it really? Apple makes some wildly successful products, and will apparently put more focus on those. Seems fine. I personally found out that Apple makes (made) routers through this post, so maybe they're not a huge deal.
I've been catching up on Macleod's output recently - I particularly liked Learning the World:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_the_World
Sublime Text 3 Giveaway
The end of Flash for video could be just weeks away
13 Red Flags to Avoid in Your Investor Funding Pitch
That's just too sad. I was thinking recently how my 3 year old AirPort express was the best router I've owned. These routers were always super easy to configure and I remember maybe one reboot in its lifetime... it powers:
2 MBP pros;
2 iPhones
1 Apple TV
1 Roomba 980 cleaning bot
1 Footbot - Air quality monitoring
1 Apple Watch
1 Sony PS4
... everything working flawlessly

Sad day for me.
I think there can be multiple solutions (and maybe the blockchain can help in that).

For example, the image is processed in the browser. The platform/lender only get the nude with the face blurred. The <code/script> to un-blur is available in a bitcoin/ethereum transaction/contract; and the borrower can stop it if he pays on time.

But for now, they are exposed to blackmail.

ps: it's interesting how the blockchain can come in handy for all these shady uses; and we still struggle to find one legitimate use case for it.
Worrying that they outlived displays and Mac Pros
It's an unambiguous fact that the status quo is shaped heavily be many generations of de jure discrimination including chattel slavery and continting structural inequalities in political power that still exist that were designed to protect those other unequal institutions.

It's a subjective political view that any or all of those things are injustices, of course, since justice is a subjective thing.
That sounds like it'd be an amazingly useful article to read if you ever write it :)
> The story of a 14-year-old girl who won a landmark legal battle to be preserved cryogenically has many people wondering how such technology actually works - for many of us, it seems like something straight out of science fiction.

For fuck's sake BBC.

https://suesspiciousminds.com/2016/11/18/cryogenics-and-the-...

> This case has attracted a lot of Press attention, and as ever, not all of it is terribly accurate reporting. Most of the headlines have been along the theme of “girl wins right to be frozen after death”

> > 32.All this case is about is providing a means by which the uncertainty about what can happen during JS’s lifetime and after her death can be resolved so far as possible. JS cannot expect automatic acceptance of her wishes, but she is entitled to know whether or not they can be acted upon by those who will be responsible for her estate after her death. It would be unacceptable in principle for the law to withhold its answer until after she had died. Also, as a matter of practicality, argument about the preservation issue cannot be delayed until after death as the process has to be started immediately if it is to happen at all.

> It is also important to know that whilst JS was a pivotal part of the case and the way it was resolved, the actual legal structure here is a dispute between her parents. When I was hearing the case reported on the radio and TV this morning, without having read the judgment, it made no sense to talk of the child winning this ‘right’ because of course someone has to pay for the cryogenic freezing. This was a dispute between the mother who was supporting JS’s wishes, and the father who was not.

etc.
> That has nothing to do with their degree and everything with their ability. They would probably still get hired without the degree.

You would think that, and it would logically seem to work that way. But in practice, it often doesn't.

A lot of employers are lazy, and use "has a degree" as a filter to cut down their applicants. And since there are so many applicants in nearly every field, it doesn't hurt the employer much. The biggest value in many degrees is literally just the ability to truthfully claim "I hold a degree", regardless of the field.

- - -

To improve that, we'd need to get employers to drop fake requirements from their job listings. But since there's (typically) only benefits to them for inflating their requirements, I don't think it's likely employers will willingly drop that requirement.
PCI Advanced Error Reporting is not the subject of this post, it's another (different) AER.
I believe now that browsers have support for non-ascii URLs, each of them have schemes for anti-phishing.

See https://www.w3.org/International/articles/idn-and-iri/

and https://wiki.mozilla.org/IDN_Display_Algorithm

plus http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/idn-in-g...
We have Crashplan at work. Haven't needed to use it yet, but it gets out of the way and it seems like a good solution.
Do they still sell Time Capsule?
You know what would be even crazier is if they built stores to put those thousands of employees in, so that customers could talk to a real live person when they had problems or questions.... nahh that could never work.
Hopefully Amazon will add IPv6 support to AWS VPCs sometime in the next year.
"the media was wrong about trump, and now they are doubling down by stoking fear in the hearts of viewers. "

Granted I don't live in the states so I can't comment on the media but have you seen his twitter account the last couple of day?

Doesn't seem to be the most stable guy running the show. Not talking about the scary reactions you will see from a lot of trump supporters with regards of those tweets.

I can only imagine what it must be for some people living in a society like this. And it's seems that this is only the beginning.
The Balanced Ternary Machines of Soviet Russia
> A sports league where one team can afford to buy all of the best players from other teams is going to lose fans very fast

On the other hand, the New York Yankees.
I will look into it now that it has been mentioned a few times.
Agreed, and would probably go a bit beyond "minor".

Other chat systems offer the ability to attach a message to your AFK status, which can be pretty helpful for setting expectations about when you might be back. Last time I looked, Slack seemed kind-of resistant to doing anything like that.
Sun is always the goto example for bad things haha. I should of said recent acquisitions.
Yeah, but "away" and "busy" are two different statuses. "Away" seems to me to indicate "not working". "Busy" seems to indicate "working too hard to be interrupted."
You realize you're advocating totalitarianism, right?
What is so special about that notebook?
How good enough are we able to follow the recipe?

Are you thinking of copying the "ingredients" list that is on most of the products?
This is an advertisement for "Credit Sesame".
This happens to be something I believe strongly, but the comment you're responding to doesn't make sense even if you strongly disagree with that, as it supposes we can snapshot American society as it is in 2016 and synthesize from it reliably just and sensible decisions. Nobody believes this, no matter what their politics (unless there's a "status-quo-ism" I'm unaware of).

The problem (or at least, one of the more important problems) being addressed in this work is the unintended amplification of the status quo --- the implicit notion that if something is a certain way now, it is best that it always be that way.
Don't scare me with that prediction! I <3 my Mac mini!
Building a Financial Model with Pandas – Practical Business Python
>I find it hard to believe that a personal blog by a MS MVP, who does a lot of traveling and presenting, drives so much traffic that he can't afford a mid-tier Wordpress instance out of his lunch money, so using his example as one where "the little guy" needs advertising to stay alive is dubious.

Are you judging him on his money capacity so you can justify blocking ads on his page ? I might be mistaken but it looks like it.

People seem to find themselves with moral superiority to block content on webpages for reasons they seem fit.

The thing is, if you're using an ad blocker on all the time, how can you argue that your blocking something for a reason, if you haven't seen any ads yet ?

If someone writes click bait, or you don't like the content or whatever, just close your web browser and in the future don't visit that website.

If everyone did that, we forced people to write better content because it would be quality that would drive visits. Since most people just visit the websites, they can read the articles or content but block the ads.

It seems that what is wrong is not the content but the ads, so advertisers and ad platforms make changes so they can circumvent these issues and ad blockers do the same.

It's a war and it will get us nowhere.
This makes me think of the observation that "you can't inspect quality into a product."

I mean, what are the use cases for this database? It seems like a fetishization of data for data's sake.
You read that incorrectly, he states 0.1% of users has an issue per day, which is equivalent to 1 query every 3 years from 100% or your users (3 times 365 times 0.1% is a bit more than 100%).
Wireless routers don't sell like hot cakes, but this was never the point of Apple making them.

Just try to imagine Steve Jobs setting up a generic router.

* * *

Now imagine him searching for a wireless router and seeing some Google product in the top rankings.

(EDIT: I tried to play with the "Steve wouldn't allow this" trope and failed — removing it to reduce the noise)
Ww3 between humans and aliens obama the loon to reveal,bad news for jews and mu
Sorry but this is total bunk. Moving an object the size of a grain of rice with sound waves is not a tractor beam. And I can go on and on. If I want this sort of crap, I'll check my Facebook feed.
In case this helps, the menu for apis.guru doesn't seem to be working on my iPhone 6s in Chrome or Safari. Actually, it just doesn't work on the homepage. It works if I go to the Browse APIs page.
Same here, nice to see an app that doesn't immediately add 300k of JavaScript before its really needed. This is 200 lines of code that's pretty useful. Great work.
That's because the Trump campaign was literally built on propaganda starting with the claims about Obama's birth certificate which really started getting him supporters. He didn't need to invent the story to take advantage of it as one of the most prominent voices spreading it, and sites like Breitbart or abcnews.com.co profited enormously from people who believed there was a real story that the real news organizations wouldn't cover.

The paid protesters story is a great example: the campaign benefited from and recirculated rumors about that which started on random blogs, conspiracy sites like InfoWars, and outright fakes like abcnews.com.co throughout the election. The guy who tweeted that photo might have been a Republican acting in what he believed was good faith but he was primed to think of that as likely by the prior months of unfounded accusations and as soon as he shared that photo, it was widely circulated by supporters including Corey Lewandowski, who was Trump's campaign manager before becoming CNN's commenter representing the campaign.
I did not indent to convey that the empirical findings in biology/chemistry are not important. I agree that you do not necessarily need a quantum description to understand biological phenomena, but sometimes (eg single electrons in photosynthesis , bond breaking/formation) you do.
Molecular simulations however were not what I was picturing when I wrote my comment. If I understand you correctly, you think because of the emergent character of biological systems, the physical approach is too reductionist. But the emergence we observe is due to (non equilibrium) thermodynamics, which is studied primarily in statistical physics. I guess what I want to say is that we should be aware that many interesting problems are found at the borders of disciplines which were shaped by historical happenstance. Example: there is immense overlap between chemistry and solid state physics, still they are considered as distinct disciplines.