skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you ever had to deal with a bad worker, though? In one company where I was a tech lead we had a guy who did nothing. When I assigned him work, he turned in garbage that someone else had to re-do (often me, working at home). He would go out to his car after lunch and get stoned and then come back in and fall asleep at his desk!

On paper, the team had four developers, in reality, there was only three. It was a huge headache trying to explain to PMs and other managers why our team didn't really have the bandwidth it appeared to have.

I therefore complained to our manager about this guy. The response was long in coming and when it finally arrived, we were to place the non-worker on an "improvement plan" which was mandated by HR. That means I had to work even harder now because I had to put together said plan and basically try to micro-manage this guy while also re-doing all his code. The improvement plan didn't work. His output was just as bad as always. This went on and on for months. Mercifully, the guy was finally let go after almost a year of dicking around.

All of this somehow reflected badly on me, however! My manager didn't like that I "made waves" in the company by requiring this guy to do work. He also didn't like having to smooth over all the ruffled feathers among the other teams who couldn't understand why we were always behind schedule.

Stupid, bad management is to blame, not me.
is that a dinosaur?
For single-person households, cooking becomes even more expensive because you're buying these fairly large food packages and have to throw some of it away because it goes bad.
You're right, that makes sense. So the situation is probably that most of the people take nothing and 5% or so takes 6 a day and lives in a permanent state of sedation.
What defines a good idea?
From an investor point of view, a good idea is one that returns on monetary investment.
I'd argue that an idea can't be very good if it doesn't have at least a neutral ROI on execution.
> This is a highly overconstrained search

Yes and no. It can speak to structural inefficiencies in the economy. For instance, I am a Computational Scientist with a decade of experience in scientific research, publications, etc. It would be a massive waste of my training to be working in an unrelated field, for instance.

Underemployment is a very real thing, and it hurts the entire economy. We as a society have a vested interest in ensuring that highly productive roles (data science, medicine, etc.) are filled, because thelse positions are more productive and boost the aggregate economy. To say nothing of the likely higher salary and job satisfaction that comes with a 'good fit'.
This technique applies to many RDBMS, not just Oracle (as others have noted). Teradata, PostgreSQL, MS SQL all have 'analytical' functions like this. Analytical functions (over, partition by, etc) are extremely powerful and can help simplify architecture/design for the data science/analytical communities.

One of the persistent issues on my team is the reliance upon a dataframe representation w/ R or python to do this type of aggregation and windowing. Most people will eschew learning the 'advanced' SQL and instead bring data locally to do imperative style munging on it.

This creates a few issues, mainly adding complexity to the analytical stack:
- Instead of querying the data and doing ETL/feature engineering in the db- you are moving data around (usually to less powerful machines, such as a laptop) for simple exploration.

- This wastes time and usually results in more dependencies (dplyr for example- no hate Hadley), sometimes even limiting you to single threaded operations. Teradata, for example, is massively parallel and will perform these operations in short order. I've seen Data Scientists wait 6hr for R to do the same thing a SQL query against a prod system returns in 3min.

- Code is not portable. A query can be executed and results retrieved through ODBC, JDBC or native connections. Without these, data engineers are often asked to install R (including libs) on some intermediate machine just to do munging/ETL/feature engineering. If SQL driven, moving from quantitative exploration to operational is quite easy (maybe just a query tune).

All that to say, I'm glad this post is highlighting some of the advanced SQL that I hope more people rely upon. All of these ideas are better articulated in MAD Skills [0]

[0] http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/vldb09-madskills.pdf
Fake news
It's not that exactly. It's that investors are more interested in making money than "ideas". And they feel that people who have a good track record of delivering results are more likely to make them money than unknown an team with a great idea.

This is post-hoc justification.

Google, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter have been worth billions (Reddit the exception) for more than a decade. They've collectively innovated how much since 2005? They have a bunch of small improvements that anyone could have anticipated and purchased many of the good ideas that have come along (Occulus). Some are floundering in spite of having massive reach (Twitter), some can't anticipate uses of their platform until after it happens (Facebook). Some are dead and their founders have joined the VC game (Digg). Did Kevin Rose not look like a pretty sure bet in 2006? Whatever happened to Milk?

Yet according to the "they know how to deliver" logic, they should be knocking new ideas out of the park. Where are they? Of course they have some successes but you could have some successes too if you have billions of dollars to subsidize yourself and an existing social network to support yourself and advertise your success. You throw ideas at a wall and the ones that work are evidence of know how. It's a broken metric.

Honestly, there is no evidence these companies are well run except for the fact that they won, but they effectively won a lottery at which point money starts flowing in. And that's the entire VC game - you'll have some moderate successes, mostly failures, and some unicorns. As long as you hit jackpot a few times you are ok. Meanwhile, part of the VC job is selling the idea that they know what they are doing, too.

And with hundreds of thousands of the world's smartest kids being funneled through the top colleges each year, you've got a lot of lottery tickets.

I think it's interesting that all of these authors are at Stanford or MIT. Seems similar to the backgrounds of a lot of tech talent:

Gates (Harvard), Zuckerberg (Harvard), Brin and Page (Stanford), Reddit guys (Cambridge area) you could go on and on.

Maybe there would be more diversity of ideas if the people behind them weren't all coming from similar backgrounds and self-selecting to certain locales...
I remember talking to the father of a girlfriend's roommate at the time. He used to be an executive at an engineering company in Chicago, but he didn't survive the 5th round of layoffs. When I met him, he was working at a hardware store around the corner from his house. He was unhappy with ending up doing a cashier's job when he spent his whole life working towards what he did previously. He never once said he was ungrateful for the job and he certainly didn't say it was beneath him, he just wanted to go back to what he was doing, and he clearly didn't just stay unemployed for his next opportunity. While underemployed, he kept looking an interviewing and didn't give up until someone hired him.

My point is, that you're absolutely right. It may not be the job you want right now, but it is probably the job you need right now. You can either take it and work on our next move or sit there pontificating if the perfect job will arrive next.
Pornography is not illegal in the US. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_the_United_Stat..., has a good summary of the legal situation.
> It's hilarious, because our best hires are people who had no CS education. Meanwhile, some of the worst hires were CS grads.

Just an idea: Try increasing salary. Good CS grads already have people hiring them and they have a ton of debt to repay.
Sometimes I suspect lawmakers are among the dumbest of all possible human beings.
> Freedom Units

Top marks!
... and a $2 bag of celery will consume your stored calories for you!

edit: is hn the no joke zone?
Maybe he should move, find something, and let the wife follow once that situation stabilizes. I know a number of people who's father worked in the gulf and came home twice a year - they turned out just fine. My dad lives in Vegas (that's where his family is) and works in CA, driving across the desert twice a week.

My most recent hire moved from Chennai to Pune for work. Trump wants to build a giand wall of ice and magic to stop Mexicans from moving to a country where the jobs are, in spite of them not speaking the language or being legally permitted to work.

There are plenty of options. It sounds like this guy is just unwilling to do them, just as he's unwilling to do manual labor.

An honest title: "9M American men in prime working age are unwilling to find work, and I'm one of them."
Is strong language and high standards abusive?

I can understand how some take personal offense when faced with criticism, but it is little more than that. Linus is quite good at illustrating the problems with the code, backing up what he says with extensive knowledge.

As soon as someone owns their mistake, the problem moves towards resolution.

It is really not uncommon for strong language to emerge when dealing with people doing the wrong thing, especially when they should know better.

I have stripped down and been stripped down when dealing with crap before.

Trying not to offend skips around the issue: it's crap, and you should know better.
Under the presumption that the value of killing you / not being killed by you / committing a crime punishable by death etc. remains the same.
Where do you live?
I am in Vermont. There is an abundance of farm stands and greenhouses nearby, and my food budget is lower than when I frequented supermarkets. I can buy 30lbs of fresh veggies for $20.
It does cost considerably more time to prepare and cook fresh food. But I enjoy cooking, so it isn't much of a chore for me.
>It is only because they pursue high risk ventures that 9/10 fail and they are only picking high risk ventures because they dream of x1000 returns.

But your explanation for their motives is also misleading. A huge constraint on VC's investment strategy is the smaller amount of money they are given. VC's are not giant multi-billion dollar private equity funds like Blackstone/Apollo/Carlyle. (E.g. Blackstone $18 billion fund.[1])

A VC fund may be small like $50 million. Or a more well-known prestige VC can raise $500 million. The recent news of a VC like a16z raising $1.5 billion is a new anomaly.[2] However, the $1.5b is still a fraction of what the private equity guys raise.

With a small $50 million fund, that's not enough money to buy management control of the more stable mid-cap and large-cap companies. Therefore, using a portion of a small $50m fund to write a $500k check to a (riskier) YC company is more meaningful than buying $500k worth of Exxon or Apple stock.

VCs are shooting for 25%+ returns and it's very difficult to do that with large-cap companies. Even Warren Buffett hasn't been able to do it over a given 10-year period.

>They could use a different investment thesis to choose lower risk, lower payoff companies and have a portfolio where only 1/10 fails.

If someone can figure out a consistent way to take $50-$100m and return 25%+ by having only 1/10 failures, that would be an amazing investment thesis. I'm unaware of any industry expert who has that track record.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=latest+blackstone+fund

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=andreessen+horowitz+latest+f...
Can't tell if "most" or "small group - but enough" people.
Ideas are by defintion always harder to find. I think thats true but trivial. The answer would always be yes.

Ideas are mostly solutions looking for a problem and mostly based on companies looking for wholes in the market they can fit into.

There is another way to think about it which is to ask are problems harder to find and is it harder to get ideas for solutions to these problems.

I did an ASK HN called "What problem in your industry would be a potential startup"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007

takinola followed up on that with this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13139638#13145691

I think one thing that really stand out is that the real trick is to find the real problem that hide underneath the obvious solutions. And they might be harder to find because entrepreneurs especially in Silicon Valley are young men who don't have much experience in what problems exist out there and is worth solving.

I wrote a follow up on the HN thread too.

https://medium.com/black-n-white/the-problem-with-problems-4...
I use Paypal
Still, the debate doesn't happen publicly. I don't know why and who opposes it. Google has no position in it. But someone undisclosed with sufficient power at Google opposes it. And does'nt share his point of view with the community...Sad day for open source.
Had that happen, too. Had two tech leads over me who didn't want to learn anything new. One guy was in love with Apache Camel, the other, was just a J2EE guy from like the early 2000s. Frustrating.
NoSQL – Filling in the Gaps
Sedatives are different. Also people who are on painkillers lose the "high" after a while, so for the most part, they are normal functioning people, which is the idea.

Also, as an aside, take into account that there are 5+ million car accidents a year. I would guess that is or at least is one of the leading causes of chronic pain in the US.
Learning a Probabilistic Latent Space of Object Shapes via 3D GAN
racism and guns are the tools you need for the War on Drugs, laws prohibiting some drugs are just there to make it easier to claim a veneer of legitimacy.
What will that intro lead to? Someone getting a job or someone not getting a job and pissing off the investor?
"Regulated but not banned" is not a middle ground between "banned or not". It is "not banned". I am not saying that you can't have regulations on a drug, I am saying that if you make a drug entirely illegal, and it is in sufficiently high demand, then you will have drug-war-type effects.
What about the computer needed to drive these displays? Will they all require a 1k computer with a top of the line AMD/NVIDIA GPU?

That is the biggest cost barrier to large scale VR adoption. To say nothing of the lack of killer software...
No this is really not the case of thinking we have enough memory. This is the realization that the static source code of a page is a percentage error compared to the memory overhead of a rendered page. The modern browser are memory hog I would rather they focus on that.

Its also a broken implementation function wise since I have asked for the source of the current page not of a reload.
iDongle wrangles the tangle of Apple cables and dongles
Ask HN: The best advice read/heard/seen on founders balancing work and life?
I clicked to see what exactly it was, and I was delighted to see a "What is Piwik?" heading in the sidebar. A nice bit of site design.
Bet he voted to "make America Great again". I feel for him but i believe the signs were there about the field he was working in, it's like a car sputtering and running out of gas. The solution would be reeducation, rather than trying to do the same dying job over and over gain.
>Where do you live? I am in Vermont. There is an abundance of farm stands and greenhouses nearby, and my food budget is lower than when I frequented supermarkets. I can buy 30lbs of fresh veggies for $20. It does cost considerably more time to prepare and cook fresh food. But I enjoy cooking, so it isn't much of a chore for me.

This already makes eating healthy costlier (if, of course, we don't count medical costs from not eating healthy), as this "considerable more time" is an opportunity cost.
GoAccess have a PPA for Ubuntu / Debian as well: https://goaccess.io/download#official-repo
This looks quite useful, and I think I'll be using it. I'm impressed by it being written in C... Especially because it can also run on the browser! Also, the default storage being Hash Tables. You don't see many modern projects like this! Actually feel like diving into the code.
I'd rather have a shitload fo shit content (that i can choose or not to consume) than be censored to be honest.

Governments should stop taking for granted that their people are sheep, and maybe then they will stop being so easily manipulated
Artisanal Casting of dishes made of aluminum in an African backyard
story of my life !
If there's an audio tag, that element exists in the DOM and has a reference to the url where you can download it. Is this a trick question?
I've been unemployed. It's tough but sometimes you have to let your vanities and pride take a hit and go for the job that's there.
How would you show them that using the HTML source?

You can use dev tools to view the network tab to find whatever URL Pandora is using.

You can use dev tools to find a media elements src attribute.

To see the JavaScript sources... You check the dev tools.

If anything, in the days of JavaScript, the HTML source will missing a few things.
$20 is not enough to get people to go to another state on a $500 purchase. Sales tax is more than that, and there aren't a lot of people buying stuff in other states to avoid that.
I find myself scrolling A LOT, when using material design. It's very hard to use.
I've met a lot of managers who "couldn't" find anyone to hire.

What they usually mean is "they can't find an employee in the location they want, with the credentials they want, with the skills they want, at the salary they want, who's been trained by someone else."

This is a highly overconstrained search. If/when employers loosen one or more of these constraints, candidates show right up.

Like everyone, I prefer to get exactly what I want.

...but it doesn't always play out that way.

When I've needed staff and my dream candidate isn't there, I've hired imperfect people that I had to train, raise the rate I was willing to pay, put together attractive relocation packages, etc., and I've never had a problem hiring in 20 years as a manager.

(Both parties in an employment relationship may not have equal bargaining power, but I take issue with the implication that employers have no agency and workers no power.)

EDIT: A point I wanted to include or imply, but couldn't really shoehorn into this inversion, is that just as employers set bounds on what they offer employees, workers set bounds on what offers they accept. Sometimes it's rational to hold out for the right role through an extended period of unemployment (while focusing instead on finding the right role and acquiring or sharpening marketable skills) than to take underemployment that leaves you with no time for improving your position.
What about non-internet media? There are still laptops being sold with DVD players. Laptops have USB and media card slots. I mean would not it make much better sense to put (let's assume for the sake of argument such filters do work in reality) this filter at ISP level? There are countries who are very good at blocking obscene and political content to a great accuracy.

Human trafficking is a much bigger problem that unfortunately cannot be solved with a 20 bucks filter. It is unfortunate to read that apparently in the eyes of the policy-makers this is a “beginning point” of a solution to a gruesome issue.
Resume driven development.
A quick search on Amazon shows that you can get "low end" chastity devices for both men and women around that price point (I am not sure whether I look forward to seeing the ads that will now follow me around the web for the next few days, but who knows what I'll learn)

EDIT: Startup idea: Fetish toy in the form of a chastity device that gives the wearer an electric shock if they try to access blocked sites. I love the thought of "abusing" such a filter to power a BDSM toy that the supporters of the bill will surely find obscene.
When people have to judge something, but they have no expertise to actually judge it, then they use price as an indicator for quality. People use price as indicator when buying clothes, jewellery etc. all the time. Isn't this the same effect, but applied to food (where healthy is considered to be correlated with quality)?
My theory why government choose to be ignorant about technology is that for them technology too often dictates its own terms (or the developers behind tech). Tech often drives societal change faster than politicians can (cars, mobile phones, internet, antibiotics, are a few examples). This is very uncomfortable for politicians so they prefer to dictate how tech should work instead, regardless if it is a good idea or even feasible.
Ai has a website at it's TLD root
Printing out money also increases the market cap of the currency; which means that people have more currency in their pockets.
Devaluation of a currency does not.
Yes, but `using MyModule` is (was?) the default and preferred way to use a module. Which is equivalent to recommend everyone to do `from module import *` in Python.
If a guy does not understand the DB theory related to data normalization, I wouldn't call him good at CS. At least not DB related CS.
"We're not being political"?
I just met a retired plumber when he charged us $500 to clear roots out of our main line.

He said he had to shut down his business - couldn't find anyone willing to learn the trade.

He said no one wants to get their hands dirty anymore.

He said it's a shame, they could basically charge as much as they like - write their own tickets.
Also good ideas with a lot of value don't imply good businesses. As an example, just look at GitHub financial numbers.

A lot of that is of their own doing. Github is a great business; they just got greedy. Interesting if they should fail, their failure will be cited as evidence that you can't make money hosting code (you already are).

If they didn't take on millions and keep hiring engineers like crazy, they'd be doing just fine. They wouldn't be losing $66 million hosting a code repository anyway....
There seems to be a creeping habit of quietly slipping in draconian legislation as a rider to otherwise routine proposals. This feels like a slightly different approach in that the primary legislation has a nice easily defendable title. Who wouldn't want to stop human trafficking? Unfortunately, it seems that there is little interest in challenging this behaviour, presumably because the only ones who are in a position to directly challenge those doing it also have a vested interest in keeping such behaviour out of the public eye.
If you have celiac disease, there is 100% evidence that gluten free is healthier.
Wonderful counterpoint, and I entirely agree with you!
Patients tend to give doctors higher customer satisfaction scores when the doctor writes a prescription, regardless of whether the patient really needs it. Patients like to feel that the doctor is taking their problems seriously and doing something. This is one of the negative aspects of moving to a more consumer-driven healthcare model. Providers try to optimize their customer satisfaction scores to bring in more business, and large provider organizations sometimes use those scores as one factor in paying doctors.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3581314/
@tzickles: do you mind me asking how you're handling it now? Is it all do-it-yourself?
The mindset that would even produce such an idea is incredibly dangerous. A computer-naive person might think that requiring that all computers be sold with specific software installed is no more burdensome that requiring that all cars be sold with safety belts. But we all know that making the infrastructure to actually enforce such a rule would lead us to Stallman's worst dystopian nightmare: a Central Authority that somehow dictates what must, and what cannot, run on your computer.

There's still a real danger that something like this will come to pass, especially when all the popular OSs come from centralised vendors upon whom pressure can be applied.