skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I see the issues and have my doubts about feasibility, here's some thoughts:

> * Technical problems. You can't hand-wave these as minor issues. They're practical/implementation issues, yes, but they're so difficult and pervasive that they elevate to the level of being fundamental problems with the idea. Spam, constituent authentication, Internet access for every constituent, Russian/Chinese tampering... These are problems that the major Silicon Valley companies have spent tons of resources on and not totally solved for their use, let alone for a use that controls the US military.

Depending on what level the candidate operates, perhaps a solution would be to take great effort to develop a 'platform', demographically, that represents the constituency. Perhaps some form of compensation might be necessary to make this work (for, say, constituents who usually don't have time for this kind stuff).

> * The average American does not have any clue how government works. I do not want them directly voting on or writing laws. I wouldn't want me directly voting on or writing laws without a lot of time to study up first, and I think I know a lot more about US laws and history than most voters.

It could be a demand that everyone who is part of this 'platform' has to spend time understanding the problem. I recall reading some articles on how, when 'regular citizens' are given time to deliberate and receive information, they come to pretty sensible conclusions. Maybe the 'average voter' isn't as dumb as they seem when given the opportunity to think things through and be heard. I think learned helplessness plays a big role in the generally negative perception of the 'average voter'.

> * The average American, even assuming potential competence, does not have enough time to read and understand all the things that go across a legislator's desk. This gets especially impossible when compromise deals need to be struck - "no unrelated amendments" is a great idea, except that then nobody would actually ever pass anything.

The above might make this a little more achievable perhaps.

It's possible that I'm naive, but I believe it's possible for the 'average joe' to make informed decisions and strongly agree with people like Chomsky who argue that the problem is not lack of knowledge or interest, but rather the (correct) feeling that 'our' opinions don't matter or have much of an effect.

I think most people opt out of politics because of this, whether justified or not.

But go strike up a conversation about football, the intricacies of the show Westworld, or whatever else holds their interest, with the 'average joe', and it becomes immediately clear that they're not as dumb as they seem and quite capable of complex thought.

I'm no historian but I'm pretty sure that quite a few of the great thinkers in our past would imagine that the 'average person' is not capable of literacy or something like using a computer, and yet here we are.
Instant feedback? You ever heard about Figwheel? Watch the video and now imagine that it also works with mobile platforms.
I use FT Audio and whatsapp as well. FT calls are answerable right away while Whatsapp calls have a whole process: swipe, unlock, find app, open app. By the time I get in my Whatsapp caller has given up. 10 seconds later they'll make a normal cellphone call.
For me, it's having a successful blog that is on topic to the position. When I started my current job 7 years ago, I started a blog then which was simply a repository of lessons learned, scripts I can reuse in the future, cheat sheets, and videos. I still use it today to look up how I did something years ago, but apparently a lot of other people use the site too. The blog demonstrates the following to any potential people willing to hire me:

* A sample of my writing skills
* A sample of my design skills
* A sample of my engineering skills (shown in scripts and codes)
* A sample of my documentation skills
* Additional proof that I am passionate/skilled/interested about this type of work.
Black mirror episodes are often very divisive. I found the season to be pretty good, though a bit kinder and gentler than before.
There is a note at the bottom of the post that it originally ran on Medium (which freely licenses its content in this way in the absence of explicit revocation of consent from the author). The piece also explicitly acknowledges that working remote doesn't work for everyone, and states "That is fine."
The usual way they reduce variance in these man vs. machine poker showdowns is to do "pairs" play. You have two humans playing simultaneously in isolated locations. The decks for both humans are the same, but player 1 and 2 are swapped for one human. That way, the bot strategy has to play both hands.

It does totally eliminate variance, but they also take that into account and correct for it when looking at final outcomes usually. Right now the bot is up by something like 800K over 60K (out of 120K) hands. If that rate continues, it will win by around 1.6M or 400K per human. The blinds are 50/100, so that would equate to roughly 33 millibets (thousandths of a big blind per hand). That isn't too far off from standard win rates in bot vs. bot tournaments [1].

I'd say it's likely that the results of this tournament will be a statistically significant win for the bot.

[1] http://www.computerpokercompetition.org/downloads/competitio...
I thought about that a lot, since I grew up in love about computers and believed they would be the solution for everything; even books.

But as many said, "digital" mostly made us realize they were other things than the "pure" content.

I believe our brain just crave as much sensations as possible, and writing, flipping pages, seeing a device move[1], touching, watching, etc ... basically the task of dealing with the physical world is not entirely a cost but a pleasure in itself.

On the other hand(sic) computers send you a massive amount of symbolic informations (think text search in folders, it's "faster" than any physical archive), that tickle another part of your brain but not all of it, also, I think that our brain doesn't actually like too much of these because it evolved to abstract flows into new concepts. And these concepts are either a bit hard or simply not exposed to the users (think relational queries). There's a detrimental mismatch.

[1] I booted a PIII desktop last year, to extract files from a TRAVAN backup tape. I cannot describe the pleasure I had watching that HP Colorado tape wake up and move. No matter how "slow" it was compared to anything today. It was so cool. Even the slick sound of tape moving ..
It's only illegal if you get net gain out of it[1]; if you turn down the power so that the maximum power transmitted in any direction is the same as before, then it's legal. You can get a small performance improvement by using directional antennas in this way as you reduce the received strength of off-axis signals which can reduce both multipath interference as well as interference from other stations.

It's not all that useful indoors though as 2.4 and 5GHz signals bounce off of walls really well so you lose much the directionality at the very first wall it hits.

1: Actually there is a total ERP requirement, but most routers with external antennas are already close to that requirement, so more than about 3dB gain will often put you over.
> Mind you, I don't think there's been any strong "we are going to reduce anti-terrorism measures" parties, or if they were they weren't popular.

There almost can't be. All it takes is one attack of any kind after they relax rules, regardless of whether the relaxation allowed it to happen, and they lose every. single. election. the next cycle.
Here's what we (Beeminder) had to say about Systems vs Goals a year ago, also prompted by Scott Adams's book:

http://blog.beeminder.com/systems/

I bet people who like this article would also like http://complice.co which is all about systematized goal setting.

(And of course Beeminder, if you're a Quantified Self nerd into productivity hacks and don't shudder in horror at the idea of using commitment devices on yourself.)
I've had a lot of success actually combining goals with systems. As in, I had the goal to quit smoking and to do that I borrowed a system from an addiction therapist I listened to on the Joe Rogan podcast:

Identify what makes me want to smoke and when, and pay close attention to those 'trigger' mechanisms. Start the day by counting how many cigarettes I had in my box. Each time I had a 'trigger' to smoke, I would pull out a pocket notebook, mark down a tally, and then tell myself "This cigarette can wait 30 minutes".

30 minutes later, if I had the same, or a different trigger to go outside and smoke, repeat the process. At the end of the day I'd count how many tally marks I had made with how many cigarettes are left in the box.

This gave me something I could visually track, it helped me pay attention to my habit versus blindly indulging in every nic-fit that came across, and within a month I had quit smoking.

This is just anecdote, but Goals vs. Systems might not be the best way of looking at this conceit; perhaps Goals contextualized within a system are the keys?
The author touches on this:

>In the case of working from home/remote work, some employees do not do their best work from home, or simply don’t like it. That is fine—but you should trust your employees and treat them like adults.

Although this doesn't address your point about your difficulty working with remote employees, when you're in an office.
> He also tried to pack the Supreme Court in the 1930s.

Which failed, and could easily be attempted by a one-term president too. I'm not sure what that has to do with term limits.

> It was enacted at the height of FDR's popularity, too.

It was enacted by a Republican-controlled congress after FDR's death.
Rolex, more than anything, makes me optimistic about the "rise of the machines" taking everyone's jobs. There is no reason whatsoever for Rolex watches to exist besides that they make people happy. As a timekeeper, a $20 timex beats them in every way, but as art they are unmatched.

Rolex is a giant art project that employs thousands and makes millions happy. That people are willing to pay for this art and the way it is produced is profoundly hopeful.
This is very close to Buddhist philosophy. Shorter goals means your mind is closer to living in the now. Which in reality is the only time it's possible to live in. But if your mind isn't with you in the now, then you aren't fully enjoying it. It would go futher and say that after making plans to do the dishes, the joy now comes from doing the dishes. Not in having them done, which only lasts a fraction of an instant. The past can't sustain you. But the present does. The feel of the warm water on your hands. The sound of the water running. The smell of soap suds. That's what life is made up of.
I tried Habitica but it wasn't doing it for me. I think a combination of it being self-driven (I can just keep clicking a button to progress if I were dishonest) and it lacking actual gameplay and being more of a stat boosting game akin to a clicker game.

Compare this to Pokemon Go where I actually felt compelled to walk to grind eggs since I had no good way to fake the GPS (though I did slowly drive one night since it was too cold to walk). There was an instance of the game actually forcing me to do something.
> Novice programmers shouldn't have blogs.

I kind of agree with this. It hinges on what you mean by "blog".

Novice programmers should absolutely have journals, to synthesize and record what they're learning, and share those journals with other people to get feedback. I kept a journal on paper back when i was learning, and today, it would be natural to do this online.

However, novice programmers should absolutely not be giving other people advice on programming, or clogging up search results with basic and probably incomplete or incorrect material.

The trouble is that we don't have distinct mechanisms for those two kinds of public writing. We just have blogs. It's difficult for either human beings or search engines to reliably separate the wheat from the chaff.
Management Theory\Organizational Behavior are taught in university but this is a terrible article.
That "changing the time you go to bed and wake up is trivially simple" is an assumption of yours, and it is wrong in general.
I am probably being too critical. I was thinking a little higher than 500, too. If you've got $1500 to spend, your best bet is to either buy 3 Hamiltons or save up another $2k for a Speedmaster, if you're going for value per dollar.
While it is dishonest to claim credit for the Fiverr job, isn't it a smart thing to do? I mean if this person was in management instead and said "we can outsource this on Fiverr and save a ton of money instead of hiring these devs fulltime", they'd get a bonus, no?

In an interview, I gave a problem to a candidate and asked him how he'd tackle it. He said he'd google for a solution first. At that moment, I recall having a dilemma of choosing between "smart guy" and "no good as a problem solver". He turned out to be the latter, but it was a conceivable answer from a smart and capable candidate too.
I don't spend a ton of time mastering algorithms for interviews. Maybe I should. But studying a canned set of specific formulas is about as fun as memorizing a Math textbook. I've found that I become a better programmer by focusing on what's interesting to me. Often times one can guess at a pretty good solution in an interview by simply having tried to make enough things fast enough, modular enough, DRY enough, etc. My basic hypothesis is that most interviewers wanna know you can think how to make things easier to reason about, faster, can ship something, and the you have enough depth to help them in a meaningful way.
Ah I see. In size() and c_str(), strictly speaking it's not the category constants that become 8 byte immediates but rather the category mask. Since the category constants and masks are all compile time constants I wonder if a smarter compiler could have performed this optimization for you.
We've got a real too-big-to-fail going on here. If a little company screwed something up this badly they'd be dead. But when one the size of Symantec screws up - oh well they've got too many customers for us to revoke their signing privileges.

It's a ridiculous system and fwiw, it shouldn't be the security companies (though that's being very polite to Symantec) that grant certificates. It should be notary publics (a business all about assurance of human identity) using a physical appliance.

Or, admit we don't care and ditch the entire system for something based on bailing wire and chewing gum, because that's roughly what we've got now.
> For that matter, a lot of us aren't comfortable with haggling and are only willing to buy a car if we can buy it like any other appliance at Walmart or Costco.

I purchased a used Toyota Prius from a Toyota dealership like this. I reviewed their inventory online, test drove the car, and paid the price they had advertised online.

The only thing they asked was if I would prefer their financing options over the loan I was preapproved for from my bank. They had a much better rate so I went with their financing. Overall, it took about 2 hours to do the paperwork and get the keys after the test drive. It would be been faster if I didn't need financing.
Related question:

Everyone is commenting that studying for the CTCI bar exam is more important than personal projects. Is something like HackerRank more or less important than personal projects?

Thank you.
A semantic fact checker could work via the snopes model. Not sure that it would really focus on pictures of men/women but here's what I was thinking.

You press a button and it analyzes all statements on the page, or maybe highlights subtitles in the case of video.

text turns green: 'yes this is actually true'

red text: 'no this is provably false'

yellow: 'maybe depends on interpretation of a couple fuzzy words'

black: 'no claims being made'

It would be a good start to holding people accountable. Large blocks of yellow/red text would lead to mistrust. Information is coming at us too fast and we can't keep up but I see no reason why AI can't help.

I understand I'm being a little hand wavey right now but I definitely think this is possible in the near future.
It is hosted on LinkedIn, which is a bad sign from the start.
The Born-Oppenheimer approximation isn't a non-quantum assumption, but the simplest form of parallel transport on a curved space. The geometric phase is a fundamental part of quantum mechanics. This is a succinct restatement of what is learned by the second year of a good physics graduate education (and maybe undergraduate one), and I'm not sure where the Goldstone bosons are relevant or what his point is.
Is this a notable photograph for visual elicitation? I saw a cow immediately so I thought the references were some weird sarcastic humor...

(Not bragging about recognition by any means. Grew up in dairy country so I probably see too many cows in things overall!)
Agree with this 100%. It's soul sucking and destroying but unfortunately coding interviews today are entirely about competitive programming and not about what you create.

So you're best off knowing how to derive an O(N) dynamic programming solution to everything on Codility/HackerRank/LeetCode/ACM-ICPC coding challenges.
Brian Eno: ‘We’ve been in decline for 40 years – Trump is a chance to rethink'
How are you categorizing these companies? What's makes one A, B, or C-level?
6 Red Flags That Your OEM Parts Supplier Isn't Meeting Your Needs
Offically, they are "Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., doing business as Walmart".
I didn't say that a good coder should translate to a good manager. But a good IT manager should know how to code, or at least use to know. Otherwise, how can he estimate whether project managers are jerking him off or not?
It depends on what your definition of "getting jobs" is.

I haven't looked for a job for years but I get freelance / consulting gig opportunities presented to me on a pretty regular basis.

Most of those opportunities come from a combination of side projects, open source contributions, having a blog and teaching online courses.

Now, I'm not sure if that's what you meant but in the above life style you don't need a resume or know how to take interviews. You don't even need a formal education.

People just come to you, already knowing beforehand that they want to work with you. You already have the job before you even know what it's about.
This whole process of job interview is broken because it's extremely easy to study for them and give the right answers if you invest a couple of weeks to a few months.

This is highly dependent on the company you're applying to. The world is bigger than GooBookHooSoft. I've worked for a lot of companies that don't do any of that "grill you on Algorithms 101" stuff, and are far more interested in a demonstrated ability to build something.

OTOH, it certainly can't hurt to study the shit out of Algorithms 101, but projects will carry more weight at certain companies. I know if I were in a position to hire right now, I'd care more about projects than CS trivia.
To say this article misses a bit of nuance is a major understatement. The descriptions (w+s, s-w, etc.) are limited, and where people fall on the spectrum (even on this limited black/white list of personality types), ebb and flow on a daily/weekly basis.
Speaking of Submariners, this reads like a submarine article.

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Creating a new sub-industry of well paid experienced developers who repair bad implementations.

Not sure if this is a good or bad thing.
Interesting to see many comments here claiming that side projects don't matter when looking for a job. I've been actively applying for a full-time dev position for the past 3 months and the most common feedback I receive is "We need to see side projects, OSS contributions so we know how you code."

I have about 4+ years in DevOps and in support. I consider myself a programming generalist, which I thought would be enough to at least get a technical interview. Instead of working on a project that will most likely be left incomplete due to fatigue or loss of interest, I rather spend that time learning ways to improve my skills to make myself the best programmer I possibly can be.

I've been considering starting my own blog and write articles about lessons learned or an e-book to express my credibility. Does anyone have any opinions with developers who write blogs/publications in lieu of side projects or OSS contributions?
Sure, if you continue going to bed at 2am and having to work at 9, then I can see how it can become a health risk. But if your body doesn't adjust after a week of going to bed at 11pm, then you probably should see your doctor.
I don't disagree at all. But, unless you're Scrooge McDuck, you're going to spend your discretionary income on something so why not a nice watch?

This little assemblage of $500 in parts is worth far more to me than the $8,000 that it's ostensibly worth. It has been there with me for so many of the most important events in my life:

My wedding: https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/3763369152/in/album...

My newborn first child: https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/7515534464/in/album...

Epic Utah adventure with my best friends: http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7247/7087962645_3d48ebb50b_z.j...

Filthy from the craziest day where we drove 250 miles of rough off-road trail in one day in the
Owyhee Desert of Northern Nevada: https://www.flickr.com/photos/defender90/20220695396/in/albu...
Except if Google decided to drop their certs, what Synmantec going to do? Sue? Google could be sued for leaving known insecure certs in Chrome.
Yeah you can say that technology is great for finding the artifacts in a complex world with lots of variations. But it's not as good for experiencing these artifacts unless they are obviously only possible in the digital space itself (gifs, animation, interaction etc.)
I know many profs who decided to switch from industry to academia because they had enough money and wanted a less hectic lifestyle. A very large number of professors actually do contract work for companies.

Even a former Master's supervisor of mine (who is officially retired) still does consulting with companies (typically game developers as he specializes in splines in computer graphics).

I'm actually in Engineering and at least in Canada, there's actually an accreditation body that reviews the engineering programs to ensure they live up to a standard. If the program meets that standard, the graduates only have to take a law and ethics exam (in addition to the experience requirement). If you're outside that system, you have to take a series of exams on the material. I know that it's different in the US, though. I believe that you do have to take a set of exams on the core material for your type of engineering as there's too many programs to properly vet all of them.
The fact that a human reporter can write this article without including a single note of skepticism is truly sad.
Open source work impresses me the most.
Your interaction is with a no pressure internet sales manager though.

I bought my last vehicle (2008 Toyota Tundra) through Costco. If my next vehicle purchase wasn't going to be a Tesla, I'd probably do it again.
"they've got too many customers for us to revoke their signing privileges"

We can however ban them from issuing any new certs. It wouldn't be the first time this has been done.
I think how you do something is more important than what you actually do. People focus so much on the what, when the process is something where you can learn about yourself and apply your knowledge to other avenues in life.
You can never use 1950s control theory to solve your problem? I think you didn't understand the my comment, so please let me clarify: I was claiming that even the control problems in this RC-car-lane-keeping domain can benefit from learning approaches.