skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are lots of issues that this article doesn't touch on. I believe that large companies have become exponentially more complex as IT has come to underpin business processes. Competition has intensified both for markets, people and capital.

The CEO's job has become, in my perception, undoable. Compensation has risen because the incumbents are trying to defenestrate themselves on a daily basis, and yes, yes there is a queue of eager applicants for the hot seat, but almost all of them are dribbling lunatics. The sensible, committed super sharp of suite c start shouting and screaming and fighting as soon as it's mentioned that they might be given the CEO role in the future - they know that it's a nightmare.

The problem that boards have got is that the complexity has created an ecosystem of corporate types, it's become rich enough to support niching and evolution, and what we see is The Red Queen. Peacock tails of fashion, pose and fucking powerpoint decks dominate. Not only in the corporate itself but amongst the swirling flock of carrion feeders that surround it.

I've been witness to/unable to hide from three "blue skys" exercises in corporate structure and strategy from "managing consultants" "auditors" and "boutique consultants". All of which were announced as opportunities, all of which were simply shakedowns and all of which are conducted in the medium of powerpoint slides.

Until a powerpoint slide is not interpreted as a signifier of understanding corporates and corporate life will decline.

My only hope at this point is the punchline of the red queen story. Peacocks are great, right up until they meet a fox.
That's fair. The point I was hoping to make though is that being self employed or even running your own startup has significant non-obvious financial risks/externalities when it comes to emergencies and healthcare in the US. Those risks have to be offset with cash beyond what many people assume is sufficient due to non obvious factors. Planning and good advisors are key.
We are asked not to lead with negativity on HN, but once in a while an article comes through that just screams out as requiring an exception.

Asking people to reduce the noise level is straight up a horrible idea. Especially the obnoxious /noisy command and the nanny state thinking it encourages.

I thrive and get in the zone when there is plenty of noise and varied conversation around me. I know that many people feel the same way. A quiet office is the worst for maintaining focus, as then any little conversation will stand out and catch my attention.

And I say all this not as a loud person. Quite the opposite.

I almost never use headphones; don't need to because the office is noisy enough to stay in a good coding zone. But having some social stigma about wearing them, that would be bad.
A clbuttic mistake. I hope they manage to resolve it. It's not like people don't have weird names. E.g. Semen is a popular Russian name with an unfortunate latinisation - the original is spelled Семён, but the umlaut is not always written, since it's clear from context, and the pronunciation is Simyon.
>There are plenty of examples

Name five?
Rails still solves all the problems it solved last year or two years ago. I'm always astonished when teams give into the hype train and replace the two things Rails excels at, templating and database access, with a 10MB frontend JS blob and microservices running in a JVM language.

Just use Rails, it scales just fine. Your hand-coded DB layer for your microservice will never be as good as ActiveRecord if you aren't Facebook.
Also javascript is pretty good at creating dsls as far as non-lisps go. The only real mainstream competitors on this space are ruby, scala and, possibly, rust.
I found it!! The elusive source of it all! Here, ladies and gentleman, you can see the birth of the exact thought:

"Hey I just read this really obscure article on something I've never heard of in school or used in my professional life, and didn't have to figure out for myself.

I bet it would make a great interview question."
There is no legislation about ride sharing/taxi with self driving cars. So whether or not an extra authorization is needed by the owner of the car is a different issue. Here Tesla is asking you to not engage in ride sharing unless Tesla gets a cut. i.e., Even if the government and insurance companies allow you to do so, Tesla won't unless you hand over your cut to them. Is there more to it than that ? Tesla is getting approval to make a car road legal. An insurance company may underwrite insurance for various purposes including taxi. Why do I need tesla's permissions to combine a road legal car for taxi purposes ?
The latter also sounds horrifying; who has time to check all their teams commits? And what sort of motivation (or not!) does that drive into a team :/
> Since when is spending trillions to attack a nation justified by its leader being an asshole?

He's more than just an asshole, he lead a genocide against the Kurdish people [1] and invaded Kuwait. And, I didn't say any of that justified our entrance circa 2001.

> Saddam was mild compared to many other regimes at the time and was a US ally for years prior.

He was a killer. That's not mild. I can't say why Reagan would've considered him an ally while he was gassing the Kurds. There are a lot of variables in play in foreign relations. Trump wants to be buddies with Russia while they've essentially admitted to messing with our elections [because we fund pro-democracy NGOs in Russia]. Who knows how Trump envisions the future of American foreign relations. He's certainly doing some unexpected things.

> the idea that Saddam's personality had anything to do with it is absurd.

You feel personality causes a person to kill thousands of people and invade other countries? Okay. Hitler had a shitty personality too, but that's not a particularly useful descriptor when talking about dictators. Lots of people have lousy personalities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_chemical_attack
HN link is still paywalled for me, so here's the archived version of it that's not paywalled:
https://archive.fo/Q0gkJ
> It sounds like a lot of us have been making password managers recently. Here's one I made a few days ago:

> https://github.com/ojensen5115/pw/

I made one as well. Same name, totally different philosophy. ;)

https://github.com/gioele/pw
The problem is not in a language but in poor choice of naming scheme that made it easy to pick the wrong function.
Many doctors' prescriptions default to the generic option. I think this is actually the law in many states: the patient gets the generic drug unless the doctor (or patient) specifically ask for the brand name.

The notification system you're describing would need access to doctors' records and/or pharmacy records, as well as patient contact info. That's absolutely red-hot information from a security standpoint. It's not cheap or easy to build a system to hold that information, let alone act on it by contacting patients.

It's a substantial technology problem, but it's doable. It's currently an insurmountable sales/education/legal problem.

(I know a lot about this area because some good friends of mine tried and failed to build a company based on the idea of getting brand-name Rx discounts into patients' hands.)
Ideally as a manager you should trust your employees. But I also know when I was self employed it was really hard to get started every day relying entirely on myself, too easy to get distracted surfing the web or working on some side project.

When I'm in an office working with others I have zero problems getting started or working on the right stuff, and never surf the web.

So the question naturally occurs to me. If being visible to others helps make me more productive, would it help others. It's not a question of a manager watching them, but giving them the best environment to work in.
Not original poster, but similar position.

I've used Debian privately and professionally on servers and desktop since the 90's, altogether several hundred systems. I've also used Slackware and LFS years ago. My personal laptop runs Arch the last few years (with Debian stable as backup partition); my work computer runs Debian unstable or testing (depending on release cycle).

The reason I like Arch is that it's close to the source. Debian often adds more patches and layers, policies and complexity to the building process. In Arch I can get an updated package in hours straight from the source origin, either built by the maintainer or built and packaged myself. It's very helpful if you are tracking, fixing or reporting bugs to upstream developers. True rolling release model is handy if you'd like to be part of open-source development or need to get something working at the bleeding edge.

Note that Debian's added complexity and stability is much appreciated for all other systems, it's just a bit more difficult to pull straight from the source for many packages. I do not need and would not want to run bleeding edge on most systems.

Edit: and thanks!
If you just want to pack up a bunch of config files, I can shamelessly plug my own https://github.com/holocm/holo-build
Was the correction you mentioned not caused by #deleteuber? It seems like the impact was a huge correction.
What's the HN web link/google search path?

edit: nevermind, figured it out. Just search the title in Google, which gives you a link to the article.
I've always been confused that people will set up 6-7 different kinds of areas in their house, but expect an office to be wall-to-wall cubicles with a restroom tacked on.

Let's see if we can list out some of the things to do in an office:

* Focused solo work

* Focused small group work

* Making phone calls - one person

* Making group phone calls and teleconferences

* Small group meetings

* Large group meetings

* Handling documents and records

* Food preparation

* Eating areas for individuals and small groups ("cafe")

* Eating areas for large groups ("cafeteria")

* Relaxation

* Reference and reading

* Loose teamwork e.g. sales and support

* Client/vendor meetings - small and large scale

* Shipping and receiving

* Maintenance

* Storage

I wish there were names for these kind of spaces beyond agglomerating descriptions onto generic terms.

I think if you say "Living room", "Kitchen" or "Bedroom" most people have an idea of what happens in that room. "Medium conference #3" is less descriptive.
I didn't think dupes on SO were removed, rather they are marked duplicate, linked to the original and closed, precisely because of discovery.
A good way to answer questions like this (as well as they can be answered, anyway) is to check the Github activity and http://stateofjs.com
A couple of years back, I used to make about $1000/month from about 150K page views. Nowadays, it is about $400 from 50K pageviews despite better CPC but ad impressions have come down.

Such calculators are worthless. There are tens in not hundreds of factors to determine ad revenue.

Site is http://www.gtricks.com
It's horrifying to me that you don't check all of your team's commits. How do they and you improve as developers if you don't discuss how they and you implement things?

Most of software development is spent finding and fixing bugs. Doing a little work up front in validating that code is written well and correctly saves a lot of work on the back end.
> The web was originally invented and gifted to humanity to promote individual freedoms and knowledge.

Thank you. This is indeed what web was all about, until the suits showed up to make money!
Effectively that's what would happen under a legal ivory sales system. Poachers would effectively wipe them out in the wild.
And usually do. The video I saw said that something like 30% of tuskers break even; the rest wind up penniless, and often with large loans.
Interesting idea, however, it seems like it would be slower for people to calculate what change to give, also Americans won't even use the $1 coin, I can't see the 18c coin gaining wide acceptance.
What are machine learning engineers?
For only one specific interpretation of "based on".
If the devs "just reverted anything if they felt like it", people would quickly move to a different fork.
I don't believe that ambient information ruins productivity. At least for me, the problem is noise, not signal.

I've spent quite a while working in spaces where the space is devoted to a team. If people are having quiet, focused discussions about what we're all focused on, I rarely find that distracting. The thing that drives me bonkers is when people are having loud, emotional, or off-topic conversations. Then part of my brain wanders off to process it and the rest is compelled to follow.

I also think Slack is rarely a good solution to trying to avoid interruption. If I turn it off for a few hours of coding, I'm far too late to participate. And if I leave it on, there are distractions right there on my screen. There's no way to overhear the useful bits and let the rest go; it requires full visual attention to process. The workplaces where I've felt least effective are the ones with big IM cultures.
1) Kleenex
2) Google
3) Aspirin
4) Band-Aid
5) Jacuzzi
6) Post-It
7) Q-Tip
8) Sharpie
9) Taser
10) Xerox
The trick is to make it so people have control. That said, I take issue with the claim people often make that all coding requires complete sound and visual isolation from other humans.

In my experience there are large swaths of software engineering tasks that involve transforming code that are not negatively affected by ambient noise and conversation, and that are relatively easy to context switch in and out of. I realize this probably is heresy to some people but it is the reality I find for myself. That does not mean there are not also large categories of tasks that require dedicated focus and isolation, but I take issue with the claim that all coding needs to occur in a sound proof chamber.

Some concrete examples:

- Fixing or writing unit tests

- Performing (low risk) operational + maintenance tasks

- Refactoring

- Design tweaks and improvements

- Deployments

- Building simple features

- Reviewing code

I find myself (and I'm sure many others do) doing these types things in an office environment that often has some ambient conversational noise and do not feel it negatively affects my work to the point where I decide to put on headphones. And no, I'm not talking about a case where someone is yelling in my ear or someone is blasting death metal behind me. I'm talking about a normal open office where people are generally respectful of each others' space and conscious of distractions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

Aspirin, cellophane, kleenex, thermos, band-aid, crock pot, jacuzzi, photoshop, etc.
only in the same way, and to the same extent

Yes, but entropy can make it asymetrical - in practice past usually have less legal states (a lower entropy point) than the future.

Past and future can be completely encoded by the direction of entropy change, if we start from, or end in one legal state.

(You can exactly tell the past of the Logo turtle (or something similar physical thing) by following its trajectory line. You can have an inverse turtle that follows and erase an existing line, then you can tell its future, but not its past by looking only its present state)

This kind of entropy increase is very common in human life - like forming memories, filling empty screens and white papers with signs, leaving footsteps in the snow etc... So the subjective feeling of asymetry is not completely ungrounded.
I'm astonished how you've been treated in this thread. You've actually mananged to convince me that reversing a linked list is a good interview question!
I think you don't have that authority over here in Europe. I'll have to read our law for the protection of personal data again, but I know for a fact employers can't just ask to see your ID (to make sure you're who you say you are on your CV, etc.) without first showing you a document verifying that the way they store that data is in-line with said law. Pretty much the only ones who can see your ID without showing proof that they've been audited for their use of it, are the Police.
> You really can't get away with that with laptops or desktops because the need for fans causes a lot of component wear

I don't buy used myself, but it surprises me to hear that you avoid used desktops. I generally buy my workstation equipment new and keep it for a very long time. Yes, the fans need periodic servicing (e.g., a thorough cleaning every couple of years), or outright replacement if you don't keep them clean. But desktops are easily user-serviceable. If I were to buy used, it seems replacing a few bad fans would be easy.
Syntax-wise, I've found learnxinyminutes.com to be a good introductory resource. I'm also looking for a good quality resource on programmatic conventions for different languages, including details on what unique/'cool' features each has, all in once place. So far I've not had much luck.
Scroll to the top of the page, click the link labeled web. It runs a Google search that should put the article near the top. Useful because many paywalls make an exception for traffic that comes in that way.
I guess if you see my responses as burning bridges then you of course wouldn't want to do that. I don't see it as burning bridges at all. I don't take a nasty tone, but a more playful one. The point is to set the boundaries for what our relationship might be like. I have had companies come back to me months later after they figure out that they'd like a relationship on those terms because whatever they were doing in the past wasn't serving them.

Strong fences make good neighbors, yada yada.
If Alphabet paid a dividend, it would make a big difference. 10x voting rights per share, but 1x dividend.[1] In 2000, Ford Motor paid a $10 billion special dividend, and most of that went to regular shareholders.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-de-incarcera...
It's iirc their backhaul network that can't keep up, not the technology they use in their BTS. Telekom and Vodafone have large fiber networks (Telekom for DSL, Vodafone for cable-Internet) so they can use existing infrastructure (conduits, electricity lines, right-of-way for houses housing concentrators, routers etc) while O2/Eplus had to build out/rent everything.

In addition O2/Eplus historically got the cheaper but more inefficient frequency ranges which made them the "low cost" players.
"This country"? The author is at the University of Waterloo, but the Abstract talks about the USA.

It should be called "What THAT country needs is an 18c piece"!
That was tried in USSR, and the result was that even less care was taken of community property.
Wow WTH Amazon? Take the training wheels off already or fix the defaults for this service.
One could have solved that problem by bringing consistency with ranking - or some other form of instituting consistency. The key is to let the person adopt whatever pseudo-name he/she wants, but have it go with a consistent and single form identity (avatar or any other form which stays consistent).

The forcing of real names has been a ridiculous idea. It solves one problem but causes many other.
"Distinguishing mammoth ivory from elephant ivory is pretty hard"

No, it isn't.

https://www.fws.gov/lab/ivory_natural.php

"as a result sales of mammoth ivory can act as a cover for sales of illegal elephant ivory."

[citation needed]

What would be the economic incentive for selling the (breathtakingly expensive) elephant ivory as the (much cheaper, though still expensive) fossil ivory?
> "Get... ceiling baffles for the whole office."

Yes please! At least this. For some reason there has been this huge trend with new buildings to just have exposed concrete ceilings and HVAC plant. Why? Seemingly because it's "cool" and how the "start ups" do it. (Back when a start up meant working from a low cost warehouse.) But ceiling baffles were there for a very good reason, to dampen and prevent reflection of noise in office spaces. How did we forget this?

EDIT: (At the last place I worked like this their solution was to install white noise generators on the ceiling. So the whole place was like being on an aircraft and very sleep inducing.)
Sortability.
Thanks, I didn't realize that.

Do you know if these exceptions are documented somewhere deep in the Debian doc maze?
Yep, iOS 10 added it.
Just like we domesticated cattle, we could do the same with practically all animals.

I mean, cows, pigs, chickens (dogs and cats) are the most docile creatures on earth. How would we enslave, rape, raise, slaughter them if they were angry and combatant and weren't submissive?

Breeding does wonders.

Check out any wild cattle and you'll see how easily, fearlessly they stomp their predators to death.

As for ethical problems, I see no difference between an elephant and a pig. Both are one of the smartest animals on earth. Yet, bacon! :D Given that first world countries enjoy their 99% factory farmed abominations of animal flesh, I'd say ethics was decided as a non-problem by look-the-other-way anthropocentric market agents.

edit: checkout Temple Grandin work with cattle.
you can have a farm with hundreds of milk cows and have 2 people working on it (part time vet that's making all the cows pregnant and managing their calves, and one full time employee). her methods made industrial milk farms manage themselves. cows practically go to the milking robot alone, never stopping, never panicking. when I saw this being done with my own eyes, no wonder family farms can't compete without huge subsidies.
The potential damage can be reduced.

There can be a backend that generates Emacs Lisp code. Not necessary optimized or idiomatic, but it could be a good starting point for rewriting.

But in general, I agree with you.
That's not a solution that absolves Facebook of social or moral responsibility if they are a link in the chain of immigration policy.
> "I assembled this chart to show how this can already have an impact five days into the experiment..."

https://rradczewski.github.io/ymmv/assets/office_noise_noisy...

I don't think this chart demonstrates your point. Don't you want people to eventually stop needing to use Noisy at all? As of now the chart just shows that more people are familiar with the Slack command.

I would also be interested in knowing how large the team is that this is being tested on.
It depends. My father goes to an evangelical church and there's a lot of cooperation. People help each other for free, lend things, fix things for free, etc...
Canada has the same coin denominations as the US, except that it has now eliminated the penny.
I prefer having an office with just my team. I work on a team with 3 other devs and 99% of the time they're the ones I need to talk to. Everything beyond that is a massive distraction.

My team can't even "collaborate" because the 70 people in the room makes it so loud that we all wear noise cancelling headphones, completely negating the purpose of the open office layout.

When you look around in the main room 90% of employees are wearing headphones. Open office layouts are a joke.
I can't get over the 1 based indexes in Lua, unless that has changed in recent years.
Tech Conferences: A fun place to be (A satire on tech conferences)
I would argue that at least half of those don't qualify.

Kleenex, Google, Band-Aid, Post-It, Q-Tip, and Sharpie are all in a dominant position in their respective product categories. Off-brand examples of all of them exist, but all of my Sharpies are Sharpie brand, I use Q-Tip brand Q-Tips, I only Google with Yahoo or Bing when Google itself is down, and My Band-Aids are Band-Aid brand adhesive bandages.