skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The meat industry isn't a person, it's an industry. It shouldn't be able to hide practices that endanger human health and safety. This isn't a privacy issue, this is about protecting the ability of whistleblowers to speak out.
Every remote job I've ever posted has received 300-500 applications. For the same role on-site (NYC), I've had to turn to recruiters.

> That said I do not believe remote positions are intrinsically more competitive than the modal onsite position sought by a typical HN reader.

Actually, how is this even a possible point to argue? The pool of candidates for an on-site job is limited to the population of that city + applicants willing to relocate. The pool of candidates for a remote job is literally everyone in the entire world.
Both BMG and CdS have succeeded for so long due in part to their constant tooling with the latest tech. A couple of years ago CdS released a video called Spark exhibiting their take on drones. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C8OJsHfmpI
the average 4chan user probably doesn't own a finney so I wouldn't worry about it, the development team for Ethereum is pretty solid I think that should be taken more into consideration before contributing money to a software project
HN and reddit emacs
( and now thanks to you all a lot more)
Impressive. Are you in marketing?

:)
Type Systems come from Russel - yup. But the notion of Type has an interesting origin in the west as well (I would love to read/understand histories of this concept from other cultures, but I am ignorant for now).

My reading is that it was invented by Scotus as Haecceity ! This was required by Catholic Christianity because of the difficulty that The Creed introduces about the identity of God - there are three entities which represent God, the Trinity - how to account for this? Well; the thisness of God is joined with the thisness of man, the thisness of the creator and the thisness of the thing which is motion (I have never understood The Holy Spirit). You can think of this as multiple inheritance! Theologians then had to account for "why three" as you can carry on making aspects of god with this mechanism infinitely, god the mother, god the lover, god the hunter and so on. But there are three - why? The answer was provided by Scotus's student Occam, entities should not multiply beyond necessity and hence there are three aspects of god because it is necessary for creation that there are.

The fun bit it that this procession of thought is somewhat guessed at because writing things like this down or debating them publically was a quick route to the afterlife via a bonfire!
Warren Buffett Invests in Canada. Should You?
That sounds silly, but that's when they killed the audio reader functionality so as to not compete with the audiobook industry right?
I was there in 2010 and it was pretty peaceful. Now it's a total disaster, along with most of Iraq.
We need to delineate manual, low-effort work from mental exercise. I can perform manual work virtually unendingly, but have a very finite ability to do mental exercises before mental exhaustion or simple boredom/distraction undermines the work. Individuals will differ, but data for manual work has no application to research, software development, etc.

Having said that, there is shockingly little research or proof for any position, and if there was it can never be generalized to all people.
> As a society, while our ethical ideal is justice, a more practically compelling priority is safety. This word, “wouldn’t,” is not compatible with our sense of safety

Safety is the ethical ideal, not "justice". We don't punish people because it makes us feel good or for some sense of fairness, we remove people for the good of society.

Edit: I'm Canadian. I know this isn't true today, but I'm glad I said it and am grateful for the replies below. I hope this statement becomes true in America one day.
Medium - https://medium.com/

MIT Technology Review - https://www.technologyreview.com/

Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/

Bloomberg - https://www.bloomberg.com/

Audible(Once a Month) - http://www.audible.com/

Waking Up Podcast by Sam Harris -https://www.samharris.org/podcast
Translating the tens of keywords in a given typical language won't get you very far though - you need translations for all the terms in all the commonly used libraries, and documentation of how to use them.
> Disney is an entertainment megacorp whose weakness seems to be live entertainment...

I don't know, Disney Theatrical Productions does pretty well. It's true that Disney has never really embraced Las Vegas, where Cirque is king, but that's also because it's not totally on point with their brand. Outside of Vegas though there's Disney on Ice, and all the Disney musicals with more to come (Frozen opens on Broadway next year, I think).
yes, and i would like to see people thinking of efficiency in terms where hours not worked are considered a good. putting it in overly simplistic terms, if someone has a better time not working than the sum of (them working + people consuming their product) then they shouldn't work.
I was thinking along the lines of Kerckhoffs' principle.

You seem to be conflating open source with key extraction or decryption ability. You seem to be saying that if a specification is known then that implies an ability to modify the system to a degree that allows those things.

You can have a system whose workings you know precisely, without obscurity, where the SW/HW specifications are open and the only secret is the key material. For instance, you could have keys be embedded in processor fuses. How would a user extract the keys in that scenario?

For DRM systems the user or consumer is the adversary, but the principles of secure system design still apply. You can still place an asset outside of adversary reach. For example, by ensuring that they need a super expensive FIB machine to read keys. Or, more traditionally, by tailoring cryptography to their computational power.

You seem to be conflating the malleability of software with its modifiability in a given system, but in reality those can be controlled. Yes, you can fork the software, but why are you assuming you can replace it on a given system?

Consider a black box with an LED. The box has an internal power supply and the LED emits light pulses in a given pattern pleasing to the user who purchased it. I could give you its physical properties and circuit diagrams. The box has data stored in internal memory. You can call parts of this data software if you like, as long as we agree that the output of the box is a function of this data and time.

The only contradiction inherent in DRM systems is that knowledge of the data/function needs to be given to the adversary and not given to the adversary at the same time. This has less to do with open or closed source, and more to do with whether the user can open the box.

I think that the "solution" to this contradiction has been reduction in fidelity, where the user/adversary is only given an approximation of the function (analog outputs that they have a hard time spreading to other would be users).

DRM sucks, but is not fundamentally at odds with open source.
Banned after the first vlog
This sort of setup can also be used to monitor aircraft squelches. I got a few Raspberry Pis during a B1G1 sale, so I have one of these setups at work and at home. I like watching the planes as they take off from the local airport and queue up for arrival, and also seeing the nightly freight flights.

More info here: http://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/

You can feed into sites like Flightaware and FlightRadar24 and get accounts with them that normally cost a lot for free.
$1200 (plus taxes and shipping) 'buys' you http://www.red.com/hydrogen, which promises 'holographic multi-view content' without the use of glasses or headsets.

That's a product nobody can beat on features for the next six months because nobody knows what exactly it can do, but it could be worth both the wait and the price.
> if tech is a meritocacy then why are most jobs made through social connections?

Two reasons:

1) There is no such thing as a true meritocracy (we can generalize this to the claim that there is no such thing as absolute efficiency, which is what a true meritocracy would ostensibly be a manifestation of in employment).

2) Human beings have limited attention and productivity bandwidth which typically (though not always) becomes less than the sum of its parts in groups.

The second point is what's really important here (and it has a causal relationship with the first observation). If you have 100 candidates applying for a position, you literally do not have time to adequately review each and every candidate in a reasonable amount of time while maintaining productivity in your professional capacity.

Theoretically we shouldn't use referrals. But in practice it's a good heuristic because it models a web of trust: if person A trusts person B's abilities, they might also trust person B's ability to judge person C's abilities. Obviously this can't be formalized well enough to be extremely rigorous, which is why it doesn't always work.

It's probably not even the most optimal solution! You could develop sophisticated organizational processes to scale up the candidate review process without leveraging trust in other parties as much. But people default to it because it works often enough and because it's intuitively an attractive idea. That combination tends to be viral for human interaction, even if it's technically suboptimal.
Wow it does feel so much more readable than using an ampersand. I'd still prefer an ampersand because it plays well everywhere and the kind of people who'd look at url and try to understand would be too ingrained to ampersand anyway.
>if tech is a meritocacy then why are most jobs made through social connections?

How do you judge someone in a meritocracy?

Interviews? Not reflective of actual work. Also trivial to bias in favor of one group due to culture fit elements.
Short term projects? Exclude people who have limited free time (generally the more senior/older ones).
Resume? Trivial to lie on.
References? How do you know the reference is competent?

Social connections are merely another, imperfect, attempt to judge someone's merit. Specifically you trust the judgement of someone whose merit you have already proven in an actual job environment.
Thanks for sharing, remote job hunting is challenging. Some constructive feedback:

TL;DR. Too much personal fluff and no meat. Nobody cares about your hobbies unless they're directly relevant to the position.

Overly general. You haven't differentiated yourself enough from others applying to the same position.

These kind of cover letters/emails should be highly specific to the company you're applying to. It should answer the HR manager's primary question: Is this applicant the best person to help the company achieve its goals?

Find out from the job description what you're being hired to do, and provide examples of things you've done in the past that are similar. Help the manager imagine how you could apply your experience and talent to that position. And do it quickly, since they're reviewing hundreds of these a day and will spend less than 30 seconds on yours.

Customizing your cover letters in this way is definitely more effort and more time consuming, which means that 99% of applicants won't do it. Be the 1% that stands out.

Finally, the HR filter sucks. Find the actual team managers/members and reach out to them instead. Referrals, even if cold, are better than nothing.
The job pool for a remote candidate is also the entire world.
we all love to rag on HN (myself included) yet we all keep comin' back.
Semi-true; it depends how the extra 20 hours are spent for myself. I've had weeks where I program 60 hours or more and it's all spent well, and then the next week I might be a little more burnt out.. take it a little easier and then sprint again.
> Doing anything -- literally anything -- that differentiates a resume from the rest of the stack is going to get me to pay more attention. Giving me a personal/emotional connection to the person and an idea of their personality is also going to help, because that's just how most human minds work. We tend to like people who put themselves out there.

Exactly. I know that there are a lot of better developers out there than me. I had to differentiate myself by introducing him in a more fun way just like I would do if I was meeting them in person.
Contracting can be a backdoor to remote work. If you're specialized it's not too difficult to find companies that need help. There's more risk (no benefits, no steady income).
The way most companies handle this is by giving the marketing team a budget to have their own dedicated developer or two.

To that extent they are no more a slave to the developer than a person dining at a restaurant is a slave to their wait staff. Sure the water could take extra long to deliver the food but that does not mean they are in control.

To be a slave the other person needs to be exercising control over you.

As a developer, ever try to tell marketing that they can't do something for technical reasons, scheduling, or because it is just a bad idea? Extreme example, the way I have seen it work mostly:

1. Marketing wants to make all advertisement autoplay audio

2. Development says: we are busy until next week working on a major deadline, and even if we did have the time autoplaying audio ads is a terrible idea because it has been shows repeatedly to turn off people from your brand

3. Marketing talks to the CEO

4. The ad are autoplaying audio that night and now the developers have to work extra hours because the deadline they were working on still needs to be done.

If anything it is the other way around... devs are a slave to marketing. Marketing says "jump" the devs have to say "how high?" regardless of what else they were working on.

You say:

> This reduces the productivity of digital marketers drastically.

But in reality unless marketing has it's own developers you are in fact decreasing developers productivity and costing the company a lot of time, potentially money, and in many cases decreasing the work-life balance of the developers.

Think about what those developers needed to stop working on to do your task. I doubt they were sitting on their hands.

Edit: with that said, there doesn't mean it's not a problem that needs to be fixed. But put yourself in the developers shoe's for a minute. They don't like the arrangement any more than marketing does.

And it doesn't help when marketing shows no respect for the developers time. Real world example: a marketing team at one of our clients has been working on a TV ad campaign for months. They finished the TV campaign and now they need a landing page for it... they just told us about this landing page Wednesday. The ad campaign "absolutely has to start Friday"... the amount of disrespect you need to have for developers to do something like that is incredible. They new about the need for a landing page for months and gave dev 3 days when they got months to make their 30 second video...
Designing the Oregon Trail
USA Military Indistrial Complex strikes again.
> It is essentially using the memory on a large number of nodes to buffer bursty throughput, and using background processes to collate the data later onto disk.

You're not describing NoSQL. You're describing something like MongoDB specifically. You're right about the specific case, wrong in the general case.

> There is almost no case where an explicit distributed caching or queuing solution backed by a traditional DB isn't strictly better.

Bah.

If you're looking at big enough data sets (think "Walmart scale", not "web scale") then you have to design your data store to cope with this volume. First, it has to be replicated to multiple servers to serve more queries and for reliability, and is an eventually consistent system a consequence (basically any time you use your read replica, or do anything on a multimaster configuration). You'll need something shardable or multimaster to achieve horizontally scalablity and you'll probably also lose your foreign key enforcement and uniqueness constraints when you do this, so you might as well go the distance and fully denormalise everything for consistent access times. (Have you ever had the Postgres query planner suddenly make something take 10x longer than it usually does because your data patterns changed and decided to use a different query plan than it's ever used before? Yeah, that's a world of fun. Now make that thing a time-critical daily batch job and really squirm.)

When you do the things to make this work, you're basically restricting yourself, abandoning database features. As a consequence, you are going to be in for a world of pain, period, sorry. One key advantage of good NoSQL software is that it doesn't give you those features to begin with, so it's harder to get it wrong. It also has data structures designed to make this sort of thing work well and be performant in ways that general purpose databases won't be, on account of being designed for general purposes.
open source does not imply modifiable
yes, that was my point
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs has a nice section going through building an interpreter and then a compiler. That might be enough to slake your interest.
That's not quite right though, is it? Nothing prevents one from "creative" interpretation of memory in, say, C, either, but it would be difficult to argue C is untyped.
If you are at all worried about it going away, you can add:

?host=imgur

To the URL and it will 301 to the image hosted on Imgur. That is assuming you have more faith in the longevity of Imgur than you do in the longevity of my side project :D
A few years ago it was https://coursera.org - they were a powerful beacon of high-quality knowledge first-hand from world-class experts. I still try to learn as much as possible there, but my feeling of the site being intrusively optimized for business and short-term gain is increasing every day.
Handling multiple simultaneous pull requests
I find this, and many of the comments here interesting. I've been working on a mixed remote/office department for a few years now and lead a team (remotely, with a 3 hour time difference) which is mixed as well.

I do notice that my standards are higher of my subordinates than the other leads. (I expect that they stick to their deadlines that they set for themselves, that they document their thought process, they talk to stakeholders when appropriate, they optimize for the project and company goals, they can produce quality code and debug quickly and effectively.) I also provide one-on-one coaching for them if they want it, or if they are not living up to expectations. I also have a significantly lower turnover rate than other teams in the company.

I always assumed the higher standards were due to personality or management differences, but perhaps not? I would be interested in knowing other people's experiences with remote managers/team leads.
You stand out in a cover letter by finding a concise and convincing to summarize why they should interview you and the value you bring. Not by telling people your hobbies or how nice the beach near you is. That kind of stuff should come up naturally in a call or in person.

The same applies to dating - putting so much info up front is rarely successful.
Farnam Street @ https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/:

"Farnam Street is devoted to helping you develop an understanding of how the world really works, make better decisions, and live a better life. We address such topics as mental models, decision making, learning, reading, and the art of living."
Cattle vs. Unicorns
Which says to me that the game development culture of "work 80 hours per week for months on end" is largely about incompetent management, and/or deliberate abuse. It's not about getting things done.
While I see your point, the job pool for a remote candidate, realistically, is the couple dozen jobs a month that they find on HN/Linkedin/StackOverflow Jobs/etc. Also, the on-site candidate pool, realistically, is a subset of the remote candidate pool* (edited). I don't know anyone who wouldn't prefer to work from home (or wherever).
To get remote work, you need to find a company that really wants you specifically and you need to give them a reason to trust you - That means that you have previously done remote work or maybe you've made a lot of open source contributions on GitHub (which shows that you're basically a coding machine and not a human ;p).

It's not that easy to find because most big companies treat employees like a commodity; they don't tend to get attached to any specific individual (even if you have excellent credentials and thousands of GitHub stars).

It's difficult to find remote work for a big company; most of them have policies against it.

Also a lot of startups don't trust employees enough to allow them to do remote work; they have to be more conservative with money so it's high-risk for them.
How are you checking? How is someone executing contract can be sure that you won't say "bad quality, won't pay", but use it anwywat. What is the point of ethereum in your concept?
Using the principles all the time is different from regularly reimplementing CS textbook trivia under conditions in which your job is on the line. Where do you work, that you have to constantly re-invent the wheel over and over again under such constraints? I'd consider such a job to be hell. Not hard, just tedious and uninteresting to the point of pain.

I'd also not consider it to be an engineering job. What you describe seems to me to be more like a CAD technician job at an engineering firm.
Lambda keeps the containers running if there's traffic coming to them, so the setup cost isn't paid per request unless there are few requests.
Would love to know people's experiences of using Reframe in production.

Is the additional structure it imposes on the app worth the complexity it adds in learning the framework?
The death penalty is barbaric. The only time when a criminal should die is when they immediately threaten another person's life and there is no other safe way to stop them.

That's why I'm so impressed with how Norway handled Breivik after he was arrested.
http://workhack.com/finance
There is no honor in propping up corrupt departments and officers. The majority of police officers do. They are concomitant to maintaining the status quo.
Sure, and also everyone tends to go for the SF positions, as they pay better. I was just mentioning one theoretical way that remote working might be less competitive than on-site.
I know that some trees have adapted to fires. Some pine cones are held closed by a resin that is sensitive to high temperatures. These cones will not open to release their seeds until the critical temperature is reached, out with the old and in with the new and such.

However, if there's nothing left ot burn and the whole ecosystem is destroyed, that's a problem
Yes. We're migrating towards a more available store (one option we're testing out is Aurora) but availability wasn't our primary motivation in choosing DynamoDB. The main motivation was consistent performance with a dataset too large to fit into memory.
> It should answer the HR manager's primary question: Is this applicant the best person to help the company achieve its goals?

Yes that's actually something I didn't pay much attention. Thanks, will definitely keep in mind.