skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eh...I see your point, but it seems a tad hyperbolic. When I was interviewing for remote positions I saw similar numbers, so I agree with that.

What I don't agree with is mapping those numbers to competitiveness. How many of those 300-500 applications were actually competitive? You can do a first order qualification check on 300 - 500 resumes in a day if you're sorting into two piles: "I can immediately say no to this" and "I can't immediately say no to this."

You'll probably still have a lot to deal with at that point (though honestly I wouldn't be surprised if you've reduced 50% in my experience - people submit truly awful applications). Of those candidates, most are still going to be unqualified.

I distinctly recall phone interviewing 20 candidates back to back, each of whom couldn't answer very simple interview questions (and I mean simple, not "HN interview humblebrag simple"). I know, I know, this means we didn't have a high quality candidate pipeline. But that's harder to do with remote positions.

So to that last point, I suppose I have to concede if you're defining competition as higher numbers of raw applications. That's not the definition I'd use for competitiveness (though it's definitely a valid one), but probably better we get that sorted instead of talking past each other :). I would consider a position more competitive based on the quality of candidates applying to it, not based on the sheer number of people applying. As someone who has interviewed and worked in remote positions I've never really been concerned when applying for them, because I've always been reasonably confident I can hit the top n percentile of candidates, where n is inversely proportional to the total number.
I love how things like the 40 hour work week with two days off get enshrined as some kind of natural phenomenon that has always been with us.

40 hours is an arbitrary number that came from trade unionists demanding fair hours and Robert Owen's slogan:

“Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.”

I mean those two things: 8 hour work day and 8 hours of sleep have been considered to be the biological/natural requirements, when the research isn't there for it at all.

The reality is, some people can work for 100 hours while others can only work for 20 hours per week without without losing productivity.

This is why I'm sick of this stupid trope that nobody should be working 80 hour weeks. Guess what, I want to, that's how my body works, why are you trying to stop me from doing that? When I was in the military I would work 12 hour days every day and my co-workers would complain because I was "making them look bad" that they only worked 8-10. What? Go home if you want.

The kind of person you are should push you into those types of roles - not the other way around. A 20 hour a week capable person isn't going to last very long in a 100 hour a week job, and they shouldn't be going out for it.

I think the major contention though is that you can't realistically succeed and live comfortably anymore as just a 40 hour a week person, because all of those jobs are gone. So inevitably 20 hour a week people, get put into 60 hour a week jobs and then say the whole system is screwed up (maybe it is, I dunno).
What is the actual purpose of punishing people for breaking the rules of our society? It could be a mix of justice or safety, but it does set a norm that you will be held responsible for your actions. If you do something bad, there is a reactive action that society builds.

After all, TANJ (There Ain't No Justice) in the natural world. Punishing people for breaking laws is one way that society "upgrades" over the natural world.
Yes, please. Can you send me one?
People on HN will rather gently point out that Electron, being convenient to you, is at the same time a horrible resource hog and exactly the opposite of what an elegantly-written, efficient and optimized application would be.
Especially for some of us who actually create native apps using Electron might just be laziness - or inability to really care about the user.
Hopefully, we'll be mining asteroids by the time lithium scarcity becomes a problem
Yup. And it horrifies me every time.
> 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.

If that was true (in the US) then there would be more rehabilitation in prisons, preparing people to reintegrate into society. Instead of we don't and have a 75%+ recidivism rate for state prisons.

Also, the war on drugs.
Fair and Reasonable
Where I come from, "Gambiarra" sometimes has a bad connotation -- in the sense that it was not well thought. So, maybe, a lazy hack?
> We don't punish people because it makes us feel good or for some sense of fairness

I always thought this was exactly the reasoning behind the death penalty.
I dont see how its hyperbolic. This is the long tail at work. Remote work allows workers to fill a niche, but it will be very competitive for broad skillsets.
Maybe they show up and fight for your life but that's not a universal experience. Some people and communities rationally fear and dislike police officers.
It's unlikely that hackers could manage even a Chernobyl-scale problem on a modern nuclear plant. Chernobyl had several horrendous flaws. For one, it had a positive feedback: as the fuel got hotter, the reaction sped up. With modern plants the opposite occurs.

Also Chernobyl had no containment dome.

Even the old GenII designs in the U.S. have much better inherent safety than Chernobyl had. There's no way to hack away physical barriers. Even TMI, our worst accident ever with a full meltdown, did not breach the containment barriers.

And of course with any commercial plant, there's absolutely zero chance of an actual nuclear detonation, much less a thermonuclear one as mentioned in the comment above. The fuel just isn't enriched enough to work as a bomb.
When the maker culture becomes eminently entrepreneurial,
we should wonder what mechanisms are set into motion. It
may as well be the old capitalist drive to turn the
critique to itself into the gears of its own reinvention
gaining ground. Could we ever escape that path?

Lately when I read things like this I wonder, how are the people in the movement -- whatever movement -- supposed to make a living without being entrepreneurial?
Which goes towards 60 hour weeks are not sustainable...
How secure is 256 bit security?
Ask HN: What are your thoughts on reposting?
I write in a data blog a decent amount, and really think readers here would like some of the posts and find them interesting. It's just so tough and decently lucky to get a post upvoted in the first 15 minutes or it gets lost.

Don't worry, not trying to get publicity for what I wrote here, just wondering if trying to repost an article a few weeks later would be reasonable and not looked down upon.
I would say, explicitly enter zip code as a first approximation. Easy and not something people generally have an issue with (they can enter work or nearby). The site put me in California, which I am not. I think you could get better traction with more accuracy, and zipcode will do it.

That and an easy way to add your favorite venue near you (since it looks like there is only one venue in the US outside of CA).

Visually and concept wise it looks interesting. I bet there are outdoor adventure meetups in most cities that would be interested.
I'm also wondering how systems of cells can produce feelings, and of what "strength" those feelings are bounded to be. Could it be that a system made from not cells but humans produce bigger feelings?

Anyway, regarding your comment, I'm not sure if we can say anything about how we should structure larger bodies (like societies) if we don't know anything about the feelings of each of their parts.
I think the structure it enforces is pretty minimal compared to many of the current JS frameworks. It doesn't take so long to get used to. Definitely much less overhead than redux in my experience. It boils down to 3 basic concepts.

I've made some moderately sized apps for it. Re-frame is incredibly productive and fun to use for a variety of things in my experience. The abstractions sometimes leak a bit (side effects can be difficult to make happen cleanly) but for most tasks it lends itself to really solid architecture.

I think they underplay how important the "form-3" components can be for complex apps (where you use more explicit lifecycle hooks) because JS events are frequently necessary, and they're required when you need to make use of raw JS libs.

Debugging in cljs is trickier than JS overall, which isn't surprising, is the real downside. But imo cljs fits a lot better into the reactive/immutable patterns that people are aiming for in the front end world these days.
I think you might be missing the author's last point which is that in a competitive field, even a small increase in output can lead to a large increase in payoff.

In his example of getting research funding, it's a step function: either you get funded (y=1) or you don't (y=0), and because you're competing with others, even a small output increase can take you from the 0 side to the 1 side.
Suppose I use program foo as part of some enterprise application on a server. I am inadvertently relying on undocumented or undefined behavior of foo.

An update to foo changes what happens in that undocumented or undefined case, and with the new behavior my application does not start correctly.

There is nothing the package manager can do to ensure that this does not happen because there is nothing wrong with anything the package manager is managing. The bug is entirely in my code. All the update did was expose it.

The question them is when will that now exposed bug actually get hit, so that I become aware of it and fix it.

The purpose of the reboot is to make sure that exposure happens at a time when it will not cause much harm and I will not have a lot of trouble finding it.
Does there exist any acceptable mixing of art + war in your view?
What are your thoughts on Picasso's "Guernica" [1] ?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_(Picasso)
It does more than just add structure, it also improves performance.
I think Gruber is right, but the problem that's going to be hard to sell to some buyers is that many of these "supply constrained" components are _only_ an issue for Apple's giant sales. I think it's clear that individually, no or very few single android handset models sell at iPhone scale. Samsung and others will continue to be able to fit "premium" constrained features like OLED displays to their cheaper phones, simply because they don't have to make as many of them.

In the case of the iPhone, I'm potentially paying the premium solely because it's hard for Apple to scale production - a harder sell if several competing Android handsets that are not as supply constrained can offer these things for 3 or 4 hundred dollars less. I'm willing to bet this will work out ok for Apple in the end, but if this happens it's probably going to be a rough ride among some journalists like we saw with the verge's myopic reporting over the 7's headphone jack removal.

I think there's another additional motivation which Gruber doesn't touch on - as iPhone sales growth starts to cool, it's going to get harder for Apple as a company to continue growing at its typical rate, especially when the iPhone is responsible for ~70% of Apple's earnings. Juicing the margins on the most expensive iPhone models could be an attractive way (for Apple shareholders anyway...) to boost iPhone revenues in general to keep the growth train going.
From: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> Are reposts ok?

> If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.

> Please don't delete and repost the same story, though. Accounts that do that eventually lose submission privileges.
Do you think it's desirable to give more power to individuals? Personally, I think enlightened despotism is probably the best form of government in terms of fairness, efficiency, etc.

In the US (a democratic republic), I see that the decision makers act in their own short term self-interest.

The risk with an enlightened despot (think typical corporate structure) is that the person at the top can really cause damage, because they don't have checks on what they can do. We can imagine the downside right now -- the strength of the republic is currently being stress tested to see if it can salvage itself simply by resistance, friction, and inefficiency to prevent Mr. Trump from destroying so much.
Westmeath vs. Armagh live stream [pdf]
Charging infrastructure required for 100% electric transport in the Netherlands
Whoops! Did not expect just being in the comments of a post to /. it that bad. It's hosted with a friend on a not-so-modern platform so the bandwidth limit is not that high.

Back up now, and I broke the path to the silly stock photos, should help keep it up.
See previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8769351
Is this really so? Perhaps in the long term 40-hour-a-week pickers pick more than 60-hour-a-week pickers in absolute terms simply because the extra recovery time helps them be fitter and have more energy.
How is building a telescope like writing software? One of favorite sayings:

http://wiki.c2.com/?TelescopeRule

Telescope Rule

Thomson's Rule for First-Time Telescope Makers: "It is faster to make a four-inch mirror then a six-inch mirror than to make a six-inch mirror."

-- Programming Pearls, Communications of the ACM, September 1985
The United States justice system, as well as that of most common wealth countries, is based not on safety or rehabilitation but on vengeance and systemic racism. To claim otherwise, when the United States has institutionalized slavery ("Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.") and more prisoners per capita or by absolute number than any other country on this planet is naive at best. The overcrowding at every prison, chronic corruption and mismanagement, privatization of the system and unionization of its beneficiaries, and lack of all but the cheapest rehabilitation programs makes it nearly impossible for convicts to reenter society and become productive members. Texas is one of the most egregious examples - especially given that they speed up the appeals process on purpose and have shit for oversight on forensic science in criminal cases. Texas alone has executed over 500 people since 1980, many of them borderline too mentally incompetent to stand trial, let alone face death row. Combine that with a culturally accepted racism among law enforcement, itchy trigger fingers, zero training for how to actually deal with people, and a cultural obsession with violence and you get the United States: a place where entire communities of Latinos and African Americans are decimated because a significant fraction of their working age males are stuck in a tiny cell with nothing to learn except more crime and nothing to do when they get out except more crime.

Countries with prison systems that try to rehabilitate, like Norway, Sweden, Denmark, etc., regularly close prisons and they have an amazing track record with recidivism. People like to claim "blah blah homogeneous society blah blah" but the fact is that common wealth countries like to kill and enslave people to punish them - often because they view it as doing "God's work."

We do not have justice systems, we have vengeance factories.
I have never had any success with applications to larger companies, although I dropped a lead with one of the larger companies in the ICO market after I got a very good offer at a promising early-stage startup, where I could engineer something I always wanted to do.

The easiest way to get a remote position is to be start a relationship as a contractor. Help early stage startups build a product, try to be as valuable as possible and they should try to keep you as an employee when the time comes. Everyone is remote and you create what you want, but you earn slightly less (but that's still a shit ton of money compared to your local area, for example if I offset living costs I have more money left every month than I would in US). Yes, it's a lot riskier, but when the company explodes, if you can sell yourself well, it should be fairly easy to find another job in less than 2 weeks.

Now obviously you need to sell yourself somehow. It was especially difficult for me in the early stages of my career, but right now in my CV I have a list of companies, some defunct, some still existing, in which I was a Lead SWE on major projects. I was forced to make vital decisions, learned a lot from it, now I can sell this knowledge. There is no replacement for that.

Ironically I find most of my contracts on "cheaper" websites such as Upwork. "Premium" marketplaces such as Toptal are useless, due to their markups almost doubling programmers' hourly rate.
I keep saying this, but I feel like gathering correct, valid, and formatted data is the biggest part of machine learning and data analysis these days. Learning the algorithms takes time, but using libraries for learning is decently quick. Getting the data you want to use takes the most time and effort.

Great to see posts and sites like this that share public data for people to learn ML and possibly even result in benefits.
I wonder how they got this curve. A lot of things can be sustained for 1 week cannot be sustained in the long term. I'd say in the long term:

* 140-168 hours/week --> almost certain death.

* 100-140 hours/week --> at risk of cardiovascular disease and many other serious medical conditions. Possible early death.

* 80-100 hours/week --> still super-bad for your body. Forget raising children, dating, getting married, or even making friends. You won't have time for any of those. Expect clinical depression.

* 60-80 hours/week --> you might be able to have meals with friends but forget having a life, hobbies, or anything outside of work. Expect depression and overall culture of unhappiness.

* 50-60 hours/week --> sustainable but not really fun. You can't join family or friends for dinner. Expect talented employees to leave because they'll find something that they enjoy more than being in your company.

* 40-50 hours --> reasonable level for long-term sustainability and retention
i would have a problem posting them publicly. Now, if someone wants to trick Comcast support so they can pay my bill, go ahead !
Kudos for the clarification. Your argument makes a lot more sense given the context of your experience.
So, Amazon actually kind of agrees! They talked about this very issue of hot keys and overprovisioning at their most recent conference. The thing is it was buried in a session on Aurora and they didn't mention DynamoDB by name -- they just called it nosql -- but they noted that a customer cut their costs 40% by moving to Aurora. Because it does automatic heat management and just bills you for what IO you use.

This is somewhat at odds with their top-level messaging which still pushes DynamoDB as the most scalable solution. And perhaps it is... there are some scalability limits to Aurora. Writes are bottlenecked by one instance. 64TB max. I think performance drops when you exceed the in memory cache. But those limits are still quite large.

Basically I sense some tension between the DynamoDB and Aurora teams and I wonder where this is all going to shake out in the long run.

Here's the full quote (I transcribed it so may contain errors):

"The one thing that surprised me is that there are some customers who are moving their nosql workload to aurora. There are two reasons for that. One, it’s a lot easier to use Aurora because it’s mysql compatible compared to nosql because the interfaces and transaction characteristics are so different. What is also interesting is people also saved money because the IO cost is much lower. In no SQL if you have a large table it gets partitioned then the IO gets partitioned across all the table partitions that you have. And if you have one partition that is hot then you have to provision based on the IO requirement of the hot partition. In the case of Aurora we do automatic heat management so we don’t have this hot parition issue. Second we don’t charge based on provisioned IO. It’s only the IO that you use. And that actually saves a lot of money. In this particular case this is a big social company, interaction company, I cannot tell the name, and they reduced their operational costs by 40% by moving from nosql to Aurora" [1]

[1] https://youtu.be/60QumD2QsF0?t=17m01s
A counter anecdote, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/06/19...

More scientifically biased advice than an anecdote, https://www.nps.gov/subjects/bears/safety.htm
If that was true we wouldn't have capital punishment at all. Capital punishment is all about revenge, people talk about it in terms of what the perpetrator "deserves". The fact that it's utterly innefective in stopping crimes is only now starting to get figured out and addressed.
Where can I find this research showing the health of these 100 hour persons?
To me, there is one extremely insightful comment on the original post. The commenter asked what the timezone of the remote positions were and if that had an effect on the applications and hiring team.

As I'm sure anyone who has had to get up at weird, uncomfortable hours in the past to work with remote teams in India can attest, there is definitely a big difference between someone working remote in your country (3-4 hours difference, if not Russia) and someone working remote on the other side of the world (8-12 hours difference).

Greece is GMT+2 or GMT+3, depending on the time of the year. SF is GMT-8 or GMT-7, depending.

I know in a perfect world that remote workers would take jobs from a queue and work asynchronously and then submit their work to another queue. But the world doesn't work that way. People are still people, teams are still teams, we are not (all) coding robots yet.
> Electron might just be laziness - or inability to really care about the user.

Or it might be that it is just good enough for the target user. My 2013 Macbook has enough power to run all the Electron apps I need without slowing down...well it did once I removed Atom and learned to love Visual Studio Code.

I think that Atom's performance woes and resource hogging tends to be a stand-in for all atom apps.
September1942 – Making the New York Times
> Why did you use MongoDB if your domain model wasn't suited?

Because MongoDB's marketing sold it as the hot new datastore that made SQL legacy - "newer! faster! web scale!" not "only use this if your data isn't relational".

The reference documentation might be more accurate but the way it was publicised certainly wasn't.
Funding a startup with credit card; good or bad?
Because the best way to know if someone has ability in engineering is if you've worked directly with them before. Don't confuse friends and relatives with someone you've worked with before in a professional setting.
The issue is that a normalized office environment will demand or imply that all workers work the same number of hours. The suggestion that you can consistently work 80 hours a week might be viable for you, but what about those who only get 20 hours before their productivity craters? What should you, or that person, do in the normalized 40-hour environment?

And what if the 20 hour worker produces more than you in 80 hours? For many environments, pay is by hour because that's the easiest thing to measure. Or it's per annum (salary) and it's supposed to track some loose or arbitrary or indirect metric.

If you shake loose the norms of a 40 hour work week, you have an awful lot of reconciliation to deal with before we efficiently extract the optimal and earnest amount of labor from all workers and compensate them appropriately with respect to their output and not their hours.
Why do we keep rewriting libraries like this? We were writing the exact same thing at one of my previous jobs back in 2010.