skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've done a lot of contract work as a software engineer over the past 5 years. It's a good way to experiment with a lot of different companies and industries.

It's generally true that contractors can't get promoted within the company. It's not unusual to see 40+ year old contractors still working as engineers.

The money is great but you really need to have a low risk investment strategy on the side... I don't think you can get rich from contracting but you can have a very decent retirement.

Contracting is good if you're burned out with startups that lead nowhere. It's the closest I've felt to being my own boss.
http://git.haproxy.org/?p=haproxy.git;a=commitdiff;h=e2d03d2...

Thanks and sorry for the noise
It’s very likely being flagged off the front page. Flagging can be used on topics that are guaranteed to start a flamewar and boy is this an evergreen flame festival topic.
Swift Server Project HTTP APIs
Doximity | Software Engineering, Data Science, DevOps | San Francisco (SOMA) or Remote | Full-time

We are the largest social network for doctors. What we do:

- Help doctors connect with each other, quickly and easily

- Keep healthcare professionals up to date by rapidly delivering clinical and impactful news, so they can focus on what matters the most -- their patients

- Help doctors refer patients quicker, build a referral network and recruit other doctors to their practice or health system

Where we stand:

- 70% of US doctors on the network

- 240 employees, half of which at SF SOMA office

- 60 engineers, 75 with data

- 1st in SF, 6th in US on Deloitte's 2016 Technology Fast 500 (https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/...)

Where to apply:

- Data Engineer http://grnh.se/kldfi61

- Data Integration Engineer http://grnh.se/nwmk3v1

- DevOps Engineer http://grnh.se/yq4xkr1

- Ruby on Rails Engineer http://grnh.se/8h1u2c1

- Android Software Engineer http://grnh.se/x078d61

- Test Automation Engineer http://grnh.se/62u4so1

- ... and more https://work.doximity.com/positions

Personal Note:

I've been with this company for almost 7 years and know many people here going on their, 3rd, 4th and 5th year anniversaries. It's the first place I've felt at home to work on stuff I love and continue to excel at my craft.

I’m also extremely proud of our founding team. Jeff Tangney is a second time founder. Our co-founders Nate Gross & Shari Buck have great experience and foresight in the medical industry. Just today, Huffington Post featured Shari Buck on being a female co-founder and the lessons she’s learned while building Doximity: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/5-things-i-wish-someone-...

I'm more than happy to have a personal chat with anyone about the company or any interested role, connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know it's via this post: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeybalachandran
I think that usually, peanut/other allergies are only dangerous if the person is eating peanuts, which that person can avoid (or other food provided for him/her if the office provides food).

If you're talking about a dog though, it is usually impossible for the person to avoid the dog.
The journalist is deluding herself : here in Europe we have guns registration (and cars too for that matter) and it doesn't stop mass killings.
I was never so happy to stay off social media as I was last night. I was awake, but not online, for about 2 hours after the LV shooting. My phone had a headline about 2 people dead when I went to bed. My wife woke up at 5am and shared the news with me when I woke up. By the time I engaged with the news sites, it was 8am this morning and most of the initial bullshit had been filtered away. Saved myself from a lot of unnecessary anxiety.
The pie in the sky is really just a mirage worshiped by cargo cultists. I'd much rather focus on more pragmatic and less pseudo-ideological approaches. Don't deliberately try to change the paradigm just for the sake of it; just focus on improving things that work, or finding new things that work (without preemptively patting yourself on the back and calling your solution revolutionary).

The apparent pressure to deliver a revolution seems inorganic and forced. It looks like ambition, but I think it's more like hype.
In this case it's worse. The people who are spreading serveless everywhere argue not only that it's simpler (anyway, simpler than what?), but most of all less expensive - and that's the main reason the companies should embrace it. Both these statements are false.
It's not cognitively possible for a user to simultaneously view every piece of content. Someone has to make a decision about what goes at the top.

Of course, users aren't passive, they could get their news elsewhere or change the filtering. But we know that defaults matter a lot. For many people, the order in which platforms present news is going to be profoundly influential.

The inescapability of choosing defaults settings, and the empirical fact that default settings do influence people a lot, taken together, imply an ethical responsibility on the part of platforms.

Making people smarter would be great - but you've got to be realistic about how effective that would be, and how long it would take.

What other usability problem would you solve by changing the people rather than the technology?
Coingage.co – cryptocurrency (coins, tokens) and blockchain talks!
”Using a firearm for home defense is socially accepted”

In the USA. There seems to be some correlation between that and the number of mass shootings in a country, so, maybe, that has to change if one wants to decrease the number of mass shootings.
> Microsoft was in the middle of their anti-trust fight so they couldn't afford to lose a "competitor" no matter how absurdly mismatched they were.

That's one possible explanation. I think a much more plausible explanation was that Steve Jobs needed a significant amount of capital infusion to turn-around Apple but he needed the terms to be reasonable, which was why he leveraged on his longstanding friendship with Bill Gates even though they were (unequal) competitors at that time.

It's next to impossible to get any form of capital for a dying company, whether debt or equity without having cut-throat clauses included to protect the investors' capital.
AWS EC2 Moves to per second billing
Well it's hard to tell; I didn't learn to code until college, but it seemed pretty natural to me because years ago I'd used KnP and Logo. It's hard to tease the causes apart---was programming easy to pick up because I had KnP, or was I only able to benefit from them because I was that kind of person?
Nameserver Documentation everywhere talks about selecting the fastest nameserver for most queries, but that's mostly internet myth at this point. RTT banding was removed from bind back in 2011. Unbound claims to support it but the band is 400ms.

On our biggest CC tld of a little over 3 million RRs our Unicast nameserver in the US receives the same number of queries as our Netnod anycast nameserver (70+ nodes worldwide).
What Developers Want and Need from Program Analysis [pdf]
In related news: eating too much carbohydrates makes you fat.
What did DARPA have a monopoly over exactly? They were and are a defense research agency.
> But NK does not act rationally

In what ways does NK not act rationally?
> I refuse to invest in serverless until I know that I can run the same code on minikube on my laptop as I can in <insert cloud provider here> because vendor lock in is real and will bite you in the ass one day.

If that is your concern, then you may want to consider that serverless isn't the right solution for your problem.

All the serverless runtimes across all the providers are basically identical. But that's not what makes them interesting. What makes them interesting are the ecosystems around them.

Lambda is the glue that binds AWS together. Most of your lambdas should be AWS specific, enough so that your vendor lock in won't be because of the specific Lambda runtime, but because of the services that you're using with your Lambda.
So, why do we have to integrate a full web browser and a language JIT compiler and a pretty full fledged VM into everything again? (XHTML rendering engine would suffice)

By again I recall Active Desktop. Except now with more standards.

Is it the cost savings of hiring a developer as a web developer?
Regarding leaks, yes, there were rumors of battery pack replacements due to corrections on welds and a separate production issue with ground terminal bolts.[1]

These issues could be due to the different composition of the 3 compared to the S and X - more steel, less aluminum - or with them trying to build a denser automated production line, or just general gremlins setting up new production.

[1] https://electrek.co/2017/09/29/tesla-model-3-production-ramp...
I like a lot of these. I especially connected with "going out for lunch" vs. "catered lunches". I totally get why companies prefer catered lunches, and am surprised more companies don't realize the benefits, but I really enjoy leaving the office for a bit and getting some sun.

That said, one thing I have an issue with is this: "“Mandatory fun” office events".

If we're talking a once-a-week thing, then yes, that's way over the top.

But if we're talking a company day out or something similar every half year or so, I think it's incredibly important. I think the bonding effect is good, but more importantly, if it's not coordinated, then there are people who will miss it. For one thing, for people married with children, going to a random "people in the office decided to go out today" is usually much harder than going to a "scheduled 2 months in advance mandatory event". For another thing, it is easy for this to devolve into some people bonding and everyone else not being part of it. So I think it is beneficial to have a once-in-a-few-months bonding experience.

(I also think lighter forms of this, like an in-office "happy hour" once a week, is a pretty good idea too).
IOHK Launches Cardano Blockchain
Neither is perfect. Today exemplifies that better than most. Citizen journalists gave us amazing raw footage of LV and sent us chasing the wrong man for much of the morning. Professional journalists did better with LV coverage but reported Tom Petty dead and then retracted their stories hours before he finally passed.

I guess I would ask Google and Facebook, etc. to keep 4chan and reddit off the top of news results in favor of more reputable news orgs. At the same time, I recognize that sites like those can absolutely provide unique info that mainstream media cannot. However, we have to recognize that the info is raw and unfiltered. It cannot become canon without further confirmation.
I think immer is brilliant. I just saw that you have guile bindings, which makes it even more exciting!

I like that they are lgpl as well. I am a believer in that kind of freedom definition, and I hope you can dual-license it successfully.
Contracting as a sw engineer is one thing.. contracting as a warehouse worker is the real problem
>>What percentage were created by H1Bs?

Start ups are largely built on sweat equity. The kind of monthly salary most H1Bs generally work on. That comes with a risk. Most immigrants take it anyway because they start from 0 and you can only grow from there. If enough people do this enough number of times, eventually the system will always product a Google or Microsoft.

So ultimately its about who is ready to work for cheap.
It's a question of taste. Inflammatory - yes, but bad? I'm not sure if I clicked "Why I still use Vim" as it's quite boring (I know why I'm using it, I don't need anyone else's justifications.) Now I'm happy I read it as the guy actually tried to benchmark these editors so that I don't have to - although arguably the actions measured are probably not a part of a daily routine of a typical programmer.
Workers at Fremont are complaining of overwork, time pressure, unsafe working conditions, and long hours. They're trying to join the UAW. It's not like they have production employees standing around doing nothing while the production engineers try to fix the line. "I’ve seen people pass out, hit the floor like a pancake and smash their face open. They just send us to work around him while he’s still laying on the floor."[1]

Comments on Glassdoor indicate that lower and middle management are disorganized.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-factory-workers-detail-...
Or just from home on your own computer, instead of your company laptop.
Oracle climbs on blockchain bandwagon with new cloud service
I don't know how this theory fits in with patient H.M. who was still capable of many types of learning and planning, despite having his entire hippocampus removed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison
At the least such a broad sweeping theory of how a brain region works should address how it fits in with evidence with the most famous lesion (and deeply studied) patient who did not have said brain area?
Ask HN: Visualizing how some HN submissions lead to other related submissions?
Here's something on the front page right now as I'm writing this question:

[What's been wrought using the Piece Table? (2014)] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15387672

It came up after a few hours of this other article talking about Text Editor data structures:

[Text Editor: Data Structures] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15381886

Say I wanted to analyze how some HN submission naturally lead to other related ones, and find some statistics for these submissions, like how long does it take for one "seed submission" to result in multiple other submissions of a similar time.

Is that already done? If not, how would one approach this. I'm looking for algorithms and analysis techniques that could potentially answer these questions. Given that my knowledge of data science and statistical analysis is ZERO, I'd love some pointers.
> Contracts are useless.

No, they are not.

1. If the code doesn't conform to the contract, it will fail on the contract boundary, with a well-defined error. If this is useless, then `assert` is also useless, which it is, of course, not.

2. With a sufficiently well-designed language and sufficiently smart compiler, you can move some contract checks to compile-time. See Racket.

3. If your language supports both static and dynamic typing, the contracts are a dual of static types, which lets you interface the static and dynamic parts of the code seamlessly and automatically (in both directions). Again, see Racket.

Meta: I wonder, why it's mostly static-typing proponents who aggressively evangelize, insult the other side, are 110% sure they're right even though there is no scientific evidence and so on. Could it be the bondage&discipline approach of static typing just appeals to people with a certain mindset, who are statistically more probable to engage in such behaviors, no matter the subject?
Life isn’t a movie: there are no mandatory self-fulfilling prophecies and learned helplessness is optional. Also, you can break by the bystander effect by actually doing something. Most people just pretend homeless people don’t exist, don’t deserve to be treated like people and shouldn’t be helped. Be different.
They talk about this, and did do some sort of things to account for it a little. That's why the conclude that more so then overall defect, languages are more correlated to categories of defects.
First-year reading list
Yeah, they're not the only ones with that misfeature. I gave up on the series for this reason (not joking!) - but now I hear the xz premium doesn't have em anymore, so hey, maybe I'll switch back again.

Although I'm a little worried reading the spec sheet. Maybe this is the first ever phone with a 4k display that actually works, but I'm skeptical. Most are simply wasteful battery hogs that simply cost extra money to be worse.
What percentage of those polled even bothers to vote now?
Having the ability to make something original, I suppose. But then you can question what is original.

I tend to think everything is somewhat derivative. But some things more than others. The things that are the least derivative, are the most creative.

And what this program does is more creative than most things computer programs do, and probably more creative than lots of things that, if a human did it, you'd call "creative."
As a contractor in the UK I feel like I have better pay and prospects than 90% of staff members.

Not 'promotion', but more respect for my expertise and more choice about my working practices.

'Promotion' is not something I've often observed happening in any of the software departments I've worked with of late.

It does scare me when people say things like "40+ contractors still working as engineers", as if 40 is old. I'm 40 next year and less than halfway through my working life (according to the government, obviously I'd like to retire early).
Off topic: How do you pronounce the name?
> all the way up to the Federal Circuit Appeals ...

I'd be curious to know what's the most procedurally complex trial out there. I.e. One where the distance between the original suit, and the issue at hand has the most steps. I.e original suit spawned a separate suit on the admissibility of evidence which got escalated and then spawned another suit on the procedural ... etc
Google launches Android Wear beta based on Oreo
Show HN: Minimalist Halloween Costumes
FWIW I have a couple of degrees, but the topic I'm outlining is most definitely not rocket science. Indeed, it's rabout educing something people assume is hard and expensive to some meter readings and a bit of simple Excel jockeying or similar. That method is published and being validated (and we should get a shiny cert from a prestigious lab soon), along with the code and inconclusive results (not enough data, so uncertainty too high).
The root of the US problem: it’s turning into a poor country because the vast majority of the greedy rich people hoarding trillions, that used to go to middle class as wages and to general government funds, and their corrupt politicians enabling this vicious cycle.

Social welfare and mental healthcare exist so people aren’t crawling on the street. Every living person needs a basic level of respect, care and dignity... if the can’t provide for themselves, falling through the cracks is not a solution but a source of many more, more expensive and worse, problems. So socialism for the rich and nothing for the poor isn’t sustainable and people will eventually go “French Revolution.” A stable democratic country has to balance competing tyrannies: rich vs. middle vs. poor, country vs. city and community vs. individual.
Custom mobile application development services
Indeed.

And video is a very passive medium, so I resist it often.
The particularly big leap Amazon made in its market valuation, was actually one very specific thing: AWS.

That tripled its market cap from ~$150 billion to where it's at now. Specifically when they started revealing how big it was, how fast it was growing, and the operating income numbers.

December 2014, the stock was at $300. Now it's $959. Nearly all of that gain is from that single thing, speculation about its future worth that is.

It's not the retail business or Echo or tablets or Kindle that did it. Those are not generating huge amounts of operating income.

The market is appraising (drooling about) AWS as being worth an extraordinary sum. Businesses are typically valued based on future projected earnings. For AWS that might be akin to $50-60 billion in sales and $16 billion in operating income (with a very rich multiple given our current market bubble). 20x multiple on $16b in operating income, there's $320 billion of Amazon's $460 billion. I'm not arguing AWS should be worth that, I'm saying the very inefficient market, filled full of mediocre investors and fools, is saying it is. One could argue the future operating income estimate might be high, but the market is frothing at the mouth right now, we're one or two notches (on a 10 notch scale) away from entering a euphoric insanity again given the market's (eg S&P 500) extreme PE ratio presently.

Throw in Kindle, Prime, Echo, Tablets on that AWS $300 billion valuation. The traditional retail business is being valued at maybe $50 to $80 billion right now. If you look at the operating income projections for Amazon for the next few years, analysts are forecasting it's going to skyrocket, and that's solely based on AWS. Here's what's really going to happen: severe disappointment. We've witnessing peak Amazon in terms of market valuation in this general time frame (whether that's $500x billion or $700 billion, this particular market bubble represents the highest valuation Amazon will have for the next ~15 years, something equivalent to the stagnation Microsoft's stock enjoyed post dotcom bubble). Bezos becoming the world's richest briefly, is equivalent to the economic bubble peaks when someone decides to build a new world's tallest skyscraper nicely timed with the next crash.
You managed to pick the two things where Rust is actually not improving on C++, because it's both more annoying and less usable compared to C++.

There's a reason the expression "fighting the borrow checker" was coined.

You're confusing your own biases and preferences for facts.
Terrorism now. Whats next, "unsavoury religious texts unapproved by the state"?

This is a slippery slope, people. But we already know that the UK is well and truly, deeply, sequestered in the abyss.
There are some actual productive uses for "slow" weapons. Farmers who might want to shoot predators, rabbits etc. Hunting animals for food as well if you support that.
That's great news! I used to buy the old z[123] compact series, but that glass back... I've got kids and it just doesn't work anymore. A phone needs to have some modicum of robustness to be useful. The ancient, crappy looking samsung s4 I now use is sadly functionally superior to the sony and apple high-end phones, simply because it doesn't shatter when dropped - instead, the plastic back cracks open (again), and maybe the battery get's detached. It's like an unintentional airbag. And it's not like that's a really robust phone either; pre-smartphone phones simply outclassed today's stuff.

Seriously, high end phones these days are a joke. They're not even trying. What the beep happened?
You could just use ngrok for this https://ngrok.com/
Yes, relying on port-knocking as your only authentication layer is not recommended; it's useful as a "front gate" to some other system.
> It's remarkable that you didn't just tick the box to show hidden files and directories

Of course I did, how do you think I found them? :-) BTW, I talked to support on the phone about this, they told me that backup/restore was not supported by OE and I was on my own with it.

> While it was binary and proprietary, several freeware solutions existed to work with the files and a bunch of paid software did even more. Either way, backing up and restoring wasn't all that difficult and certainly wasn't impossible.

Oh, I eventually did figure out how to back it up and restore it. My point is this is something the application itself should be able to do. It's a fundamental thing it should do.

As for the proprietary binary format, it turns out that Thunderbird said it could import it. I breathed a sigh of relief when it did so successfully. I should not have to rely on 3rd party tools to backup/restore/decode critical data for my business.

With TB there was no longer any reason to put up with that.

BTW, I have files going back 40 years, and email archives going back 25 years. The machines and programs that worked with those files are long gone. I prefer to store things as text files for long term storage, as much as possible, or at least the most common file formats like jpg.

Storing in a binary, proprietary format just isn't acceptable.

P.S. I used a bunch of file compressors back in the DOS days, and before DOS died I uncompressed all of those archives and stored the uncompressed files.

P.P.S. Thanks for taking the time to write out the tips, I hope there are others this can help.
Sounds as if you will love spacemacs!
> Returning stuff by mail is a pain

for now.