skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Do you ever feel the urge to work on something tangible?
Besides your computer, that is!

I've been at this for about 15 years now. Writing code. Making websites. Making people's computer problems disappear basically.

I have lived a life "in tech" almost exclusively.

I was talking to my neighbor the other day who is a plumber by trade.

He was explaining how he is working on a new apartment building right now installing all of the faucets and pipes and what not. Running up and down stairs because there is no elevator installed yet, etc. Basically getting his hands dirty.

I have never thought this before... but as he explained it to me I actually started getting envious of him.

Which is an idea that I never thought I could ever have in my entire life.

I want to do something real. With my hands. That other normal real people can see and appreciate.

Like a working tap faucet for example. That's pretty awesome if you think about it! It's a magical button that gives fresh water to real people whenever they want! They might not know it... but they LOVE that tap and really appreciate it!

Whenever I learn a new algorithm or a new CSS trick or whatever that I think is cool... my only outlet is online essentially. I know a few local people who can talk shop so to speak... but after 15 years I was hoping to have met more than a handful of my ilk.

Maybe I'm just depressed? Maybe I'm just bored by my own routine? I don't know.

So I ask you HN, are there any older programmers out there who just got stir-crazy churning out the same old code year after year just to make a buck?

What did you do to overcome that hurdle?

Thanks for reading!
Skimming through this makes me feel even more comfortable using my iPhone ... look how smart you need to be to exploit it!
>Do other companies do this? Unless this is GE-style force ranking, I've never heard of it.

Probably not right during the ramp up of the most critical product in company's history...
How to Activate Comcast Xfinity Services Online
This is a cultural/incentive problem with big companies. They don't know how to innovate and are afraid to give up control. So they spend their time and resources on financial engineering, clinging to the old way of doing business. Restructuring and mergers are the only way they see forward, because they would rather increase profits by replacing employees and removing choice for consumers than by innovating.
Doubtful, but I'm sure you could find a way if you really tried, maybe with someone to talk to you while you sleep.

Euphoria is only one of several effects on the consciousness, and in many cases the deliberate cognitive processes that are enabled/invited by that combination of effects are the real treatment. This is when the issues causing the depression are thought patterns, which can sometimes be more effectively examined and dealt with under the influence of ego-fear-dissolving euphoria, dissociativity, form constant hallucinations, etc.
Once again, emergency services are required to see you without payment in advance. Treating an ongoing condition requires multiple visits to a doctor who is not going to see you if you don't pay. By the time a chronic condition gets bad enough to qualify as an emergency, it's often too late to treat.

...Did you read that article you linked to? It outright says "I do think medical bills contribute to or cause a significant number of bankruptcies."
That’s a decent counterexample, although in my opinion Disney didn’t look at all out of touch with consumers just before their 2009 acquisition of Marvel or their 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm (Star Wars and Indiana Jones). Oh, and don’t forget Disney’s 2006 acquisition of Pixar, who has continued to do quite well commercially, critically, and in my humble opinion.

My gut reaction would have been far worse if a brand with very negative consumer connotations (like Comcast) had acquired Marvel or Lucasfilm or Pixar. Let’s be real, DreamWorks hasn’t made anything as wonderful as How to Train Your Dragon since their 2016 acquisition by NBCUniversal (owned by Comcast). ;)
I think his comment was fine and by the looks of things a few others feel it was fine too. The purpose of the comment section is discussion. Interesting meta discussion is discussion and still in some way relevant. Some of the best threads have evolved into meta discussions or taken things to a higher level.
The top three management consulting firms are ranked #1, #3, and #11 on Glassdoor's best places to work. Clearly their up-or-out policies aren't seen as horrible by their own employees. And as a consultant who works at one of those firms, I've never seen anyone sabotage someone else's performance, not once. In fact, you are probably rated best when you help support those around you. Certainly the policy causes stress, but these firms are top destinations for MBAs regardless.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Award/Best-Places-to-Work-LST_KQ0,...
L'article "la fabrique" s'est étoffé. En bien ?
> Tesla said the performance-based departures were not considered layoffs and not subject to state notifications. It also said the moves have generally boosted worker morale, as high-performing employees have been rewarded.

Maybe I'm just paranoid but this part kind of smells to me.
It primarily, but interesting topics from across the spectrum pop up.
Only California county that sent an alert to cellphones has no reported deaths
If you are right then the talk about performance is just subterfuge to circumvent the law, and also it starts to look like they also illegally targeted workers talking about a union (which certainly looks bad if you've just been in the news for having too many workers injured on the job).
What style - firing 2% of your employees in a given year? That is not a very high rate for a large company. It's only news because everything Tesla is news.
I didn't know it either, so ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignment_(Dungeons_%26_Dragon...

A chaotic neutral character is an individualist who follows their own heart and generally shirks rules and traditions. Although chaotic neutral characters promote the ideals of freedom, it is their own freedom that comes first; good and evil come second to their need to be free.
You imply there is a true sense of superiority somewhere. What could be more a true measure of general superiority than wealth? It comes from succeeding in a game that everyone's playing.
Its the morality (alignment) system of dnd; lawful nuetral and chaotic on the x, good nuetral and evil on the y.

The y represents what you trend towards (good v evil decisions) and the y represents the degree by which you do so.

So chaotic nuetral implies that you're generally nuetral, but its unpredictable when you'll make a good or evil decision (ie the reviewer somewhat arbitrarily lets you go on a non-critical mistake)
Found my citation for that: http://www.drsteinemann.com/Articles/Steinemann%20et%20al.%2...
I'm not interested in debating the definition of OS. If the textbooks are as wrong as you imply, I guess I'm wrong too.
in a free society some people will choose to disassociate themselves from it.
Qualcomm demands to ban the sale and manufacture of iPhone in China as part of
Adobe CEP HTML Engine is based on Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) version 3. It includes also a version of IO.js under the hood. Despite of it's now merged back with the Node.js project, developers have access to browser, but to entire stack of "server" technologies also.
> Seems to work very well for this consulting company.

But is it working for the rest of us?
Forgotten and neglected theories of Poincaré [pdf] (2006)
No, this is exactly what a 'working competitive market' looks like. If you somehow still believe the simplistic fantasies of economics 101 with a clean partition between 'the market' and the meta-market game, then you urgently need to wake-up.
Do they set a "quota" for 2%? Or is it that they do it every year, and 2% is about the number that falls out?

I do agree that a "firing quota" is backwards; it should be a standard of performance. But even in a healthy, high-performing company, 1 (or maybe 2) out of 100 people being a drag/net-negative contributor doesn't sound far too off. Ultimately I think it helps the other 98 people to ask those two to leave as soon as it's clear they're not going to become a net positive. If that assessment comes at a specific time of year, so be it; if it's "Okay, we have /n/ heads to chop off, where are they coming from??"... then yeah, not so much.
They could be, but a) YouTube hasn't been doing much to market its live streaming services to Twitch's audience, and b) Twitch does a way, WAY better job of allowing streamers to make money than YT does. YT has been demonetizing videos at the drop of a hat, much to many creators' frustration, without providing any tools for creators to make alternative revenue, including locking down the ability to link to Patreon unless you already have a very established channel.

Compare that to Twich, which has multiple ways to support streamers right in-app and available to even pretty low-viewership streamers.
LOC can be a huge indicator of quality of code imho—would you want to work on a 100k loc app that is more or less crud operations for a specific domain? Etc.
I doubt this will be good for the little guys. Personal experience in the games industry here. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe.
Then again if you ask the average US freshman if the US military shot and killed a bunch of student protestors, you'd find a number who wouldn't believe you.

Saying "US military" is somewhat misleading.

The soldiers who shot and killed four students at Kent State University were part of what we call the "National Guard".[1] These are reserve military units.

National Guardsmen usually have full-time civilian jobs and are only called into service when needed. Sometimes these soldiers are called "weekend warriors". A National Guard unit is controlled by an individual state up until the time that the US government needs its services.

It would be more correct to call those soldiers "Ohio state military". At the time of the shootings, the National Guard unit involved was under the control of Governor Rhodes of the State of Ohio.[2]

There is a big distinction in the USA between "federal" (aka national US) and "state" government. This distinction isn't necessarily clear to foreigners. Granted, this distinction isn't necessarily clear to about 70% of US citizens either. But that's an entire other discussion.

Edit: the law has been updated since then, but something called the Posse Comitatus Act was in effect at the time.[3] It is against the law for the US military to act as a domestic police force:

From and after the passage of this act it shall not be lawful to employ any part of the Army of the United States, as a posse comitatus, or otherwise, for the purpose of executing the laws, except in such cases and under such circumstances as such employment of said force may be expressly authorized by the Constitution or by act of Congress

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_of_the_United_S...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
Is this significantly different from the original site being at anonymoussms.com and me registering anonymoussms.io and doing the same thing?

I don’t think I buy that this attack isn’t just as possible on the real web.
Agree, don't give this clown any of your information. This "startup" will do absolutely nothing and appears to simply be a marketing gimmick.
> but still extremely handy to know and use in 2017

Dude, you're seriously understating this as if it's antiquated but useful.

It's used in immensely in bio field and disease and any thing that require time to event (reliability).

It's an "old" method in so far as when it was created but still relatively new and in late 90s or so people are still pushing survival analysis (example: Counting theory was used recently to prove certain things about survival analysis.) There are still new method of CIs and tests. And survival trees.

Also IIRC Cox model papers is one of the highly most cited paper either in a med field or overall I forgot.
Start with a hobby.
It is a two word summary of the following two paragraphs:

They join program committees for conferences, but they have a maniacal distaste for the peer reviewing system. There have been too many missed opportunities at the hands of ill-justified criticisms. They care so little for the process that they will actively try to sabotage it. They roll a d6 for each review and assign it the corresponding score. I was lucky this time, but many others haven't been.

Usually, they take great pleasure in writing an incomprehensible review with no relation to the text they've read. But today is different, they only have one review to write. They rolled an accept, now the dungeon master exposes their bidding.

You would not ordinarily expect a chaotic neutral in academia. Academia is very bureaucratic, which fits with a Lawful alignment. A chaotic neutral character isn't even going to pretend to care about the rules. It makes you wonder how the hell they have remained in the system this long when they are so obviously phoning it in with no effort and no pretense at making at effort. It is such an obvious fuck you and your damn rules attitude, it is incomprehensible how they have failed to get fired.
I know Tesla seems to hold a special place for many people. But I don’t see how these business practices result in them disrupting the automotive industry.
1k seems pretty low for sales staff if we really are including the showrooms. I'm counting ~100-110 showrooms listed on Tesla's website, so that would amount to 10 people per showroom. Doable, I guess, but still low.

Are janitorial/maintenance staff considered to be employees in this count? Or are they contracted out?
No More Best Practices
The story was formatted with Shorthand [1]

Does anybody know an open source equivalent? Thanks.

[1] https://shorthand.com/
A Common Logic to Seeing Cats and Cosmos
most large IT company do, including amazon google and ibm
Ask HN: Any good rails 5 starter app similar to hackathon-stater for Node.js app?
Hackathon-starter is one of very popular nodeJs starter app with close to 21k+ stars on GitHub. Are there any rails 5 starter app which has most of features such as authentication, authorization, admin, testing, payment processing, blogging, e-commerce and other features integrated to it? I have come across with a couple of rails starter app which do not have all features. Or community support is sparse.

1.What are the disadvantages for having lots of features?

2.Why rails community is not coming up with a starter app similar to hackathon-starter?
If you haven't used flex & bison and you're writing your first compiler, you need to learn them and still take care of the things they don't do for you out of the box (they don't know C and the context of the input).

IOW, it looks like the hardest work may still be up to you, but now you're dependent on external tools and self-hosting has become a bit questionable/problematic (you'd want those tools to be compiled by your compiler as well, right?).

Parsing tokens, OTOH, isn't a big deal. You don't need heavy artillery for them.

IOW, if you haven't had lots of experience with those tools or compiler creation already, you may not gain much from using them for the first time. If you have, you may reuse your experience and possibly even code.
High-level executives at Tesla are bailing out.
Back when Musk announced his overoptimistic production schedule for the Model 3, his two top production executives quit.[1] Nine more high-level executives have left so far this year.[2]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-04/two-tesla...
[2] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/08/02/tesla-ts...
To be fair Bitcoin is also having trouble with this
“Life time use” != "use over a long period of time"

In epidemiological surveys, lifetime use == reports using at least once.
That's... a lot more than I expected TBH. Looks more like a list of sites to straight up block since most look like scam domains.
Good points. I don’t have a good idea of how Twitch streamers make money now, but my impression is that it’s mostly through subscriptions (through Twitch) and donations (not through Twitch). Even back 5 years ago streamers talked about how most of their audience (being tech-savvy) used Adblock, and I suspect that situation hasn’t gotten any better. Is Twitch making most of its money from cuts of subscriptions?
It does look more like a vocational boot camp. There are two tracks mentioned on the website: "Software Developer", basically a full stack web developer, and "Computer Support Specialist". Not exactly computer science.
Requiring large numbers of people to agree to a change makes it predictable - I've seen few surprises from Western governments; whatever one thinks of Trump, his behavior is what he advertised in the campaign.

But whatever your theories, the data is that democracies do have the most stable and predictable business and legal environments, and more so than China where instability and lack of rule of law is a complaint of businesses, especially foreign ones. Almost all the world's leading businesses are based in democracies; the vast majority of business is done in democracies. Those monarchies that ran the world for millennia didn't perform so well.

It's not just predictability either; corruption is a huge problem. In places with lifetime appointments, what happens to corrupt leaders? They can't be voted out, and lacking the rule of law and separation of powers, they will not be investigated and tried (unless a more powerful leader causes them to be). And why should we think that lifetime appointees will care at all about the voters? The lesson is, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Countries without democracies, in fact, stagnate (such as China until the encounter with the West in the 19th century and again under the Communists (compare w/ Taiwan and Hong Kong), the USSR, N. Korea (compare with S. Korea) and many, many more). Also, by not giving citizens a forceful voice, they ignore and overlook citizens' interests, leaving serious issues unaddressed. Even the well-intentioned cannot centrally plan politics any better than they can centrally plan economics - nobody knows enough to understand and address the needs of hundreds of millions.

Finally, one reason democracies have more prosperity is that they are more dynamic. In autocracies, economic success tends to depend much more on access to those in power. The government will never allow a SpaceX to challenge the favorites of the powerful, Boeing and NASA; or allow Microsoft and Compaq to take down IBM; the Internet to take down the telecomm system (at least not until it was proven to be a necessity in the West), etc. It's because the autocrats have no reason to allow a challenge to their own power and every reason to prevent it.

I'm afraid this debate was settled long ago, around 1776 in the U.S., and monarchy and autocracy clearly lost.
Coding Interview Cheatsheet
I think it would make a trip to a psychologists office much more exciting
As a professional photo editor and historian, colorized photos really agitate me.

As a photographer, collector and enthusiast of vintage prints and photos and amateur historian, I deeply appreciate the aesthetic of colorized photos and understand the motivation to reproduce and master it. There is more to art than truth.

The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival. - L'Intemporel (Third volume of 'The Metamorphosis of the Gods'), André Malraux (1957)
The Utility of the Humanities in the 21st Century
We have minesweeper :)
Knowledge that ammonia can counteract chlorine is quite useful. I'm not sure if I would do an experiment involving lethal amounts of chlorine but that knowledge statistically increases lifespan.

"Fire Burns and hurts" is an early lesson for many people, in a vaguely similar way, reading a crazy book like that is a shortcut past the more life-ending lessons.
The first few bundles actually made a point of Linux support including support for porting games that didn't support it.
Thanks! I didn’t even intend to have what I would call a “meta discussion.” I intended to express my opinion, but with a disclaimer that I recognize my opinion to be a gut reaction and that my mind is open.
I’m not going to look for references right now, but there is current research into the anti-inflammatory effects of classical psychedelics.

Anecdotally, it has been speculated by researchers that it is in fact this effect that produces many of the observed benefits, apart from the psychedelic experience itself.

And so people are looking at analogs that can have some of the same receptor affinity profiles without causing psychedelic effects, or with much diminished psychedelic effects.

Personally I think a protocol such as what you suggest is a better approach and would work.
Hallucinacions are part of the healing with any psychedelic for me. Set yourself in a pleasant environment with cool people, and the experience that you get will be long lasting and behavior changing. Not always life changing, but it always added something positive to my views, thinking or overall scence of wellbeing. At it is the same for mushrooms, lsd and ayahuasca
To elaborate further, "firing" makes sense if Tesla is pinning its low Model 3 production numbers on inefficient and/or incompetent staff.
How much money have these websites made? We estimate their joint profit at over US $43,000.

Why are they even bothering? The headaches involved in doing this aren't justified by the dinky revenue.
I don't remember. Googling gave me these:

http://educationnext.org/much-too-early/

https://www.education.com/magazine/article/higher-math-grade...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201004/ki...
Hey!

You are not alone. I started getting this feeling around 2-3 years back and the feeling still lingers in me. I want to get out of tech (its been around 9 years in tech for me), and build real stuff, stuff you could feel and touch and adore.

I would quit tech, if i figured out what i wanted to build (for real). I would augment my craft with tech, but i wouldn't want to be working in tech to make a living.

And no, you are not depressed for gods sake! You are absolutely normal! The problem with the tech industry as i see it, is that you never attain mastery over your craft. It is a never ending game. You always have something new to learn - the paradigms keep shifting and priorities keep changing. While that may excite the majority, there are a bunch of us who would like to master our craft to perfection - and this sense is hard to attain in tech (please feel free to disagree, and if you are the lucky few please get in touch). I have envied craftsmen too.

But if you talk to them, they would probably envy us - since we make more money than them.

Best thing i figured is, use your privilege of making more money than majority and secure your future so you could buy some time to explore the craft you want to perfect. It should be on the side. And once you are clear you want to do it for the rest of your life - quit your job and move on to work on your craft.

Hope that helps!
I know someone who just got fired in this round at Tesla. His manager never communicated to him that he was a bad performer. He was not on a PIP or any performance plans. He was also working on Model 3. One fine morning his manager called him and said this would be his last day. He is a single income earner and was so shocked by this news that he is getting borderline depressed. They offered only 2 weeks of severance.
> Our Mobile Phone networks are expensive in the US

No they're not. Cell phone bills are one of the only two deflationary categories in the basket used to determine rate of inflation by the federal bank, iirc.

That aside, I agree with your view. No one uses Sprint if they have a choice, it's their (previously) cheaper rates that locked people in (via contract or via simple inertia).