skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The state of tech in Berlin vs. global trends
There are many stories to tell that could paint a better picture of what it’s like at the company I've called home since moving to Berlin almost a year ago, from the funny (we are not allowed to eat the “good” snacks as they are reserved for clients) to the soul crushing (obscure deadlines for the sake of “challenging” the team). The first draft of this rant went down a list of grievances but ultimately there appears to be some sort of major rift between business and tech and right now business is winning. While the tech team itself is full of agile thinkers (agile in the broad sense of iteratively released products) the business side of things plays lip service while clearly moving closer and closer to old school, clock in clock out, siloed, top down management that should have been stamped out of any modern startup leaning business school worth its salt.

My view: a tech team works with management to achieve goals (maybe based on user data or feedback). MVP equals the simplest solution to test implementation and build it out if it works (using measurable goals) or move to the next option if it doesn’t, repeat. Our management team’s view: dictate a solution (with no user data or feedback) with a deadline and roll it out fully completed. If it goes pear shaped roll back to a subset of users, triage.

The main concern I have is whether it is a fluke to this company (action: apply to new company in my new city), indicative of Berlin tech as a whole (action: move out of the country) or an industry wide trend (action: rethink my life) OR am I just whinging and need to shut up and code like the code monkey I am?
I can't support this enough. I'd add laying off alcohol. I haven't been diagnosed with depression but I can get in a serious funk if I haven't been exercising, sleeping enough, eating right, or if I've been drinking too much. Again this isn't a one size fits all cure for depression but it's worth a shot.
Here's a recipe (not mine) that logs to Calendar instead: https://ifttt.com/applets/219749p-when-i-go-to-the-gym-log-i...
For me I dislike the isolation and feeling that someone can sneak up on you so my speculation is that it's not a great daily driver but could be useful in spurts. Maybe after a while it would feel normal but I am unsure.
Wouldn't Amazon presumably plop itself down on a Washington Metro line?
Please don't post unsubstantive or uncivil comments here.
I don't understand how that helps. You can't built very many 200mph tunnels, so housing at the ends will still have to be very dense or people will have to drive far to get to the stations. So this just shifts the housing density problem.
Understandably, these threads are full of anecdotal cases of effective depression treatments. But why should we assume the there is is a one-size fits all treatment (or even 3)?

I think depression is akin to a common error code in the mind (and maybe body too). If the mind is at least as complicated as the biggest program we can imagine, why should we imagine one thing will likely fix this problem?

This is like suggesting the same code would always fix a given common error.

It seems more likely to me that there are many causes of depression. While there will be many commonly effective treatments, they will vary based on context. Sometimes the effective treatment will be very specific / personal.
No. I actually scrape two state lottery sites (I live on the border). One state used to allow online purchases but that got nixed due to the possibility of purchasing them while not truly in the state (which would be considered gambling across state lines which has federal laws and regulations).
But they cam write and deploy a version of iOS which will not respect the "wipe the phone" command after 10 false password tries, making brute-forcing viable (it also helped that it was obvious the phone just needed a 4-digit number to unlock). Luckily they refused to do that and won in court.
Checking the radar. In the midwest, weather comes at you from a long ways away, so I wrote a script to set my desktop background to be the current national radar mosaic every 15 minutes.

Explicitly setting the background programmatically was very unreliable in practice. The beauty of my script is that it simply wgets the image, checks if it is valid, resamples the image using a high quality algorithm (slow but worth it), places it in a folder, and deletes the old image.

My background preference is set to shuffle between images in that folder every minute, therefore my script acts like a pipeline.
Hey neerkumar,

Thanks for the kind words! We aren't focused on sales, but in case anyone here is, what do you mean? It'd find sales prospects based on how similar their companies are/what they tweet about?
> Also, the US isn't that armed, compared to some other countries.

Wikipedia would disagree with you there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_c...

You don't sound like a "gun nut", but I have to question anyone who can't acknowledge that America is way more obsessed about owning guns than the rest of the planet.
As long as it's not too heavy - I would guess that neck strain would become a problem after 40+ hours a week.
Yes, I know what it is. And yes, I think I could do it.
It at the very least shows that mindfulness gives you more control of your reaction to your thoughts. A normal human being gets constantly bombarded by random thoughts, a lot of them negative, and it tends to affect his or her behavior. Mindfulness teaches you to be more aware of your thoughts and gives you the choice of allowing them to affect how you behave or not.
Facebook and Instagram down for some users
Why, oh WHY, do those #? nutheads use vi? (2007)
Well I'm not an expert in the domain but I'd wager there's models for what happiness is, from which you can determine how to measure that. For example if you thinks it's a variable composed of self-appreciation and appreciation of others you can have a good estimate with a properly-designed study.

Why would that seem wrong ? Because it could miss cases where people don't know their own happiness ? I think a model based on actual observations is more right than a hypothetical transcendental happiness. Because people could lie ? That's where the proper design of the experiment steps in.

This is off the top of my head.
When was the last time someone went on a killing spree with a fire extinguisher?
Which is pathetic and absolutely inexcusable.

The internet and computers keep getting faster, and instead of the web getting MORE responsive, thanks to jackoff web developers, it's getting SLOWER and SLOWER.

I'll never forget the first day as a teenager that we had cable internet finally offered in our neighborhood. Going from 56K it was pure heaven. We're running a (P2-era) Celeron 333 MHz and pages loaded INSTANTLY.

Now, I sit there with a connection 6-10 times faster than my teenage connection, a computer with 8 cores running at almost 4 GHZ and I have to wait for a page to load.

I just checked. ~5 seconds to load the front page of CNN. 5 seconds for Facebook. 7 seconds for GMAIL. (Not like I need to check my e-mail often, eh!) All those numbers are 3x or higher on my laptop.

I actually still use the HTML version of gmail even on my desktop. Why? Because it loads in less than a second. (I just got a time-to-load-page extension, yep. 0.52 seconds verses 6.5 seconds.)
Did you know Spotify also has a its approve and disapprove buttons in the desktop app on opposite sides depending on what particular radio-like feature you're using?
Yes, hence why I use the term "ancestral wolves" and not simply "wolves," in the hopes of avoiding confusion. Many people assume dogs are simply some sort of captured/degenerated/infantilized versions of the modern-day grey wolf. This is not at all the case. The likely ancestor of the domestic dog was an ancient lineage of Middle Eastern/Eurasian wolf that is presently extinct and did not survive the last glacial maximum -- because humans hunted its megafaunal prey to extinction. Dogs used to be classified by most textbooks as subspecies of Canis lupus, the grey wolf. Increasingly, genetic analysis shows that Canis familiaris might properly be its own species.

The dog was, in all likelihood, domesticated multiple times over multiple thousands of years in various parts of the globe. The lineage that survived to present is likely to have come from the Fertile Crescent area, even though its domestication predates the agricultural revolution. (Dogs joined us when we were hunter-gatherers, and cats joined us when we settled down to store grain and thereby attracted rodents).

I am not convinced that non-human apes "domesticated" the dog the same way we did, even if modern apes seem capable of taking actions superficially analogous to domestication. Ancestral wolves specifically followed human camps around and lived among us for (presumably) thousands of years before it even occurred to us to domesticate them as such. By that time, nature had 'pre-selected' them for us -- the friendly and cooperative ones, who could survive at the margins of our hunting parties, outcompeted their more feral cousins, who kept their distance from humans and then starved when the mammoths ran out. The first ancient wolves we came into frequent, nonviolent contact with were, in all likelihood, the result of many generations of natural selection before we set about artificially selecting them.

Ironically, and counterntuitively, dogs were more naturally fit than wolves to survive in the early days of the Homo sapiens.
How Facebook Outs Sex Workers
I used it to look into Gigabytes response to Intel SA 00075
described in https://embedi.com/files/presentations/BH-Las-Vegas-2017-Int....

before: http://download.gigabyte.us/FileList/BIOS/brix_bios_bsi5ha(a...

after: http://download.gigabyte.us/FileList/BIOS/brix_bios_bsi5ha(a...

You can see that there is an extra function call added that tests for response.length.

Given the easy availability of the assembler dump you can expect progress towards demystifying IME.
I'm not a professional in the security field, but I sense that there is lots of possibilities by just doing a
"strings image/00275000.NFTP/amt.mod". Gigabyte might be special, but they have left their assert prints in the code
and you can get a sense what the thing is doing...
I can't speak for all cities, and clearly Detroit is different from New York, but at least here in Seattle the problem isn't the lack of space but the cost.

Putting aside the reasons (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc, all being willing to pay well, people wanting to live in an urban area, etc etc) the ground truth is that developers can charge a ton of money for a residence in Seattle now.

So they do.

No one's building anything affordable because hey - why not get paid a ton more for doing basically the same work by developing a luxury apartment/condo/etc.

So it's not that the city's full, it's that most people can't afford to live here anymore.
> is still hard enough to require doing it on a server

Hot word detection would suggest that voice is easy. "Accent" and "Intent" recognition is the hard part.
It's a fair point, and I can't really know how much of it was just me maturing as a person.

I can say, though, that making these changes at any point in my life would have been a vast improvement. Sleep and nutrition help me view life in a much better lens and exercise gives me a structured, constructive outlet and scheduled time for reflection.
Calling that "serverless" is something of an abuse of the term. You can call it "push-based" rather than "pull-based" (a Chef/Puppet model), but there is definitely a "server" to be had--it's the machine running SSH and with the canonical datastore. It is--and this is one of many reasons I don't like Ansible very much--just a pretty poor server and often the developer's workstation.

"Serverless" would be more like what I described with regards to Chef Zero, where a machine, as it bootstraps, is able to fetch its playbooks from somewhere and self-execute with some sort of sourceable configuration data. The standard Ansible workflow is not only not "serverless", but it is antithetical to cloud-friendly scaling and fault-tolerance practices. (Think about how you're going to manage auto-scaling groups with it. It hurts.)
The Five-Tool Designer
Anti-virus products are a huge security risk.
Wow this is awesome, thank you for sharing this.
The placebo effect operates on the domain of perception. In other words, placebo is a psychological effect, which may deceive a patient into perceiving that he or she is getting better even though the sugar pills they just took had no physiological response from the body.

Stress has a big psychological component, but it is also something that can be physilogically seen and can be measured. It's important to see the distinction between the psychological perception and the true physiology.

Stress may not be the best example because as stated, stress has a lot to with the psychological state.
Refactoring Comments into Better Code
Just because vaccines, antibiotics, and refrigeration exist, it doesn't mean there is universal access to them.

I think the references to "almost every person" and "modern country" are sweeping away a lot more people than you let on.
The unification-fd library referenced in the article is probably a pretty good example. I have not looked at it, though, and it would be nice to have explicit bits of code pointed out in an explanation.
Wasn't that the promise made to us after World War II by automotive manufacturers? We built cars, we built highways - and the inner cities suffered, and then people stuck in suburban hell suffered.

How is this significantly better? We still have to distribute people from their houses to the tunnel, and from the tunnel to where they want to go.
> Exactly. One has to trust Mozilla every time one visits the page

This is where IPFS could be useful. It's content addressed, so the address guarantees that you're getting the same, unmodified, content
If Symantec considers the government to be an adversary, then why are they trying to court them as a customer?

From the article:

Tech companies have been under increasing pressure to allow the Russian government to examine source code, the closely guarded inner workings of software, in exchange for approvals to sell products in Russia.
I think that's a pretty good idea. Our daughter joined the Girl Scouts for two years and all she got out of it was to be free child labor for cookie manufacturers. Apparently the troop leader did something fishy with the cookie money and even though they met their goal, they didn't get the reward. We still have boxes of the stuff in our pantry.

I was a Weeblo (Boy Scouts) as a kid and didn't get much out of it other than classroom learning, but it was better than selling cookies. I got bored after a few months and didn't go back. Like any nationwide organization, the quality is determined by the locality support.

I guess they will have to change their name from The Boy Scouts if enough girls show interest.
Lame, depends on what you mean and how it's studied.

https://www.bensonhenryinstitute.org/research-published-rese...
Haskell has this with `Maybe`, although you could write the Bool instance yourself pretty easily if you liked.
Nice thread and here my top 10 list of antidepressants (in that order):

1. Most of the times, there's a clear reason for a depression, something which is not that easy to change and worse not that easy to identify as the real cause (e.g. wrong boss, wrong cofounder, wrong investor, wrong friends, toxic workplace, big nose, etc.); before looking at the other antidepressants, try to get rid of the main issue; often it is even too late, even if you get rid of the main depression cause, the depression just stays (PTSD). Either because the cause was too strong or too long. Some think that there is no direct cause-effect-relationship but this could be also another sign of a severe depression and that they just resigned (‘I can’t do anything about my depression, it’s genetic, this is me...’). It ‘s easier to resign and to give up, especially if you are depressed

2. Have social encounters every day, best: have a SO or friends (ok) or some good coworkers (better than nothing); this can be quite hard, having social interactions is not that easy when lacking a SO or friends

3. No addictive/depressing online stuff (FB leading the way, then your smartphone)

4. Sleep

5. Cut gluten, should be on #1, gluten and too many wrong carbs boost anxiety

6. Keep carbs under control, no need for keto but low carb might not be the worst idea

7. Exercise

8. Working/be productive, consume less

9. Create urgency, set yourself goals with deadlines, get busy and you won't have time to get depressed; just imagine you catch a plane the last minute (do you think you are depressed when catching the plane? No of course not)

10. Meditation

Again: Advice 2-9 won’t help if 1 is not solved.

Edit: Why the downvotes?

Edit2: After I got downvoted, my final advice...

11: Stay away from depressed people on HN because "negativity is infectious" (Robert Greene)
This is the same Zac Holman who was fired from GitHub [0] when he was having tough times.

It's great how open he is about it. I'm waiting until we see going to the doctor to talk about pain in your brain the same as going to talk about pain in say your colon. That is, perhaps not something you'd talk about to everyone but at least you'll be able to see someone for free in Europe or with minimal insurance costs in the US.

[0]: https://zachholman.com/talk/firing-people
Is there a legal, accepted MDMA assisted treatment path or something you fashioned yourself? Any references you could share?
And I think I could fly, but I'm not going to try. See how that works?
I would imagine you've accounted for this, but I'd highly suggest not applying for multiple jobs within the same company, with tweaked resumes/cover letters. I've seen a few of those and they always turn me off. When I'm sifting through dozens of resumes, I really don't want to feel like someone is roboblasting all of our open positions.
Seeking programming quizzes
I am making a website to make it easy for anyone to get a job. The url is makeconnex.com

I am seeking help in making programming quizzes. Quizzes in different programming languages and frameworks.
Hey Fred - I do believe we met when I was chatting with edX a little while back, funny seeing you around the internet. =) And yeah, this is much more of what I would describe as "serverless". It kind of sounds like what you're doing is pretty Packer-compatible; any particular reason you guys went the way you did?

For my purposes, Packer isn't always available, which is a bummer. The Chef Zero approach I described above is nice for my purposes because it works with either an AMI or a live instance; when I write cookbooks I break them into "bake" and "configure" recipes and sub-recipes, and the "bake" steps are effectively memoization of steps I also run (idempotently) when a machine comes up.
Absolutely.
We are already here.
Frankly a lot of times "mindfulness" seems backwards. If I'm upset about something happening in the present, absolute focus on the present seems like not really the best approach, and I don't think indulging in thinking about the future or reminiscing about the past are really features you need to beat out of yourself. Also I was talked into reading the Power of Now and it's one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read.
I have the same doubt. Does anyone have more information?
Compared to living in a small village only listening to opinions from the news it definitely is getting out of the echo chamber.

Your feed is a combination of many things among others who your interact with. If you are a person who only want to hang out with people who believe exactly like you then sure. But most people aren't like that they have friends based on where they came from if it's facebook or based on what they are into ex. like with twitter.

You didn't use to have that much access to other peoples opininions as you have today. I am simply not seing anything to back what you are saying up.
The #1 problem with the article is that it restricts the analysis to the U.S.. With the current political climate around immigration, Amazon can't easily bring engineering talent from around the world to its headquarters. A site outside the US could solve that. The RFP said "North America".
- "What is with it with people expecting that a quick run will sort out your life? Like cool, activity releases endorphins and shit, but are endorphins going to pay this credit card bill? They going to patch things over with my friend? They going to find me a job? They going to fix my life?"

- "How the hell am I supposed to get out of the house to go running a few miles when I practically can’t get out off my couch?"

No, running and exercise won't immediately solve your problems, but neither is sitting on on your couch.

What exercise will do is make you feel good and make you a productive human being so that your brain is functioning optimally and so that you can solve those problems.
Yeah, that one amused me. It's almost worth getting an Alexa for that.
I have a system built on top of Calibre's "recipe" scripts which scans a set of RSS feeds every day at 3am for new articles, scrapes and cleans the full content where necessary, bundles them into .mobi ebooks, and sends them to my Kindle's email address. Amazon's
network wirelessly delivers them overnight, and I wake up in the morning with a fresh batch of reading material. It's like a personalized newspaper subscription.

Similarly, I have a self-hosted instance of Tiny Tiny RSS set up with an array of custom scraping plugins to pull all the web comics I follow into one feed, which I consume with the Android client. I'd push this through my Kindle delivery system, but then I'd be stuck reading black-and-white versions of color comics.

Along the same lines, there are a few YouTube channels I subscribe to whose content can be enjoyed nearly as well in audio-only form. As a university student, I do a lot of walking most days to get from place to place, and I fill that time listening to audio content. The same server which runs my news- and comic-gathering systems also watches those YouTube channels, pulls down new videos, converts them to audio, and publishes the results as podcast feeds which I can subscribe to through Pocket Casts on my phone.
And also cannot be used in open-source projects.

CC-BY-NC amounts to saying: you can play around with this in demos and academic projects that no lawyer would ever go after anyway, but you can't use it for real.
Treating Depression with Deep Brain Stimulation Works–Most of the Time
It really depends on a lot of the software as well. Linux doesn't inherently trust just the CPU instructions for entropy. In fact, it recently borrowed a new feature from OpenBSD and added it called getrandom():

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
> Oscar Wilde once wrote that “Each man kills the thing he loves”. I don’t know exactly what Wilde meant by that, but our collective attention and obsession, amplified by the speed and intensity of the internet & social media, tends to ruin the things we love: authors, musicians, restaurants, actors, beloved movies, vacation spots, artists, democracies, and even a tree that became too famous to live.

This is exactly true, and one of the more important reasons to use a pseudonym online and avoid social media. Any attention you get is at best short-lived, and at worst dangerous.

The tree is gone because someone out there is has internalized some disturbing feelings and he (because it's probably a male) is incapable of dealing with them in a productive way. You can replace tree for almost any deviant online behavior, which encourages the feelings without satisfying them.
Shifting to a less hidebound / bureaucratic location is a great solution. Also: Elon’s goal is a more than 10x reduction in costs, and he’ll be able to charge related to the value of people’s time.