skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My problem now, what makes me irate, is that the #metoo tag embodies this idea that, because so many women have been silent victims of harassment and assault, that any claim to harassment or assault somehow must be trustworthy because it is being openly stated.

I was listening to a program on NPR the other day, and the guest was somehow bemoaning the fact that when individuals make claims of being victimized, they are met with a reserved skepticism rather than accepting support.

What was totally missing from this discussion--what the host failed to challenge on--was that what this guest was proposing in fact was abandoning an innocent until proven guilty assumption in favor of a guilty until proven innocent assumption, which is dangerous and immoral. It is appropriate to be skeptical, because such a claim is very serious and potentially damaging. And such claims should be held up to rigorous scrutiny. I say this not without empathy for victims, being a victim of sexual assault myself, but as someone who has also seen how vicious and destructive these witchhunts can be.

I have a colleague who was wrongly accused of sexual assault (I know because I was essentially there and saw what actually transpired), and I've seen how completely destructive it can be personally and career-wise.

I also have been accused, through not-so-veiled insinuations (of course, not being explicit allowed her to sidestep any challenges, because there's nothing to actually challenge), of harassment by a vindictive ex who was jealous of my new relationship, and have seen what happens when colleagues, who you thought were friends, blindly accept these sorts of claims without looking into both sides of the story.

It's horrifying to watch this happen, and to me only undermines real victims by casting a shadow of doubt over their claims from others.

My experience is that this issue is far darker than anyone wants to acknowledge, and as much as there is problems with sexual assault, there are also problems with vindictive slander capitalizing on people's prejudices, to avoid personal responsibility. The horrific stories of Harvey Weinstein have turned into a witch-hunt against men that is equally horrifying en masse.
Some of my side projects exist only long enough to understand/solve the deep technical challenge required to make it work. Completing the project after that is just unfun work.
Per unit of production is a far better metric for export economies.

Per capita is only meaningful without international trade.
There's marker assisted breeding, QTL analysis, etc., but the hard limit is generation time.

If you want to introgress a particular trait into a useful background, it's going to take ~5 generations to do it adequately. That generally means 5 years, or sometimes you can squeeze in a winter nursery in the southern hemisphere.

Proper QTL analysis requires making suitable inbreds (several generations of selfing), creation of the RILs (another several generations of selfing after the making the F2s), and finally a couple years for gathering trait data. Oh, and this all requires generation of proper markers and so forth. Starting from scratch, this is a decade-long process if everything goes well.

As for diversity, you collect wild accessions and those are generally maintained by a seed co-op, often something associated with a university.
From "Elements of Libel and Slander"[1]

> First, the plaintiff must prove that the defendant made a false and defamatory statement concerning the plaintiff.

How do you prove that you didn't sexually assault someone 5 years ago? Gee, a recording of all of your interactions would come in handy here.

[1] http://injury.findlaw.com/torts-and-personal-injuries/elemen...
Schools and governments were buying up PS3 systems because they could be turned into cheap clusters.

Sony didn't like this, as they were losing money on every PS3, so they disabled the functionality.
From other posts in this thread I gather he's accused, among other things, of groping women without their consent, which, if true, goes a bit beyond making an "unwelcome advance," in my opinion. Whether it's true I don't claim to know, but responding to it by talking about how it technically does not constitute sexual harassment seems ill advised either way.
>I don’t have employees, I don’t cut checks for investment. None of the women who came forward were ever in a position where I could make or break their careers. Sexual Harassment requires that I have such power.

Not a great sign to open your defense by arguing about definitions rather than factual claims.
Yeah, but the real money is in licensing.
When Science Was Big
It's not the answer you want to hear, but you could pay for access.
How long are these agreements valid for?

If you use the learning edition once, are you bound by it for a lifetime with no way to end the agreement?
the point is that they're indexing into an array of unknown size.
Even if they dive into a corner of your side project from 10 years ago that works, but you realize isn't ideal, and you don't have the time to improve that part of the code?
For electricians and welders, there are licenses / certification. Obtaining the license / certification demonstrates the baseline competency
You can also use the std::size() free function to get the size of a C array, an std::array or any other standard container.

http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/iterator/size
We Chose This Profession (2013)
When Tech Founders Become A**holes – THE STARTUP REPORT
IANAL, but it seems that yes Google could be in trouble there, assuming that the Excel EULA prohibits reverse engineering, and also assuming that Google did actually use Excel to compare the behavior of opening different files.

It also depends if Microsoft had published the xls[x] spec, and under what license.
Is comparing the output of two different systems “reverse engineering”?

Is modifying your output to be in par with a competitor reverse engineering?

My point is that the competition doesn’t know if SAS uses banana peels to generate their output- we only know that the the results are the same- and I don’t think that is a reasonable definition of reverse engineering.

The algorithm has not been copied- only the resulting output. Trade secrets remain protected.
>> So, basically poking your competitors software with a stick, being an effort to understand its inner workings, is reverse-engineering. When prohibited by EULA it becomes a breach of contract.

Correct. The problem with that is you might hire someone who has lots of experience with a product in order to develop a competing one. You have that person tell you how the new product needs to behave. This is essentially doing the same thing, but who is violating the "agreement"? At the time the employee learned about the product, they were a legitimate user with no intent of reverse engineering. They may or may not have personally accepted the EULA (it may have been installed by the IT folks). When they go to the new company, who becomes responsible to any alleged wrong doing? I guess I'm saying there is a grey area where things boil down to intent rather than action, and that makes me think it's wrong (on top of the more obvious issues).

On the upside, IIRC there are countries where this activity would be legal and the enforcement of the EULA terms against it are unenforceable. IANAL, so find said country(s) and development practices to circumvent this problem on your own. I think it's unfortunate, but it's exactly the kind of stupid problem that pushed RMS to start the GNU project.
> Are there any recommendations on how to best support it?

If you want a fun project, you can grab a kayak and a GoPro in order to prove that a river is navigable, which enables legal access up to the ordinary high water mark.
I don't envy whoever would have to haul it up that gravity well.
This has to be one of the best comments I've seen on this whole issue. Way too many devs seem to think it's a massive undertaking and they need a giant project. Hiring engineers don't even want to go through 100000 lines of code (they have lives as well!). Even starting by uploading your dot files is something and takes all of 10 minutes (with the added bonus of having them available if you need to switch machines).
Well, you could always ask Woody Allen.

https://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/an-open-letter-...
My guess (and there's probably a whole lot more to the story)... Uber pays lower interchange fees and gets a cash commission up-front per registered cardmember.
You know what's universally hard? Finding people who are good at their jobs. References don't matter, experience doesn't matter, education doesn't matter. Why not? Because it doesn't say anything about actual skill. What does? Side projects, where you can actually see if a person has skills.

> a corporate lawyer purely based on their pro-bono work?

You hire a corporate lawyer based on their public reputation. For a programmer, that's their github portfolio.

Business are in a unique position to actually judge programmers by their merit, not just hearsay or bullshit references or lies on a resume. Of course companies are going to factor that into their decision!
Just wanted to note that Square Cash is also directly integrated into Snapchat and Facebook Messenger.
Ask HN: Meaningful jobs outside the office
After nearly 10 years of being in IT, wearing different hats: a software dev, lead, account manager and now a founder I feel like I want to leave the tech world. Firstly, I’m fed up with no-value-for-humanity, intangible projects. Secondly, I can’t sit in front of my desk that many hours anymore. I just want to go out and feel the nature. Has anybody here left the IT and found a meaningful job, possibly at least partially including working outside? Looking for inspiration.
Yep, I also think modules are still relatively far away. I also hope that the C++ community can embrace some package management system.. at some point in time. Hopefully before I die
Worldpay and Tsys are small fry, akin to Chase Paymentech or Elavon. First Data is the big monster in the room, with 70% of the market, and all the other processing networks I just mentioned and more make up the remainder.
Having a second business is normally not allowed without permission. If its not related most employers might be ok.

Like a PM I knew at BT who had a side gig as a violinist - one year his band had a residency during the Edinburgh festival (at the balmoral no less ) - if it had been a job related to huis day job no way would have he been allowed
Work history, references, general questions and maybe some whiteboarding. Honestly just a regular interview.
Should it be illegal to put up 'no trespassing' signs when there is clearly a longstanding public easement?
I've found that the companies that insist on a thriving github portfolio are also the companies that expect you to work 16 hours a day on their code.

Normal places with normal expectations on work/life balance don't expect you to be pumping out code every second of the day.
>, most women have done this a couple of times and found it both painful and useless. This leads to apathy.

Whats the alternative though. How do we fix this.
Don't quit a job until you have another -- and actually being currently employed is like free bonus points when interviewing.

Have you heard the expression work smarter not harder? You're working 16 hour days likely for the income of a regular 8 hour day -- so you're literally making half the salary you think you are. That's not smart.

Some crunch time is normal and if you're lucky, compensated for. If I'm working all out weekends to finish a project (might happen this month for me) then damn straight I'm taking some days off in lieu for that when things calm down. If it never ends, that's not crunch time.
I don't share your experience and my guess is that you're not advertising your projects enough.

If you have projects that you're proud of — mention them on your website, on your Twitter's bio, on your LinkedIn profile, mention them everywhere. Even better, once per year go to a conference and talk about those projects in front of an audience, such that you can then have videos on YouTube too.

We like building things and there's absolutely no shame in marketing ourselves or in talking about the things we've built.
>Isn’t the market supposed to “correct” in favor of labor in that scenario?

The purpose of neoliberalism is to ensure that no matter the actual ratio of supply to demand, the price of labor will never rise. Must never rise. The basis of this entire economy is low wages.
Eh, it's scarcely better than a Markov chain. I was hoping for something a little more useful, like the ability to scroll through many similar words or concepts.
While it's possible for any individual to put a price on just about anything, it ain't always easy (as you just explained). We've decided that it's the government's responsibility to help put a price on some of these ineffables -- air quality, etc.

For a well-functioning market that doesn't get bothered by protests and other political machinations, the government needs to provide an easy mechanism to pay for whatever it is you care about. Any market which is restricted to folks who can afford high-cost lawyers and custom legal contracts, that market will be inefficient. Saying, "put a building-height covenant on it" in effect means "let's spend money and time on political advertisements and protests so neither of us are happy."
I live in Bozeman and have made many trips to the Crazy Mountains over the years and can say that this article hits the nail on the head. This isn't just an issue in the Crazies either. Almost every mountain range in the region has some sort of land access issue. In the Bridger Range, just west of the Crazies, the Forest Service choose to reroute a trail to avoid a legal battle. Other examples include places that the trail cuts across the corner of someones land for 10 to 20 feet, yet the land owner gates off access.
It is a shame that wealthy land owners are able to buy their way into closing these trails through the threat of expensive litigation.
I never expected to see any substantial non IT company here, but looks like it is!

I forward you my encouragements.
In twelve US states, not telling people is a crime. California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington require all parties being recorded to consent.
What the Heck Google? My Pixel 2 and Project Fi Woes
I think it's fair to consider how passionate a person is about improving their career skills. For programmers, that often consists of side projects. For other professions, it could include going to conferences, taking classes, reading trade publications, etc., all of which would be worth mentioning in an interview.
That doesn't strike me as postmodern at all. It strikes me as classical realpolitik
> The idea that a programmer could have an entire second business and not write any interesting code in the process strikes me as really odd. There are NO tasks for the company that could be usefully automated?

He runs a dog business. Probably best using pen and paper... or microsoft office... definitely not custom code.
You mean the comments Lutz made in Oct 2016?

There were 325k model 3 preorders in April 2016.

Tesla has been in business since 2003. Show me a comment from 10 years ago of musk complaining about subsidies.
FCC to loosen TV, newspaper ownership rules
1 in a million for a RANDOM face.

Apple admitted during the announcement event that is was quite a bit lessor odds for a biological relative, especially a twin.
1gb of ram for an IRC client.... I don't know... :|
In California, the employer can state that I'm not allowed to later work for a competitor. However, non-competes are not enforceable in California, unlike Washington for example.

Contract law has limits, and those limits differ on a state-by-state basis.
The specs for the open-XML file formats (the newer XLSX) are open.
Why not? Can you elaborate? Because 10 minutes with a Github account is enough for me to decide whether I'd hire someone or not.
Ditto. At my current place my employment agreement doesn't allow me to publicly post code I write in spare time.

My previous employer was a defense contractor, so... yea.

I don't have any side projects that I can share. Sucks, but that's the reality. If I get fired/quit and can't find a job without side projects, I have a list of things in my head to build in ~months if that's what becomes necessary.
Only slightly. The question is if this small increase in stuff is worth the total degradation of ones life quality. I say it doesn't. You earn more but then you spend that extra income on expensive stuff that you don't need just to feel that you are still living a good life.
> As somebody who has plenty of open source projects--the set of employers who actually looks at them is within epsilon of zero. I have not once, not once gotten a meaningful question from anything I have posted on Github

I guess that isn't the idea here. I think the idea is for them to grab a dev from the next cubicle/floor, point them to the repo, ask "can he code?", and the dev says "sure looks like code to me, yeah."

"Showing up" is 90% of every move. Sure, the guy who copy-pasted something together could get the job that more talented dude who was too timid to share their stuff would be much more suitable for, but such are the trade-offs here.
Crunch time is real, and I don't object to it. Working 16 hour days as a matter of course is not "crunch time", and no employee should tolerate it.
> it's important to make a distinction between cheating in a relationship and sexual harassment

I know nothing other than what I've read online, but it seems that his accusers are not complaining about him cheating, but rather that he sexually harassed them:

https://medium.com/@quinnnorton/robert-scoble-and-me-9b14ee9...

Specifically:

> And then, without any more warning, Scoble was on me. I felt one hand on my breast and his arm reaching around and grabbing my butt. Scoble is considerably bigger than I am, and I realized quickly I wasn’t going to be able to push him away.

I am not saying I know who is or isn't telling the truth, but this definitely isn't just about someone conflating cheating with sexual harrassment.
You just need the will

EPA Bans PCB Manufacture; Phases Out Uses

EPA press release - April 19, 1979

https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/epa-bans-pcb-manufactur...
Security Advisory for PIA VPN Android App
and outside work if its related to you day job
This is true, and I regard that as a reflection of the immaturity of this industry.
Not sure if this is how it works in NH. But, IMHO private land owners should pay more taxes for their land if they post against roaming. Or the reverse, pay less land taxes if they allow roaming.
"Shaq is rich," he said, referring to the Los Angeles Lakers' Shaquille O'Neal, "but the white man who signs his check is wealthy. Oprah is rich, but Bill Gates is wealthy. If Bill Gates suddenly woke up with Oprah's money, he'd slit his throat."
Too bad they are all bad people and need to be banned from entering the USA... jk! jk! When I hear something positive around Islam in the US, it makes my mind spin and I have to check if I have been suddenly teleported to an alternate reality where people have an actual interest in appreciating the rich cultures and their nuances and history.
Just to add my data point, my company does look at side projects as part of the hiring process.
> I think we tend to become risk averse as we age

I don't think so. You're generalizing. Actually I would think that the opposite can happen.
Some thoughts about the "no one's forcing you to use it" arguments (of which I'm also partial to, having removed myself from Facebook).
Humans do have a need to socialise/connect with other humans, just as we have need food and water - we quickly lose sanity in isolation. To give an example, the worst punishment in prisons is solitary confinement (being separated from the other criminals!). The link between social isolation and health problems and ultimately early death has also been demonstrated.
It seems to follow from this then that we do really need Facebook to the degree to which they control all means of socialising, and online communication is only becoming more and more primary over time. In other words, imagining the extreme case where FB is only means to connect with the world (and this is their stated mission), we can no longer choose not to use them anymore than we can choose not to breathe and eat, insofar as physiological well being goes.
I've come across places that wouldn't consider scripts and such to be "side projects". They expect something much larger to be of any consequence. And they want it to be somewhat relevant to the work they do.
I think it should be illegal. At the same time, it would be nice if the Forest Service would place signs on these trails clarifying that access is allowed and list the contact information for the proper authorities. That would, however, be expensive and the land owners would no doubt remove the signs.
Let's go even more simple: Just be a decent human being

What you do and don't do should not be tied entirely to work relation situations.
I think maybe there's a miscommunication here. Of course I've had conversations about my projects. Of course I've discussed them at length and in public spaces. Prospective employers have never asked. And, yes, it's clearly highlighted on my resume and my LinkedIn profile, with an entire section of my resume calling out interesting and high-quality projects.

Employers do not care. Other people? Sure. Employers? No.
>Or what about other engineering disciplines? Does one really ask a Mechanical Engineer or a Civil Engineer about their side projects?

Not civil engineers (because it's hard to build a 4-lane suspension bridge on a Saturday) but very often candidates in electronic and electrical engineering have side projects that can help them land a job. Are the electronics breadboard projects that you did in your garage absolutely required to get a job?!? No, but they help you stand out among the crowd.

The reason that <computer programmer> is different from your analogies of marketers, lawyers, recruiters, etc is that the activity of programming is often a source of fun and play. Some children with curiosity start programming on their own and continue it into adulthood. (And hence, they might have some personal github projects.) In contrast, people typically do not do "lawyering" for recreational fun.

Programming is enjoyable enough for some that side projects on github are mostly a voluntary and organic phenomenon. Some employers are taking advantage of that signal and prefer to hire those types of programmers.
Sure. It’s an illustrative example that it’s a common C style.
Thankfully Mr. Pruitt does not speak for the ACC. Our view on public lands:

In order to protect America’s natural resources and wildlife, the federal
government ought to retain ownership of the majority of its federal lands.
Preventing the sale of federal lands to interests contrary to their
preservation requires citizens to hold officials accountable at every level
of government.
Since we are on Hacker News, I would recommend to read what top mentioned by Hacker News users (by comment) [0]. This recommendation contains not only about IT but also other topics.

[0]: http://hackernewsbooks.com/top-books-on-hacker-news
So if I'm Burger King, it's illegal for me to eat a McDonalds hamburger to see why people like them?
Maybe that's not a job I want, if the hiring manager is lazy enough to 'require' side projects to consider a candidate.
I'd block it and wait to see if your clients notice... If it breaks functionality for some of them just help them fix this and say you fixed performance issues so you could reduce prices later down the road.
I don't have much hope for that if there's not even anything done for people effectively doing the same on land they do not own [0].

[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/02/california-w...