skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
xD | Washington, DC | Full-time | Onsite or Remote | Salary: GS-15 (fed government pay scale)| Backend Dev (experienced)

About xD

xD is a startup in the U.S. Census Bureau that works with internal partners and other agencies to build experimental data products. We build products that challenge the status quo of how agencies leverage their public data. To meet the growing demands of business and technology, we work closely with our agency partners to deliver new and exceptional product experiences to their constituents.

Position

We’re hiring a Backend Web Developer to help us build amazing products with our agency partners.

We’re looking for someone who is:

* Passionate about working on high-impact projects that further the public good

* Able to thrive in rapid development cycles

* Self-directed and able to set goals independently

* Excited to teach and learn new techniques

* Enthusiastic about building open-source software

* Skillful at communicating technical concepts to a non-technical audience

As a Backend Web Developer with xD, you will be responsible for:

* Building back-end information systems, including APIs and web applications

* Planning or contributing to sprint-planning meetings, stand-ups, and retrospectives

* Using version control, specifically Git and GitHub

* Writing software tests and adhering to test-driven development

* Designing relational database architecture and writing performant SQL queries

* Writing in modern, open-source scripting languages such as Ruby and Python

* Developing web applications using open-source frameworks such as Ruby on Rails

* Deploying and administering web application servers

* Building with scalable search technologies such as ElasticSearch or Solr

* Working with large data sets, including scaling their handling and storage

Apply

To apply, please send your resume to luke.keller@census.gov with the subject “Backend Web Developer Application." Make sure your resume includes links to example projects and source code.
And it will get paid... How?
Ads are keeping your net experience free.
It's been updated now.

I think these kind of pages are usually updated manually by incident response teams.
I believe OP's point was that aggregating crowd-sourced reporting of outages is surprisingly accurate and prompt, not that there aren't any other tools for reporting outages.
> I still can't communicate with people sitting literally meters away from me

That doesn't seem like a problem that software can solve.
I tried self hosting Mattermost as a family communication tool. It just wasn't solid enough to keep the wife and I happy.
Because, while you can by dint of extreme effort produce a user experience with IRC that's broadly comparable with what Slack offers out of the box, doing so requires so much relatively rare expertise, and so much more support investment, that it's not cost-effective to do so.
It was a little by accident and a little on purpose. Basically I scared the living bejebus out of myself (it's called "hitting bottom" in AA) and realized I was full of shit, but I didn't need to be (a lot like the Evangelical gambit of "You're a born sinner and on your way to hell, but God can save you if you clean up your act.") which is kinda true if you think of sin as missing-your-goals, hell as avoidable-suffering, and God as the class-of-desirable-goals instead of that dogmatic religious crufty myths.

The destination was high conscientiousness, but the direction from where I was was a higher sensitivity to disgust. Mainly disgust at myself and my living space. Cleaning the clutter around me and myself more frequently was a sign I was on the right track. Not quite OCD, but on the way, still a ways short of disrupting my life.

I outlined a plan (as if I made a reasonable and actionable plan to help someone I cared deeply about) to clean up my act and pinned it right over my desk, then kept to it.

How'd I scare the living bejebus out of myself? YMMV, but psychedelics worked for me. Look up The Marsh Chapel Experiment.

Some more real world actions:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/raising-your-...

And best of luck to you!
Any plans on expanding:

- the ticket system (connectors to external systems, boards, etc.)

- CI connectors

- integrations for team systems (Slack, MS Teams, ...)
Circle CI is a great product, but the new v2 YAML format is very clunky and leads to slower build times. I wish they would focus on their product rather than predicting tech trends.
That was a notice posted for yesterday.
Simon Wardley is a big fan of containers – despite what you might think
Nice :)

I too have ddg as default search engine. I refuse to bookmark (or set as default) google again, so to use it I need to type part of the domain, wait for it to load, and either paste or retype the query. That cost also helps me to stay off of it, even if they have a better search engine. The risks involved with one company owning most of the things one does online, is not worth it.
PSA: Check your inbox for email from stellar.org, you may be sitting on $
I saw a link for Stellar.org on HN back in 2014 and signed up because it seemed interesting. They granted me 6000 coins in their currency back then and I simply forgot about them.

Turns out they're worth like 0.63 USD right now.
I just cashed out.

Maybe you have money too?
Article gives me the impression it was never a "lucrative tax break" and just a point of confusion, and coin-to-coin exchanges have always been subject to capital gains.

Anyone have thoughts on this?
I agree. "Bitcoin as anarcho-capitalist proof of concept" does seem to be the correct framework for understanding why it exists, why it works the way it does, and what one might find valuable about it. On that front it's been at least a partial success. I can't buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin, and I doubt I ever will, but the fact that it works at all is a lot more than I suspected we would see at this point. It's definitely caused me to rethink quite a few of my assumptions about macroeconomics.

That doesn't justify why anyone else should be shoehorning blockchains into their projects.

Earlier today I saw that Kodak is going to be launching KODAKCoin later this month as a mechanism to somehow assist photographers in selling and distributing their work. Presumably Kodak trusts Kodak. Any photographer who wants to use Kodak's tools to control the distribution of their work has to trust Kodak. Kodak has an IT department. They don't need trustless or decentralized. What they need is a boring ol' SQL database.

Maybe cryptocurrencies are a good idea, maybe they're not. That's more of a political and economic question than a technical one. Either way, they clearly do work more or less as advertised. What I'm still waiting to see is someone who is not a libertarian bent on the destruction of the global financial system using the blockchain to successfully solve any other previously intractable problem.
That points towards (part of) the solution - yes, a key part of reducing fatalities would be restructuring infrastructure, society norms and zoning so that people drive significantly less. And that's why it's anathema in USA and not likely to happen.
So in the short term, if it’s not a long-lasting project, pick what you’re comfortable with. If it’s containers, that’s fine.

But longer-term, I’d be investing my time in learning about serverless practices. Because that’s where the future is.
Hi Api. Your questions are _spot_ on!

Speculative investing + skyrocketing valuations does encourage highly motivated reasoning-- a unique kind of confirmation bias:

"This technology MUST be the answer to all the problems of the future because I'm getting wealthier TODAY!"

Irrational exuberance is rampant.

That said -- the recent New Yorker article on Estonia's digital society [1] covered that country's usage of a blockchain to manage patient healthcare records.

> the backbone of Estonia’s digital security is a blockchain technology called K.S.I.

K.S.I. from Guardtime [2] is an enterprise permissioned blockchain that is less decentralized than bitcoin and ethereum. Still, its exciting to see that Estonia is leveraging immutability and (some) decentralization to build a secure persistence layer that provides data provenance and a log of data access for management of their citizens' personal data, including healthcare records.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-di...
[2] https://guardtime.com/technology
It does not. My point is that me and another persons laptop could send packets to each other. But with the on-premises service, I still need to be directly connected for the client to work.

P2P networks can also work even if you're not connected to the same network. Point being that it's a direct connection to the person that you're communicating with, with no indirection.
Here's a potential solution for Google: just log load times for people who use Chrome and are logged in to their Google account at the browser level.

All the hard work of eliminating abuse is something they've done already for those accounts. And their userbase is so big, and presence so strong, that it would generate pressure everyone would benefit from.
It isn't relying on it - MS recommends people use Defender, which works fine. But unfortunately not everyone is doing that.
Admins, could you correct the headline to say “crypto currency website”?
heaven and limbo are christians concepts - if you are not a christian/catholic[1] (aka 6/7 of the world) and you find out a child dies, you presumably dont even give these things a second thought.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
Google wants you to search more, visit more pages, so it can show more ads. So it needs a faster Web.
Proof-of-stake as opposed to Proof-of-work
It's ok, bitbucket is down too. Let's take a break!
It's because someone couldn't Slack the ops team. XD
Yes the most important part in this article to me was how a group was able to alleviate the stress of their working lives by forming a co-operative together with no hierarchical power relationships, thus controlling their own workplace.
Kraken has similar problems (regarding often being down). Before that, it was bitfinex who had trouble with withdrawals. And beginning/mid 2017, it was poloniex.

I'm afraid there is no exchange (in my experience) who managed to have a flawless experience, and nowhere to go when you're not satisfied with your usual exchange. Maybe decentralized exchanges will help with that? Time will tell.
This reminds me of the recent story of automated content generation for kids on youtube, some of which is borderline abuse, and a lot of which is nonsensical in its entirety(lots of money being made, regardless).

The problem is that because of this flood of automatically generated content, anyone who actually is creating content has to do similar things or else be left behind by the recommendation algorithm.
Search for Trump on iOS and you'll see an AMP icon.
Brought to you by Google AdSense

What exactly is "new" besides the brutally awful design and color scheming? I see the same malware laden downloads that can be found anywhere else on the internet, surrounded by ads as was there before. Over 600 separate HTTP requests and counting on a project page? Really? You seriously expect developers to use this?
I mean block websites that monetize using CPM, which would incidentally be the vast majority of ads served using DoubleClick's ad marketplace. These also tend to be the ads caught with ad blockers, since CPM requires technical artifacts like iframes that are easy to spot.

Sorry, I'm trying to be as succinct as possible, but I've come to see the advent of ad blockers, intrusive ads, pervasive tracking, client-heavy web practices, and clickbait as a single phenomenon that has its roots in the rise of CPM as the primary pricing mechanism for advertising.
Trying. Now read the explanation of why it does not succeed, because no it does not represent the behaviours of these dæmons.
Up Close with Segway's Advanced Personal Robot (2016) [video]
Scientists Make Coldest Liquid Water Ever
>but if you can identify an image in that way then you can claim the copyright anyway.

Just identifying the images are the same doesn't prove which was the original though. The hashes being publicly available is the key, because you can easily tell which came first.
Yes definitely. Second half of 2018.
While the redundancy would be nice, I can't see it being worth the effort/money for anything but the most critical of systems (which should probably be self-hosted in their entirety to begin with). If the internet (or some major swath thereof) is down, that's going to cripple a lot of businesses these days regardless.

I just don't see it being worth the extra effort of self-hosting a redundant copy of the system, and then keeping that system up to date with the latest software for security patches / features / bugfixes. Especially when the cloud version has n x 9's of uptime.
Bezos will need to quadruple it to beat Mansa Musa[1] - which is not to say that's impossible...

1: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/meet-...
20-25 years is at the limit of what I could imagine staying in one house with any certainty. How does the extra longevity justify the cost unless I plan to never ever move again?
Kid, you have no idea... ;-)
Spearhead: AngelList-backed fund for founders
>3rd party applications should NOT be responsible for insuring that the OS can receive critical security updates

It is because these (misbehaved) 3rd party applications do things that cause the mitigations update to make computers unusable.

>and of all things, hilariously defaulting to 'no'

It does not default to "no" since the default is to run MSE / Defender.
It's interesting - most developers don't seem to really take certifications into account, but they still seem popular in the sysadmin/devops crowd (AWS in particular seems kind of nuts for them, not sure why).
Erg, the idea of Google phoning home information about each page I visit at the browser level is a bit terrifying...
They are severely arbitrarily limited ones.

That's a very related problem.
Do you have a reference for that? I have never heard of a company that wasn't some specific legal vehicle. Wikipedia defines it specifically as a legal entity. It's not clear to me what a "business organization" means if it's not defined under law, in that it would otherwise seem to be a bunch of individuals coordinating their activities, not a formal entity in its own right.
Absolutely. ad-hoc networks, using sound/bluetooth as a transport. Connected to the same network in general. We have all these things available for us to use, but we haven't so far. (well, there is experiments, but no big application like Slack has actually built something solid and usable with it)
For that matter, the time you're in the office updating tickets isn't necessarily linked to your work hours.

Lots of people operate on schedules like "think of a good answer to the problem at 8 PM, crank out two hours of work, roll in at 11 AM to test the fix and update the ticket". As far as this study knows, that work pattern equals "high productivity at 11 AM", even though all of the actual work happened during the "low productivity" timeframe.
Sites rendering now with same stock photo : /
I'm very aware of the new Satya MSFT and think it's great. But you can't take away distrust built over years of Microsoft saying "we changed" then committing competition-killing bad-faith practices when they think nobody is watching.

Here's to hoping MSFT is actually different today.

Furthermore part of my calculus is that internal culture matters. Last I checked MSFT's internal culture still doesn't value openness and user trust the way Google or Facebook do, where it's a core company value.
This is actually pretty well done, but I can't help but feel like the number of articles and documents trying to explain or teach git is a sign that the tool just has usability problems.

Maybe I'm misremembering, but I don't remember people having so much trouble with svn. With rcs and cvs, sure, and it was mainly stuff with breaking locks, moving files, and other BS that were part of the bad design. With svn I remember the problems being: setting up the daemon (https vs svnserve+ssh), fixing a wedged Berkeley DB when that was still a thing, and getting hook scripts working right cross-platform. With git, the common problem seems to be: "what command am I even supposed to use here?" and "I broke it somehow and I don't know how to fix it." If the number of articles about it ever seemed to go down I might say, "Oh, it's just growing pains for new users," but they still seem to be out there constantly. Why is everybody still having trouble learning to use git?

Note to the zealots: This isn't to say git is bad, anymore than vi/vim is bad for having it's own arcane interface that users have complained about and struggled with for decades. Lots of terrific software carries burdens like a terrible interface, or an onerous configuration, or a lack of documentation. That doesn't mean we can't be critical.
>Bitcoin's main purpose is and always was to have an alternative to the financial system, crippling regulations, government control and taxes.

Does bitcoin really do any of those things? Right now, btc core is not an alternative to cash- a problem that maybe will be fixed in time, but currently only seems to be getting worse. If bitcoin really did take off as a global currency, the IRS would audit unreported bitcoin transactions- and it'd have your financial records because the corporations and individuals you interact act with would cooperate, and it'd only need a few to start to deanonymize you. It seems like the blockchain would almost make the tax job easier, because all transactions are public unless people move from bitcoin to a zerocoin model. Even then, the IRS would pursue those who didn't report and have transaction information from vendors to work to identify fraud.

So, bitcoin doesn't seem like an alternative to taxes. Also have no idea what it has to do with most government regulation. And, is it really an alternative to the financial system? Yes, people can use bitcoin instead of a checkings or savings account- but still need to use traditional services to invest in the market, and the financial system will continue humming along making more money from money and making gobs of money profiting off everyone else's market inefficiency whether it's working in usd or btc.

So, what are we left with? It seems like core btc is only an alternative to a speculative investment in something that the federal reserve cannot print. And believe it or not, the vast majority of this country either doesn't care about quantitative easing, or believes in basic macroeconomics. Core right now seems to just be a LARP fantasy for libertarians convinced that "this time we can finally get rid of the evil Fed and their evil money printing". It'll never happen, and if it does offfer any kind of freedom, it's the freedom to go back to pre-fiat boom and bust cycles of economic hell detached from modern macroeconomic theory.
Because you rarely get damages above 50k for even severe injuries.
It would still be ads, but much nicer ones that come out of direct negotiation between publishers and advertisers, instead of some shady clickbait ad agency randomly selected to invade your site by Google's algorithms.

My experience has been that direct-sold ads produce more revenue for publishers than programmatic ads. I would love to see research on this one day.
Sure, but it starts with goodwill...
It's interesting that Dell won this one. Sadly there's not a lot of technical info about the system itself or the big storage expansion (probably more Lustre, sadly - my tax dollars at work).
AMP is borderline MITM.
No one seems to be up in arms about slow websites. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If AMP and others exist, there's a reason, and it might be more useful to respond to that than to respond to AMP.
So the oracle is incentivized to tell the truth because lying will hurt the value of their tokens? What happens when someone offers them more than their tokens are worth if they lie?
Ironically Defender was preventing me from receiving Windows updates, so I had to turn it off. I assume that means I'm in a catch-22.
> I doubt you can even hit a target directly under you from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, at least without a fairly significant amount of effort.

> You can't just fire a rocket "straight down" -- if you just point at the Earth and thrust, you end up in an elongated orbit that misses the earth entirely.

The second sentence doesn't justify the first. You can thrust in various directions even if your intended trajectory is straight down. I surmise you would simply need to reduce orbit speed to maintain the same angular velocity the whole way down, which doesn't strike me as a computationally or physically difficult problem.
I've used this product and you can't jam the entire chip into it. You can only jam pieces of it before the search space is so big it runs forever. It is useful for smaller pieces, but it will eventually go critical and melt down your server farm if you keep growing the problem size. That was my experience a few years back.
Children are sexually abused by family members, then by adults at schools and clubs they visit. Abuse by strangers is rare.
It depends. From what I'm reading: generally, with apparently one possible exception, Meltdown doesn't work on ARM. Generally, both variants of Spectre do.
P2P does not solve and cannot solve a number of problems associated with business communication.

If you are sitting in the same room with your colleagues, what do you do when there's a power outage? Sometimes there really isn't anything to do but wait. If those kinds of outages were less rare, you'd need to figure something out to smooth productivity. Whether that is buying a generator, or finding things to do regularly that don't require electricity depends on your business.

We have distributed systems that are used by normal applications to solve issues like this. When we need to, we put an ActiveDirectory replica in every satellite office. Frequently organizations forget why they spent the money on so much redundancy in the first place, re-centralize stuff, and it might be years before they experience a big enough outage that reminds them why they were "wasting" those dollars on redundant systems.

As you say, there are plenty of systems that could be made less fragile than they are. Slack is specifically interesting because they made a number of "more central" design decisions, even though chat as a protocol is easier to make "more distributed". What did they get out of this tradeoff? A ton of well packaged features and integrations with other systems.

Could the same thing be recreated in a more decentralized fashion? It is theoretically possible, but it could be years before we see a product/system anywhere near as functional. I would love to see an on-prem Slack product. Atlassian offers the closest suite I've seen that fits this bill. It is not easy to operate these systems at scale.
Preload is treated as a browser hint. Presumably, your browser knows you're on a capped network.

https://medium.com/reloading/preload-prefetch-and-priorities...
The problem is that anti-virus software is not a normal application, it is a weird, very complex kind of parasite that burrows deep into the operating system. This means Microsoft must be very careful, lest the parasite unintentionally kill the host.
That doesn't mean he learned nothing, or that his experience was detrimental.

I'm simply concerned about the collective fear parents have of their own children's liberty.
But then you'll need a beefier, heavier laptop, possibly with shorter battery life.