skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’m stuck in a dead end job right now. I will never be granted a shred of decision making capacity or autonomy.

It is a waiting game. Waiting for more assignments. Waiting until 5PM. Waiting for my paycheck. Waiting to get fired. Waiting to retire. Waiting to die.

(n * (Commute. Sit. Wait. Commute. Eat. Sleep.)) Die. Where n == the days I have left in this world.

The things I work on feel like absurd, meaningless boondoggles with no head and no tail. So here I am spinning my wheels as I hurtle toward a grave.

That I know this is my reality forces me to deeply question the society I participate in. If I am so bound, restricted, constrained in my actions and daily routines, why not just cut to the chase as die already. The repetitive script for how my invarient pattern of living shall progress is obvious. Do I really need to live through it 10,000 more times?
The world is small... I always liked Fio, they had documented API and you could do whatever you wanted even in ages, when other banks insisted on using their software.
What (I believe) gkya was trying to point out is that "the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target" is a rather pointless statement. Of course it's a function of the distance to and size of a target; but Fitts' law consists not in this observation (which was nothing new to Fitts himself, and most likely to the entire human race ever since the first Paleolithic man tried to throw a stone at something), but in the actual function, ID = log(2D/W).

The cargo-cult reading of Fitts' work which is so prevalent nowadays probably accounts for many of the instances of cargo-cult UX design that are so popular today.
Now, this is true in many senses, as it's inherently how static analysis works, but I've also had many experiences where someone joins one of our IRC channels, shows some code and says "hey the borrow checker won't let me do this thing that's totally safe" and then I or someone else replies "well, what about this?" to which the answer is "...... oh. yeah." This is virtually almost always from C++ programmers.

It's hard to escape the mindset of languages we're used to!

> At the same time a lot of the error messages are very cryptic

You should file bugs! We care deeply about the legibility of error messages, and the whole --explain system is there to try and go above and beyond.
The pricing scheme is derived as an optimality solution for the company. Obviously, it always (mathematically speaking, weakly) benefits the firm.

An all-knowing monopolist will extract 100-epsilon% consumer surplus. That's why economists are big about regulation and taxation.

Is it deception? Not necessarily. A pricing scheme is a menu of deals from which you pick the most beneficial for you. You then optimize as well - just that the company gets to set up the menu.

If a company were to decide to leave a minimum surplus to you, the optimization problem would be almost identical. We just assume that companies set this minimum value small. Perhaps, however, this may not be the best long term strategy?
Not all companies may try to extract everything.

But what is a good and fair amount?
I want a world where it is more clear what we should work on. Most startups come up with solutions looking for a problem. Yet if people or companies formulated their problems more directly, we wouldn't have to guess at them. As a consequence, work would be more meaningful and more effective.
If you want to add voting to Wikipedia, you have understood neither voting, nor Wikipedia.
He, and Keynes' prediction of 15 hour work weeks, were largely right. We spend quite few hours in the week doing the work we need for basic shelter, food and security, at least to a 1845/1930 standard. You could theoretically live in a simple house in a non-congested corner of countryside and feed a small family simple food on perhaps a days average wages a week (there are some logistics around actually getting someone to hire you for a day a week).

What they got wrong is that the things we ended up prioritizing for the rest of the time are luxuries, that costs money and that we thus need to work to afford, rather than merely leisure time. This then pushes us to want to live in (expensive) cities, to be near better jobs and luxury spending opportunities, which again means we have to earn more to afford this.
I only spent like five minutes with it and then I tried donwloading xconvert.

(I am part of the "read the docs only too late if ever" crew).

Thanks a lot!
A hackathon series in Afrikan cities focusing on transport
Maybe: “Respect users’ screen real estate.”

And the corollary: “Don’t fear information density. Remove decoration if it allows faster access to the information that matters.”
Well, I'm a North Carolinian and I just heard about this group from the article. I plan to attend the next meeting on the 22nd.

Not all of us out here are hicks, especially when you get to the big cities. Look at the voting trends by county and you'll see that Wake goes blue every year.
The world will never be without jobs; work will just become detached from financial productivity and wellbeing
Thanks for the reading material, quite interesting.

I think you are right, recently I saw an Arduino-like projects book, but using VHDL instead, which somehow pointed into this direction.
The authors of it and the authors of this were talking on Twitter; the one in the article is pretty specialized, so that's why they didn't use this. They recommend Sentry's library for every non-wasm use case, basically.
ARM did release a very detailed, machine checkable specification(that they themselves use to verify security with), to everybody:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14174533
Easy automated testing in Node.js with TestCafe (video tutorial)
Unless you use a very large screen, in that case you often have to move the mouse over half the desk any time you want to click the menu. I remember the fun I had back when Apple produced those 30" screens.
Our success at combating strict gender roles that kept women out of the workplace hasn't been matched with a social embrace of stay-at-home dads or other family members who don't work in order to focus on helping care for their loved ones. Unfortunately, instead we've ended up with a society where everyone is just expected to work all the time. There needs to be less stigma against people without jobs. We need to stop assuming that everything of value is always done for a profit.
Q&A with MIMIR CEO Nick Fierro: Blockchain, Challenges, and Opportunity
I'd also like to plug Iain M Banks' Culture series as an example of post-scarcity living. There is no shortage of ways to spend one's time or define one's identity without it being coupled to income generation.
"Testing on components of the system, dubbed KRUSTY..."

Named after Krusty the Clown?
Factories were a huge improvement over peasantry/starvation actually. Yes, they were still horrible, and we've improved since; but there was a reason people moved en masse to the industrial towns.

I suggest Polanyi's The Great Transformation if you want to find out more about this.
what do you mean stuck? what do you do after 5 that is so meaningless?
Did you mean to say 'Usability'

Ergonomics was and still is it's own thing. It very much relates to the physical world exclusively.
> But I imagine that new and old contributors get some satisfaction when their contribution get "merged into master", no matter how much that sounds like yielding to the hierarchy.

I spent one day in my weekend upgrading a couple of Rubygems to be compatible with Ruby 2.5 after some things were deprecated. One of the authors just closed my PR, left no comments, and committed his own changes to master. His solution was a little bit different than my own, but he was able to commit to my branch.

A "Thank you", or a "Hey! I did not know that it was deprecated in 2.5, thanks!" would have been appreciated, and I felt a bit miffed even though it is not a big thing.
Yes, I should have done that as looking out the window at a tree would have been organic and unlike the sensationalist news. I did not realize how much harm my constant checking of websites have done to my attention. Now I don't have a job and for reason I need to find the cobra insurance did not work yesterday. My daughter has asthma and I paid $450 to buy Albuterol and Flovent. I think I will eventually get it reimbursed from the insurance carrier but the guilt I felt for ruining my jobs and the shame I felt. oh God.
Am I the only one who likes work? And I don’t mean my job, just work in general.
Jobless people, eg retirees, who have their needs met but choose to "work" seem often happy. My father was a teacher, his pension is sufficient, he spends his days working with a teaching union.

A friend who was a construction engineer builds extensions and does building work for relatives.

My mother when she was able lent her extensive knowledge of countryside planning to the local council, helped on patients fora for hospitals, cared for more elderly members of the community.

They all do "jobs" that can be paid for, none of them needed to financially. They all seem content in their roles.

Being penniless and being jobless are different things. Moreover, not all people choose to find identity in the jobs they do for survival.
On my list is a GPU passthrough setup, which is described in following blog post [1] (with screenshots).
I did not set up it yet, but I will try it out next time I build up my home desktop from ground up.

[1] https://davidyat.es/2016/09/08/gpu-passthrough/
Have you tried it to build web projects? Unfortunately there are very few experience reports out there.
When I used Vivado a couple years ago on the Zynq, I was shocked by this. It was supposed to replace ISE, but was equally bad at version control. Absolutely ridiculous.
Free time will turn to violence. I don't see a system of robots doing the work --- since it will be destroyed by the masses of media controlled unemployed workers. In the middle ages religion was used to tame the masses -- robots will need something similar.
Problem being that web design is the most likely computer discipline to not actually have that many academics in it.
Sorry, I didn't mean to minimize the consequences.

There are massive failures, and now, more than ever, software interacts with other software in unpredictable ways.

I was just expressing the feeling that things are even worse in other domains. Though sometimes automating a huge unstructured mess is difficult, imagine having a huge unstructured mess and dealing with it by hand!

Programmers might have many problems, but at least a subset of the work happens in a purely mathematical space.
These conversations I feel always seem shallow to me. Automation is definitely helping to free us from a lot of work.. but the world we live in today feels like a preview of what an automated world feels like. In reality, our material lifestyle is still supported by a very large number of people working away in countries most Americans can't find on a map for extremely low wages.

If we're going to talk about "reorganizing society", it should factor in EVERY person in the world. Not just the lucky 10% in first world countries.
It already it. Most people middle class and up work way more than they strictly need to for simple wellbeing. It's just that our standards and expectation for wellbeing shifts, and shifts quickly.
Dark Caracal has trojanized Orbot, Signal, WhatsApp and other Android apps [pdf]
Bitcoin could be here for 100 years but more likely to collapse Nobel laureate
As far as I know, Stripe SEPA is only available in EUR currency[0], so this nearly excludes the UK completely. At least for us, all SEPA payments were outside the UK. Probably 95% from Germany and Austria, and the rest from a few other EU countries. Not a huge sample size, but we've been running with SEPA for a few months. We did an A/B test for a a few weeks as well, and basically observed no hit in total revenue when we offered SEPA or without it (only cards and PayPal), so that was the main reason we pulled out the plug. Not just the chargebacks.

Another thing I should mention is the async nature of the whole thing. Unlike cards that get authorized/declined instantly, we're talking days or weeks with SEPA. For a monthly subscription, this eats into the first month easily.

Again, we're talking about private individuals here (B2C), typically students in our cases, and as I mentioned predominately from Germany, so YMMV a lot with other customer types or countries.

[0] https://stripe.com/docs/sources/sepa-debit#create-source
Far more difficult to get into. It takes months to review applications, and they reject a lot of them.
Predicting what user reviews are about with LDA and gensim
>And finally, beyond all these dysfunctions, loom the most-discussed, most existential threats to work as we know it: automation, and the state of the environment. Some recent estimates suggest that between a third and a half of all jobs could be taken over by artificial intelligence in the next two decades.

I've yet to read any research without crippling flaws that suggests this kind of prediction isn't rooted in fantasy.

To take one example, look at https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Fut... section on call centers and imagine that Comcast applies ML to the next call you make with them. How well would that work?
I think its clear, in our world, you should work on what earns you the most.
The desktop apps of the 90s was the heyday of UX. There are many positive things that could be said, but in the interest of brevity, I'll mention just two.

Customizability. Users could set up their own hot keys, and even their own tool bars.

Discoverability. Every UI widget (knob) had a tooltip, which explained its function. When a menu item was being browsed, there was a help line on the bottom that explained its function. Items that could be clicked were either visually distinct (such as buttons), or highlighted when hovering over them.
not OP, but can relate:

The less meaningful work I get done during the day, the less energy I have after 5. Most days, I'll make quick dinner, turn on YouTube, watch videos for 10 minutes, and suddenly it's 11pm.
So, that's standard practice in the industry. Download your own stuff from a pirate site, then sue the shit out of the pirate site owner.
It's not a worthwhile project when 99% of your vulnerabilities are in the software and nearly all of them need you to run untrusted software to be exploited.

"Browsing the web" is not likely to become a task that can satisfy high security requirements ever again. Too much cruft gets added to browsers faster than it can be thoroughly audited.

If you need absolutely no CPU bugs (including bad design decisions "working as intended"), take a well-understood, possibly older design like 680x0 or MIPS and run it on an FPGA.
I know this isn't point, but a lot of gas stations sell charging cables.
Thanks, kind of. It doesn't seem to have been deployed into production, though.
Agreed. However, if you drive a tractor and write code to drive tractors, say, are you a coder or a farmer (or a software engineering or a soil scientist ...).

Perhaps you see yourself primarily as a mother, or an artist, or ...
Exactly. Right now, we aren't doing work. We are doing makework, because society won't give us the tickets to eat and have shelter without it.

My work is all the things I ought to be doing, but have to fit around the daily makework. Less of it gets done than I'd like.
So a digital interface that is displayed on a screen of a desktop is "UX", but
the very same digital interface that is displayed on a touchscreen attached to
industrial machine is suddenly a totally different field "ergonomics"? Or does
it need physical buttons to be called that?
Bloodlust is related to Dunes. The child saw a dead body:

https://www.bakerwhitefield.com/#/dunes/
Interesting list indeed. At my company (saas provider, ~60 people, B2B learning platform, ARR in millions), we are considering providing a test environment to enable our users to test our new features (we deploy new features every ~6 weeks).

One thing that make us reluctant to do this is that we doubt people from our B2B users will put the time and efforts needed to fing bugs in a disposable test environment.

I'm really interested in learning the best practices to "battle-test" a new release for our current stage. Because for now, gradual feature deployment "à la GAFA" looks way too expensive at our stage (deploy to 1% of the user base, get feedback, fix bugs, proceed to 10%, repeat, and finally 100%).
What makes you stuck? You sound like you've accepted your fate. If you want to change things, just do it.

If your reality is so bad that you want to die, then how is taking action to potentially change things worse? A big part of this discussion is people want meaningful work and a meaningful life, but they want other people to give it to them. Why is that expected?
It's not that I don't understand this. It's that a web page on "the laws of UX" counts on the readers' interpretative capabilites to get such point across, and excludes any concrete example to make their point clear.
Comes down to urban planning, the west is depressing because you move from box to box in your mobile box. If the systems were less efficient we would rely on each other more and perhaps feel useful, a third world city is a great place to live, mentally.
I agree, but I think we absolutely need to be thinking right now about how society is going to be functioning three or four decades from now. The rate of technological advancement hasn't slowed down, and depending on how closely you're following developments in a lot of these countries we traditionally think of as poor or underdeveloped you might find yourself surprised at how quickly they're starting to catch up.
Part of the problem, I think, is that most people like work. When people sense their hours are spent on fruitless or simple tasks, or they're not valued for it ("low skill" jobs) it's frustrating. Accomplishing things, making progress, solving problems ... these are very satisfying aspects to "work.". But how many jobs offer that regularly?

I have a more aggressive timeline than most on the spread of automation (a catch-all for job replacement, obsolescence, changing labor market). I'm of the opinion there will be a significant shift on our lifetime with whatever social repercussions and accommodations follow. But I don't think people will ever stop "working."
Shamelessly promoting Deepak Chopra on her wellness web site was inexcusable. But proxying Kalanick while promoting "meditation wristbands" for drivers??!

>"Even in top-level conversations where Kalanick appeared to be absent, other executives and board members suspected that Huffington was serving as his proxy. The founder of the Huffington Post was a constant presence at Uber’s offices, making suggestions that seemed to promote her new wellness company, Thrive Global Holdings LLC. For example, she wanted to put “nap pods” at driver hubs and give drivers meditation wristbands. Huffington’s company received $50,000 in consulting fees from Uber. The perceived self-dealing didn’t go over well internally, and she had the money returned, according to a person familiar with the matter. A spokesperson for Huffington says that Thrive provided services at cost, and that Huffington refunded the fees when events required her to take on a more active role at Uber."
After long unemployment period and bad times, I need work, not the social thing, just the activity.

I guess to some, the fact to be doing something is better than the job being interesting, a career, well paying .. (as long as it's not to extreme of course)

btw, I believe that we're wired to like work as a basis for social bonding (if you believe that social bonding was selected to help for survival, and work is basically mutualized survival). So doing something in group is probably always good as long as the group factor is good enough (aka not being slaves)
I see myself as a human. What I do for money or for hobby doesn't define me all by itself. I'm interested in music production as well as in B2B sales. I'm a software engineer as well as someone who spends weeks at a time in the nature without any electronics at all. You can't say that I'm a software engineer or a DJ or a salesman. I'm all of these.
Well, they'll still need to sort out real memories from imagined or implanted.
True. That is really difficult to obtain though. But assuming that most people are eventually diagnosed with cancer (even if just close to death), then a similar maybe a little lower population must have undiagnosed cancers.

In the end you'll need a properly conducted study with random undiagnosed people to get reliable numbers though.
Was I the only one wondering why all these English people are living in Iceland?
Skype requires a verbal announcement if used on a broadcast. It does feel weird, but it's the cost of using free software. https://www.skype.com/en/legal/broadcast/
There is nothing wrong with working and liking your work. I have a passion for music and coding, working all day. Problem is that most people need to work for another reason; $$$ instead of passion, to avoid ending up in the streets. That's more like slavery.
I don't really know Fitts' work, but I do understand that what that sentence means is obviously "smaller things are harder to click or tap". But that is very obvious and thus meaningless without indicating what that implies: e.g. "make bigger buttons".
Can't agree. I've been a reader since high school and well into college. Subscribed for a few years after and eventually stopped.

It's a lot of "water" with 1-2 worthwhile articles per issue at best. It's also extremely biased in more ways than one, trying to please its target audience as much as they can as opposed to challenging their views (which good journalism is supposed to, else what's the point).
Some people get caught in situations where furthering their career and eating next week are mutually exclusive propositions.
No. Work is a hobby for me. I enjoy the process of working, progressing, doing something. I don't really have any other hobbies that I wish I could be doing all day. We have to have something to wake up and do everyday, otherwise life is very boring and just a waiting game until the end of our days.

If people don't enjoy their work, their mission should be to keep looking until they find something that suits them. It's worth the effort finding something that you enjoy doing everyday.
Places with user generated content used to be where a lot of people would go to get bullshit free opinions and reviews also.

Then the marketing departments caught on to that and proceeded to poison that well.
How have you missed VRChat? It's taking over. That's the killer app right there.
a 1% false positive rate. ouch.
2007 – English Cross-Channel bridge bid revealed
Ask HN: Were people as skeptical in the early Internet days as of blockchain?
Inspired by this reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7rego7/were_people_this_skeptical_in_the_early_days_of/

For those of you that are in their 40's, do you remember people being very skeptical as well?
Why is parcel x5 faster than webpack?
Not really - you can't choose to work 15 hour weeks at most places, even if that is all the money you need. I know if I could CHOOSE to work 20hrs/week and get paid half the salary I definitely would, but that's not an option for 99% of us. I prioritize time over luxuries, but employers still dictate the terms.