skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see a lot of praise for Backblaze’s services and support and I just wanted to warn that I’ve had the opposite experience and am in the middle of switching to another service.

I’ve used Backblaze since 2010 and in the past year contacted support twice. In both cases, they were only interested in quoting esoteric policies and technical limitations rather than actually solving my issue. As in, “Oh that’s because our system works like this and this and has this limitation.” Ooookay, that’s not what I asked; I asked how to solve this problem of mine that your poor system is causing.

For example, the most recent time was when I started getting emails warning that all of my external drives were offline and my data would be soon deleted. Instead of “Very sorry about that, here’s how to fix the issue,” I got this long response about the ways their system looks for new files in serial and it can get jammed and start ignoring everything, with no apology, no acknowledgement this was their issue, and no solution. I had to go fishing for solutions and drag the information out of them to finally figure out what I needed to do. Which it turns out is to get back an internal drive (totally unrelated to the other drives Backblaze abandoned) I had physically removed and repurposed, put it back the computer, wait a long time for Backblaze to see it, then uncheck that drive in Backblaze and remove it again. This was a good example showing how the client design is poor and the support is worse.

The other two major technical issues that convinced me I need a new service asap are:

1. The client will lie to you and you never know what’s really backed up. Even if you use the secret alt-click to force a full drive scan, it can still miss files and tell you fully backed up when files from days ago are still nowhere to be found. Luckily I’ve never actually needed to do a restore, but I almost thought I did one time and would have been furious at all the missing files I noticed.

2. This might not matter to some people but absolutely no meta data is backed up.

I hate to badmouth them since the company seems like a really good citizen, they project a very positive image, and their software seems good on the surface. But when you dig in, there are a lot of issues with the software and service, and I recently realized having Backblaze wouldn’t actually reassure me in the event of a local disaster, so migrated away and I wanted to warn others too.
If you want to work with robots then you were probably born a few decades too early. I can't imagine a more depressing life than spending 8+ hours a day with a group of people and being so determined not to make any friends (what you describe as "cliques").

If people are "SLACKing" off so much work doesn't get done then that gets escalated just like any other performance concern. If not, it feels a lot more like sour grapes than anything else.
That's exactly the vibe I got from the "cofounder" who is Head of PR. At 2% equity and $1,500 a month, that has to be the rawest deal I have heard of for someone who is essentially responsible for all of the company's traction.
Do not tell them this, they will completely disable your account.
> I enjoyed HipChat

Is that just due to client fit and polish or for a more fundamental reason?
I do not work for Google but know people who do, and did. The ones who are happiest have a high degree of personal autonomy and self actualise to work on things which interest them. Some of them took their 20% cool time to real work.

Some resented being moved interstate or overseas, and sought a path home to where they like to be.

Some say they are burned out and burnt by scale problems but mainly I think it's loss of autonomy at root. Being told to do things you don't believe in is hard.

Only one left in some sense fully vested, and he's a bit bored by the outside world. I don't think google is a 'chocolate factory' but be warned after initial enthusiasm wears off, you need to retain some sense of core role in any job, and few may be as accommodating as Google is said to be.
Wow, thank you so much. This is incredibly useful.
Thanks, this is great.
Sweet. Passing this along to him.
Significant iPhone X Cancellation, Apple Hides Painful Quarter
>*There are real issues with non-annoying ads, like tracking,

99% of online tracking comes from Google Analytics, not ads.

> ...but I don't think most people know or care very much about that.

Indeed...
Awesome! Been wanting to do this with another niche community; can I asked how you built it?
pretty sure you'll need to get a degree and a teaching certification otherwise you'll be a teacher's aide. at least in my country.
If project management honored every engineer's every desire to delay the project out of an abundance of caution, would it have launched at all? It seems doubtful that this was the only case in which they had to choose between delaying the project and accepting risk.
Isn't that exactly what the experiment did? They divided subjects to 3 groups: 1 with cognitive training, 1 without anything in particular (wait list), and 1 with physical exercise.
It seems to be trendy to blame Slack for all the ills of modern civilization. Is it the somewhat smug tone of all Slack's corporate communication? Maybe. Other than that, it seems to me to be more or less the same general bucket of telegrams, telephone calls, pages, texts, emails, etc. that each preceding generation has blamed on their inability to focus. If you can't resist distractions, whether it's Slack, or watching the ducks in the pond through the window, yes, you should close the blinds. I don't know why this rated a post on Medium...
The Muse (YC W12) Is Hiring a Product and Data PM
It's for security to check for sex and drug use.
A manager of a large consulting firm in my city told me that they used to hire 8 month co-ops and would consider themselves lucky if they broke even.
The national speed limit doesn't apply when on a race track.
Do you have any references? Wikipedia suggests the opposite. I do not find anything wrong with new research but presenting it as groundbreaking is laughable.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose
[2] https://doi.org/10.1038%2F360062a0
Wow that guy from Hater is REALLY good at PR.
> If you're here to preach morals, enjoy your very brief stay. If you're here to learn and share, please help contribute to our wonderful community ...

I'm not sure, but it seems like you're implying that preaching morals cannot be a contribution to your community.

If so, I think it raises some interesting issues about community and morality.
Can you imagine at the dealership:

You step into a basic Toyota, you gauge the speedometer. It reads 0 on end, 160 on the other.

Next you step into a basic Honda, you gauge the speedometer.
It reads 0 on one end, 80 on the other.

Which one will most people buy, all other things being equal?

Now, if you want to have an absolute maximum speed, governments can insist on tamper-proof governors. Kinda like Singapore does for its cabs.
Like I mentioned in another comment below, I am not an anti-social guy. I played the game, and I did just fine. Everybody at work liked me and I had no issues.

But I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about how the system is messed up. I didn't enjoy being unproductive. I didn't enjoy having to keep Slack open all day to make sure I don't miss out on what people are up to. I do believe the company lost a lot of talented developers because of the office politics.

And you know what? Everyone did just fine before they started using Slack. Everybody was friendly to one another, we regularly had globally inclusive face-to-face social gatherings, many of the team members ate lunch together, the team was pretty social.

But with slack, everything became political. It didn't bring people closer together in any way because people were already friendly enough before. What it did do was create more politics and make everyone waste more time than they used to.

Before slack, wasting time was a single player thing, you would maybe slack off for a bit reading hacker news but quickly get back to work, but after Slack, slacking off became a multiplayer thing, and just like any other multiplayer architecture, Metcalfe's law applies here too, which means the amount of wasted time grows exponentially.
I've considered using "magic login link" emails but greylisting[1] seems to be an insurmountable problem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting
Is there a support page with instructions on how to contact support or did you just hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button?
> accelerating quickly uses up more energy than accelerating slowly

Can you explain this to me? I know gas engines have this attribute but I assumed electric motors didn't.
One more thing:

> [Google Translate] allows you to go to a foreign country and get around without speaking the native language. Great. But a phrasebook can do the exact same thing, except it doesn't claim breakthrough AI machine-consciousness

Wait, who is talking about consciousness? That's a different deal, and let me assure you I'm as skeptical as you appear to be. AI is a buzzword here, don't let it distract you from the effectiveness of the actual techniques.

Also, it stands to reason portable automated translation like your phone can do is not something a phrasebook can do. I can point to a random sign, take a picture of it and have Google Translate give me a helpful if quirky translation. I definitely cannot pull out a phrasebook and hope something matches what I'm seeing in the sign; it will take ages. So it's at least more convenient.

In fact, I've done this with Japanese instructions to assemble a scale model. Granted, here the problem domain was very constrained, and I already sort of guessed what I was trying to do -- and yet, Google Translate was orders of magnitude more helpful than flipping through a phrasebook. Would it be as helpful if I was in completely uncharted waters, where I can make fewer guesses? Probably not. Still, very impressive.
Different people have different methodologies of working. Some could probably perform fine with work interspersed with random chatter at intervals. For others this would completely destroy productivity.

Imagine parent poster is one of the latter. Now imagine that people like yourself judged that he was "determined not to make friends" because he didn't opt to participate much or at all in group chats. Then all you need is people talking about other people at work something people do everywhere and shockingly we have exactly the situation parent poster described.

There may even be people like that at your work who feel the same way he does.
But the definition isn’t if it is like something for a human to be a bat. Human experience doesn’t really come into it.

It is like something to be a human. But the conscious experience of a bat (if it exists) may be completely alien to us in every way. That’s not relevant to what it is to be like a bat. The only important thing is if it is like something to be a bat.
> And I still occasionally find one hours later

On yourself even after taking a shower, or in your clothes that you threw into the wash?
This is great advice; it's how our team functions, being 100% remote, but are leasing space that we come to if a team ever wants to sit together in person. It's available, but managers have made it clear it's by no means compulsory.

So, we have off-topic channels, a channel to plan social events (I Live in Austin Texas and we have more than one musician who will post events, and we've made company outings out of going to see a coworker perform), there's one for movie chats, and even a "LFG" (Looking for games) channel for the folks who like to play and discuss video games.

They're all as active and vibrant as our #devops and #product-discussions channels.
Are you actually saying not using slack is risky? Do people not talk in your universe? Send emails? Text messages?
How about the combination of species that created the atmosphere at all? Gave it oxygen? Enriched the soil?
This. Diehard fan - at least previously, but times are a changing.

Let alone the OS feeling less polished, the removal of time remaining on battery and other user hostile changes, the touch bar being poorly thought out net loss (e.g. the fact that you can’t adjust the brightness so in low light typing, it messes with your eyes), I’ve had to warranty 3 MacBook pros in the past year. I’d never had to warranty an apple product before.

I don’t want another iPad or iPhone. I want a laptop that just works and I’m willing to pay for it. Please somebody deliver that, since apple isn’t chasing it anymore.
> ...who the fuck are they designing these things for?

Obviously you since you own the thing.

If people didn't buy the fast cars they wouldn't build the fast cars...how many Beetles were sold worldwide and those things could barely do 110kph with a good tailwind?
Where do you work that you have to constantly fight off others from backstabbing you? That sounds like a really, really stressful and unhealthly work environment.
ctrl-W to close windows is worse. I can't count the number of times I tried erase-word-backwards and closed the browser or other window instead.
Then probably you haven't understood one of the biggest user needs - people don't want to "be bored". They constantly want some entertainment as stimulus.

Look at people around you (grocery checkout lines or bus stop or subway or Starbucks) - everyone is glued to their phone screens. And Facebook is the ultimate magnet to waste those 2-5 min wait times one has to endure every so often. Earlier, people would get bored waiting in line, or strike conversations with strangers or just muse over random thoughts. No more. All that attention has gone to their smartphones.

And advertisers are simply following those eyeballs. Since Facebook manages to capture so much attention of so many humans, they rake in billions.
> If something happens that's egregiously morally out of bounds, then people will find or create ways to enforce against it.

I think you left out "and a lot of money is involved". Do you think there would have been an emergency hard fork if the DAO only had $100 in it? I sincerely doubt it.

> existing enforcement mechanisms will impose themselves as trying to define what moral is.

Morality and Law (code or not) are different things. You can't code morality - you can only encode the programmer's morality. (Which is not the same thing, because the programmer can change his/her mind.)
Unexpected item in the bagging area
Exactly, well said. As humans we’re excellent at blaming pretty much anything else (Slack, email, telephone, telegram, anything really) for what is our own and only our own inability to focus.
For software developers, the best way to communicate is through the bug database. Developers don't use "slack" at our company.

Of course, it may be different for sales and support people, etc.
Absolutely! I was like you
and I am not even a developer...
People of ACM – Regina Barzilay
Not anymore, the yahoo finance is unfortunately broken...
It was from a conversation between two neuroscientists. They were talking about Nagel earlier in the discussion.
I don’t know if Nagel came up with that definition though.
Could you explain how the way I stated it is circular?
I think the Web could come up with a robots.txt-like standard where all the requirements for passwords, usernames, maybe even form field names etc. would be published in a parseable form.
I had came across a post (https://www.codementor.io/blog/land-clients-freelance-develo...) that does a good job going into the details about how to get started on your freelancing career as a developer — I think you might be helpful?

In any case, best of luck to you!
Work is work, fun is fun. There's a clear line between them, mixing them leads just to trouble. I don't slack off at work, and in return I expect the minute I leave the office to not get any work messages anymore.

All this fake friendliness and clique behaviour is just more stress and distraction.
Interesting article. One can easily notice that most folks seem to treat the speed limit as a minimum speed rather than a maximum speed. It's not just designers designing for speed. They do so because of market demand. That demand is boosted by advertising - both overt and culturally pervasive imagery. Buckle up folks. Try not to speed. You're really not saving much, if any, time. Also minimize left turns and lane changes. When you do turn (or change lanes) always use your turn indicator. When cars are robots they can do these things. The worry it that freedom loving consumers will still choose thrills over safety and this may stunt the adoption of robocars.
It works. Even with wet ethanol.

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6cd5b6vq
Author would have a better point if he talked about how the widespread use of memes/animated gifs is what makes such platforms into junk.
I wonder if mailing lists suffer from this at all.

I used to believe that ML were the best ratio of work+content / noise. Because the medium is limiting, so it doesn't invite for smalltalk(sic).
Pffft. Why would I want to drive a Benz when I can build my own Ferrari?
I worked for Google back in the olden days when most people didn't have a smart phone. One holiday season, they did this really cool thing where everybody got a free Android phone. Starting the next day and continuing forever, the toilet stalls were full all the time.

TLDR technology has a downside
Appeals Court Makes a Mess of Copyright Law Concerning ISPs and Safe Harbors
Ugh... Hipchat. Relatively straightforward things that they don't seem to be able to address:

You can't chat with more than 1 person without creating a private room. Slack makes this effortless. It's been on Atlassian's radar for almost 1.5 years with no movement:
https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Hipchat-questions/chat-wi...

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/HCPUB-431

And when you're in a private chat with someone, the jumping text you see when the person you're chatting with is typing. Over 1.5 years and they can't fix that? It's horribly distracting and just kinda sucks.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/HCPUB-950

Anyways, the whole thing feels dead and is very clearly a low priority for Atlassian.
Exactly this. A veneer of personalization can make it so that you must consent to get the service. Realistically not every use can be put down a priori because that would preclude allAB testing of new features. I’m expecting a much larger “cookie pop up” but getting an option to reset data will be nice (until I need to use the service again)
I don't like any kind of IM/chat apps used like an endless meeting. They're good for tackling one single issue with probably a handful of people at a time. Even with @mentions, hashtags and channels, chat is still a single stream that pretends to have context like email or forum posts do (with subject lines and conversation threads).

As a habit, I don't use any chat group (be it Telegram or any other app or platform) if there are more than five people. The explosion in the number of messages and the frustration in not being able to catch up is too big a cost on one's health and productivity. These tools don't enhance collaboration. On the contrary, they provide a facade of "being busy".

We seem to keep trying to reinvent email and forum discussions (that have more context and confine discussions by topic) again and again, but not achieving better results.
I dunno. I use Slack for a couple of groups as well as my full-time remote work.

I turn off all notifications & just check from time to time. I have a project manager who tends to pester me with DMs a little too much, but if I'm trying to concentrate I just turn it off.

I'm 50 years old & still "pre-internet" in much of my thinking, but I don't have a smartphone, turn off ALL notifications and then turn them on one-by-one on a need only basis, and still can't figure out why people have so much trouble managing their internet lives.

It's not the tool that's causing your problems.
Cars are actually quite safe if you consider how much we use them. Your odds of dying in a car accident are quite low. Given that robocars have their own trade-offs, I don't think it's too surprising that some people will elect to continue to buy human-driven cars indefinitely if given the choice.
> Isn't this "gig economy" thing weird? Isn't it strange that people don't have stable long term employment? What's up with that? Is it good?

If you look at it purely from the perspective of economic theory, stable long-term employment is weirder than everybody being an individual contractor. Ronald Coase asks the question "Why do firms even exist in the first place?" [1] and comes to the conclusion that many transaction costs come along with marketplaces, and firms may be well-suited for dealing with those transaction costs internally. In this light, It may be observed that the gig economy firms "solve" transaction cost sub-problems, eradicating the bulwark of the firm and exposing the would-be workers to the competitive forces of the marketplace.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
The critic in addition to criticizing the fit and finish (fair thing to do) chose to criticize aspects of its emergency design --but according to commenters, same critic swooned over BMW i3 which has similar emergency design choices. Maybe the critic has a point, but then should at least criticize EV MFGs equally.
All of these devices are built specifically to steal your focus with buzzers and flashing lights. If anything it's an arms race.
I find instant communication useful for quick "Am I doing this right?" problems people have. Sending something like "I'm getting ssh connection refused while trying to connect to this host. Can someone else try?". That can quickly be answered by multiple people and people can chime in their quick thoughts for what is likely the problem. Trying to communicate a bunch of people with one line question/answers would be super annoying with the latency that email has.
Perhaps Ive been lucky in this regard but I've never seen that. In fact, the people most disengaged from the tertiary work activities tend to, in my experience, also be the lowest performers. Honestly, if the existence of chatter "destroys" your productivity I don't think it was all that high to begin with.
One of the best talks at Siggraph last year was on Bungie's
particle system Destiny 2 (slides are here: http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2017/index.html). The talk was an elegant breakdown of how they (1) created a CPU interpreter for a domain specific language describing particle parameters, (2) ported it to the GPU (even running an interpreter on the GPU for parts of the production game!), and (3) how they converted it into a compiler for the obvious performance wins.

Apparently running bytecode interpreters on the GPU is not uncommon: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/07/30/ubershaders/
Well, the best way to communicate about software issues, requests, and bugs would be through a bug database - but certainly there is a lot more communication happening in a business that I would want mucking up my issue tracker.
We've had IRC for so long that it makes me sad it hasn't succeeded more.
>However, a majority of the severe injury and fatal collisions are preventable, so they are not accidents

100% of transportation-related incidents are preventable, full stop. You can always stay home. Beyond that, it's a question of how we balance a number of factors such as risk and quality of life.