skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After 15 years of doing this my theory on corporate promotions is simple: you need an executive sponsor.

VPs don't know who you are by default, they have too many reports. And if you're assigned unsexy work like keeping the trains running, well the better you do your job ironically the more you become like wallpaper.

I'm not saying you have to be a kissa*, although that does work at a remarkable number of companies, I'm saying you have to make yourself known to a person with power. Otherwise you're just a name and easy to reject.

You want to believe in meritocracy but in my experience the correlation between effectiveness and promotions is weak to nonexistent. If you want to get promoted -- besides doing a good job (and sometimes not even then) -- the reality is you probably have to market yourself upwards.

The OP complains about not having enough metrics in his assignments but do committees promote people based on stone-cold, anonymous metrics? I'm guessing a lot of it is how they 'feel' about someone.

But these days as a developer the sad reality is you probably need to switch jobs every 3-5 years if you want to keep moving upwards, unless you're really lucky.
I think we're at the tail end of a unique cultural moment where "phone addiction" is even a conceivable idea. They are already arguably the human tool, and in a decade or two the devices will be so firmly a fixture of interaction that "phone addiction" will seem as quaint an idea as "book addiction."
Yep! https://twitter.com/TheBuyMeACoffee/status/94921063772447129...

We're integrating Coinbase Commerce to start supporting all the major coins (BTC, ETH, BCH, LTC). Expect this to go live in a week or two :)
source code is available at https://keepass.info/download.html (scroll down to "Other Downloads and Resources")
I've bounced between a number of cloud drives/sync folder services over time.

I'm currently happy with Resilio Sync, fka BitTorrent Sync. It uses peer-to-peer sync ala BitTorrent, where the only "cloud" shares are peers you build/authorize. It supports encrypted shares where some of your peer devices, such as your "cloud" share, may participate in syncing the swarm without being able to directly decrypt its contents.

https://www.resilio.com/individuals/
(Apologies in advance if this sounds snarky, don't mean to be)

There are hundreds of posts on using Keras/TensorFlow/PyTorch/etc to do MNIST classification, and many examples on Github. All these resources are very easy to find by Googling. This post doesn't seem to have anything different to add to the conversation. So, why do such articles continue to be written, and why do they still get upvoted on HN? Is it that a lot of people want to learn these things, but haven't gotten a chance to, so they upvote with the hope of staying in touch with the topic? Is it FOMO? One might be forgiven for considering this spam.
Or neither account should be necessary to get along in this world.

But you raise a good point about it having the potential for being yet another class marker.
Yep. I'm not kidding.

I worked on one such app. It was lost in the cross fire, I was asked to try to fix a bug. I came back and said this wasn't a bug, it was a badly built system. If they wanted me to work on it, I'd need a few sprints dedicated to it. They passed. A month or two later, it was impacting some crucial flows. We revisited it and funded it. I AB tested the rewrite against the original and saw a statistically significant improvement in user behavior. We retired the original, I presented my findings to our product team. They agreed it was impactful.
I think I laughed a little too much looking at the site. Good work.
Sure, I agree with your implication there, but you never know what peer-worker has goals of becoming your manager and in the case of labor organization, might benefit from informing mangers/owners of peer-worker organization. What are we left to do then?

The feelings underlying my comments here are that I think it's important to not shy away from divisive topics in the workplace. OpSec only goes so far. At some point we must take risks to create a better future and creating an environment that nurtures open and honest discussion, even if divisive.
Yeah

make foo.c

Should just work. No makefile needed.
The Caddy Telemetry Project
I admit that I do not get at all why people make such a fuss about wine. At the end of the day its purpose is to get people drunk and not taste too bad along the way. Turning it into a sorta-science seems silly to me, as the endgame is getting wasted. ;-)

OTOH, I used to be like that with tea, especially Green Tea and Oolong. When it comes to tea, I can be a real snob, and with good reason. With tea there really are so many subtle nuances it boggles my mind to this very day. If you are in the position to do some research, spend some money on fine teas, you can experience tasty pleasures that are beyond what words can describe. And I can go on and on and on about that, without noticing that people who do not care about tea that much get bored really fast.

So to some other people, wine is what tea is for me. And in fairness, I have not much experience drinking fancy wines. But I have no desire to, either. When I want sophisticated nuanced sensual pleasure, I drink Tea. When I want to get blotto, I drink wine.

These days, I am more pragmatic about it, but I still shiver at the sight of teabags.
I have been meaning to spend some time with redo!

https://cr.yp.to/redo.html
Yeah, I'm not clear on that either. I know you can set up servers with different IPs on DO to talk with each other and from there "privacy" is a matter of configuration. Seems like UFW would be a tool to use for that.

But I am not a "network specialist" and I've never even looked at AWS so there's bound to be lot I don't know in this arena.
Aren't you worried about that fact that any program you run could potentially read all your passwords using the key file?
> What I found most off putting, was when meeting my skip-manager (your managers manager) for the first time during my exit interview, all doors for a senior level promotion were suddenly open, to incentivise me to stay. Doesn't feel great when negotiations with your employer are comparable to those had with your cable provider.

Wow, that's one hell of a way to look at things. Thanks for that perspective.
If a manager of some kind were to notice the Slack messages and ping someone specific to help, that would be a perfect example of the kind of management that is so sorely lacking at so many companies. Many employees are too burned, or proud, to even put out an SOS... so a cry for help is actually a gift to management. If only it were someone’s job to think for a few minutes each day about each employee and notice if there is some small action that would help them.

Nah, let’s just alternate between micromanaging and being totally absent; fret about lack of productivity or lack of progress; maybe institute a daily stand-up.
It seems so unlikely that you'd have already analyzed your deletion statistics for males vs females that I think you have to be trolling, but I'd love to understand your worldview if you are not. Could you provide a link to your Wikipedia deletion activity?
I'm using awesome-CV: https://github.com/posquit0/Awesome-CV
This is my cv: http://www.bussolon.it/curriculum_Stefano_Bussolon.pdf
afaik, large shops are usually organized by a single union. For example, GE Aviation is organized by IBEW and GE Transportation is organized by UE.

The situation you're talking about, I think, is more common in construction.
I do embedded work. I agree CMake is horrible when cross-compiling and runs into trouble. The errors make no sense. It took me days to get OSG cross-compiling. It was a horrible experience.

I'd much rather a Makefile where I can override the compiler and flags for my configuration. I can easily figure out what I need to do based on compiler and linker errors for missing headers and libraries.
But we called it lots of other things.
Er, that's a slippery slope, equating anyone who rejects the authority of the state with mental illness.
I started a new job recently and I know exactly what they mean in #2. Everyone was celebrating hitting a big quota, and they were discussing really nice bonuses and everyone was so happy. I'm just sitting in the corner hoping they will be doing more bonuses like this that I can actually get in on.
It's a consequence of the bending of spacetime around a singularity. All possible paths that light (or anything else) can take through spacetime lead towards the singularity.
Go out into the world, and poll a few hundred people of all ages and backgrounds. Take note of how many either lose interest or start laughing when your explanation of how to install a lightbulb continues past “screw it in.”
Context sensitive UI's are for example very common in games. Some also included tabs.

So, context sensitivity is not in it's self novel.
What was always most interesting to us about starting a recruiting company was treating hiring as a data problem. As we increase our scale, we get more data we can use to improve the accuracy of matching engineers to companies. We're now testing the equivalent number of engineers per month as a company that itself is hiring almost 1,000 engineers per year. Very few companies operate at that scale and we'll be releasing some more blog posts analyzing our data soon.

If you've used Triplebyte as either a company or candidate and have feedback, please ping me - harj at triplebyte.
Python comes with your distribution. It's Java that is the bigger obstacle in some shops, I expect.
Strafe-jumping physics explained [video]
> the benefit of being a good team player is that it helps you build relationships. Those relationships often turn into opportunities down the line.

Most of the time other people leave or move to other teams.

Being a decent human being is not about getting practical advantages - otherwise sociopaths would be the most helpful people around.

Instead, many large corporations want to instill a culture of competitiveness and often cynicism because competing is what they do.

Cooperation, lasting relationship between employees, mutual help, solidarity are increasingly scary words for many companies.
No, the equivalent would be as soon as he raises the issue, no one can type even one more line of code, not even a character, and their editor would be completely blocked.

That’s what these companies need. The entire business comes to a screeching halt.

And if they really needed more motivation, production servers could be shut down if the issue was not resolved in 24 hours. That will really hold their feet to the fire.
Argh, sorry, I read 'does' as 'doesnt'
Time to attempt to defend Shkreli again because while I find him to definitely be of questionable moral character, I get even more sore at the unhinged Shkreli-bashing by everyone I know which seems to be based almost entirely on mood affiliation and tribalism.

The reasons for him being the "most hated man in America" mentioned at the end of the article are:

>increasing the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000%, holding an anticipated Wu-Tang album hostage, harassing women on Twitter, and for his smug court appearances.

Does it seem odd that those are all lumped together in people's minds? Only the first one should have any bearing on the question of whether he's actually loathsome.

* Holding the Wu-Tang album hostage is a totally reasonable thing to do, he did pay an exorbitant price for the right of exclusivity after all. Most people in the hip hop community seem to hold the whole incident more against RZA than against Shkreli in any case.

* The claim of harassing women appears to be false, based on the evidence they linked to. I followed their link and it appears his harassment consists of inviting women to go to the presidential inauguration with him. When they turned him down (in the most insulting terms they could personally think of, apparently) he didn't say any more. So that's harassment now?

* >his smug court appearances. Not exactly a federal offense.

The serious allegation is about raising the price of a life-saving drug, and on this point I totally understand hating him. I can't bring myself to hate him based on that though.

Personally I don't see how it's much different to take a ridiculously underpriced drug and raise the price to what the market will bear vs. being CEO of a company and keeping your drugs' prices at its historically high point. I know everyone hates CEO's of pharmaceutical companies anyways but my point is how is he any worse than the lot of them? Purely because of emotion.
Ok, so the fundamental issue the blog references is "women who worked with Erdos are significantly more likely to be tagged for early deletion", that statement is backed up by the actual stats.

So the question is, what is the cause for this discrepancy?

It is possible that the women who worked with Erdos were much more likely to be irrelevant than the men -- by a factor of 4 -- in which case this would be reasonable.

The alternative (her claim) is that they were marked for deletion because other editors default to assume that women are less relevant than men, unless proved otherwise.

My question is: are the people who are tagging these articles for deletion field experts -- mathematicians or whatever -- who can actually understand the relative importance of individuals, or are they running through a checklist? If they're just running through a checklist does their checklist just reinforce old stereotypes? For example, old newspapers would not bother interview women engineers, scientists, etc, and even if they were historically women were absolutely kept out of those fields, so even if interviews were random, statistics would ensure low public visibility. Hence relying on the existence of published biographies is not sufficient, and is arguably less relevant than the Erdos number.

Does it treat an Erdos number as being proof of importance in some cases, but not in others? If your default view is men are real mathematicians, and women are not, it is easy to interpret a low Erdos number as evidence of importance (it confirms your belief of relevance), but if you start out with the converse -- this person isn't relevant or important -- then it's just trivia.
I have a Patreon account where I get paid via Stripe, but I don't believe I ever properly set up a separate Stripe account. I filled out the Stripe connect form and now I am worried that Stripe will have a problem with paying me if there are any inconsistencies between Patreon info and what I just gave Stripe to fill this out, such as different email addresses with the same bank account.

I don't know that there is anything you can do about it. It is just an FYI.

Here is my page:
https://buymeacoff.ee/DoreenMichele
Yeah I definitely used unnecessarily harsh language. Lesson learned: read thoroughly before being a jerk ;)
Thanks for this

A thread full of people talking about how bad working for yourself is had me questioning my upcoming decision to quit and try to do something for myself, and what you said is the biggest reason why I want to. I love hard work, but I don't love pointless work. I already do some low pay contracting on the side, but it's with a couple of small companies that trust me 100% so they never tell me "no". Don't get me wrong, they will question the hell out of my decisions and I've changed quite a few in response to the questions, but at the end of the day they trust me to do what's best for them.

I already have the house paid off, have no other debt, and have low 7 figures in reasonably liquid investments. Working for myself has been a dream of mine as long as I can remember. I don't need much money, just enough to get by.

Anyway sorry for the rambling. Just wanted to say thank you, you made me feel better about going into work today. Maybe I'll make today the last?
I'm normally not a fan of adjunct positions, but I wonder if they make sense for certain fields. Some of my best CS courses were taught by adjuncts who were able to relate the subject material to concrete examples.

Not that traditional academia isn't valuable—we still need to provide the right environment to nurture the facets of our industry that don't have an immediate financial connection. But I do think that adjuncts, in the right circumstances, can help to address any shortage, while also improving our field as a whole.

Of course, the danger is that adjunct positions will be seen by leadership as a cost-saving measure only. Screw that.
Completely anecdotally, a lot of people are migrating to the Denver from the SFBay area. Denver (and the surrounding areas) has a very high quality of life, a burgeoning tech scene, good health care systems (a number of my doctor / nurse friends have recently moved there for positions), and a relatively low cost of living. It's a short, easy flight from anywhere on the West Coast and it's not too bad from the East Coast either.

Indeed, Colorado is the 6th most popular place to move to from California according to that out-migration post the other day: http://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/265

Google, Slack, Strava, Gusto, VMWare, etc. etc. all either have offices or will shortly -- This boom seems much less energy-driven and more sustainable. Which sucks a little for my relatives who are public school teachers there and can no longer afford to live near the schools that they work at...
From the article:

> If I just kept going, I’d soon be promoted to the next level, Senior Software Engineer.

That's (being promoted to) T5.
Name != 'jcadam'

I mean, as far as I can tell. I've been trying to land the mythical 'remote gig' for years.
How many of those candidates have white skin making them ineligible?
We use bonusly. As a proof-of-concept, I imagine it'd tackle some of your requirements. Bonusly points are tied to real world rewards, so there's incentive to use it.

People who had a lot of "assists" at our company regularly brought in 1000+ points a month, which then translated in $100+ in amazon gift cards or steam points.
If you're into problem identification, may I recommend "Are your lights on?"

It's a masterpiece.
Also macPass is compatible with Keepass database 1.0, unlike KeepassXC.
>I admit that I do not get at all why people make such a fuss about wine. At the end of the day its purpose is to get people drunk and not taste too bad along the way.

"I admit that I do not get at all why people make such a fuss about sex. At the end of the day its purpose is to make babies and not be too unpleasant along the way."
Each to their own I guess. I find the Ribbon UI intuitive.
LittleThings online publisher shuts down, blames Facebook's algorithm
I used to work at {OTHER_BIGCO} and felt the same. It was so bad at one point, I could basically toss a coin if I was going to work on something different that week. It was at point I realized there was no chance the promised promotion would come (well that and the lack of senior devs to observe) that I decided to move on.
And in Clojure, Rust, Scala, Java... With sequence combinators being lazy in almost all languages that have them, writing complex folds isn’t usually a very good idea if the same thing can be achieved in discrete map/filter/etc steps.
> I proudly and lovingly nursed the pipeline back to health. I fixed dozens of bugs and wrote automated tests to make sure they wouldn’t reappear. I deleted thousands of lines of code that were either dead or could be replaced by modern libraries. I documented the pipeline as I learned it so that the institutional knowledge was available to my teammates instead of siloed in my head.

> The problem, as I discovered at promotion time, was that none of this was quantifiable. I couldn’t prove that anything I did had a positive impact on Google.

I briefly took a part time job in college. It was at a mall, walking distance from school. It was a mid-range clothing brand that I can no longer remember the name of.

Ostensibly, it was a sales position. I'm pretty sure the word sales was in the title. Anyone who has ever walked into a store like that knows there is very little sales (as in salespeople exhibiting selling skills to make sales) occurring. It's 99% "can I help you?" followed by "just looking".

After a couple weeks my manager took me aside and said my sales numbers were bad. It wasn't a threat -- they were having a hard enough time keeping staffed -- but she pointed it out to me.

So, under no pressure to actually change those numbers, I decided to do it anyway. I figured out that if you stand at the cash register and the customer didn't explicit tell you who helped them, you could claim the sale for yourself.

A couple weeks later my numbers were through the roof! My manager congratulated me.

I don't think it's uncharitable to say that my story would equip anyone to navigate 95% of the corporate world.

There's a lot of FUD in this thread about working independently. So one more data point: I've known a number of people over the years that everyone here would know (by title if not by name). What do they have in common? They all struck out independently at some point in their careers.

It's not either / or. Going independent early can be a great way to sidestep a lot of the ladder-climbing sillyness you'll have to do. It will also, if you're doing it right, make you a lot better at your job.
I've got no issue with C syntax either, but to be clear, syntax != semantics.

To cut to the chase:

* syntax = structure

* semantics = meaning

C syntax would include things like curly braces and semicolons, whereas C semantics would include things like the functionality of the reserved keywords.

This SO answer gives a more detailed explanation:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/17931183/1863924
"Google is like any run of the mill tech department in a boring corporate environment, but with free food and a side project on self driving cars. Got it."

This applies to nearly every single tech company in the Valley at this point.
People in Northern Sweden Now at Risk of Losing Access to Cash
Can you provide a summary of the convincing arguments from that article, in 1 or two sentences? I plan to read it myself, but I think the parent comment is relevant.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/29787362

> remotely defensible

Feel free to write your own make superset that supports spaces. It's an irrelevant factor to the usability of make as a whole.
Im tired of trying to adopt and stay current with Googles ever changing "This is what you should use" product line.
How big is the world's Candy Crush addiction problem?
There is no such thing as a tertiary source. Either you have a primary source, or you have hear say.
Is the donor charged a different amount based on whether they pay through Stripe or Paypal?

If I go to donate $5 at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/xn, it looks like I'll be $5 if I pay through Stripe with a credit card, and $5.45 if I pay using PayPal:

https://gist.github.com/cwarden/4df8d8a5df0ff010e39d810f58ec...
How many of those languages are declarative, not imperative? The advantage of Make is that you only need to give it the inputs and the outputs.
What approach do you take? I'd be interested in knowing b/c I often have ideas that might benefit from that funding model and I usually wind up thinking "nah, that could never work".
Cool, so have you gone through and deleted all the articles about individual software engineers? Because I know of numerous.

What is your definition of "notable"? I assume if you can produce stats you have objective criteria?

Have you deleted "local hero" articles?

What is the criteria for relevance? I recall there being numerous studies in the past demonstrating articles about important events and people in non-western environments being deleted.
Just a minor nit. Both the mention of fishbone diagram (and an example) and 5-whys would have made it tad better.
Reactathon: A full day of talks curated for learning React, progressively
I talked to the board, and they say that we're not taking merger requests at the moment, but would be open to a licensing agreement :P