skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "email" field in your HN profile is not shown to other users. You need to put it in your "about" field if you want it to be public. Many people don't realise this.

(The same is true for you, Eilene - your email address is hidden. If you want people to be able to email you, click your username in the top right of the page, and add it to your "about" section.)
My guess is the younger the more familiar with stuff like modafinil. There's growing outrage that at least half of Oxbridge is on it and that it provides unfair advantage against "clean" students. It's also my understanding that in the valley especially where hours are long and nights short, modafinil is the go-to.
> High stress, high pollution, rat race of a lifestyle, you are regulated and taxed on more things you even thought possible

New York has incredibly low pollution compared to other cities of comparable size, especially in the US. As for "regulated and taxed on more things than you even thought possible"... are you sure you're not thinking of California?
No crash might be the problem with it: you try to go to sleep and end up just kind of laying there half the night.
Good luck with your book.

I worked as a software developer for 6-7 years in San Francisco and Emeryville, CA, and never became aware of or suspected widespread drug/stimulant use apart from coffee (a beloved thing in my view). Alcohol was definitely something one saw consumed at startups.

At the present time (now in Colorado, working with a remote team), a colleague of mine uses prescription medication to deal with ADD. Another is into the psychedelic drug scene and micro-doses LSD.
Where does the word “mansplain” come from
Peter Thiel Got His Revenge On Gawker. He May Yet Regret It
Criteria for building a successful AI Chatbot
The older I get, the more "sleep" calls my brain makes ;-)
In the finance industry Adderall is very popular. I know someone who works as an in-house psychiatrist at a top-tier investment bank. Most of the employees that go to see her are looking for an Adderall prescription.

I've known a few people who use cocaine. It is useful for the people who want to stay up late at the clubs and be able to work the next day.
Sure, it's very hard to fully approximate that aspect of the job in a quick coding screen. Small algorithmic problems don't come close in the grand scheme of things. But they still put you in an environment and context where you don't have the advantage of being an expert ahead of time.
I found this news incredible. Poloniex is a great exchange, but it has many problems to escalate. Support is one of the worst that exists and any problem you take takes weeks or months to resolve. Besides, nobody knows very well who the owners are, there is little transparency on basic issues. And with that confusion about USDT, no one knew the exchange's position and if they actually have liquidity.
So many of us are in debt, but I would definitely encourage you to think about re-shifting your own paradigm if it's comfortable to do so:

If you would like entertaining reading to assist in your own building of a new mental model around money:

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/

(written by a programmer who retired early and is part of the "financial independence" movement/blogosphere)
So is it almost impossible to be a top scientist in your field if you don't get some help so that you can have those epiphany-producing insights, etc?
good thing - he will be able to finish all planned his reforms
Yeah, that's exactly what we found - we created a JIRA project called 'DOCS', which made search trivial:

'docs disk filling up'
Here's the URL without tracking junk:

https://mashable.com/2018/02/26/ai-beats-humans-at-contracts...
The problem is that a web app can never be good enough, because a web app can never be secure. I simply can't trust my private data to a PWA, because the developer can ship me malicious JavaScript at any time. With open source I can compile and audit code myself (or rely on others to do so for me); with an app store I can rely on a vendor to audit code; with a web app I have no assurance.
Crostini Linux Terminal for Chrome OS
Sure, I was talking about the if true happens case.
There is also the issue that even if all of the money were split between everyone--some people would spend all of theirs and some would save theirs. Wealth is accumulated money, not income.
Very cool. Good job.

I use a relatively simple AWS API Gateway -> AWS Lambda -> AWS SES for this. But as trivial as it was to set up it is still way more work than this looks like. Having something more turn-key is nice.
I used Jclouds [1] a few years back to do this. While it's very powerful, it's also fairly complex (abstracts not just storage but also compute/etc). At the time, I remember wanting a simpler abstraction layer over it, and ended up building my own. Maybe something like that exists now, I'm not sure.

The devil is in the details of how each provider offers vendor-specific things and you want to take advantage of them. For example Reduced-Redundancy storage
is iirc an Amazon-specific offering, or if others offer it, it's probably under different SLA terms/measurements. This rapidly breaks many generic abstractions; maybe this is why everyone ends up writing their own little shim layer for their situation.

In some sense it reminds me a bit of building database-connection-pools in the 90's, before they were really standardized everyone rolled their own and learned all the awful lessons about reference counting along the way. Then along came ODBC, then JDBC, and things were so much easier because you only had to deal with one API, and the databases would conform to their side of it. So I think, isn't that what OpenStack (or something?) is supposed to be for cloud services? But whoa, the depth and complexity of these services far exceeds that of a 90's database. It will take a while -- but over time and with patterns of common use well established, a stable base of standard APIs will abstract away most differences, making things so much nicer. I can dream.

[1] https://jclouds.apache.org/
Serious question, how did you obtain a series of banking jobs after previous employers noticed (fired you for?) your drug use? Do prospective employers overlook these things, or never check references?
True, but a different title wouldn't get as many clicks.
The Media will pick it up, start to explain to average Joe that iPv6 is the latest tech, currently still only running x% of Internet. But Elon has something even better then IPv6, using encryption and Peer to Peer design!

I was going to say Stocks going up, then I realize SpaceX is not public yet.

I wonder if the Internet Services part will be sold to Telsa?
Haha, well, I can only assure you that it's basically just fine. Nobody gets hurt. It's just a thing people do - like drinking coffee or energy drinks. But it works better.

In the case of amphetamine-related stimulants (ritalin, adderall, dexedrine, speed), it's easy to come off them if you aren't abusing them for pleasure as opposed to work. There's a level of use that enables effective work, and then another much higher level that makes you feel 'high' all the time. If you get high every day, you might well get addicted. But I've never seen it - I even abused my ritalin pretty heavily for pleasure for months and then stopped cold turkey (by accident), and it was just fine. I was mentally the same as I was before the ritalin, and no side effects that suggested physical addiction. I wouldn't recommend it though, it might affect different people differently.
I'd like to echo nathan_long's sentiments.

I worked for a small startup in Atlanta from 97-2000, then another startup in Silicon Valley from 2000-2004 (yay dotcom boom -- I slept under my desk more than once). I relocated to NC in 2004 and continued to work for that company (from its newly acquired NC office) till it was acquired by HP. I remained at HP a couple years. In 2009, I joined another SV startup (my third I guess) and worked from home for that startup till it was acquired by Yahoo in 2013. I've been at Yahoo, now Oath/Verizon since.

In all that time post-college, I've never used any form of drugs (besides occasional alcohol either outside of work or at a company party, beer bash Friday, etc), never felt any pressure to do so, and I've not been aware of drug use by colleagues with the exception of one person, but even that was hearsay to me.

Some of the stories I read about SV, I wonder how I could be missing so much (see for example, "The Nudist on the Late Shift").

That said, I tend to keep to myself. For me, work is work, and play is play, and I'd rather not cross the lines.

46 y/o, highly compensated software developer, married, father of two, used marijuana recreationally in college (I have a funny federal security clearance story about that...), never used any other drugs besides one not so good evening with LSD. Long distance running is how I keep my head straight, besides getting enough sleep and a relatively good diet.
drug people find other drug people because drugs
That's really cool! Thank you for building it.
Agreed. Although I did miss meeting engineers from other disciplines (EE, Mechanical, Chem. E., etc). I'm not sure if they are simply scarce in Manhattan, or if I was in the wrong places.
Linguician is really cool!
>most only abuse coffee-- you can tell because the norm is to drink coffee until you're literally red in the face when there is serious work to get done.

That doesn't make sense. Being tweaked on caffeine doesn't make you more productive. It doesn't even make you feel more productive.
Thanks for sharing that! I wasn't aware of either the next story line nor the absurd and crazy German adaption.

That feels painfully wrong and is quite disgusting.
Forgot to mention that the overall opinion can be 0 (neutral) too.

https://ratesome.com/topic/Naruto

15 opinions currently, and the overall opinion is 0.
Ikea’s new wedge dowel joint makes stronger furniture and faster assembly(2017)
How to run SSH and HTTP on the same port
Same here. I have worked in Germany, Spain and London and never seen any drug use. I would have shocked me for sure. I don't see the point or need.
Find out if your password has been pwned–without sending it to a server
What is the measure you are using for Dropbox being one of the largest companies in the world?

In the beginning of 2017 Dropbox claimed a $1 Billion dollar run rate, however at the end of 2017 Dropbox had a net loss of $110 Million. When your entire year is a loss of $110 Million, saving $75 Million is very important to the companies survival.
The SRE team is infamous! I tried the interview for the SRE team to see what it was like. At the final interview I was asked to implement a K-NN algorithm, which I did, and then optimize it for k dimensions.

When it was over I asked the interviewer if there was ever a time when he had to implement such an algorithm on the job during a production outage event and his answer: No.

In my experience working within devops teams maintaining and developing public cloud infrastructure I don't think I've ever had the pleasure either.

In retrospect I don't think it was a bad experience. I think there are roles which exist in software that do require a higher level of rigor than others. I'm often amazed how easily many developers will dismiss performance concerns (premature optimization!) for example. I would expect a hiring process to be upfront and honest about such requirements and candidates should be aware of their own skills and background before applying.

But most software development jobs at ABC Corp are not the SRE Team at Google and they hire as if they were.

I think that's the risk we take with standardizing and automating hiring processes.

update: just markup.
Scientists Fear for Colombia’s ‘Melted Rainbow’
a problem for me, as a reporter, is the lack of statistical evidence of any kind for this. It's very difficult to get an accurate portrayal of the problem based on surveys that would require self-reports. That's why forums like these are helpful in informing my reporting.
Seattle has better connections to Asia, given the way planes travel it is closer to Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul than any other major American city besides anchorage.
QNX is reasonably widely used and a quite elegant system. Among other things, it runs the user-facing electronics of several car brands.
Research shows having a roommate is enough to combat feelings of loneliness.

Marriage in and of itself isn’t shown to automatically increase happiness; most folks reported having maintained their baseline mood after the wedding

Maybe this is just old definitions needing to be updated, but “family” in the traditional mom-dad-kids all visit grandma and the like, isn’t essential to the species.

Socializing is, but not the traditional structures
Good idea. Going to look into adding this.
A fair bit of marijuana in the Seattle tech scene. No particularly visible ill effects from what I can tell. I have the notion hallucinogens have been used, but no one admits current use (to me). I would expect the more far out tech scene to be more into hallucinogens than anything else.

Cocaine, meth, & opioid use - no idea. Personally, I'd guess opioids are uncommon in tech: foggy heads don't fly. No one I know is admitting cocaine/meth to me.

Of course coffee is extremely common, if it is even worth remarking on. And booze flows very freely.

I don't get invited to exciting parties to meet the really odd people out of a professional setting - I go home to the wife & kid. And I work for a big boring company. So my sample is a little skew.
Staying focused in the notification era
It is a reflection of an open source (R) developer's experience during and after his completion of his Ph.D.

I can relate a lot since I also did a Ph.D. and have been contributing to an open source programming language (Haxe). I even also got an open source remote job right after graduate as he did. I share the same struggle of procrastination and the problem of lack of communication. To me, it feels like finding another me in a parallel world.
This is a good point. I remember when I was in grad school the first time there was a guy in his 50s or 60s who would ask long meandering questions that got on everybody's nerves. Nobody liked him.

In school I add value because of my programming skills. I can program better than the other people here, so people frequently come to me asking for help debugging their stuff.
We're pretty comfy here 9/12 months a year. The Spring and Fall are fantastic, and Winter is getting milder each year.
I was worried about this when I first moved to NYC. I got in touch with a placement company, had an intro chat, and told them I'd be in NYC for a certain week. They lined up 4 interviews for me.

I very much enjoyed forcing a timetable on possible employers, as I got choices all at the same time.

I don't always enjoy recruiters. In this case, mine was very valuable!
The "Ghost in the LLC".... I look forward to the day when a self-owning corporation is a self managed application for an autonomous system and has no human intervention. Like this: The Implications of Modern Business-Entity Law for the Regulation of Autonomous Systems ( https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2758222
) Credit due to Drone Law Today for the title. (https://player.fm/series/drone-law-today/ghost-in-the-llc)
A good tool for every journalist to have in their tool chest: https://keybase.io
Thanks for posting this. I'm $700 poorer now, but excited about my new life pushing a sled around. :)
I have to say I agree with 'stzup7. I work in finance in NYC; it's a high-money, high-tech, high-drinking environment. I have coworkers that work too hard. They're not taking anything more than coffee.

I know a couple of people outside of my field who are taking stimulants and talking about it. I know a couple people within my field (and outside) who take drugs solely recreationally, not as a performance booster or a way to get to sleep or anything, and certainly not on a regular let alone daily basis.

And I definitely know enough people within my field closely to know that they're not taking stimulants.

I think you just inhabit a different world, yes. (And I worry whether you inhabit a world of people who think they're productive; a sizable number of the the really productive and skilled people I know tend to be so clean that they don't even drink.)
thanks for the link. I need to find updated stats on that. I wonder if the number of those in the ER because of cocaine has risen....
Doesn’t this in some way betray the encryption? For example, if multiple users had illegal.csv in their accounts, getting access to one user will allow you to prosecute any of them without decrypting their data because they will all share the same sha?
Oh, the assumption is definitely warranted in many/most situations. Though there are often alternatives (such as contract-to-hire) to mitigate the risks.
They're responding to people who buy fish, which is most people, so it's less "Global Fishing's" and more "Humanity's Exploitation of the Ocean".

The maps look like a comment on our population growth, or a call to reduce that growth if we don't want nature to reduce it for us. Eating more plants instead of fish and other forms of efficiency could help too, but may forestall the inevitable if we keep growing.
> it is no wonder to me why AWS generates all of Amazon's profit.

Going out on a limb here but I'm guessing that Amazon makes a good amount of profit from their online retail store.
It's probably easier to provide your email or put it in your profile, many commenters might not want to associate their username with a public comment.
Bombastic headline, but no meat here. Y Combinator is a fantastic place for founders/startups, especially for those that work hard at leveraging the available mentorship during that fleeting three months.

The article's comparison of YC to Ivy League schools is hackneyed, but relevant. YC's reputation, much like Harvard's, was built before most competitors were ever around; that kind of esteem is hard to build and doesn't disintegrate in a year or two. Paul Graham has said this.

YC's place in the tech world will hardly be subverted by a 'bad' IPO result for Dropbox. Zenefits' issues, it should be noted, didn't slow down YC, either—nor should they have.
You have some of the best ideas. I would love to get more involved in helping with programs like these. Substance abuse can be the most challenging to approach. From my experience, some people are on a self-destructive path and they forget how to take care of themselves. Some drugs are almost zombifying in that they are begin to only think about their next fix.

I would like to see more options here for medicine and research. Truly, recovery can be a long process for many and it takes time for the brain and body to heal from trauma. Some of that may be emotional trauma as well. I would love to see more options for preventive mental health services in the United States.
I really like the point about runbooks/playbooks.

> We ended up embedding these dashboard within Confluence runbooks/playbooks followed by diagnosing/triaging, resolving, and escalation information. We also ended up associating these runbooks/playbooks with the alerts and had the links outputted into the operational chat along with the alert in question so people could easily follow it back.

When I used to work for Amazon, as a developer, I was required to write a playbook for every microservice I developed. The playbook had to be so detailed that, in theory, any site reliability engineer, who has no knowledge of the service should be able to read the playbook and perform the following activities:

- Understand what the service does.

- Learn all the curl commands to run to test each service component in isolation and see which ones are not behaving as expected.

- Learn how to connect to the actual physical/virtual/cloud systems that keep the service running.

- Learn which log files to check for evidence of problems.

- Learn which configuration files to edit.

- Learn how to restart the service.

- Learn how to rollback the service to an earlier known good version.

- Learn resolution to common issues seen earlier.

- Perform a checklist of activities to be performed to ensure all components are in good health.

- Find out which development team of ours to page if the issue remains unresolved.

It took a lot of documentation and excellent organization of such documentation to keep the services up and running.
I'm working in a small/medium business in Montreal, Canada. I've been hear for almost 3 years and AFAIK no body here takes stimulant.

Of course I might be wrong, but I know a lot of these people well enough to call them my friends and I have not see anyone taking stimulant nor overheard anyone talking about their consumption.

You can contact me too, no problem.
It is a bit cheesy, yeah? But I do like the simplistic, big buttons with clear pictures. I don't want to have to take an extra second to decipher a material-design pictograph that sacrifices some aspect of understanding for visual aesthetic. Waze gets their users on the value the app brings to people, not how good it looks. There aren't many other players in the field of crowd-sourced traffic data like Waze shows (at least in the US) so I don't see them working on updating the UI until it actually matters.
The author had a lot of good points, one I think he missed:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it". Upton Sinclair

Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/upton_sinclair_138285
Engineers aren't the money makers.
How do you filter spam ?
Microdosing LSD and taking adderall are going to have completely different effects. That’s a pretty apples to oranges comparison. I can’t imagine how any dose of LSD would ever increase productivity, but adderalls benefits as a stimulant are pretty well documented - you will be able to stay up and focused longer, although as you noted you may end up paying for it in other ways.
Cities and Ambition (2008)
But now your process is heavily biased against folks whose work has primarily been for their current employer, and they don't have any reasonable side projects to walk you through.
The Horror of Blocking Electron’s Main Process
Maybe their product is worth the price because the features you just rattled off aren't provided by other companies to a satisfactory degree and therefore Dropbox is 5x better than competitors for you?
Gray hair helps. I’ve got enough experience at this point where I can be productive without going into “production frenzy.” Lots of the younger folks don’t get that yet and think it’s all about how much code you write or how long you’re at your desk. I like to think of it as the difference between doing work vs “producing evidence of having done work.” There is a lot of pressure to do the latter I think, especially for the junior folks.
They make great software, service and hire very talented people. Everything costs and you are not will to pay merely $10 a month? It's just silly.
I'm assuming that a greater portion of that type of work isn't do-able in an office farm. Businesses need to make a certain amount of money per square foot, so labs and whatnot aren't feasible.
Apple confirms it now uses Google Cloud for iCloud services
Reddit, Tumblr will fight for net neutrality with protests this week
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465315
It does seem to be pretty bimodal, doesn't it...
Learn about getting input - buttons, switches, potentiometers, etc.

Then go for motor control: Servos, steppers, DC motors, relays, solenoids, h-bridges, PWM, etc.

Add in some other sensors - perhaps ultrasonic distance sensing, Sharp IR sensors...

...then move into hacking on a Neato Lidar sensor...

At this point - build a robot?