skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That reads an awful lot like you're optimizing for people good at leaving email trails, i.e. at office politics.

There's only one way to actually measure someone's output, and it's working close to the team and witnessing their actual productivity. Getting involved. 1-on-1s.

Of course the farther removed from this process the more politics come into play.
Nimble (YC S17) seeks Django expert for contract work
Hi all,

We're looking for a Django expert to help our 2-person dev team for about 10 hours per week starting asap for the next month or two.

If interested, email lauren@hirenimble.com with answers to:

-How many weekly hours are you available and for how many weeks? Do you have any scheduling constraints?
-Are you a US-based contractor?
-What is your hourly fee?
-Overview of your Django (and React) experience

Mission alignment (love education and/or want to make the world a better place generally) is a bonus.

Please don't email if you don't have substantial experience in Django.

Thanks!
The concepts behind make are quite good, but the interface it provides is not decidedly not. It reminds me of Git in that respect. I'd think replacing the opaque symbols used everywhere with more descriptive words would be helpful. I don't suppose anyone knows if modern Make versions support alternatives to $@, $%, $?, etc. that can be read rather than memorized?
In QV, you buy votes with money. You can buy as money votes as you want, but you have the pay v*v for it, where v is the number of votes.
Ask HN: How did you escape from middle management trap?
I've been working as a team manager (dev + QA) in huge IT corporation for almost 3 years now and I am feeling that I got stuck at this position. There is a senior management level but it's extremely difficult to get there. Have you ever been in such situation? How did you escape from this trap?
That's the bit where the GGP's "optimising for the right factors", or something adjacent to it comes in. Many things can't be objectively measured, and upon realising that, many techies give up. But there is subjective truth, which for sure is a lesser truth than the objective sort, but truth none the less. How did you come to believe that you've made 100 people 1% more successful? If you can convince yourself that you've done good, important work, you can probably convince other people too -- but you have to do it, they're not going to convince themselves. Collect the evidence, such as it is, and articulate your case.
They were waiting for you to solve your own problems just like they did. Your job at that point was to make the README better.
Better to send them email than this.
Make may seem crude these days but has manageable complexity, I've never run across a build issue I could not debug. Its model is so simple, I can have it fully in my mind and be confident this is how it works. Moreover, this model simplicity allows me to build reliable systems on top of it.

CMake is a nightmare of implied complexity. I've run into multiple situations (usually but not always involving cross-compilation) where it was simply incomprehensible. No amount of time invested would let me figure out why CMake blew up.
There is no way I can build something a little out of the ordinary on top of CMake and be confident that it's solid. It's just too complicated.

This sort of balancing, upfront ease of use vs hidden complexity comes up often and I have been burned enough in the past that experience dictates to pretty much always go for model simplicity and pay the upfront costs. I don't see this often however. A lot of the time people will go for what feels or looks right, superficially, without bothering to look beneath the surface or think about model complexity costs. It's an attitude that has led to many disasters in this space.
Yup. If you don't have a manager who works their ass off to help your career, you don't have a good manager. You recognize them by the fact that they usually talk a lot about what management means, and what it should do, and aren't afraid to change that opinion if they learn something new.
Need your feedback on this growth study
I'm strongly considering it just based on the community surrounding each project.

KeePass 2 seems to still be hosted on Sourceforge, and I'm not even sure where to get a copy of the latest (non-release) version of the source. The [Sourceforge repo][1] seems to be an outdated SVN repo which was last updated in 2009, and I don't see any description of how to contribute code to the project anywhere. As a result I'm not really sure how to gauge the level of activity on the project itself. Similarly, the website is ancient and doesn't seem to have kept up with the times; I seem to recall it was only recently that it even got HTTPS support.

In contrast, KeePassXC is hosted on GitHub, development is done out in the open, and it's trivial to see that in just the last year there were [dozens of individual contributors][2]. The website looks clean, is user-friendly with up-to-date documentation, and a [contribution guide][3] is plainly visible in the README on GitHub.

As a result, I feel a bit better about the long-term prospects of KeePassXC over KeePass 2.

[1]: https://sourceforge.net/p/keepass/code/HEAD/tree/

[2]: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/graphs/contribut...

[3]: https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc#contributing
The niche of those who need freedom of speech keeps getting bigger every day.
...it has an API.
Well they sabotage by software as best as they can.
My LG3 will start to hum with notifications in the middle of the night because the accu is charged - and obviously its necessary to warn users with old accus out of theire sleep.

Rooted and booted.

Well at least we are wasting more efficient- communism would take forever to waste this much, for this little.
Thanks, that explains what is happening.
> The bar for a senior engineer should be identifying the biggest problems plaguing an organization, and successfully tackling them.

You're missing the crucial step of advocating for these problems to be solved. Until you know this is actually something important to the organization, you're just scratching your own itch.

In OPs example, did it really matter that the data was occasionally bad? Quite often analytics exist to check a box in a sales pitch, but nobody actually looks at them. OP couldn't quantify this impact for the promotion committee because they likely didn't quantify it for anyone but themselves.
Awesome website and I hope it kicks off. :) https://buymeacoff.ee/michaelbrooks
Alternatively she makes money from endorsements and covert advertising on her channel.

(Similar to many hardware review tech channels.)
A long time ago, in a developer's paradise called the 1970's there was an automated build tool called "make".

It had this and only this syntax:

If a line begins at character 0, that is a list of files whose timestamps should be checked, if any are 'old', then execute the series of command lines beneath, identifying them as starting with a tab character.

That was it, the entire syntax of "make", and it was complete. Then some smart people fucked it up and we have that piece of shit we call "make" now.
I have enough trust in the HN community that they would be able to call out falsehoods and downvote comments that are factually incorrect.

Why would the moderators get involved anyway? Should they also moderate criticism of Russia whether right or wrong? of North Korea?
This is soo wrong. This will consolidate a 2 class work world. One that deserves to be on LinkedIn and one that is only present on Facebook.

Even worse, those in the "lower" class even have to deal with their job life creeping into their private lives.

Really stupid, everybody should have both a LinkedIn and a Facebook account.
Now that Apple supports Service Workers in Safari, I can show off with my PWA
Academia as we know it is dead. It's an antiquated institution that is quickly being replaced by a more relevant solution.
Right, mbpro 2015 being the last "good" one.
I don't use CMake for embedded systems because the syntax and options are even more obtuse for what I need to do with it. When I get down to it, every make-based build system I've ever used boils down to using the macro language to generate all the targets, and then building your output board image by dependencies. But it's the details of how to do this that vary widely depending on your application for the board.

CMake does a great job of compiling executable code and linking it using your compiler of choice, but where it falls flat is in giving me a convenient mechanism for fitting that executable into the system image.
> Why should I not bring my politics to work? Isn't bringing politics to work what got us the 40 hour work week and the weekend?

There are different kinds of politics. There's the old saying "never discuss politics or religion at the dinner table," and I think the "politics" there are the kind that are more akin to religious belief: beliefs that are strongly held, where compromise is difficult or impossible, and have big emotional components. An example are the big divisive social issues, talk about figurehead politicians, or touchy current events. For these topics, there's a high likelihood that a bitter argument or fight will break out if they come up in mixed company.

I think the politics or worker-organization among peers are totally different and very appropriate for the workplace. There's going to be a level of solidarity between the people discussing them that encourages empathy, and actual social good can come from the discussion.
I obviously don't work for Google - so an outsider's opinion:

- Expanding on op here, senior software engineer isn't one who is doing more junior work: It is pretty much a different job profile. You are making higher order decisions.

- Promotions come with a lot of timing as well: Honestly talent evens out after a bit and luck/timing/inter-personal skills tend to take over. I have seen excellent code bases that nobody cared about. I have seen a lot of pretty crap code generate billions of dollars (and trickle down to the devs as money/levels).

- Re: Reorgs: life is mostly unfair. I heard this in an ad and it stuck, 'we lose more than we win'. I am surprised you stuck with that manager/team for that long though. Career is a lot about making the right bets in terms of companies / managers / teams as well. I have had reorgs affect me negatively and positively (they shutdown the project and promoted me anyway - a long time ago in ms), so there might be some survivorship bias here. I guess I do try to project every situation into what the protagonist could've done better instead of sympathizing :/.

In an ideal world, we will have people who can grow (and make more money / level etc) in both dimensions: Vertically in terms of responsibilities and horizontally in terms of quantity of same level work / team dynamics etc. In practice we have a system pretty much everywhere where growth is defined solely vertical. This leads to a ton of actual problems too: You get a person really really good at coding / execution but shit in big picture thinking / broad system design choices / cross team work etc. spend a bunch of time in a level. Now you have to either promote him into a spot where s/he will fail OR lose em to attrition. Either choice tends to break.

A quick note since I have seen some people change / grow / learn in these unsuitable positions against odds: All these actions have a probability function in they way they work out. so take my points here about eventualities of various promos with a pinch of salt. Some do end up working out and these anecdotal statements obviously don't apply there. I do know whenever we choose to push / recommend a promo, we definitely are hoping for it to work out though :)
Choosing not to be a completely unethical scumbag isn’t idealism, it’s the baseline.
I am a 3ds Max User, and I hate the ribbon.

I use this software predominantly because of it’s superior user experience design, which involves a GUI that some would say is dated but most still agree it is great. I love everything about the GUI except the ribbon. Updating the GUI with Qt has not helped the ribbon’s case one bit.

It seems a typical side effect of ribbon application is extraneous options at ribbon’s reach which could very well be be tucked away in a preferences pane, and controls that could be more readily exposed tucked away in the ribbon. And, all of them are therefor now hard to find if not in daily use.

3ds Max users learned it serves one part of what we do decently, which is low level poly modeling where you keep switching between tools which have no great categorization and you know each of these tools like the back of your hand. Even then, most have abandoned the ribbon. And Explorer has nothing even slightly similar. The inconsistent widget display, interactivity, and functionality is a real issue.
Correct, this is what I meant.
It is my understanding that black holes create new stars. It's also my understanding that small mass will eventually be drawn towards bigger mass. Does this mean the eventual "heat death of the universe" won't actually happen as stray light/heat/RF/particles/whatever will always get drawn in back towards a mass like a blackhole and reformed?
Why the great pay gap reveal is an explosive moment for gender equality
> Instead you simply have to deal with towers of abstractions, understand the experiments

Sounds like the Matrix.
Washington state has passed the country’s toughest net neutrality legislation
On iPhone I set it to switch between Greyscale and Normal with a triple click of the home button so it's really quick to change if I want to watch a video.
Sort of related -- I'm sure this made it to HN when it was new -- is https://beebo.org/haycorn/2015-04-20_tabs-and-makefiles.html.
Discussion of the original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14233542
You can look at data reduction tasks as dependency networks. Generate/retrieve data, reduce data, plot data. If the intermediate artifacts are files, you can use make to run the data pipeline.

If part of the data changes, or new data arrives, you just run make again, and the whole pipeline re-does whatever is new. Very slick.

It has free concurrency (make -j N). I've used this effectively several times for medium-scale (~GBs) science data processing.
> If only whoever authored Make 40 years ago

Make was created by Stuart Feldman at Bell Labs in 1976. The fact that it is still in use in any form and still being discussed here is a testament to what an amazingly good job he did at the time. Whether it is the right tool for any given modern use case is up to the people who decide to use it or pass it by. I still work with almost daily, and it's in wide use by backend system engineers if my experience is any guide. Yes, it's quite clunky but also quite powerful and reliable at the few things it does. Its also pretty much guaranteed to already be installed and working on every nix system, and that's not nothing.
اذاعة القرآن الكريم
> Wait a second. I was in a business relationship with Google.

Didn't take me long to realize that most company events and get-togethers and volunteering and other assorted non business activities are bullshit and a complete waste of time.

Like he said.. "it's a business relationship"
> I asked myself how many people already see the whole world like this by default. I guess about 8 percent of men are colorblind (women are much less likely to be colorblind) and I was thinking about what that might be like.

For the record, the most common type of colorblindness is red/green. So it's not like 1/10 men can't see any color and "see the whole world like this".
Yeah, I agree with you that you can't build a system where people get promoted to Senior Software Engineer just for fixing bugs and writing documentation. I do think it should be worth something.

It doesn't take a senior engineer to fix a bug, but I believe that it is a senior-level skill to be able to identify subtle bugs and pick which ones to fix.

The current situation creates perverse incentives because nobody wants to fix bugs, and everyone suffers for it. The team executes slowly because everyone has to wade through dead code, undocumented code, buggy other components. Time you invest in fixing things would probably be a net savings for your team/Google, but are probably not a net savings for you personally.

I adopt the Joel Spolsky measure of a developer as someone who is "smart and gets things done." I think a good reward system should incentivize picking the right tasks and making high-value contributions to the team, regardless of whether a lower-level employee could have theoretically done the work if it was specified and assigned to them.
It's certainly better than the 200+ lines of JavaScript something like Webpack spits out when you statr a new project. I had to debug some of our project's build files and realized halfway through that my teammates didn't write this Webpack config monstrosity, Webpack generated it by /default/.
I do employ a few people now, but in the beginning, it was just me for about 4 years:

OSREC - https://osrec.co.uk
Bx - https://usebx.com

Got started with OSREC because I could see a gap for a good suite of tools that could automate mundane data tasks in banks and hedge funds. Also, I did not enjoy my investment banking job.

Got started with Bx because many people complained to me about Quickbooks/Sage/Xero and I thought I could do better :)
I store the .kdbx (database) file on a network synced folder (e.g. like dropbox or gdrive). However, I use a "key file" in addition to a password. The key file is not synced and remains on computers that I control. I also have a backup copy on external media.
And suddenly LinkedIn is dead.
This is why people change companies every two years. It's easier to get a promotion by studying for interviews on leetcode than by spending the extra time promo gaming in one's career.

"Facebook will give me a sr software engineer position after 5 hours of interviews, here is that offer letter" is a very strong position. Market dynamics are a lot faster than internal promo dynamics at bigco.

Once you reach sr although, you usually have to go through the promo game from what I can see. Most companies do not hire staff engineers unless your already staff engineer somewhere else at another bigco. This is why people tend to become manager after this point, because you see its more effort to become a staff engineer than it is to become a 'sr manager', which is about equivalent to a staff engineer. People also become a manager for the learning experience. Understanding 'the other side' can be quite enlightening.
Are there links to the actual patents in question? And how does this affect the LibreOffice notetabbar?
Were you going from junior (L3) to intermediate (L4)? If you were, then the task you described seems appropriate - you don't have to do much to go from L3 to L4.

The author of the blog post was going for senior (L5), which you can't get just by maintaining code.
Puzzle Jugs, the Drinking Vessels Designed to Confound
I thought "oughta be enough for anybody" was an obvious "640KB" joke, but maybe I'm just old. Anyway, it certainly is enough money to appropriately cushion an attempt at freelancing.

And the best thing to do after leaving a job at Google is to move somewhere cheaper!
You're right and not all manufacturers will produce high quality devices or continue to support them. So in a market where some devices are high quality and some of those are well supported, how does a customer differentiate between high quality and low quality? Or well support and not well supported?

The best strategy for a consumer is to buy a cheap device that meets their needs and if it doesn't then it was cheap enough that they can replace it.
> time stands still for the photon, but space bends

Sounds like a processor tick.
I worked with Dave, too! While I didn’t get the gig I was after at the time, I was super happy with the help I got from him. Not surprised, but glad to hear the biz is working.
In case you didn't know, the 80 column limitation has its origins here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#IBM_80-column_pun...
Compared to the autotools I'd say make is fairly decent! But yeah, it's a mess. I wonder if it's really possible to improve significantly over the status quo if you're not willing to compromise on flexibility and design the build system alongside the language itself, like Rust does with cargo for instance.

Make on the other hand is completely language agnostic, you can use it to compile C, Java, LaTeX, or make your taxes. Make is a bit like shell scripts, it's great when you have a small project and you just want to build a few C files for instance[1] but when it starts growing there always comes a point where it becomes hell.

[1] And even then if you want to do it right you need compiler support to figure header dependencies out, like GCC's various -M flags.
As an owner of a cybersecurity company, I'll give some thoughts why it seems more difficult.

1) Heightened awareness of threats and insecurity
2) Increasing sophistication of attacks
3) Solution overload without interconnectivity
4) Public access to large data breaches

...
Googler here: I think that gaming metrics is not that easy. Here by metrics I mean things like:

- Your impact on revenue (if you work in ads)
- Your impact on search quality (as assesed by independent raters)
- Etc.

If you can "game" these, I think you are solid.

My advice would be to try to come up with your own project ideas (related to what your or other very close team is already working on). Often times, people stick around in their teams for a long time and there is not much inovation -- you are a new guy can bring some fresh perspective.

People who get promoted the fastest are usually those who are self driven and start projects from their own initiative.
At my screen size (13in macbook air), you don't see the amount you're donating until after the scroll, wish that duplicated higher up.
People ask for things they can’t ask for all the time. Being a property manager in Seattle pretty much seems to require willful ignorance of renters rights because they make money off of your ignorance.

My first job out of school I never had a non-compete because I refused to sign the first one and told them to give me another one, which they promptly forgot.

It said I couldn’t work in Internet Technology for a period of two years. My entire resume and focus. Yeah I’m not signing that. It’s just a formality it’s not a big deal. Well if it’s not a big deal you can change it right?
I don’t even know what the metrics are though. I work at a big company, and I know they have metrics that drive raises, promotions, bonuses. They keep them very closely guarded though. Any time I ask my manager about the metrics, I get a non-answer.
Thanks, @arrayjumper!

Patreon works best for creators with a huge loyal following, those who are most likely to pledge a monthly donation. Small creators find it difficult to raise any money at all from Patreon.

I think it's a decent idea to provide fans with an option of quick one-time payment since many do not like the idea of going through the long process of signing up and paying monthly.
It's worth explicitly considering the two concomitant problems:

What does not get measured gets ignored. It's not necessarily a bad thing to measure stuff. But it's easy to overlook a metric that later turns out to be important.

If you're measuring the wrong stuff, or measuring it in the wrong way, your metrics are again erroneous and your decisions will be based on ghosts.

Lao Tzu was truly onto something when he said "the more I learn the less I understand".
> It's just a number big enough for all intents and purposes

Sounds like a register.