skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm working for a San Francisco YC alum tech company but living in one of the most affordable places in the US.

> It's beautiful out here and I wish more tech workers would consider the Midwest when they decide to leave the Bay Area.

I think you are confused to the core issue. Your situation is relatively difficult to sustain long term and I know of only 1 person (out of 20+) that tried it that have succeeded for 10+ years.

It is a bit anecdotal but, to me, it is pretty clear that the issue isn't "consideration" but "Remote work is genuinely offshored to cheaper IT resources in India/China/etc". Those of us who want US-level salaries find it extremely difficult to sustain a remote work situation indefinitely, particularly as they age into the 40s and 50s.

If I could be certain I'd hold down a job that pays 40% of what I make now, indefinitely, I'd have left the "Big City" 10+ years ago.

The truth is for "average" developers as we age, we get trapped between being "too expensive" (people start trying to negotiate you down except when the economy is at full employment) and the financial obligations a family represents.

To be honest, it is a large part of why LeanFIRE and FIRE communities are so popular with tech folks. Many of us want _out_ but the financial risks involved aren't practical unless we are wealthy enough to be effectively retired in a LCOL location. I doubt many (if any) of such people plan to actually stop writing code.

You should probably also keep in mind that "small town" Kansas (50k+, but not a major city) is not the same thing as "rural" Kansas (where there isn't 50k people in the county spread over a much larger land area than Manhattan, KS).
Whatever one gives you a better deal financially. They are both fine schools and unless you have designs on politics pick the cheaper option. My 2 cents.
It's a nice way to filter out people who can code and basically do the job, but didn't have the financial resources to get a CS education, and weren't lucky enough when researching to see that his is an interview question. Although at least they'll know for next time.
How many products do you know where most of their ads were an initial announcement to the world, vs. how many are throwing up ads constantly just to fight back the flood of other ads?

And requiring money is often bad too. Many very good products just don't profit enough to afford mountains of marketing.
I don't see anything in what they did that won't work with HEVC or AV1. They just hacked VP8 to be able to save and restore codec state per frame so they can generate multiple versions of the next frame, choosing smaller when network condition is bad. Their innovation is in preventing congestion rather than reacting to the aftermath of congestion.
So you think the H1-B is a scheme to suppress wages with oversupply?

The H1-B's aim is to fill a shortage of skilled labor. Annual caps exist explicitly to control supply and prevent wage depreciation.

The thing that wasn't accounted for was captivity of H1-B holders from certain countries who'd applied for their greencard. Given the long wait times, they are effectively enslaved to their employer. With reduced portability comes reduced wage increase
Agreed! Though I'm sympathetic to the writer trying to convey the point to a general audience, I don't think we (the generic HN person) are typical NYT readers.
Probe: How IBM ousts older staff, replaces them with young blood
It's late and I may not be thinking clearly or be well informed enough but...

I wonder if this type of thing - implementing algorithms on GPUS that have been the bread and butter of CPUs for generations (parsing regular languages?) - begets a new style of using computer hardware. The sketch shows several clever techniques to get a modest performance gain on the GPU, but what happens when the GPU hardware keeps getting better and the CPU stagnates?

I keep thinking back to that Feynman lecture of computers using the analogy of an office filing system. There the final step was a filing clerk so dumb he could only add one to things but he could do it so fast that he was still better than the filing clerk that could reason out all the operations. Can we extend that analogy to have 8 filing clerks all adding one to different wrong indexes and then choosing the right one in the end? (I'll be honest, my understanding of how GPUs work is rudimentary).

Perhaps the gains we get from doing the wrong things in parallel actually start to outweigh CPUs doing the right things in sequence (ex branch mispredictions).

EDIT: My ramblings aside, kudos to the author for a thought provoking piece.
Extortion
Do you know there is a fake administration on Hangouts threatening me with extortion if I don't send 120 more dollars to the Philippines to Meet up with some girl and unfortunately I was dumb enough to use my real card to go to there site to get the fake Meetup or hookup ID and they have ready stolen money from me and I had to turn off my cards
ECE NTUA only.
How is university and government funding socialistic? Neither involves the workers' ownership of the means of production (and indeed, they exist in a state that is anything but socialist).
The article is about the area of UI design, which is part of a game's design but not the entire thing. It's entirely possible for a game to do well despite having a bad UI, but it would be foolish to assume that it did well because of the bad UI.

If you're arguing that no UI can be better or worse than any other because it's all "art", that is absurd.
More for your Bitcoin
The change seems immaterial to me except that it’s much clearer. The article author injects a social justice angle without describing any specific impact.

Who is really affected by this? Any concrete examples?
Top 6 Data Visualization Books
> Once they figure it out, they'll price this person as a person, and he won't be able to swing it as dramatically.

Ronald Coase, of Coase theorem fame, believed that markets are rarely efficient: "Coase argued that real-world transaction costs are rarely low enough to allow for efficient bargaining and hence the theorem is almost always inapplicable to economic reality."[1] In this case, the inefficiency persists because the costs of implementing a more detailed model would far exceed the benefits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem
In my experience, contractors are almost without exception worse than full-time employees in terms of the quality of their work. The contractors who stand out get selected for full-time work relatively quickly and consistently.
You don't need a cul-de-sac to play street hockey.
> That's why we (try) to do it in the public sector in the first place.

We teach in the public sector to reduce the downside risk of a uneducated, destabilizing public.
Because they can afford it.
It would actually be better if we replaced x million lines of COBOL with x million lines of COBOL. For many reasons:

1. it would run on a modern environment instead of a weird mainframe OS using a weird database

2. it would use modern coding conventions such as local variables and control structures instead of goto

3. it wouldn't be x million lines after you remove all the dead and duplicate code. These are codebases have been developed for 3 decades with the principle "we don't know how any of this old shit works, don't touch anything you don't need to"

But yes, you would also get a lot of advantages from porting everything to a modern programming language with good tooling.
COBOL code base is pale in comparison to modern systems, and mostly self-contained. The number of critical legacy systems written in ancient languages nobody supports anymore is going to increase, and given the reliance on third-party code (libraries, compilers, frameworks, tools etc) the problem will be much more prominent in several decades from now, when all current programmers retire and the institutional memory should kick in.
> The number of critical legacy systems written in ancient languages nobody supports anymore is going to increase, and given the reliance on third-party code (libraries, compilers, frameworks, tools etc) the problem will be much more prominent in several decades from now

You're talking about Javascript?
> You can get all the packages you need for web development, AI or statistical/mathematical stuff in python from say debian packages

Um... not quite that simple. If you are just developing for yourself, and you have full control over the deployment environment, then of course things are quite simple. (Assuming you don't need to track a fast-moving ecosystem, like machine learning, where packages update constantly and there is a huge rat's nest of interdependencies between OS, kernel, hardware drivers, and algorithmic libraries.)
WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum quits Facebook due to privacy intrusions
Hell hardcore
A number of people, I think in the "COBOL Cowboys" discussion, on HN have pointed out that it's not learning COBOL that's the issue. The language is the easy part. The real problem is learning the mainframe systems and concepts, and especially gaining meaningful experience with them. Emulators are available in some cases but back in the day all this stuff was proprietary, and doesn't follow the familar UNIX-a-like mould of many modern OSes. (It goes without saying they're nothing like Windows, either.)

EDIT: I think this is the COBOL Covboys discussion I referred to above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14083214
If only there was another way.
Maybe you could mostly learn it on the job if they thought you had interest? I actually had an internship in COBOL with zero prior experience. They were hoping to convince some of us kids to give it a shot. In my experience it wasn't hard at all, but I'm not really sure what level I was operating at.
It reminds me of the Def Con and Coachella FAQs
Barely related to this, but looking at the results (section 5.2) I'm amazed at how much worse T-Mobile is for latency. AT&T and Verizon both give about 2 s of delay for Hangouts, while T-Mobile gives 7 s of delay.
60+ courses to pass in order to graduate right?
A senior softeng from my team is from there
There you go: "The Beauty of the COBOL Programming Language" https://devops.com/the-beauty-of-the-cobol-programming-langu...
> for what it's worth, I too find it highly confusing that "partnership" and "LLP" (vs LLC) are both terms and not as closely related as one might first suspect...

They are just as closely related as one might suspect: an LLP is a partnership where the partners enjoy limited liability.

An LLC is not a partnership, though multimember LLCs are, by default, treated like a partnership for federal income tax purposes.

(The LLC is a fairly new form of business entity originally created as a lower overhead alternative to the corporation that would provide a distinct entity for corporate joint ventures; the LLP is also fairly new, but [in its US form] it was formed to protect innocent members of professional firms from personal liability for actions of other members of the firms, and is in many jurisdictions restricted to professional firms.)

LPs and LLLPs make things even more fun, though.
Some sort incentivised exercise was offered at our local school. The winner was putting the fit bit on a kid each breakntime and getting excellent result. Strapping then on young children gets good numbers fast.
I appreciate frankness. A lot of the animations are just standard, out of the box iOS animations, like the push/pop navigation between UIViewControllers. I would imagine that most users like and expect these.
That part was probably more about using the scientific method in personal life, I got a bit off track. But to answer you, the idea is that you should have a belief beforehand, and the experiment is how you test beliefs. The experiment should be designed to falsify a specific idea. Like say for example your code doesn't work. You have to have an idea of where it could be broken in order to test that belief. So you know there's a method with complex decisions, and it should call foo, but you believe that it isn't. To test this you throw a print at the top of foo, and see what happens. The belief is necessary to create the experiment - you won't make efficient progress if you put print statements after every line. The experiment is designed to differentiate between "this idea wrong" and "this idea is probably right".
I wouldn't expect people to make that choice when there are better options. If I wanted to get away from urban life, I'd go move next to a forest with hiking, or near a ski resort, not near miles and miles of endless farms.
Yes. I agree with this.
Having command line and interactive terminal experience and actually programming your environment the more fundamental skill to have on mainframes.
AFAIK Javascript is not used for critical systems which will be in service for decades. Besides James Webb Space Telescope, of course.
San Jose has AT&T gig fiber for 80 a month, with no cap. Way better deal than Comcast.
PeerTube: A decentralized video hosting network
Yeah, minimum by law is 5 years, average graduate takes 7, true hell
So if any one of those conditions isn't the case, you are an employee under the law. I see people in this thread wondering how it'll affect companies like Uber/Lyft/whatever

'B' is downright apocalyptic for contract developers in all sorts of roles. Sounds like massive judicial overreach to me. If your summary is accurate, I wouldn't expect that particular guideline to survive appeal.
No metric is perfect, but if you were measuring fat percentage in a moderately-accurate way it would be a very solid basis for an incentive.
Is there a changelog available somewhere?
Intro to Map Data Visualization Design
Neither: https://lambdaschool.com/courses/ds/machine-learning/
She's not the only person leading the group, but it's awesome that she's one of them!
Sure, but Watson isn’t really a product and IBM isn’t really a merchant here. There’s never going to be a Watson review anywhere because (AFAICT) Watson is just a marketing name for a wide range of technologies, none of which do any of the stuff shown in the TV commercials. That’s the problem.

I don’t even know who those ads are targeting. Anyone who knows anything at all about this stuff will be dismayed at the sheer BS of it all. Everyone else seeing the ads isn’t in a position to steer customers towards IBM for all their AI needs. They really need to kill the whole ad campaign, surely it’s doing IBM more harm than good.
Not to mention the video someone posted beloew from an engineer talking about Erlang there in 2014 has some interesting numbers. Christmas/New years is peak, and on Christmas Eve they were maxing out at 146GB/s out.

If we assume they maybe averages 75% of that over 6 hours, that's 146Gb/s * (60606)s / 8bytes/byte * 0.75 * 0.05dolars/GB = $14,782.50 for a 6 hour period (estimate).

That's highest listed bandwidth tier price for Azure, I'm sure they would pay less for a number of reasons. But let's just say that $10k for a whole day may not be out of the realm of possibility. That puts bandwidth costs possibly North of $3 million a year. Even at $1 million, that's a lot of money.
You can apply the same logic toward civil disobedience and people ignoring unjust laws during the civil right movement era or ghandi's era.

I think many would agree that kind of 'law breaking' should be cleared, and they apply the same logic to non-violent drug offences.

There is also a good segment who were forced into plea bargains due to the structure of the US legal system, the pattern of racism in arrests, convictions, evidence planting and so on. We know a chunk of those people are in jail for bullshit reasons, and thus the push towards releasing these people and removing the records.
Couple of ideas that I’ve used when working on and through my own stuff.

1) Track your time. Pay for a time tracking app (one that has a timer you can start and stop) and “bill” to your own projects.

2) Renegotiate commitments to yourself and others. Sounds like you get overwhelmed and this pushes you toward depression.

3) Talk to a professional if you have insurance or can afford it. Mental health is no joke especially in this industry. It’s ok to realize you need help figuring yourself out. Otherwise, find like minded folks you can talk to, on a regular basis, in person.

4) Work Sustainably, you don’t need to get lots done everyday, you need to get enough done for many many days.

Hope some of this is useful. Feel free (anyone) to reach out if you want to chat more.
> When you are talking to 'the business' I find it helpful to remember you are their 'tool'. How you do what you do, or what you use to do it may be an unhelpful abstraction.

Oh, I am aware. I don't resent it - I've grown past that (I was, once - I was more dogmatic nerd then). It's rather that there's often a mismatch between the technical ground reality and the business reality - focusing on bridging that gap would be helpful for all involved. Part of that is my role, part of that is the role of the business. :)
Picture a shopping mile with a train station at one end. Many people will arrive by train, do their shopping and then want to return to the train station to get back home.

You can also reduce the number of bikes needed by doing timed redistributions. Two people in the same appartment building, one leaves for work around 7 while the other leaves around 9, can share a bike if someone brings it from the nearest subway station to the local bike station at 8.
Tachyons fan here.
Fortunately he has fit bits on all 10 fingers so it wasn’t a waste
Without compaction this is often very difficult to do because you don't have large chunks of completely empty memory pages that are convenient to return to the OS; often you end up with a single object on an otherwise empty page, or a free block header on the otherwise empty page. If your malloc library coalesces free regions (or doesn't store its metadata in the heap at all) then this may be a bit easier.

In any case, the GC or malloc lib can use madvise() or posix_madvise() with MADV_DONTNEED. This tells the OS that one or more pages are now junk and can be forgotten, but it leaves the pages mapped. If the process touches them again the kernel will page fault and re-allocate a new page of physical memory but otherwise the physical memory is available for the OS to re-use without swapping to storage.

Modern well-designed VMs will defer acting on this advice unless it actually needs the memory. If the process touches the pages before they are reclaimed very little actual work is performed.

Compacting GCs are another story; they can always wait some time period after a new highwater mark is reached then madvise() on the empty heap areas with little penalty.

I'll also caution people to remember that free memory is wasted memory. If a program isn't using it then the file cache should be.
There is supposed to be a link to the release notes on https://www.python.org/downloads/
I switched from iPhone to the Pixel 2: One-week report
Why do the temperamentally blessed sail through life’s storms?
Socialism is not Communism.
Temenos T24 core banking software is based on something even older than COBOL called MultiValue. This is a “pre-relational” database (now unironically rebranded “post-relational/NoSQL”). I hear Temenos also has an innovation App Store is putting COBOL on the block chain...

SAP business logic is written in ABAP, a descendant of COBOL.

Oracle Core Banking was originally I-Flex, which was spun out of a Citibank internal IT organization in India - dating back to the 1980s. There’s got to be some COBOL in there somewhere, though they are also committed to making Java the next COBOL.
Heck, my mother and I both independently were recommended to supplement with extra magnesium. Most people are also deficient. It’s also useful for cognitive and GI function.
* The package formats (source or wheel) do not sufficiently capture assumptions that devs make at release time, in order to produce a usable installable artifact at install time.

* Worse, when different package builders release binaries, there is insufficient information in the binaries metadata in order to know which sets of binaries will actually install AND run properly on any given system.

* Finally, the Python packaging ecosystem suffers from a "Tesla Autopilot" problem: some kinds of things are actually WORSE if they only work 90% of the time. So, many people get by just fine with pip and virtualenv... until they don't. Since package building and dependency-solving are not exactly the sexiest or most fun part of software development, most devs in the modern era don't necessarily take the time to understand the actual roots of the problem, but instead bat around lore and cut-and-paste stackoverflow until things seem to kind of work.

A major part of Python's current success is due to its numerical and data analysis libraries. These, in turn, are successful because they take advantage of deep capabilities in C, C++, and other "native" code. This means that Python packaging inherits the original sins of C (the dynamic linker) and of C++ (no standard binary ABI). Most other languages do not have to solve such a hard problem: Perl, Ruby, Node, etc. all don't go nearly as deep as Python does in terms of leveraging a rich ecosystem of native code extension modules.

Even Java avoids this and lives almost entirely within the JVM runtime - but even then, classpath conflicts show that dependency management in ANY language is a hard problem unless treated holistically and intentionally. Python got its package system bolted-on after the fact. Then several tools came and went as maintainers entered and exited the ecosystem. With Anaconda and conda, we are just now finally at a point where people can reliably install the basic scientific and numerical libraries, across hardware and OSes..... 20 years after I started using the language. :-)
Socialism as in what conservative rhetoric considers it to be.
I'm just a math grad student, no claim to being a pro, and I can concur already that really digging into the meat of something, some new theorem, say, is MUCH easier with peers to throw off the wall ideas at.
2016 Macbook Pro butterfly keyboards failing twice as frequently as older models
CS is not engineering so it doesnt count as a suggestion
If you are an IT company and all your work is done through contract developers, perhaps you _are_ going against the spirit of the law.

Labor law is meant to protect those in the employer <-> employee relationship, and most contractual work explicitly weaken this relationship a lot. So contractual work really shouldn't be the norm in a business.

If you can't provide your main business without this set of people, then those people are probably your employees?
Making charcoal is an exothermic process. You only need a little bit extra fuel to get it started.