skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say yes. I'm an older engineer. I recently went for an all day onsite interview. Everyone on the team were fresh out of college in their early 20s. We all went out to lunch and everyone talked entirely about video games throughout about which I have no knowledge really. Afterward they told me I was technically solid but not a team fit.

Older engineers (50+) like me are supposed to have retired aleady.
Also recall Amazon purposely tries to “stay flush” with expenses and revenue, so naturally this article is true. Amazon sees to avoid taxes, and invests in avenues of expense that benefit it rather than benefitting the tax man. The theory being “how much tax to you pay on net zero income?”
Who is attacking white people here? Nobody is blaming all white people for slavery. At least not in this article or in the comments here.

Maybe "whites are responsible for slavery" is a deceptive statement for all i know. But nobodys saying that.
Ask HN: How do you prepare for a public speaking event?
Do you prepare the full speech? Or, do you create a rough sketch of ideas and fill things on stage. Recently, I understood the hard way that it's easy to overestimate the clarity of what you want to say and go blank when you're actually speaking. I want to avoid this trap in the future.
Ancillary services like frequency stabilization are the highest ROI application of batteries in the grid and nothing to sneeze at. Without batteries, transmission and especially distribution need to be sized to the highest momentary spikes in demand, and given the long lead time and high costs to upgrade these facilities, batteries are a great solution. They can respond instantly and solve the problem at a very low cost.

As for storing power overnight, batteries are on a similar manufacturing learning curve* as photovoltaic, albeit a few years behind. Most people thought PV could never be cost effective, until suddenly it was the cheapest. Batteries too will surprise the doubters. It's just a matter of time before batteries are more cost-effective than pumped hydro.

*Moore's law-style cost reductions were first observed in airplane manufacturing in 1936. Cost of manufacturing decreases with the volume produced:

http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/research/papers/others/1936/wrigh...
For those interested in reading more on this

Source article: http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tesla-paradox-1423786534

Electric car site looking at subsidies across the industry: https://electrek.co/2016/11/25/tesla-subsidies-big-three-oil...

One complaint I have with both of you both is that neither provides breakdowns by dollar of subsidies per car produced or sold.
It is a little handwavy, but perhaps the BG worked for generations to achieve key areas of hybrid superiority by honing pure breeding lines in these two families? Does not seem to be what the BG are doing, though.

Furthermore, one can now ask if the more perfect specimen for a given environment might be a chimera: this genome for nervous system, that genome for leg muscles, this other genome for internal organs, etc.

But your main point stands. The Dune series presumes that such a thing as breeding a superior human is not very difficult to manage on the scale of mere centuries. I am not sure how even define such a thing. And I rather doubt such a specimen would breed true with a similarly superior specimen.
You can't lump together all forms of luck into a single "objectively true, pragmatically false" category without considering the magnitude of impact luck has on what you intend to do. In the extreme, playing the lottery is almost entirely luck, and it's very much pragmatic to believe that it is so.

It's not a binary choice between 0% luck / 100% power, and 100% luck / 0% power. There's a whole continuum in between, and the exact luck/power breakdown for any given action is a matter of objective fact. Where we run into trouble is when our perception of the breakdown does not match the objective reality, and we waste our time on impossible tasks or don't bother to try tasks that could have benefited us.

And the breakdown of luck/power is objectively skewed in favor of power for those who are white, and skewed in favor of luck for those who are minorities. So while white privilege and white supremacy might both be wrong, they are certainly not wrong to the same degree. While privilege is a view closer to the objective reality and is thus probably overall beneficial as long as you don't take it too far. Likewise for feminism/incel.
I have trouble feeling bad for the guy. He was paid what he had agreed to.
Sorry but I didn't find it that compelling. A year after signing up I received an email saying my score went up. So I took the bait, logged in and found my score had not only not gone up but I was pretty sure it was lower.

A month later I received another email saying my score had gone up, this time I had logged my score just to be absolutely certain. Sure enough my score had gone down again!

After that I marked the Klout emails as spam. Any company that has to lie to their users to get them to log in has already failed even if the end comes years later.

I think the game was to goose the metrics so they could get another round of financing. The goal should have been a focus on making the product more compelling. Short cuts rarely work in the long run.
I'm not so confident that Amazon will continue to have fingers in so many things in the future. I think Amazon has figured out a pretty good formula for entering product categories that are relatively new, but we'll see if they can compete long term as more focused competitors arise. That being said, their utter dominance of retail and it's vertically related industries will probably continue for a long time. But I'm pretty skeptical of AI, smart home tech, autonomous vehicles, drones etc.
Well it's a widely accepted definition[1], so it's a bit ironic that you fail to understand there's more to the word, particularly in context. Popular synonyms include things like "restrict", "restrain", "control".

1) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/regulate
Continuous Delivery in Agile – Jez Humble
Adding types to local variables is quite useless and should be considered redundant and non value adding verbosity. The main driver for typing is at interface boundaries so you know what types of input another function expects.
Andrew Ng – The State of Artificial Intelligence
Anti-If: The missing patterns (2016)
Brodsky was a Soviet dissident and a very original, innovative, creative thinker.

One of several things I remember is him writing about the torture and imprisonment he suffered. All he said was that he didn't talk about it, because it only served his abusers to do so. They tortured him to terrify others - as an act of terror. By torturing one dissident, they intended to subdue all who spoke to him and read him. If he repeated it, then the act and its power were magnified, repeated over and over. If he said nothing, they were powerless; it was just one act at one moment and in small room.
> Apple is vastly more profitable than Amazon.

And not a dime of that was paid to shareholders as dividends. So what does it matter?

I once had a local businessman tell me that profit was a waste. You are such a poor leader that you can't find a way to reinvest that surplus in your company and its people? So you give a quarter of it to government and put the rest in the bank so they can use it to make themselves money?

I'm not a fan of Mr Bezos but I think he has the right idea; if shareholders aren't demanding cash then take the opportunity to feed the net revenue back into the company. Some day the shareholders will wake-up...
I can write code that works, finish features, and I'm pretty good at debugging. I can also teach/encourage others without condescending, ask good questions, and explain a problem clearly technically and non-technically (once I understand it myself).

I guess I'm mediocre in that it consistently seems to take me 8-10 hours to finish jobs that come with a 4 hour time estimate (my company is big on estimates). I'm also pretty sloppy - code reviewers routinely catch minor errors that I should have known better than to commit.

I have the experience, way too often, of using some feature that I pushed months or years ago and learning that it's, like, haunted or something. Doesn't work the way it's supposed to at all. Obvious failures that I should never have called "done".

When it comes to building a complete product, from start to finish, I mostly can't get past MVP stage (talking about personal projects in this case). And I once spent over a month trying to update the version of TinyMCE for a CMS that I was working on, and did not succeed. I literally got another job and left the company with that task unfinished. The new job pays double, and I still feel like a bit of a fraud.

And yeah, I'm writing "bog-standard PHP" as the other commenter put it. I've tried to get work in other languages to diversify my skillset, and haven't succeeded. At this point I'm starting to not care anymore - I like PHP just fine, loose typing be damned, and I'm starting to think I want to move out of technical roles rather than improve my language skills.
Irish american here. My ancestors came after slavery waa abolished in the us. They faced much discrimination when they arrived. Yet i still indirectly benefit from slavery and its repercussions. My family fled a decaying crime filled city to the suburbs. Their black neighbors could not, thanks to redlining and restrictive conevants. But by then, irish Americans were more likely to be seen as white. I grew up in a nice town with good schools as a result.

Sure, slavery didnt literally benefit every white person. But youd be hard pressed to find a white person today who never experienced any form of white privellage
It’s not as simple as that. Google did not go out to commoditize content. Technology created a new distribution system that allowed them to dominate the distribution of content.

If you read the case, many of the videos Viacom was asking Google to take down, were uploaded by Viacom themselves. So everyone was scrambling to get more eyeballs, that ultimately led to commoditization.

Also referring to the parent post, “desert” is not the right analogy when you create surplus around you to keep out competition. I think the knowledge industry is more like a religion, where the information is free but there are still strong structures that support it.

In case of religion, these structures are supported by supportive communal relationships. In technology, by massive network effects.
They failed at many things as well. Fire phone, fire tablet, etc.
Simplify your functions adding “hooks” to your Promises
Labor-driven ideologies are poisonous, they require that you consider another person as useful, therefore exploitable, to some end not their own; then, to call some work positive, some negative, as the ideology sees fit.

Instead, uselessness and leisure must be engineered to nullify with machine-like precision, the notions that labor is a commodity with any attached value and that the imposition of any belief, through labor or violence, has any corresponding uselessness or usefulness.

Distraction must be perfected in our lifetime. A person born in 2050 should be dazzled by endless fireworks displays and snackfoods until at last they are disintegrated by the simple side-effects of their own cellular respiration.

Indeed, everything recognizable as human being, or a soul, or a similar metaphor for the idea of the self, owes it to all other such entities that it wishes for them nothing but complete and lifelong sensory saturation with mutually harmless novelties and comforts. This is the core manifestation of self-preservation of the social animal.
Yes, with no contract, it was work for hire.

And it's understandable that he feels bad about it. So I do feel bad for him. We've all made mistakes.

Given the headline, I had expected more than grief about no royalties. I mean, that is a disturbing old man.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17038596
You got it "right" in terms of what my snobbery likes! ;) Obviously the style of writin is not actually a direct proxy for skill and understanding, but I do believe it relates to experience. Dropping the article is so new that I think most people who've spent the better part of the last decade working on cryptocurrencies would have to make a conscious effort to adopt that style of writing.

Could you, by the way, provide an example of how, in maths, you'd use e.g. "average" without an article in a sentence? I'm having difficulty coming up with an equivalence to this issue, but then I'm no mathematician at all.

Edit: also, sorry about the snub. I got confused and thought we were talking about how the article used the word. I wouldn't have been quite so abrasive if I'd realized I was also commenting on you, personally. I do tend towards snarkiness but usually try to avoid making it personal.
http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2014/11/19/slavery-economy-ba...

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/content/historical-context-was...

Just a couple of references I found with a quick search.
I have my grandfather's pocket slide rule.
I would suggest reading Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empericism’ for the relevant issues there.
I see, yea that could make sense in many situations.
> And not a dime of that was paid to shareholders as dividends

Apple pays a dividend and has a massive stock buyback program.
I love the HP-35s. Having common conversions at the press of a button is really convenient.

Here's the buglist for the HP-35s: http://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/hpmuseum/articles.cg...
Ok. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/01/0131_030203...
Given that SQL DBMSs are so far from a true RDBMS, imagine where we would have been today if true RDBMSs rather than SQL ones had been implemented.
I would consider all passive investing rent seeking. Or at the very least a kind of rent.

Just a quote from an article that sort of illustrates the attitude I have towards it:

> One disturbing implication of Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital, is that the American economy is slipping into a form of “rentier” capitalism, in which passive income from wealth, increasingly in the form of inherited fortunes, is supplanting dynamism, hard work and innovation. - https://qz.com/196575/to-get-rich-forget-entrepreneurship-an...

Apparently I'm not the only person with this attitude, although this poster was down-voted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13151809

There's also some links there. I do use passive investing, but I do consider it a kind of rent and I think society might be better off with less of it.
Amazon's retail business probably has a pretty low margin, and I'm not sure it can make it up in volume. Maybe AWS + Kindle make up for it, but I have my doubts. If you believe in efficient markets (which I, personally, think is bunk), then AMZN's 777B market cap to APPL's 926B means the Market doesn't think so, either. Apple has both large volume and high margins, which is a killer combination. On the other hand, I doubt Apple is going to grow much, whereas Amazon probably has some growth left.
>It's a bit odd you responded to various parts of my comment but not the "But more importantly I think you missed my point..." portion (i.e. kind of silly for us to debate this audience straw man)

Your argument was that almost all creative professions have auditions similar to whiteboard interviews. I pointed out that that's not true because it's only true for performance artists. You then took the discussion off topic by arguing that movie stars aren't performing in front of audiences.

Actors are expected to perform in front of an audience, programmers aren't. The ability to perform in front of an audience is difficult and rare, and is completely orthogonal to the skills required to work day to day as a programmer. Whiteboard interviews are just too far removed from anything resembling actual programming to be a work sample test. At best you're administering an ad hoc IQ test, but then you're adding an adversarial public performance aspect for no good reason. That adversarial public performance aspect is the biggest single difference between whiteboard interviews and real programming work--it's a much bigger difference than the difference between acting auditions and acting day to day.

>I'm guessing, like most developers, this is your first/only profession

I also switched careers after years in another field.

> not every job requires the level of problem solving we deal with on a regular basis

This is true. But having worked on the embedded systems side of hardware, there are many professions that do require at least the level of problem solving that programming does.

EEs (the majority of whom don't have any kind of certification unless they're working in power systems), computer engineers, and even embedded developers don't routinely go through the kinds of whiteboard problem solving tests that you're talking about. Engineers working on real time, safety critical systems are hired every day without a Google style 6 person interview interview.

The key differences are that these companies aren't trying to cargo cult the Google interview process, they don't have engineers a year or two out of college conducting the interviews, and they aren't paralyzed by the fear of unqualified candidates slipping through.

I spend a lot of time on (capital E) Engineering forums. You don't see people on those forums complaining about the industry standard interview. You don't see flame wars started every time someone even mentions interviews. I've never heard of an EE with 20 years experience being asked to solve pet problems by a 22 year old new grad. And I've never heard of an EE spending months practicing for an interview.

Clearly our interview process is broken. Perhaps it's time to look at similar industries and spend some time trying to figure out if we are really so different instead of insisting that programming is so uniquely challenging that it requires such a controversial interview process.
The Best Big Data Companies and CEOs to Work for in 2018 Based on Glassdoor
Machine learning is happening locally on device.... Not being sent back to server...
That, or `Array.from`. You can even create an array from a string:

Array.from('string')
[...'string']
I feel bad for the guy. The album was pretty successful...
So you must be a fan of obfuscated C contests?

The main reason list comp in python were given so much praise is because how they are (were?) More efficient than loops. I personally find a series of generator expressions followed by a list comp more readable than a three-level list comprehension, although the latter is more readable.
Vestager is an extremely skilled politician, but she is also extremely ambitious. She is leveraging a crusade against American tech companies to try and vault into the EU President's office. Vestager is very slick and talks a great game about protecting competition but this is just a thinly veiled attempt to raise populist support for her own political ambitions and implement protectionist policies across the EU.
New Consul UI Arriving at Consul 1.1
But wouldn't that work against Google app engine? Who would pay lots of money for cloud services if it's impossible to make a living from the results?

Also these big companies have so many competing interests - how do these empires manage internal conflicts of interest?
key part:

"[A lawyer specializing in this sort of law] explained that when dad and Chrysalis came to a handshake agreement, as long as the paintings were originally considered “works made for hire,” the copyright for the paintings always belonged to Chrysalis, thanks to the 1909 Copyright Act. Copyright laws were amended in 1978, making it more difficult for commissioned works to qualify as “works made for hire,” especially in instances where a contract was less-than-specific. Unfortunately, the courts have heavily favored publishers for cases that dated prior to 1978, which means dad missed the cutoff by a scant seven years."
The bulk of mainstream media. A quick google will show that, though interestingly it also shows some newer articles raising the same point as the GP there.
> This has never been true, has it?

That's like saying everybody lies, therefore nobody has ever been honest. Sure, journalists are human and have emotions and make mistakes, but it's not a binary issue; it's a continuum. Journalists generally should strive to be dispassionate.
That assumes that people are trying to optimize their Twitter "face." There's definitely a difference between a very focused profile around something specific and something more general that mixes different topics, including personal ones.
Visitor Management Solution
Ed Mastery: Manly McManface Edition
The particularly distorted quality of the Australian energy marketplace, distinct from all the other worldwide markets which I absolutely acknowledge are, in their own terms, equally distorted, but the quality here, is the drop in the FCAS service bid by 90%, for what we have to call better frequency stability: The battery responds faster, and there is significantly less visible perturbation to frequency stability, and it does it 9x cheaper than the prior market driven process.

How good is that!
I think it varies based on the style of the presenter and whether they like to keep it loose or prepare every word.

I like to prepare. My best speeches were the ones where I wrote small ideas I could potentially say on post-it notes, and stuck them to a large wall.

Then, I re-arranged, edited, added, deleted, etc. until I liked the story line.

Then, (a la Tim Ferris), I break it up. I practice each 10 minute section separately, being able to deliver each 10 minute section 10 times in a row.

And just remember: presentations are not 'What do I say next?' but 'What do they need to learn next?'
What in particular from the article seemed overly passionate?
Isis top men have been captured
Isn't it this very HN voting system also based on the same premise? Getting past first few votes (the hardest) take you to the wider world.
This seems like a long shot suggestion but could you train a service dogs to detect the changes in the odor and to signal to the person for recording? Since the odor is very detectable even by humans then the dogs should have zero problems detecting it far sooner.
Google app engine isn't the biggest source of revenue for google.
He should have leveraged the success of the album to get high paid work.

Jim Carrey was offered $350K for Dumb and Dumber, which he turned down (he wanted $400K). Then when Ace Ventura became a surprise hit, the offer for Dumb and Dumber was raised to $7,000,000, which he took. He made only $350K for Ace Ventura, but that opened the door to a bigger payday.

Based on the success of Dumb and Dumber, he was the first actor ever to be paid $20M, for Cable Guy, a flop at the box office.

You get paid for /previous/ success, and that's what the author's dad should have learned.

Edit: removed mistaken reference to Liar Liar, thanks
Apple made more profit in 3 months than Amazon has generated during its lifetime
There's a difference between the start of the dictionary definition of profit

a) noun 1. a financial gain

and

b) GAAP profits

Amazon has made loads of a) and not much b). Perhaps not coincidentally b) are what you are taxed on.

The financial gains made by shareholders in each over the last 5 years as reflected in increase in market cap are about the same for both - $626bn for apple, $648bn for amzn.

For those not into accounting, roughly how it works is if your basic sales are $10bn, costs $8bn then you can put the $2bn in the bank (apple) or spend and expense it on stuff that will increase market share (amazon).