skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Going to lead a struggling dev team in a different culture, now what?
I'm flying in a few days to a developing country to lead a team of software developers. They are struggling with a project and the deadline is close. I accepted this contract because I like the country, the CEO and want to push myself to a first experience software lead.

One reason to bring me in is to implement good software development practices to the team. They are seriously lacking on this aspect: no test, a single staging dev server (no local dev env), no doc, inconsistent function and variable naming, the list goes on.

On the cultural aspect, the team is certainly stressed and I wouldn't be surprised if a few members will be defiant about seeing a Westerner joining the team that late in the project. Depending on how the CEO will introduce me to the team, I'm either the boss, am respected by default or another team member with no authority at all and can't rely on status to move things forward. Hierarchy is extremely important to this culture.

I can't just impose things: I need to sell good practices to the team so it becomes the natural next step to implement them.

It's going to be hard to implement a full software dev pipeline in such a small timeframe but I'd want them reach the point where:

- the project is shipped
- they understand why naming is important
- they modularize their code
- they do stuff for a reason (no meaningless SO paste)
- refactoring becomes a reflex

My solutions for this:

- mandatory code reviews, especially my own code. It seems to me like a good way to show the team how you refactor code properly, will make me meet and talk closely to the devs and will, hopefully, inject a sense of collective code ownership.
- making it very clear from the very beginning that *I* will be the one to make efforts to make myself understood: I know that some of them have a below average English level and are not comfortable to speak to foreigners

How would you handle this situation ? What first steps would you take ?
Intro to Osquery: Frequently Asked Questions for Beginners
On one side: a gigantic company with a fleet of lawyers whose full time job is to write policies that are as advantageous as possible for the company.

On the other side: a random non-expert who needs some insurance, among a thousand other things going on in their life.

How much fault should assign to the second one?
From his telling, the company was not very communicative when he contacted them, but, fundamentally, saying he should fly back to the UK for treatment and they'll cover the flight does not seem unreasonable.

He complains that "unless you are injured so horrifically that you cannot survive another moment without life saving surgery, odds are they’ll just tell you to fly home and have the surgery for free." But, to me, this is exactly what travel insurance is (which is why it's so cheap). Expecting fancy Singaporean hospitals unless it is strictly necessary seems totally unreasonable.

If they were not so communicative, he also basically decided to not get back to them on the vital "is he fit to fly?" issue for a few days (he had been OK to fly to Singapore after all), until after the surgery. There were a few days to go until the surgery, so that was enough time to get him back to the UK. Also, why hadn't he gotten in touch before? He texts pictures to friends, books flights, &c, and does not call the insurer or even ask somebody else to call on his behalf?

For what it's worth, I think he made the right decision in getting treatment in Singapore at his own expense, but that was still his decision.
Car ownership really is cheap in the states at the low end. Amazingly so from the perspective of the rest of the world.
This was my favorite paragraph:

> Personal finance experts love to discuss how much money you can save by avoiding that daily Starbucks habit or packing a brown bag lunch every day at the office. While I guess you could add to your bottom line somewhat by cutting back on the little things (a) this stuff doesn’t move the needle all that much, (b) it’s the little things in life that can give you small joys on a daily basis and (c) the large purchases will have a much greater impact on your bottom line.

This is also a big difference I've noticed between a "rich dad, poor dad" mindset. Sweating the small stuff doesn't make much of the difference in the end, it's the much less frequent but more impactful decisions (where you live, who you marry, the car you buy) that determines your overall financial well-being.
EA Sports Predicted France Would Win
I meant during the thing. Like you don't talk to the police without a lawyer present, maybe you shouldn't talk to the insurer without a professional present.
Fair point. Correct is likely defined differently for the consumer and the business.

Perhaps the answer is simple: Amazon is somehow making money from the example I cited - more money than showing the consumer relevant extras. Or they've done research to show there isn't much opportunity for more income by improving the algorithm for this.
I think I have a solution at day 2.

At the start:
A sees 12.
A knows B can see 6 or 8.
If 6, B knows A sees 12 or 14.
If 8, B knows A sees 10 or 12.
A knows B knows A sees 10 or 12 or 14.

B sees 8.
B knows A can see 10 or 12.
B knows if A sees 10, A would know B sees 8 or 10.
B knows if A sees 12, A would know B sees 6 or 8.
B knows that A knows B sees 6 or 8 or 10.

Day 1:

A passes.

B thinks, since A sees 10 or 12 he knows I see 6 or 8 or 10.
If I saw 6, I would think he saw 12 or 14.
A knows I see 6 or 8 or 10, so if he actually saw 14 he would know I see 6 and the answer is 20.
A just passed, which means A does not see 14.
B passes.

Day 2:

A thinks, B sees 6 or 8.
If he saw 6 and thought I saw 12 or 14, then when I passed he would know I did not see 14.
That would mean if he saw 6, I would have had to see 12 and he would have known the answer was 18.
B just passed, which means B does not see 6.
That means B sees 8.

The answer is 20.
It sounds like you're doing something that most people do, despite it being incorrect. That is, conflating "health care" and "health insurance". Everybody has gotten so conditioned to the idea that "health insurance" pays for everything health related, that we all seem to take this for granted. But it doesn't have to be so.

I believe that our goal should be to reduce the cost of health care so that most of it can be afforded without insurance - with insurance then returned to its role as a hedge against the more extreme/unlikely events.
Swiss Households Are Now the Most Indebted in the World
Yeah, it's unclear to me why he didn't ask for/demand coverage for the emergency finger-attaching procedure. In the article, he skipped the details on that in terms of supposedly having to inform them beforehand for an emergency procedure.

That emergency procedure, not the follow-up, seems more in line with what the plan is designed to cover.
Whenever someone says that AI and IoT would automate insurance underwriting, I start to fret — because it very quickly starts to imply more and more data collection. This is like pre-crime but for your health. Meaning, you start paying high premiums right away because later in life you might be at a high risk for a specific condition. (I know this already happens for smoking, but that is declared on a form — not by a company sending a drone to spy on you)

Since this is a startup forum — I believe health insurance to be so dark and morbid (with things like companies haggling with living relatives about ventilator care) — there is got to be a better way! (I realize this is more of a lament than a constructive suggestion)
I think there's something to be said IN FAVOR of the notion that person A's health risks don't trade off against person B's health risks at a 1:1 rate.

The crucial thing however, in a data protection sense, is that there are too many people who don't realize the implications of giving away data about themselves. A shopper signing up for a loyalty card scheme in a grocery store might sign a blanket waiver allowing the scheme operator to pass the data on to whoever they please to be used in whatever way they want, without thinking about the possibility that it may end up in places where it won't serve their best interests.

So there should be something similar here to health warning on cigarettes. Kind of like "Warning: Signing up for this loyalty card may make you uninsurable."

Also, I think there should be legal infrastructure in place to ensure that there are certain rights that you can't sign away as part of a contract that, in practice, you don't have the option not to sign (like Google's general terms & conditions).
Has there been any consideration of the driver Google uses for the pixelbook? The touch experience is at least as good as a macbook and I think it's superior.
We're going down some kind of bizarre path. Insurance is ultimately about risk sharing. If every risk is modeled then there is no insurance, just expensive prepayment.
At the moment, it's mainly just price. We try to offer the same services but with much more affordable plans.

One spot where we do differ greatly though is our bulk email verification. We check for more risk factors and information about an email address compared to other companies.

This companies directory part of our site though is more just a service for easily finding the main contact information and emails for a company, without having to be a member of MailDB. Being a member is free, though! :)
I actually got paid a salary for learning & programming in IBM mainframe assembler (BAL or Basic Assembly Language) in 1970, for an insurance company. The CPU memory was so small (32K, yes 32,768 bytes) that the only way we could squeeze enough functionality was to write in assembler, with overlays (no virtual memory). Debugging consisted of manually toggling hex data and instructions at the control panel. What a blast!

It was a lot of fun, but terribly inefficient programmer productivity. I would not want to go back :o) Dereferencing registers prepared me for C pointers later.
>Assembly Language Step By Step - Programming with Linux - 3rd ed
+1.
I have read 2-nd edition. Great book!
Well there's also the question of knowledge transfer.
There's no way a 5 day hospital stay in Bali (excluding surgery) costs $22,000. That sounds way too crazy. No way the locals can pay for something like that.
I think it's funny how your entire comment reads as a love story, then ends with "There is no alternative. I feel trapped".
I'll just refer you to the relevant /r/conlangs discussion on this, rather than repeat the same arguments back to you:

https://reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/8wjs73/is_there_a_cit...
Some Facts of High-Tech Patenting
Clearly! That’s why I am looking for help in any form in order to improve.
I work alongside healthcare informatics and I got to say this is entirely the case from what I have experienced - the less you go to the ER the more the insurance profits. All of our research and data collection revolves around people getting tests and treatment PRIOR to something major happening. Regular bloods tests, proactive bp and a1c monitoring, etc lead to better heart disease and diabetes treatments so you don't go into a crisis. The collection of data allows treatment to be better for the population not to charge a higher rate to specific people. Keeping you out of the hospital is monumentally cheaper than a couple doc visits a year for a couple lab tests.
Minivans aren't cheaper; the Dodge Caravan is cheaper, for both definitions of the word.
This article is missing a huge and expensive market segment - 4 door pick-up trucks. I was at the dealer last week and found lots of pick-ups in the 55-70k price range. They are seemingly popular here and I get the appeal especially if you want to just toss all your stuff in the back and hit the mountains, but they usually get worse mileage than a SUV and cost just as much.
I buy data from LexisNexis. AMA.
Except they're wrong. Over the life of a car, a $5/day starbucks habit can cost more than the difference between buying a new vs used car. If you keep your car for 10 years, $5/day is $18k. Our current cars are 13 years, and 17 years old.
Could inspire a book: "The Joy of Sucking"
Only if you use + 1 as a rule. What if your friend uses more efficient + 2, as you know the difference is by two?

(Then unless you know who has the lower number, you're out of luck.)
I'm very suspicious that the article mentions $22,000 hospital bed cost for 5 nights stay (excluding surgery).
The system and the people, everything behind this system, should have iron clad immunity from any claims of any sort.

Imagine they sound the alarm, the thing falls, but, surprisingly avoids major destruction, in the meantime the chaos leads to accidents, deaths and looting... the cure ended up being worse than the disease in this particular incident. People might rightly want to sue for damages, even if on average this warning would save lives.
>I never carried collision or comprehensive insurance, having the opinion that dealing with insurance is always a pain in the ass. The insurance premium is simply a markup on the expected value of what the insurance company would pay out. My "inner mathematician" couldn't permit it.

so what do you do if you drive to work, and you total your car? do you have the cash on hand for a replacement car?
But for that you would need to read the actual case, you couldn't just look at the label "convicted for child rape"
> And it could lower your rates.

Lack of a national competitive market for healthcare insurance in the US ensures an oligopoly within each state, and thus argues against your reply. Also, keep your eye upon demographic rate trends, not individual rates.

In other words, for the same demographic over time, have rates been going up or down as the insurance market consolidates players over the past few decades? The trend is inarguable [1]; it is a monotonic function. What data do you have that convincingly advocates including data brokering of lifestyle data into insurance actuarial calculations makes a material change in this function or the marketplace?

[1] https://www.thebalance.com/causes-of-rising-healthcare-costs...
Why didn’t they use submodules, then? It doesn’t force the code into the same git history but makes shared code easily deployable.
"but the Touchbar Era has taught me that it sucks to have my user experience tied to the whims of a singleminded hardware company."

He's negative on Apple, sure, but this should really read as "it sucks to have my user experience tied to the whims of a company". And that makes a better OSS tagline anyway.
Most of the regular (as in non-tech) people I know even though they like Macs (because they are beautiful) don't buy them (even if they have the money) because they don't think they're worth it. The people that do buy them are the ones that already bought into the Mac eco system, mainly because of the iPhone.

About the technical aspects you listed, I think most of them are debatable. But I do believe that none of them are the driving factors that explain why people but these computers.

What I don't understand is why we, technical people, are afraid to admit that we are also vulnerable to the extremely effective marketing campaigns of Apple.

You wanna talk about quality? I spilled a full cup of hot tea TWICE on my lenovo, and nothing happened. It turned off because it has a circuit that closes when it gets wet (to protect itself) but other than letting it dry, the computer is working just fine (I don't put sugar in my tea :) ). I dare you to try that in your new Macbook!
They’re not meant to be read outside the context of training in the bujinkan.
I don't think all parties of a chat need to consent for that information to be shared, aside from specific cases like doctor-patient and lawyer-client.
True including Einstein,Edison,Newton and writers like Victor Hugo etc.
The difference is that health insurance has an enormous upper limit on what it can save you. You rarely want to spend money for insurance on things you can eat the cost of. You want to spend insurance money on things you can't afford, and health care often meets that criterion. Plus, if it's employer sponsored, you're getting it at a substantial discount.
> packing a brown bag lunch

What's the significance of a lunch bag being brown in the US?
I agree with you here. Certainly Spotify has a different scenario - whether you pay or not, there's an extraordinary amount of content you can consume, and you do that with no added cost per consumption.

Not to mention, they probably have several hundred times the amount of data to use for recommendations since a user changes song around every three minutes. Multiply that by the number of users and average number of songs someone listens to in a session... that's going to be a big number.

Also, music choice is mostly preferential. Some preference is used when buying products but most of the time I feel like there's a need which influences the product purchase and this factors more heavily into the decision.

Netflix I would say is a good counter-example of a content provider which is based more on preference but again, the content takes longer to consume so there's likely less data than Spotify. Not to mention, it seems they've been giving more recommendation preference to their originals lately.
It seemed fanciful at the time and he was mocked for it quite a bit.
Other people want or need vehicles that offer more than a conveyance of themselves: Kids, gear, livestock, boats, ATVs, lumber, etc.

It's easy to own a 'beater' if you only use it to drive from your house to your job, to the grocery story and back for 40 years.
Good job! We see many orgs adopting this approach for the same reasons you mentioned (disclaimer: we build a CMS for these sites https://forestry.io).

The healthcare.gov site might be a good comparison for your team. It was a large legacy-CMS site when it launched. It had a lot of performance problems so they migrated to Jekyll which solved everything. Here’s a quick video from one of the guys describing the migration: https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/the-nerds-who-saved-obama...

Also, Kyle Rush worked on the original Obama site (Jekyll) and shares insights here in this video. He attributes their success to the fact that their front-end devs were able to A/B test the site multiple times per day to increase the donations. It’s loaded with good arguments to move to a static platform. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia8vsuiXiL0

If you're curious to see some build-time benchmarks for Jekyll/Hugo, check out this (from our team) https://forestry.io/blog/hugo-vs-jekyll-benchmark/
Never. Not going to happen.
Really? Outside of the lack of force touch, I haven't found the Surface touchpads to be any worse than Macbook ones in terms of accuracy.
Insurers should be required to list the statics for the number of accepted and rejected claims on the policy website. Currently there is no way to tell which insurance is more or less likely to screw you.
So while I'm not versed enough in the crypto-space to comment on your first two points, I'd like to agree _Heartily_ about point 3, "Ease of use in the cryptocurrency world is something of a joke..." (And if that's why you're being greyed, that's dumb.)

As a "dumb user" I went to buy some crypto after the initial crash last winter. I found that: Most exchanges do not permit use in my state (Washington). Of those that did, Coinbase/GDAX ended up having technical issues, leading me on for months of useless support tickets, before blackholing me entirely, and once I finally obtained some eth on gemini, diversifying it into a handful of altcoins required yet-another "exchange search", learning how to do some very sketchy wallet transfers, and using MUCH less trusted exchanges that actually allowed my state and the pairings I needed. (And if I want to liquidate my position, I have to basically invert this whole mess of a flow.)

I very well could be going about this in a dumb way, or it could have improved, thus this post (in that someone can feel free to correct me). My perception is that ease of use is in fact a joke, and if crypto wants to become a thing for "Boring Normal People" it needs to fix that.
> Personal finance experts love to discuss how much money you can save by avoiding that daily Starbucks habit or packing a brown bag lunch every day at the office.

I actually think the true long term cost savings is in health care costs and general personal health. Making food yourself will cut down on excess salt, sugar and fats which are so prevalent when eating out. This will certainly help you stay healthy in the long run.

That being said, almost all cars are a financial loss and you'd be better off driving a 2000s civic. I always found it ironic that Michigan was loathe to pay for plowing but instead just bought SUVs.
I'm actually very interested in all the input devices for Linux. I feel like Desktop Linux is not as good on user input devices, compared to MacOS/Windows, e.g. touch screen, hand gesture, stylus support, and of course touchpad.

Would like to see them all improved. If there's such an initiative I'll definitely donate.
The locals in the US can't afford the full-charge rate for hospital care, either. That doesn't stop it from being the rate actually billed before any discounts the particular patient may be qualified for, and, as such, the rate charged to someone who has the misfortune of not being qualified for any discounts.
it's not really applicable to health insurance case because getting it through your employer is tax free, effectively saving you 25% on the cost.
The type of units that cater to people on very low budgets don't usually get posted to the web. You find them by walking the neighborhoods and seeing "For Rent" signs. On my last run, I saw a few dozen for-rent signs in one lower-income neighborhood near downtown, with rents ranging from $250 to $650. Almost none of them are solo units--you'd have roommates--but you'd have decent housing, close to transportation and work.
Why aren't they BOTH wrong?

Save $5/day AND $18/k over ten years? Compound daily the both of em...

Or don't... each direction has pro's and con's.
There's generally a decent number of non SV or remote positions in the thread. Obviously it's biased heavily in SV's favor, but each month it seems like there's more remote opportunities.
Some people obviously have a genuine need for a larger vehicle. Those people usually don't spring for the blingmobiles.

To a lot of people, their cars and or other material belongings are outwardly visible extensions of their (imagined) personality, and signifiers of wealth to their peers. It's just a different set of values.

Personally I absolutely love cars. Not for any status or macho identity, but for the mechanical intricacies and neat design ideas. I am much more interested in a 1970s Opel Kadett than a big new Mercedes or something. I enjoy the act of driving, not the idea that "I am driving something expensive that other people desire".

Have you considered cycling instead of walking? It's cheap and there are so many opportunities to geek out over neat ideas.
if 'you' are attempting to consider a spectra of possible universes, let alone compare them or analyse them on a hypothetical x, y vector of possible outcomes which stretches from now until the end of the "infinite" multiverse; you will fuck it up royally. Infinity is not a mathematical concept, and is instead abstract and used to practically account for unknown variables. While the many worlds interpretation is cool, considering how it actually affects anything we do or how we sit in the universe is a miserably hopeless feat. probably have more luck searching for god in a piece of toast.
> Over the life of a car, a $5/day starbucks habit can cost more than the difference between buying a new vs used car.

Does this statement not express the concept?

One decision (buying new vs used) can completely wipe out any benefit you got from buying Starbucks every day, for 10 years. That's a very long time.
Chinese Researchers Achieve Quantum Entanglement Record