skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems as if we are talking in terms of 'self organising/flat' or 'hierarchy/pyramid' with this being a binary choice.

What made Valve go for the 'self organising/flat' option in the first place?

Was this in reaction to the founders experiences of working in technical roles at 'hierarchy/pyramid' style companies?

I think that society currently is quite fearful of the technically able folk who can put people out of work with algorithms and robots. These technically able people can also put processes in place and bring in efficiencies that lead to a bigger business and the need for more people. If you sell twice the amount of stuff you might need twice the amount of people doing customer service, quality control, production, warranty and other things for the new business brought in. However these people need to be thinking people, not the people that did stuff by rote and were automated out of existence by algorithms.

Despite there being a veritable internet based industrial revolution underway society wants to promote people with accounting skills or a law degree to the top of the org chart lest the technically able class end up running the show. In fact techies are only allowed to go into management if they abandon actual tech and keep their hand out of it.

To be honest a lot of office departments could be obliterated with a few well designed website forms and a few API calls. There isn't any need for A.I. or self driving cars for this level of revolution to happen, a lot of people really could be replaced by a few 'if statements'. Then there are the pointless jobs that congeal into existence in any medium sized company that are absolutely not needed.

Yet the people that put the company business logic into code know how the whole thing works. They also have the data. If your tool of business is the phone and your idea of work is shuffling from one meeting to the next then it must be hard to accept that customers prefer the website and even harder to accept that you should be way down the org chart compared to the people that can code. It might not have been cool twenty plus years ago to learn tech so those that didn't can't really accept that they missed the boat on the tech revolution.

I think that this fear of the unknown, this idea that code is voodoo, this insistence on keeping programmers in the basement is the bigger problem than 'flat/hierarchy'. We have ended up with a management class that are about as useful as our politicians and there is real danger that in the Anglo-West we will lose to China bigly like how the Germans and Japanese reamed us out so badly with engineering during the last century.
Obama pardoned (or at least freed) Chelsea Manning.

> He's a hero in every sense of the word.

I think we can have an intelligent discussion of his conduct, but let's not waste time and attention with hyperbole. We all know that some people believe he is and some believe he's not; what substantiated, well-considered knowledge can we add?
I’m not aware of this issue. Even if it exists, I’m positive that it’ll be fixed sooner than later.

Such a big overhaul for a country of 1.3 billion indeed will have some quirks that’d need to be fixed over a few iterations.
But does it actually make any difference?
I bought a refurbished Thinkpad X230 earlier this year and I'm very happy with it.

What tipped me over the edge is the repairability and modifiability of the laptops. After an ASUS laptop broke and I was only able to fix it because some random eBayer was selling a working keyboard, I swore off non-business laptops. There's a whole community of people who do nothing but mod Thinkpads, and companies that just refurbish ones (which have often been sitting in some office somewhere and are in great condition). Linux runs fantastically on it as well.

As for the trackpad...well, it's not great, but I use the trackpoint which I've always preferred. The keyboard on the other hand is amazing.
Google Superfish. Seriously.
not the op- but I think what he's implying is that all the good engineers are in golden handcuffs with the FANG or unicorn startups making $300k. In the old days you could match the base salary and say my stock is better. Today its harder when MSFT is 3x or Netflix has 5x in the last few years. Your startup stock of 100K with 10% probability of becoming worth 10x in a few years just doesn't sound attractive enough to a good engineer. If all the good engineers are taken, it sucks the life out of other startups.
I think a lot of what you're saying is valid, but to be completely clear: these are graduate students who are reviewing for tier 1 conferences while being yet to publish in a tier 1 conference themselves. There is a legitimate argument that they simply don't have the academic maturity, experience or competency to be reviewing other researchers' submissions, regardless of how well intentioned they are or how much they want to prove themselves.
Costs of housing and other living expenses have increased to the point that Manhattan is cheaper.
>Take the Vault 7 releases for example. What was the public good done by that information being published? Those are our weapons,

They have gone out of their way to ensure that there aren't any unpatched exploits released with the info, even with most of the tech community being unwilling to help.

They are not "our weapons," they're a detailed rundown of what our weapons can do and how we use them. Our alleged "enemies" couldn't do any more damage with them than we do by ourselves.
The US Govt surprisingly has very lax laws towards privacy. I guess you can’t build a govt for the people when corporate money runs the system.
It's hard to describe, but I feel like I had a permanent "fog" in my brain. A lot of things just didn't click and I'd re-ask the same question countless times to confirm that I understood something.

Then, one day, I decided to try something and I felt like that fog lifted. That was about 5 years ago and things have been great ever since then.
p-Hacking and False Discovery in A/B Testing
In a perfect world it would either be impossible by design or result in a compile error. I'd settle for "reliably crash with an error message saying where in the code it happened".
A similar property near downtown Salt Lake City is $250k.
For the right job, I would absolutely prefer that.
Audacious too.The default skin is a windowed UI but it can be changed to WinAmp skin.
One of these is not like the others. Snowden and Manning seem genuine. Assange may have been genuine once but it's quite clear that in recent years he was either compromised, turned, or himself adopted some kind of rather loathsome fascist ideology.
Just because are lots of common things that deposit nanoparticles in my lymph nodes doesn't mean I should give up on the exposure I can control.
Get a salve made with cannabis and other plants. Something like: http://www.papaandbarkley.com/product/releaf-balm/
Technically, it is against policy to transport minors under 18; that’s up to the driver.
The only use of force during the fall of USSR was by reactionary, pro-soviet KGCHP.
Be sure to try QMMP if you haven't already. It's an actively-developed WinAmp clone. I found that I still like manual m3u playlist management better than the dynamic or db-driven stuff.

http://qmmp.ylsoftware.com
>The drug is illegal

>but the reality is that such a drug is dangerous and absolutely does hurt people.

With this reasoning, skydiving, base jumping, and even the act of simply driving a car should should also be illegal. We let people do far more dangerous things, yet keep them legal. There is another reason LSD & most psychedelics are illegal. What that is, I don't know.
You are being dishonest. He said that he will accept extradition if Manning gets pardoned. Manning was never pardoned, Obama just commuted his sentence.
Absorption through the mouth skips a large portion of the digestive system.
Interestingly, she mentions using machine learning for analysis of the Higgs Boson data. Does anyone here know more about this?
Unsurprisingly no seems to have mentioned Mondragon yet, which would derail from the "typical primate behavior" type of comments. Worth noting that while not without its problems, Mondragon is one of the largest employers in Spain.
I think the first citation in the comment you link to gets something wrong. It states that there is a correlation "very closed to zero" between actual performance and perceived ability. If you take a look at the paper, it addresses that. The better-than-average heuristic accounts for the compression you see, and once you remove it's effects from the picture, the correlation appears.
The interesting part is that this trivial toy problem is hard to learn for a standard CNN.

They probably engineered the toy problem to be that simple, looking for the simplest problem that still displays the phenomenon.
I heard LSD is rarely synthesized now and instead people end up with research chemicals (now scheduled) like 2C-B instead. Do you know if this is true?
I’m looking for a professional agency that could create my LinkedIn profile. Has anyone know one?
So, what do they plan on doing with all the nationalized and ex-propriated properties the gov took all those years ago, give it back to the title holders' descendants? Miami Cubans are going to have some questions...
Having worked as a SFE while going to school I can say there are times where I had wished I didn't have this mentality. Don't know how many times I thought "I'll never use this" and blew it off only to a couple months later run into an edge case where I had to go back and relearn some stuff. OS was specifically one of the classes I've been going back over recently and frequently. I kinda realized as I've gotten older that I'll spend a decent amount of time reading over a lot of material that doesn't immediately click as being useful or is terribly interesting to read but when it comes up I get a lot of satisfaction out of the fact that I can say "OH READ ABOUT THIS" even if it was drudgerous. Plus I'd have to agree that it opens more doors and more interesting work, not just CRUD/web apps, when you have an in depth knowledge. Also if you're not challenging yourself to do difficult work then you're not going to have to dive that deep into the knowledge they teach you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17584642
This is a really interesting read.

Specifically, the section titled "The Nature of Elitism"; and the definition of "elite", elite groups, friendship and communication channels.

It's interesting to think about as it relates to one's own experiences with group dynamics in the workplace and maybe even more so - volunteer activities where explicit structures may not be defined.
That is some excellent advice. Thanks for mentioning this!
A intriguing remark near the end: We are also very excited about the near future, because we plan to start using quantum computing to do our data analysis.
It's not completely different. They appear to be identical in large portion. Check the diagrams at: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6630507B1/en
A lot of people consider the effects of lead from leaded gas to have been a major factor driving criminality over decades, so it seems odd for someone to not even be aware of that enough to specifically address it.
Ha, I am in the same boat. There's hair/scalp therapy and then regular therapy. I am not my (lack) of hair.
how sad is it that I was happy to see neh still operational after all the trump budget cuts?
The last jet ski I rode had a pretty candid warning label on the back about this.
>You could probably write software while on CBD.

It is possible to write software on CBD, THC, and others.
>No matter how hard you work, no matter how original and productive you are, if your bosses and the people who count don't like you, you will be fired soon or you will be managed out.

Is there any organization where this is not true? Every single organization has stories of talented people who lost out because they could not convince the right people of their value to the organization.
For those subject to random drug testing, can legal CBD use trigger a postive result for marijuana?
The best compilation video №12 – Funny Cube mix
Just a note, I've read that CBD actually suffers from first pass metabolism by the liver, so taking it orally is extremely inefficient. Anecdotally, I've found the anxiolytic effects to be more significant from smoking it than eating it. I also find vaping flowers more pleasant than consuming oil, and gives me more control over dosage.
(Not OP, but I'm currently founding a startup in the Bay Area.)

I don't have the perception that the Bay Area startup scene is dying, but it's perhaps true that the Bay Area startup scene is dying. Basically, you can't raise a $3M seed round on "I went to (Stanford|Ivy League|other top college) and have an idea for a mobile app" anymore, nor can you raise follow-on rounds off anything but revenue growth. That means that the days where a couple 20-somethings could found a company, hire 10 people, and code by day while partying late into the night are gone.

Good riddance, IMHO.

The startup scene is still healthy, but is very different demographically. Some observations:

Average founders skew older - it's more 30- and 40-somethings that worked for a big tech company and cashed out a million or so in stock options, or had a previous startup exit. (The exception is crypto, which is largely financed through ICO now.)

B2B is ascendant over B2C, and many startups are financing the company with pre-sales from paying customers.

Team sizes are smaller, and many companies are using outsourced labor where they either open an office abroad for engineering, or they use Upwork etc. to find contractors.

Startups in general have gotten cheaper and leaner and are more focused on doing the work rather than living the dream.
Gosh. I deleted all my social media except LinkedIn and this has been bugging me. Its tempting me as well. lol
I think that line is pretty thin. I also think in a pseudonymous web forum it rarely comes across as intended. We often need to know the author or have access to owners information to “get it”.
Inside the Tokyo temple where the 'waving cat' was born
I think people who are interested in this subject should look at Sensorica and open value networks.

Self-organizing structures are not necessarily the most effective structures because they are given form by the information technology that the agents are using and are shaped by the constraints placed by the environment.

When there is no mold (the information technology is too shapeless - human speech or something like forum software) then the whole thing will essentially implode once the information grows out of bounds for every individual to keep up with all of it (delegation and separation of concerns is not explicit so it doesn't happen so readily).

Coming up with a sensible communication system that gives shape to organization without restricting the freedom of the agents is an interesting 21st century problem that should get more attention.

When people say that no structure works with few agents it has to do with the fact that humans, when in small groups (tribes), establish informal hierarchies that are very fluid and natural. However at larger scales the group needs to be fragmented into several factions which are also ranked, sometimes explicitly, it becomes important for individuals to signal a visual indication of rank or somehow show which group they belong to (this can be seen throughout history, I recommend a book called "The Dominant Man: The Pecking order in Human Society"). I think the trick is to try and create an "unstructured" network out of units that are small enough that they don't reach the threshold of needing formal structure, these cells can be informal and comfortable (tribes) but compose to create the organisation.

Effectively this means thinking of 'two pizza teams' as individuals when organisations are at scale and abstract out the individual as just a member of his team. Giving the team complete autonomy over how it handles its internal affairs and only judging it based on the work it produces i.e. as an "individual".
It is, notably, just that one. If everything were in Hebrew, I would personally be perfectly happy to adjust. But being the only non-English token makes it a completely unnecessary source of cognitive load in a language that is already criticized for its standard library’s frequently inconsistent use of grammar.
Microsoft Surface is now a billion dollar business
Apple faces deactivation of iPhones in India due to TRAI’s new rules
I can't really disagree with most of your post.

The reason Plan 9 or its ideas can't be resurrected very easily now is because every machine on the internet has to pretend to be UNIX and speak a thousand ad-hoc protocols. UNIX's many flaws have been papered over, one by one, by incredible brute force (instead of in one fell swoop). I'm only lamenting the fact that the 90s were a crucial period in the development of the commercial internet, and in another timeline it could have developed in a very different direction.
Uber driver stabs customer over $1.50 balance
I would assume most android users think android is cheap rather than free. It would be interesting though to see their response to such price hike(if it ever happens)
My experience with this dynamic is that leaders and power structures emerge in “leaderless” organizations despite the best efforts of participants. This leads to a lack of accountability for the excercise of de facto authority because it supposedly does not exist, and rapidly creates toxic and exploitative environments with zero recourse for grievance.
tl,dr

> This comprehensive meta-regression analysis reports a significant decline in sperm counts (as measured by SC and TSC) between 1973 and 2011, driven by a 50–60% decline among men unselected by fertility from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Because of the significant public health implications of these results, research on the causes of this continuing decline is urgently needed.
Usually, yes. That's why we haven't banned Tylenol.
Holy shit, I can’t believe I just read a story about LambdaMoo that didn’t mention the Mr. Bungle incident. Is that legal?

http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-r%61pe-in-cyberspace... - content warning: rape, or rape-like things, it’s complicated

——

MU*s were pretty important to me. I fell into them, I left them, I came back, I met the person who’s now my significant other and creative partner on a high-concept SF furry muck he ran. Some of my circles still hang out on them; I find I just can’t go back. I only have so much creative energy and I’d rather spend it on comics than on late-night role playing.
My RSS feed basically acts as my newspaper. I have feeds from the local papers, lots of sports news, tech news, news for my hobbies, etc.
GN: a meta-build system that generates build files for Ninja from Google
The 'scientific method' is not something that can be reduced to formal reasoning. Bayesian inference is a type of formal reasoning for making predictions, and as such, is a mathematical 'toy model' that doesn't correspond to the real universe.

Yudkowsky worships pure mathematics, but he always had it 'arse backwards'. It's not pure mathematics that's the ideal, it's numerical and iterated methods and heuristics (cognition). Pure math can only be applied to idealized situations, whereas numerical methods and heuristics apply everywhere. So in fact, it's numerical methods that are fundamental, and pure math that's the imperfect idealization!

Yudkowsky read too much Tegmark in his youth and was sucked in by the idea that 'everything is mathematics' (or 'everything is information'). But to repeat, this is all 'arse backwards'. Thank goodness that I read some Sean Carroll and debated with a friend of Sean's on his forum; that's what finally talked me out of all that Tegmark multiverse/'reality is a simulation' nonsense.

It's the physical world that's fundamental, cognition is next level of abstraction up, and pure mathematics is a top-level abstraction (it's not fundamental). As Bayesian inference (and all formal methods) are part of the domain of pure math, they can't serve as a foundation for rationality.
Cognition is more fundamental than math (because it's closer to the base level of reality - physics).

As I commented recently to Scott Aaronson on his blog, what distinguishes cognition from pure math, is that pure math is about fixed equations, whereas cognition is about heuristics , iteration and numerical methods. But in fact, P≠NP implies that cognition is the more fundamental. See:

https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3875#comments

So for instance, AIXI (a much touted mathematical model of general intelligence), is the 'fake' (imperfect) solution, whereas a workable heuristic implementation would be the correct (perfect) one. This is the complete reverse of what Yudkowsky thinks.
When I minimized the "components" and put them side-by-side, I immediately had a flashback to high school LAN parties. Almost everyone had this sitting above their taskbar in always on-top mode.
IMHO the proof is in the pudding. What was the last first party title that Valve released? Left4Dead 2? It can't take that many people to make hats or ignore the numerous longstanding issues on Steam. It's not like they are providing tech support or policing the marketplace. What have all of those people accomplished in the last decade?

If there is still a games division in Valve it is exceedingly dysfunctional.
In Linux root can open, read, and write /dev/msr.
>>works for the in-group it can be alienating and anxiety-inducing for others

see also: literally every company in existence.

I realize people tend to become invested in reinforcing the status quo but I am still baffled at how every time Steam comes up 99 out of a hundred comments act as if office politics aren't exactly as powerful and unaccountable as every anecdote about Steam and their cliques.
So if you manage to avoid being tortured or killed, then what you did wasn't a sacrifice and wasn't patriotic? Considering the definition of hero goes so far as saving somebody from a burning building and receives minor burns, I think it's rich to say that because that person didn't receive full body 3rd degree burns or die in the fire, that they're not a hero. They risked their life and did their best to avoid or mitigate the damage they caused themselves.

Are you saying that the rescuer who fails to save the person and dies in the fire is more of a hero because they screwed up, or chose to give up and be burned alive? What about the rescuer who saves the person and intentionally runs back into the burning building and dies to gain "hero points"?

Yeah, the case against Assange in Sweden was just to get him to go back so Sweden could extradite him to the US. That is something legitimate to run from. I believe it is foolish to maximise the amount of damage to one's self, for many reasons least of all that it hampers one's ability to achieve their goal.
Caves all the way down