skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most organisations structure power in hierarchies, meaning a small number of people at the top of the pyramid are responsible and supposed to be ultimately accountable for ALL decisions being made under that structure.

This naturally leads to a situation where those working at the top are being overwhelmed with demands for their attention and decision making approval.

A conscientious person - arguably a good _leader_ - will take this responsibility seriously, and devote their time and energy to handle all those demands as best they can.

But another type of person - a "player" - will realise that the work of decision making actually _detracts_ from their success within the organisation. A "player" will figure out they should avoid the work of leadership as much as possible and instead devote their time to fostering their own image, gaining popularity, claiming responsibility for other peoples good decisions and generally working their way up the pyramid.

For me hierarchical power structures are the root cause of the problem here, not human nature - the "player" is really acting rationally, taking the path of least resistance to achieve their goals.

The problem IMO is we're using legacy approaches to organising ourselves groups that stems from military theory of the 18th century - that most armies themselves have now moved beyond - see https://www.amazon.com/Corps-Business-Management-Principles-....

We need smarter ways to organise and we probably need AI at some level to help us scale up to higher volumes of effective decision making.
It's a genre that keeps fascinating people who like that genre - what possibly twisted mind could do such horrible things? It's indeed an often taken and explored trope of fiction, certainly not for everyone.
Also all of the Mafia themes: So many of the media on that hides the gruesome reality of recruiting people out of poverty to push them into a never ending circle of violence, with notorious killers that tortured their victims in much fashion like jack the ripper. (Think Richard Kuklinski, whose death count is without a doubt much higher than Jack The Ripper)
And yet many of the fictional books, series and games portrait the Mafia as being about honour, family and pride.
It's a fictional world that if made well enough is interesting to explore.

Probably that game wouldn't have been for me either as I despise torture porn akin to saw. But that doesn't mean, that this sort of fiction is inherently bad. Tasteless for sure, yet in a genre of a grotesque deep dive into a parallel universe where the gruesome and grotesque is justified by a mysterious, higher cause.
You can see this phenomenon in American football where the pretty good quarterbacks often become great coaches but the very best quarterbacks rarely do. The pretty good ones got good by being very detailed students of the game, memorizing thousands of plays and watching as much game film as possible... the absolute elites like Joe Montana often just had the ability to see an open receiver 30 yards away and throw the ball with 4 inch accuracy to the point that he would have run to during the ball’s flight.
Compressing cracked games was a big thing too. There would be a lot of competition to get the smallest version of a game for faster downloading from a BBS, getting more games on a floppy disk etc. Getting the best compression software was a sign that you were an ‘elite’ cracker.
(Disclaimer - was part of that scene as a young teen)
Not when you consider that in the context of this article, the set of people flipping coins had already had all the rationalisation opportunities and were still left with no clear way to make the decision, whatever that decision was in their circumstance. Once you've removed all the deterministic structure, all you're left with is playing the odds.
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And have exhausted all the available rational guidance.
Everyone wonders whether to quit or break up sometimes. That of course doesn't mean you should do so. The title is miseading. The first line of second paragraph states that data was collected on people that were 'deeply unsure' about something. Quite a lot depends on how much you are actually considering it. Unless you are sure the data in the study is representative for your situation, this study doesn't help much.
Hey, its not that bad, as you know only carefully vetted and patted down people are allowed into the exclusive lounge where the charity was born:

> the foundation “started with a small group of businessmen chatting at the airport while waiting for their flight, wanting to do something to help the Great Barrier Reef
I graduated with close to the average amount of debt, around $22,000. But $22,000 was NOT the whole amount I paid, just the amount leftover after my parents and I paid as much as we could up front. The total cost was closer to $60,000. Still, I graduated with a degree that will help me pay my debt off in a reasonable amount of time.
the idea is to rank 1000 cities and 120 countries according to their startup ecosystem strength. Giant algorithm activated, looking for a sanity check of the locations in your country or region, so i can fix it in the next update.
Yes. Loans should be harder to get. This will reduce school costs, reduce applicant numbers, and force students to really think if college is necessary.

Community colleges will take more of a lead, tuition will plummet, kids will enter the work force without a “unforgivable” loan.
> But it seems like at least part of the problem in endemic in our view of organisations. People often want management positions because they are paid more, are more secure, or have more power. Maybe if we shifted our view of management as "just being a different skill set" and not always being higher paid then we'd find people without the required skills wouldn't try and obtain those positions and would focus on what they are good at.

Some tech companies have started to do that with technical seniority tracks. I think one bit that's still missing remains the ability to move people back into previous positions without loss of face or income if they don't fit in the new one.
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I thought a lot about this a while back. A very few large companies have dual tracks, one for promoting professional engineers but keep them out of the management track. In my opinion, this is a good idea.

If a software or hardware engineer is promoted into managing other engineers, this is an entirely different skill. It helps when one understands the technical requirements and issues but management is a business skill.
He says it, and even if you don't believe him one bit saying it makes it a little bit true because you have now sent a signal to future candidates that the anti-establishment constituency can't be ignored.
True, the book is indeed about "future", so I of course accept that by definition there will be speculation. I'd be lying if I didn't find the book valuable. I think my gripe is about his not-so-strong solutions—but the author does admit upfront that he sees his role as a historian is to raise questions. So maybe my complaint was unfair :-)

My memory is fading, but I appreciate the three "key questions" he asks to think about at the end of the book (transcribing looking at the physical copy near me):

- Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?

- What's more valuable—intelligence or consciousness?

- What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?
Feynmann was not exactly what you'd call "statistically representative".
I know of a lot of tech people who “self demote” because they don’t enjoy management and others who left jobs to avoid managemt. and you can do quite well as an individual contributor. Is that true in other industries?
Then I wonder about people who are trying to give advice about how to take advice from themselves because they claim they're successful. It seems like a rung beneath snake-oil.
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I wonder who is more eager to justify their decision and to tell themselves they're better off now: Those who tore down all bridges and left in anger? Or those who stayed and climbed up the social ladder even though they hate their live?
What you're saying isn't wrong. Applied to that snippet of the qoute though is wrong.

At least semantically it makes it appear as if you read half of a qoute, reacted, and formed your reply based on that reaction.
And I'm saying ISPs would never let that happen. The amount of people who torrent is absurd, and the amount of people who are using the same net as someone who torrents is even greater. For this to be the least bit effective, they would have to dismantle VPNs, dynamic IP addresses, and somehow find a way to target specific people when they're using public internet. It's unpractical and salty record companies are picking their battles incorrectly. But they will be forced to learn this soon.

Just for clarity, I only mentioned the trial part of things because that's how it currently works. Sorry for confusion.
The parallels in both cases are that service providers have no incentive to hold costs down, because the costs are not directly borne by the consumer or are delayed.

Providers charge whatever they want, because they know you really don't have a choice and that insurance is picking up the bill, and if insurance won't pay you can go after the patient. Patients don't have any way to price shop (it's usually impossible to know the cost of a procedure or service before you get it, nor what will really be covered by insurance) and are insulated from most of the costs by their insurance.

In education, a huge chunk of the tab is covered by loans, which makes students price-insensitive, and the institution has no real incentive to hold costs down, in fact they actually use the fancy rec center and stadium to attract students. They can also run up the gen-ed courseload to artificially increase the amount of time it takes to graduate. Students have no real flexibility here either, because it's not like you can take a class at another university because it's too much, or choose to pass on a gen-ed.

The sad truth about healthcare is there's just too many middlemen all taking their cut and it all adds up. Hospitals, drug companies, insurance companies, doctors all need to make their cut, and by the time the service is delivered it's extremely expensive. Most other countries impose a lot more price controls, reduce the number of middlemen, and provide doctors with free education to increase the supply and remove the need to repay their own steep student loans (iirc you are looking at about $400k these days). Fixing the problem involves taking on a number of very powerful lobbying groups at the same time and is going to piss off a lot of people whose gravy-train would come to an end.

In schools, the problem largely comes down to reducing the amount of administrators and reducing the spend on non-essential facilities (rec center, stadium, etc). The actual teachers themselves are usually overworked and underpaid, the money is disappearing at an institution/administration level.
The Peter Principle suggests people are promoted to the level of their incompetence. The Dilbert Principle (which Harford also mentions) suggests incompetents are promoted to middle management to minimize their ability to do harm.

The Gervais Principle uses The Office (and organizational theory according to Whyte) as a reference. The firm ranges from pathological to chaotic. Clueless overachievers get put in middle management, while sociopaths are groomed to jump to the top positions.

This was a funny, interesting overview, made me actually want to read about academic organizational theory for the first time in my life:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
From the point where I'm standing (being Dutch), two-party systems look like inevitably ending up near 50-50 (because both parties keep adjusting their political viewpoints to get more votes), and in the process creating an us vs them mentality.
the universe doesn’t expand into something bigger. It’s like multiplying the set of the real numbers by two, the set doesn’t become bigger and its boundaries do not change.
As a developer who has risen through management ranks quickly I can say that without training and support I would have very readily lived this principle. One set of skills can only be partially transferable to the new demands of management.
Explaining what is/was "around" the big-bang was never done properly in most physics courses I've taken, and for a good reason: you need to understand the notion of local space metric before you can get that - as the theory currently stands - there is basically nothing outside of the expanding universe.
The problem, which I worry is unfixable, is that managers are the people who decide which jobs are most stable and paid the most. Unsurprisingly, they give themselves the majority of the spoils.
In a similar way, I know a lot of people who do their best to not look good for a promotion. Most of them are coders that do not want to stop programming and start managing teams.
That's interesting, thank you. If i torrent 1 movie from netflix, that's only worth about $12 (or whatever monthly subscription). Ignoring all other factors that would make it not worth it to litigate (not a legal court case but just send a letter to an ISP), this is still not worth $20.
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Shazam shouldn’t. And OP brought up NeXT by saying macOS.
Proposal being -5 is fascinating. What's equally intriguing is that "Should I dye my hair" is dramatically more positive than "Should I have a child". Mind you, perhaps they should have checked in on that one at the 1-year mark.
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All of the things you're taking about are possible to do with Excel. Of course I prefer R, but at some level we all abstract away algorithmic responsibility and return granularity.
So $work did java app deployment with Tomcat and puppet at scale (>100 services). Sweet. Mostly.

3 problems, 1 is that in the unlikely event you had an external system dependency, (say, shudder, imagemagick or really, any non java binary) you were totally hosed, because lots of systems work needed to be done to provide it (say, make rhel packages in corp repo plus puppet guff) and also keep it up to date.

2 was, since it was outside the supported path, actually, you couldn’t ship anything that wasn’t Java in Tomcat, Java invoked binaries were hard, but non Java services, even judiciously and with a super good reason were basically impossible.

3. Your stuff might be coupled to the base operating system in some way... which meant that the operating system patches needed to be tested against all possible application deployments and thus patching (including kernel) became the de-facto responsibility of the team owning the application, which lead to major delays in patch application.

Containers mostly shift these problems around (and create new and different problems too) rather than solving them, but my experience is that they do genuinely shift them around in a useful way.
My manager at Charles Schwab said "managers don't know anything"
Data caps incentivize conservative use of a shared resource. They don't prevent congestion (only surge pricing could do that, but nobody wants to check market rates before sending a packet), but they make congestion a much rarer occurrence.
In some sense this is like asking who scores more goals in football by looking at whether they took a shot or passed it on. In the end I think relative richness (i.e. making more than your neighbours) and social relevance (i.e. people needing you) will always be more important for building self-worth and long-term happiness.
Are you paying to use Elm? What's stopping you from sticking to 0.18? What's stopping you from building your own 0.19 IDE support?
Teaching requires a set of distinct skills which are different from researching. Naturally not everyone is equally gifted or developed in all areas.

One of the most valuable skills in life is the ability to adapt your mental models and present ideas at an audience-appropriate level. It is useful in teaching; it is also useful in leadership, sales, design...

As an exemplar, I submit Akamai CTO and MIT professor Tom Leighton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3LMbpZIKhQ&list=PLB7540DEDD...
The worst stories from a decade-plus of Ask a Manager
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Ramen (Chinese noodles) were introduced and popularized by Chinese immigrants in Meiji-era Japan.
It's surprising to hear that you (and others) think I'm talking about the reaction to my advice. I don't think I've actually seen anybody call my writing confirmation bias any of the times it has made it here.

This is something I notice in the reactions to other people's posts. I'll read something, nod along to a bunch of good ideas and overall wisdom, then come read the commentary here dismissing the whole thing.

Oddly, thinking about it now, it's something that never seems to happen to my own advice. Perhaps it's so self-evidently obvious that my success is random chance and bad ideas that worked in spite of themselves, that nobody ever felt the need to point it out.
As the child of two teachers I vehemently disagree with what I consider your inaccurate and wholly unsupported supposition.
Could you please improve your commenting? We're looking for civil and substantive posts that are informative.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I was not able to find it. What I was able to find is this: "Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language." https://docs.python.org/3/faq/general.html#what-is-python

Yes some people do write scripts in Python. Does that make Python a scripting language? Maybe in your definition of scripting language.
Alternate explanation: Most quarterbacks aren't the best in the world. Statistically speaking, coaches who are former quarterbacks will typically come from this group.
I've seen order-of-magnitude difference in abilities of companies to:

* Build products

* Sell products

* Recruit

* Build rapport with customers

* Evaluate business models

Most of that is ability. Few people have ability in /all/ of those directions. I've seen people who are even competent (not great) at all of those launch successful business after successful business.

By "successful" I don't mean billion dollar unicorn. I mean businesses which employ tens (or hundreds) of people, have millions in revenue, and last indefinitely.

This stuff isn't rocket science. If a Fortune 500 make widgets, and you make higher quality widgets at lower cost and make people aware of that, you'll run a sustainable business.

As a small business, on one hand, you'll have slightly less access to distribution and marketing channels. On the other hand, you'll have a much leaner cost model (no multi-layer executive hierarchies to sustain). Your team will also be much more focused, productive, and agile. You'll also be more risk-tolerant. All of those provide competitive advantages.
Easy, CLU (1971), ML (1973), Ada (1983), .NET (2003), Delphi (2007), D (2007).

Not every implementation needs to be turing complete C++ style.
Actually they very much can. They just can. Except if you believe in some kind of soul / body duality. Else human-like thinking is something that can be achieved with the right (and properly complex) computing program, including consciousness. And that would include anything logical or illogical that we're capable of.

In other words, if you do believe that humans can be illogical, then who told you the human thinking doesn't come from an algorithm itself (of e.g. NN nature)?

Not that this is not needed, of course, because what I wrote is much easier to achieve. I wrote that "Algorithms can blindly follow through into an obviously illogical decision". That doesn't even need the algorithm to be illogical itself, but just to arrive at an illogical (obviously for us, humans) decision. It can still arrive at that logically. E.g. if I program a simple algorithm that "if the car sees a zebra crossing, go full steam ahead" the algorithm will do just that, whereas most humans would question it.
Depends how you define, "success."

Most companies that provide a valuable enough product for enough customers to build a decent career for the companies employees are started by average Joe's with no special connections and are executed very poorly.

You'd be surprised how easy it is to start and operate a decent business. The difficult part is growing and scaling that business.
I can't imagine a student not having to provide his university name and major. Lend 20k per year to study the history of arts, what could go wrong?
Not only was that a great story about mythology and fake tales that comes from war, it humanised and told the story of the Hmong.

What is the point exactly? Fox news is telling the Hmong's story better?

To be fair the story is amended, so you really need to link the original since it might have been worse?

[edit] Link to her story - https://apexexpress.wordpress.com/2013/02/26/22813-kao-kalia... (about 10mins in)

To be clear Yellow Rain is fake, this is an incredibly important story to be told. To be a westerner and believe in the Yellow Rain is nuts and should be laughed at, but how does one talk to a Hmong person about it?

Post WMD's, we still have Vietnam using Agent Orange in known propaganda, we know Rohingya refugees are lying at times but we don't know how much. It's important stuff.

How they treated the interviewee(The Uncle) was shitty, especially in the earlier version but at the end of the day this interview talked more about the Hmong story than the other shitty news outlets like Huffpo and created more thought.
I reread the comment on my desktop today, and found that I was highlighting the text as I read it, which helped me concentrate on the area
It's not expanding, separate points are growing further apart.

Any metaphor you hear about a balloon or fabric or things like that is an overly simplified version of complicated mathematical models of the universe.
I think you or someone understands this subject should write a detailed comment in this thread that explains this to software folks like us. I appreciate the help.
Standardized testing leads to teaching to the test, and the tests need to be easily gradable, so we teach kids how to take tests that represents content in a mannor that is a mile wide but an inch deep. Multiple choice is a crap way to measure most understanding.

This doesn't take away your other point: unsupportive environments. Socio-economically disadvantaged kids are truly disadvantaged.
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Yeah, productivity.

Because spending 10 minutes writing asynchronous FFI code is definitely worse than spending a couple of hours debugging a runtime failure.
> The better they had been in sales, the worse their teams performed once they arrived in a managerial role

I hope the study authors controlled for the [short term] effects on relative team performance of taking a very effective salesperson out of the sales force [and not even having a replacement]...
I think it’s like the universe being a balloon (infinite or not) and inflating it. The space between any two points on the balloon increases over time. And at the Big Bang the space was basically 0.
Yeah, this could work for someone from Vulkan.

Humans also want a tiny possibility of it happening to make their "what if" worth, and are willing to pay to get that.

Just like they are more engaged when there are props and sets and costumes when they see a play. A play requires suspension of disbelief, so they could have also made believe that they see the set and costumes over a naked stage, but we don't want that, we prefer to have them as aids.