skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I literally hope that company goes out of business as soon as possible. If I have a few moments my feedback on sites that use it is literally "get rid of this annoying foresee bullshit"
A more nuanced approach might work there. Some people are up at night because their projects keep them engaged, and delivering pizza to those people is not a bullshit job. What Graeber alludes to is when people have pizza delivered because they need to work their own bullshit job and thus do not have time to cook.

In other words: If there were less bullshit jobs, there would be less pizza delivery. Hence, to a certain extent, pizza delivery is also a bullshit job.

I'm not sure I subscribe to this reasoning, but I think this is a more honest representation of Graeber's argument.
> His working definition of bull-shit job is that the job holder calls it a bullshit job.

That is a very subjective definition.
I think I'm in love
I don't think the poster was grieving against Lobste.rs so much as the companies poor understanding of how domain names work.
Fair point - if those exist. Current tourist traps are popular because those are the very-interesting and somewhat-interesting spots, as opposed to "there also used to be a medieval city here, now there's a factory, gee that's interesting".

In other words, that's already happening, and it does help, but doesn't scale quite with the demand. There's always diversification ("go see that niche thing if you're into it - old mine, train museum, festival of this and that, power plant, take a bike tour instead"), but the attraction of extremely-popular spots is self-reinforcing.
And how many memory corruption and UB errors did your Python and JS code had?
Thanks. Then we're in disagreement :-) For me, people are a part of the whole system, following the same rules as everything else in the universe. No special exceptions, no "get out of jail free" card.

(by the way, it's reducing energy gradients—differences between here and there, doing work—not energy itself)
From the article: "Heritability measures the proportion of variation in a trait that can be attributed to genes, and not the proportion of a trait caused by genes." If e.g. schools get better, and the whole population would have access to these better schools, everyone would be more intelligent, yet the heritability would still be at 80%.
I don't remember it allowing you to re-order sections, though.
Using min() seems like it could be incredibly dangerous as an "implicit" behavior, not to mention surprising.

I'd wager it'd be much better to just specify that abort() gets called in the "overflow" case. (Given that overflow is basically never what you want anyway.)

Yeah, it'll crash but at least it won't be suprising/undefined behavior.
That's a cultural thing. German-speaking countries are flooded with slavs so they are not treated so well.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found a nice solution to this problem yet. For those requiring quasirandom Monte Carlo integration over a say a 2x1 rectangular grid there is always the option of scaling the unit square points by 2 and then rejecting half of the points. Not super elegant and not very efficient in high dimensions, but at least it is unbiased and maintains the low discrepancy characteristics.
Thanks for taking the time to explain to this guy the big obvious perspective he is missing here. So frustrating reading one-sided comments like that.
I didn't mean to undervalue the benefits. I need to communicate better. I only intended to state a part of the argument that US generally pays substantially more than Europe. There are many (including myself) that choose to stay in Europe in-spite of it, valuing other benefits such as (better healthcare, work-life balance, education, involved society, gun control etc). It still does not change the fact that US pays better, and that it would be better for Europe to do so as well if they want to attract top Engineers aways from US...
I don't know if it's not possible to outsource it, if you look to the U.S. an absolutely massive amount of work (intelligence and military ops) is outsourced to private contractors

Ex source (sorry, old one, don't have time right now to find a more recent article I was thinking of for reference): https://www.salon.com/2007/06/01/intel_contractors/
MIT: Observatory for Economic Complexity
So, out of general interest, I was looking for real time visualisations of global trade and economic activity to try and understand our current geopolitical situation a bit better and came across this.

In a similar vein:
http://exportpotential.intracen.org/#/home
Well the 3Bn won't be visiting Paris every year. If they visited it in their lifetime (40 years) then it'd be 75 million per year. Not a small number but definitively feasible.
No vegetarian mincemeat pies for Missouri then?
Is it just me or has Dyson's brand really benefitted from The Terminator association?
I guess people get quite good at their job, even if their full time job is pretending they are busy doing something useful.

Meaning, it may be hard for businesses to spot who is doing the bullshit job because everybody with a bullshit job does everything they can to keep that job.
I suspect WhatsApp not encrypting the backups was likely not a technical issue primarily, but a business one. Google gives free storage and can read all your chats on Drive to target advertising. Whatsapp gets free storage.

If you want to protect Google Drive properly, use an "at-rest' encryptor like VeraCrypt[0] or Syncdocs[1]

[0] https://www.veracrypt.fr/en/Home.html

[1] https://www.syncdocs.com/how-to-set-up-google-drive-encrypti...
MARKETING: Increase Traffic to Your Shopify Store 2018
When I was an young new graduate I did consider moving into US, even got some interviews, thankfully I decided to stay in Europe.

There is no amount of money that would cover what I would be loosing in vacations, job safety, unions that actually work on IT, paternity leave, healthcare, ....

Plus I got to become fluent in 6 languages, and basic knowledge in a few others.
Your comment is valid if you assume that a business works like one homogeneous organism, in the language of biology, you have one organism on which natural selection (in this case, the market) acts.

I think, especially with larger companies, you have to treat the whole organism as a bunch of sub-organisms that works together (most of the time) towards a common goal. In that case you can have several different forces acting, for example, the size of a department may be a positive attribute for the manager of that department, even though that size drags the entire 'super-organism' down. The manager probably also goes out of their way to 'protect their people', again to the minor detriment of the super-organism. But is that bad for survival of the super-organism? Probably only minor!

Think of behemoths like IBM - think of how many international dependencies they have, think of how many sub-departments they have, think about how often these departments must fight with each other to make themselves look good to the higher-ups. Think about how much money they make and continue to make, it takes a lot of infighting to get such a big company down.
So for example, with regards to startups growing rapidly on VC funding:

What is the lowest acceptable number of employees that a company that's planning to go public can have? Sometimes I wonder if this rapid inflation phase is just a check boxing exercise, and thus create a lot of bullshit jobs.
130M customer records from Chinese hotel group found for sale
That was the most extensive invocation of Poe's Law that I've seen someone write in some time
I did not communicate clear enough. I'm NOT saying life in the US is abstractly better than Europe. It is a personal choice, and I quite decided otherwise(moving to Europe from the US). It still does not change the fact that Europe generally pays less than US, and that it would be better for European companies to pay better to attract /retain top talent from the US.
Learn Python by using test assertions
Likewise.

Brexiteers hold him up as a paragon of British engineering and entrepreneurship. But he took an already-solved problem and "re-imagined" it with twice the cost and power requirement.

I'll stick with my Vax, thx.
Affinity Publisher (an InDesign competitor) in public beta
100 Burritos
Here’s How Much Time You’ll Waste Commuting in Your Life in Nearly Every US City
I think you are somewhat correct with your brainstorming scenario, but Germany was still plenty innovative in the last century.

Software technologies like MP3 came out of Germany. Companies like SAP and Hetzner are successful and german. Berlin has a healthy startup scene. Green technologies and automotive is dominated by Germany.

Overall I think Germany has plenty of risk taking engineers but the capital is more risk averse than in the US. Capital includes angel investors and pension funds and everything in between.
Physicists Are Almost Able to Cool Antimatter. Here’s Why That’s a Big Deal
Interesting how little the names of places have changed in 4-500 years - Bishopsgate, East Cheap, Cannon Street, Wallbrook etc. All recognisable.
After a recent stint living in Berlin and working for a German company I think it also may have something to do with the quality (and price) of higher education and the open EU job market. Many people I was working with were in their late 20's on their first job as a junior because they stayed in school much longer than they would have in the U.S. because it's a very low cost (and more of a societal expectation in Germany to have at least a Masters) so you've got a broader highly educated workforce rather than the U.S. where a bachelor/masters from an Ivy or Stanford will set you dramatically ahead of others. Also, you have a lot of highly educated people coming in from Italy, France, Greece (these are the most common ones off the top of my head I remember working with) that have an even worse labor market at home and are willing to work for less.
its brilliant, congratulations!
Dyson sucks better than Vax!
Bullshit jobs also 4) keep a country's population occupied so they don't self-organize and revolt against the country's entrenched power structures.
Fascinating to discover I am currently sitting where there used to be a Franciscan monastery!
I think so, following this logic:

You have a FOSS tool that's awesome to work with.
By yourself, you can take the time to set it up and learn how to maintain and use it.
It's actually the case most of the time.

If this tool is interesting/useful enough to attract companies, they don't always have or want to have a service/person to set up, configure, maintain and debug this tool.

In that sense, companies making the FOSS tool can sell active support, maintenance and hosting, and I think it's perfectly fair here.
Its entirely possible to be profane without the use of profane words. I am surprised this didnt get a mention from Vice:

http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t...

TL;DR
"We spent several weeks building a UI that used pop-downs to construct sentences, and only had completely harmless words – the standard parts of grammar and safe nouns like cars, animals, and objects in the world."

"We thought it was the perfect solution, until we set our first 14-year old boy down in front of it. Within minutes he’d created the following sentence:

I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny.
If I can find anything common that I think others would use, I'd blog it (under https://www.jvt.me/posts/categories/blogumentation/), and am looking at building common snippets into ie Ruby Gems that can be shared and improved over time
I could literally rewrite your comment swapping "process" for "people" and it would resonate with others.

People, process, technology. They are 3 pillars. You cannot build without all 3 working in sync.

Good employees can only do the right things with the right technologies - which may be a whiteboard and a notepad - and the right processes so that they know what the "right thing" is.
Show HN: Create a restaurant website in one click
Preparing for the day quantum computing cracks public-key cryptography
I just checked with Firefox Focus on Android, and the 'launch' button is missing. Even if I go to the `/messages` URL I am redirected back to the account splash screen. That's my default browser, especially as I only wanted to log in for a minute to check on something on my personal device.

It does work with Firefox on Android (not Firefox Focus), if you check 'desktop mode'. Weird that you should have to fake the user-agent string to access it.
It's because we are growing up with VCs teaching us that you have to burn money for 10 years before you can be profitable.

Honestly, I'd sign with my blood if I could get my business to make £5M a year in profit and own nothing to VCs or banks.
Yodeals – Multi vendor Marketplace
As someone who’s written a lot of Python I understand where you’re coming from, but I generally think of it the other way around: why does Python lack the ability to create lightweight structs that a lot of other languages have and I often find exceedingly useful (I mean I know why, dynamics and duck typing and all that).

Creating a whole class just to neatly carry around a few related values always felt like a very “heavy” solution.
yEd is actually not really a drawing application, as you cannot (easily) draw generic drawings. What you see and edit is always a graph, consisting of nodes and edges.

For yEd the lack of rotating shapes is a deliberate decision based on implementation difficulty (it's based on an older yFiles library version), workarounds are available (importing arbitrary shapes), and the fact that in a graph drawing application there are several things that don't play well with rotated nodes, such as automatic layout and ports. For yEd Live we are considering to add the feature, but we're still trying to figure out how to lessen the impact where things don't work well together. After all, automatic layout is one of our main selling points. We have already implemented rotatable nodes as a demo [1], so simply adding that to yEd Live would be trivial from a technical standpoint, but we like to care about UX as well.

Other applications may not have the same constraints (graph vs. generic drawing) or may disregard some of the problems (e.g. in draw.io you get overlapping shapes when you arrange a diagram with rotated nodes, since for the arrange feature all nodes are apparently axis-aligned and not rotated).

[1] https://live.yworks.com/demos/complete/rotatablenodes/index....
Someone could be obsessed with books to the point where it's harming other aspects of their life. Although I'm sure the insult is often used as genuine anti-intellectualism, I also understand why a society would not be impressed by someone who spends 15 hours a day reading Captain Underpants books.
What I'm getting from you two is that you're desperate to insert Brexit into any conversation.
Other posters already mentioned the storage factor, so I'll mention the safety factor:

Hydrogen is flammable, but kerosene is not; kerosene is instead combustible. Here's the technical difference between the two[0], but in practical terms it means that you can drop a lit match or cigarette into a tank of kerosene and nothing will happen. You can even heat a tank of kerosene directly with a propane torch without igniting it[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combustibility_and_flammabilit...

[1] https://youtu.be/7nL10C7FSbE?t=105
I think it's ultimately about risk. Once it's able to make a profit, a huge, inefficient organization will probably continue to make the same sort of profit in the same sort of way. A smaller organization is more likely to do very well or very poorly, but investors don't want that. They're being paid to get 5% a year, not 200% some years and -50% other years.

IMO this would be one of the biggest benefits of UBI -- money coming from actual people instead of risk-averse institutional investors.
They make pretty good handheld vacuums. I have a miele upright also, but nowadays tend to use the dyson v7 for a lot of quick stuff instead.
So part of process includes disciplining those who fail to adhere to it. Not sure why firing person A is somehow a failure of process in your book.

Whereas without process what basis would you have for declaring person A out of band?
I think the "burden of proof" part is exactly what's holding him up. As a skeptic, and an analytically minded person, and perhaps even as a blogger - he's uncomfortable writing "Mr Smith has chronic back pain" without a little more concrete evidence.

I'm arguing that as a doctor he shouldn't require more evidence in this case. It's fine to write "Mr Smith has chronic back pain and I recommend he can use his own chair" and be right only 80% of the time, and introduce a process whereby sneaky chair-seeking miscreants can reliably get a doctor's note even if they don't have back pain. It's fine because the consequences of being wrong are extremely low. In practice doctors should be, and often are, OK with making diagnoses of much more serious conditions that are only 80% or 90% or 99% likely to be correct, even when some other test could reduce the uncertainty further. If he's waiting to be 100% certain a patient has bipolar disorder or anorexia before prescribing any treatment, he's doing them a disservice.

The level of certainty required should be in line with the severity of the condition being diagnosed, and of the recommended treatment. And when writing a note to an employer, it's correct to say "Mr Smith has cancer" or just "Mr Smith has a medical condition", not "I'm 94% sure Mr Smith has cancer, perhaps the next scan will be more conclusive".
Is foursquare still popular? I just moved to Estonia (American from SF) and I feel like I see many more people using general Google reviews than foursquare or Yelp
Shapiro is doing great work with his Sunday Special, where he sits down with someone and they just talk about certain problems. His regular show sometimes panders a bit too much instead of focusing on making logical arguments in favor or against certain things. Even though I disagree with him on certain things, I think it's healthy to get exposed to a wide range of ideas.

Crowder is a mixed bag for me. I'd say he's a bit of parallel to John Oliver at times. You can't take everything that they say completely seriously. I'm a big fan of his "Change My Mind" series, where he goes out to have discussions with people and he puts em up unedited. Although the quality can fluctuate a lot based on how familiarized each person is with the issue being discussed.

I'd also add Joe Rogan's podcast to the list. He's very good at talking things through with people, trying to understand why they think a certain way. It's like a journey of exploration. It never gives me a vibe of someone trying to shove down a specific political agenda down my throat. It's also very long and unedited, so they have time to really dive into complex issues and you know that the other person's views aren't being misrepresented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus

Historical analysis tends to disagree with the underlying philosophy of peak oil.
Breakthrough could see bacteria used as cell factories to produce biofuels
Reminds me of an internship I did at a large organization, where the computer I was assigned to was partially unusable (even after formatting it would hang and freeze all the time), but procedures stated that I couldn't change it because it wasn't 3 years old. Procedures also stated that I wasn't allowed to bring my own computer to my workplace, so I ended up spending a lot of time sitting there drinking coffee and reading books, instead of actually doing the work I was supposed to.

Nobody cared.
I've been trying for half a year to get the source code for a very simple app from the Dutch parliament. They've not complied yet and put me in touch with their lawyer who also keeps delaying. Normally, there should be a response within four weeks. I've no idea how to escalate it.
True it takes a long time for formerly great organizations to die. I think a lot of the problems with this type of analysis are time scales and costs of switching. IBM is probably not the best solution for anything if you're starting something new; but if you already have something it's probably good enough and it would cost too much to change right now.

So IBM can limp along until new organizations develop products that are sufficiently cheaper or better that it makes switching the logical move. Or the companies tied to IBM eventually fail and replaced by more nimble organizations.
Brands Will Soon Be Able to Track Rewards on the Blockchain. Here’s How
Haha, the diff on the package.json is brilliant!
Humans: 210° FOV (for reference)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_view
It might be an interesting experiment to automatically attach an expiry date to new rules, and if nobody (or too few) stakeholders vote for keeping them, they automatically go out of scope.
Show HN: Min – minimal manpages
> a "Run" button that popped up a completely inscrutable dialog box

I've relied on that dialog box throughout the years, as Microsoft keeps moving things around and hiding functionality.

Hitting Win+R and typing "control userpasswords2" works identically in Windows XP, 7, 8 and 10 and is far less inscrutable than divining where they've decided to hide the settings in any particular Windows version.
Strong AI
For extra fun, the Microsoft implementation of memcpy_s returns an error instead of crashing if either of the pointers is NULL (thankfully doesn't apply if the copy size is 0). There's a reason I don't like writing software for Windows ...
> But he took an already-solved problem and "re-imagined" it with twice the cost and power requirement.

And then shipped production off to Malaysia and Singapore.
This is what happens when a human organization becomes too successful: it generates more money than it knows what to do with and the parasites do take notice.
They're the Apple of the vacuum cleaning world. They were good at marketing, launched baglessness as a major new innovation which allowed them to completely dominate the market until everyone else copied it, their self-consciously different style also found many imitators, and since then the overengineering has been the brand's chief selling point.
LEGO built a life-size, drivable Bugatti from over a million Technic pieces
I seen Henry and Hetty being used on a cruise ship and fell in love with a little happy blue guy. Too bad you cant get any of the line in USA. I dont think they have representation in North America.
> If only there were unit tests for real-life bureaucracy...

Not called unit tests but we have something similar here in Norway:

- 5 or more weeks of mandatory holidays. (both you and your boss get trouble if you don't use it.)

- maternity/paternity leave (more than a year combined IIRC, and while it won't land an individual in hot water legally, -everyone including your boss expects you to take advantage of it. Oh and it might land the company in hot water if they prevent anyone from using it which might explain why even the company often actively encourage it.)

It works mostly the same:

- like unit tests it verifies that the organization works, including edge cases like "what if half the company is away for two weeks at the same time". (The last point is encouraged by design it seems by specifying that at least two of the weeks should be in the summer.)

- like unit tests it might seem like a giant waste but turns out to be useful in the long run.
I've been the crime boss of Armageddon multiple times since I started playing in high-school around 2005. Most recently created a character in 2016 after a 5-year break. Back to a break, prolly for longer this time.

Duties include shaking down noble houses, bribing law enfocement, and executing assassination contracts.