skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was listening to Feynman's lectures on Quantum Mechanics this morning, and he was talking about the lattice structure of materials and how different lattice structures permeate EM waves and stuff. You've got this repeating atomic structure. Each of them is carbon, or hydrogen or iron or whatever. I suppose in essence you could say on their own each of these is "bullshit" but it's the repeating lattice structure that gives a material it's properties. This reductionist view of "bullshit" jobs is kind of silly - some jobs are unfulfilling, or seemingly pointless but you can only really evaluate them in the overall structure and productivity of the organisation. It's the emergent lattice that counts, not the individual elements.

In the case of this article, author is looking at a single aspect of a larger organisation, and like the blind men and the elephant [0] can only guess at the reasons.

There could well be good reasons for these processes and procedures. Could be to do with management accountability, or insurance (more likely). The fact that in isolation it seems "silly" is notwithstanding that there might a reason in a larger organisational context. Kind of like a traffic light hardwired to red because at scale, operationally it just makes more sense to do it that way [1] (this article is a bad example because it doesn't go into the explanation as to "why" - operationally, which when I actually heard it seemed quite reasonable - can't find it now).

The way I look at management is like this - a LED produces light by way of spontaneous emission, which is all well and good, but to produce a LASER you need all these photons to be emitted in phase which requires a whole heap of extra bullshit circuitry to create to produce stimulated emission. There is a curve of cost/efficiency where you can go "oh well why am I spending all this money when all I want is light" - but if you don't do all this extra "inefficient" stuff, well then you can't have optical communication, CDs or a fancy lightshow.

Don't get me wrong, there are inefficient organisations that produce little, or even do damage, but IMHO by looking at individual jobs we're looking in the wrong place.

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

[1] https://www.thelocal.de/20150615/there-is-a-light-that-never...
Crohn disease guide
My 15 years old got diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease recently. Being undiagnosed for so many years has made Crohn’s hard to treat. For her, the symptoms are weight loss, fatigue, red or itchy eyes, and inflamed or bumpy skin.Seeing her I now know these symptoms cause fatigue.I have been reading about her symptoms and complications on reddit, everydayhealth and this helps me solve all my doubts regarding her health. I am looking at advice from parents who have some special guidelines or diets that can help ease her flare.
You need to take into account who is behind the paper.

Ben Laurie has had a bug in his bonnet for all things blockchain since day one because he missed the boat.

Since then he's been constantly bashing on Bitcoin and anything that doesn't have a central authority regulating it.

Trillian is basically a Merkle-Tree remarketed as something new.
Spot on. Spare time would allow us to conclude we can expunge rentiers.

Here is a video on land value tax, which would fix our messed up feudal economies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD_dZvPwAj0

Posting here as shadow banned after two posts because Hacker News hates any kind of free speech.
I did a javascript version here if anyone wants to try the software equivalent :)

http://forwardscattering.org/post/36
Does improving query optimizers or other internal stages sound interesting? If you've been a DBA for 10 years then you're going to know a few things about the way databases work internally, even if you specifically only have experience with say SQL Server or Oracle.

You could very probably pivot around into database development/maintenance and the transition (including the job-hunt bit) may be less bumpy than you expect.

The process of figuring out if this is a worthwhile idea might also be able to squash the loneliness bit: go tinker on open-source database systems for a while, in your spare time.

I've heard Redis is very clean C code and very easy to hack on, so that might be an interesting starting point. On the other hand Redis isn't quite SQL, it's a key/value store, so perhaps it wouldn't be a good fit.

MySQL and PostgreSQL are so part of the furniture one's initial thought on poking those might be "why would I even dive in", which is totally valid if nothing's on fire and there are no critical money-eating bugs or whatever. But the chances are a decade's DBA experience might come in handy.

I've no idea what languages you know, how much experience you have with what, and (most importantly) what random technical things will leap out at you as especially interesting when you see them.
I like mine as well:

> Administrative staff: 452

> Students: 8000(approx)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsruhe_University_of_Applie...
Private Github gists. But I also have a dropbox for bad code I find in projects.
Ask HN: Why this bloat in Angular?
Why does each raw skeletal app generated by Angular need 240Mb of disk space and contains around 32 thousand files 239Mb in the node_modules folder.

If Angular is already global, why does it need all these files? And what are they doing?

Disclaimer: I am an old timer and really miss the just 'download and unzip' days of javascript and open source
200 Gt = 0.007% of the ice mass of Greenland.

Or 0.5mm sea level increase (from your link).
How to Protect the Confidentiality of Your Sensitive Data with Security Testing
Yet AWS still default to wide-open security groups for their new Cloud9/CodePipeline instances that my devs create, and Trusted Adviser tells me about the insecure configuration...
That may work for me, but it's unlikely that both myself and my partner would be able to negotiate it for the entire month. I hadn't considered that we could maybe negotiate something for a shorter period together until now, I may investigate it for next year!
Like a lot of things it's probably a heavily-skewed distribution. For a large number of europeans it could be a half dozen from holidays alone. For businesspeople in Europe it could easily be dozens of trips per year.

But there's probably huge swaths of the population who have never traveled internationally for economic reasons, or because they live in a large country (like China, the US, India or Russia) which makes that less necessary.
Vimax Capsules in All Over Pakistan – Where to Buy Online
AFAICT none of the links you give offer any support for the claim that "psychiatry is bullshit".

Several, if anything, support the exact opposite (e.g "antidepressants to be more effective than psychotherapy" -- 'psychiatrist' is not a synonym of 'psychotherapist', a psychiatrist is a medical doctor specialising in mental illness, so is licensed to prescribe antidepressants). Most of the others are just not relevant to the claim ("Young children emerge from single potentially traumatic events psychologically unharmed" -- how exactly is that supposed to be evidence that psychiatry is bullshit? By some kind of hidden implication that just because thing X does not cause mental illness, therefore mental illnesses don't exist?)
Yeah we both live away from family, so require a few days here and there every year to travel back (holidays, I'll family etc). I hadn't really considered just doing it for 1/2 weeks and trying to combine annual leave with unpaid leave or remote work for the period of time until you and another commenter mentioned it though!
"It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would."

No, not in a lot of industries.

Many large, established industries have oligarchies that are all more or less inefficient.

For an established company, there's nary any reason to provide hulking, outsized returns because expenses for whatever can always be justified.

Think - surpluses start to develop - is the money going to go into some kind of dividend/repurchase? Or is the Director who's been clamouring for 'more heads for this or that' going to get his staff? It will be the later.

Every manager wants to 'hire hire hire' because it gives them more power. And it's pretty easy to justify it to their bosses and to themselves.

Google could easily fire 10K people tomorrow and wouldn't skip a beat.

Also, it's often surprisingly difficult to measure the efficiency of groups or teams.

Some teams, heck even entire divisions, can be full of hardworking, smart, professional people churning out 'great work' as judged by their CEO. But that 'great work' actually may not move the needle one bit.

The ability to determine how valuable work is to outcomes is something that startup people start to understand, but some go through their entire careers having no clue.

I worked at two Unicorns and then a Fortune 50. It was very inefficient. What totally blew me away is that nobody - not the staff, not the directors, VPs or CEO had a clue - or at least every let on they did. It was difficult because for a couple of years I didn't believe my own intuition, I assumed ' the executives must know better'. Nope. It was a kind of shocking/reckoning to see how dear leaders can be totally out of touch.

I will say this: it's hard to be efficient on large teams. What might seem like 'BS' is really just because you're only operating at 50% efficiency. In product marketing I realized that if our team made only one, single important decision for the company per year - our sales were so big, that it would be worth it. So you could say the company was hiring us for talent, not for work, but we have to show up every day anyhow.
3 Ways Wearables Are Reinventing Preventative Care – ReadWrite
Exactly they use ideas that may have a base in communism but if you‘ve ever taken the effort in reading what real communism means you‘d know China is no communist state.

It is a mix of several political ideas and capitalism is also a big part of it - it’s the part that leads other nations to produce goods at the cheapest rate there so they can say they’ve done everything they could to save the workers human rights.

The truth is that companies like Apple etc very well know that people there are treated like slaves - but profit is more important than human lives...
I have to disagree on Hubspot CRM. We moved to it on the startup plan you mention about 7-8 months ago, and have found it very difficult to use in a fast, intuitive and streamlined fashion.

There are key areas that are missing basic functionality (EG: being able to see a list of deals that haven't been contacted recently) and if I could turn back time, I would not have made the decision to move to Hubspot.
"Ah, so that's what Kops, cloudformation, aurora, packer, UAT, ELK, Jaeger, service meshes, istio and calico are."

"Yeah, no. I have no plans to try and actually make anything with that tangle. Hah."

"Although... I do know what nginx, java, containers, k8s, VPCs, ansible, jenkins, and CI are... so... maybe it's really all the same at the end of the day, I'll see everything in this list similarly 5 years from now, and I should see if I can tolerate it?"

"Hm. There is the small fact that I don't really know what k8s, VPCs, ansible and jenkins actually do, let alone the entire first list, and of all of these I've probably only really used Java, and that only a few times. I think I've had a few minutes' look at GitLab's Grafana dashboard once or twice?"

"I'll bet installing all of these, including all dependencies, would take probably multiple tens of gigabytes of diskspace, and probably consume more RAM that I have installed." (I'm running short on both, I have a few hundred MB of diskspace free right now, and never any free RAM :D)

"I wonder how effectively I can learn these on the job?"

"...I wonder if there are any jobs that don't require $tool_existence+1 years of experience with any of these before they even consider candidates ._."

Goes back to writing PHP script in text editor
'James Dyson pitches himself as a sort of British Steve Jobs'. Does he or is it others who say this? Where is the quote?

As to the supposed comparison by others, someone from Dyson said '“Apple makes a stylistic product; we don’t have any designers at our company. We start out with the internals first and then match the style to it.”
It has not been my experience that large private organizations are any more efficient at shedding useless jobs than public organizations. Maybe, maybe during a round of layoffs but good people are let go during those too. It is easily overlooked that corporations are a legal fiction, not a real entity. A business can’t do anything, only the people in it. Managers never recommend they be the ones laid off even if they’re the problem (though middle or senior management might accidentally lay off a bad manager or two on rare occasions, but again never lay off themselves). Also I’ve seen in larger companies, no division head wants to get a smaller headcount unless they’re a new person specifically brought in to be a wrecking ball.

Similarly, “the market” is a convenient fiction, a shorthand that occasionally exhibits describable collective behavior but ultimately is also composed of people. There is creative destruction but it takes place over decades, far too long for any individual activity to be pointed to and say that ruined the company except in the most extreme cases.
One, bullshit jobs may exist as loops that can be hard to spot if they're multi-step. Department A generates work for department B, which generates work for department C, which - after couple more steps - generates work for department A.

Second, "bullshit" in "bullshit jobs" doesn't mean useless from market's short-sighted POV. A competitive market is prone to formation of negative-sum games between companies, and further to formation of more companies supporting those games. Consider the advertising industry, the poster child of wasteful negative-sum games: in saturated markets, it supports competition for fixed customer pool. To that end, it employs countless of creatives designing new texts, posters, videos, etc. It then employs printing shops and distribution centers to place all that material in the real world. All that effort, man-hours and fuel is wasted - in an attempt for one side to get more market to themselves, only for the other to cancel it out. If all parties agreed not to do this, everyone would be better off. But they can't, and so instead a whole industry of bullshit jobs is created.

Those are, I believe, the two main sources of bullshit jobs - internal closed loops, and negative-sum games.

(EDIT: in a sense, those two are actually facets of the same phenomenon.)
As a foreigner learning American English + (pop) culture in the US one of my favorite things is to ask people to tell me the difference between geek and nerd. Originally because I was having a hard time grasping not so much the meaning of the words but the connotations and projected values by those using the words. I still ask that question and find the discrepancies amusing.
But I never heard anything about bitting chicken heads off and all that. Amazing!
> With one of the most restrictive IP licensing scheme I've encountered in my professional life. Way to promote innovation indeed.

Different business models are different, and things tend to get ugly when you find a way to print money.

I'll take the "restrictive licensing/patents" model over the Google/Facebook "private sector surveillance" model any day of the week...

> At the risk of sounding sarcastic, I have a very hard time putting SAP and innovation in the same sentence. They're basically the Oracle of Germany.

I think IBM might be a better comparison. Certainly the scale of the past century, both SAP and IBM did plenty of innovation.
It was like this in Barcelona. In August the center is crowded to the point of disfunction; it's like being at a festival or something. I used to live a few minutes from Las Ramblas and I dreaded even going down the block to pick up milk from the corner store during high-season.
I use discord personally all the time and really wanted to use it for business but couldn't.

Some reasons:

* You are in all channels, all the time.
* no threaded replies (most important)
* the notifications system is weird
* weak integration system (integrations cannot add widgets to chat)

Some more reasons that I forgot. But these ones most importantly.
Overleaf v2
Discipline, time management, fear of commitment, money to some extent and then occasionally my self-image.

Reading the responses here makes me feel blessed for my problems. Also I am making progress on them (these are long term things that I will be dealing with in some form my whole life, hopefully the money one will be gone by the time I add health to the list).
I went camping in the alps once. On our last night, my friend took a bowl and gathered ashes from the campfire. Half ritualistic, half jokingly, she said that those ashes mark our trek and experiences, that she would carry the ashes back home no matter what.

I was very confused how she would pass a bowl of unidentified ash from the airport security (we only had a backpack each). She drafted a poorly done and obviously fake death certificate. It was not campfire ash anymore, it was the remains of her father.

The people at the airport were visibly awkward, they tried to be as accommodating as they could. She flew back home with a plastic bowl of ashes from our campfire, it even had some parts of birch and branches.

Airport security was easily fooled. And the author's mom is easily fooled too, motherly instincts be damned. Would a neural net be fooled by the author's attempts? I know for sure that an automated security system would sound the alarm on my friend. I 'd like to see adversarial networks fighting each other on such premises. A son network trying to fool the mother network and vice versa ad infinitum, at least 1 billion of simulation hours in. What kind of wonders would come out
Don't know about Vax but my 17-year old Dyson performs just as efficiently as when I bought it. I notice that most of the new cleaners in the market in my region appear to copy Dyson's cyclonic separation idea - because it works!
It's so sad to see that PhD students spend energy thinking about how to develop such policing systems. I don't understand it. Aren't these guys given any ethics class ? They should use their systems in their labs, tracking where everyone goes all the time, and store that data on one computer system available to the dean of the university (and his friends, the IT guys, and whoever knows about hacking)...
For that to be true, these minor transgressions would need to actually be ticketed and enforced. By and large they are not.
Indeed, that book starts really well, in that it states an existing problem: the sole owner overwhelmed by their business, and losing their sense of purpose and happiness. But as it goes on the solution it suggests is disappointing. It may make sense for company owners to delegates and run their operation like a machine. But it is a recipe for frustration for the actual workers—who then may find themselves in the same situation the author's entrepreneur example starts with...
Why Scality is investing in Kubernetes
You could use fuel cells that work with more convenient fuels.
Yes. You can request a copy of any personal information held by any company. This is a pre-GDPR right too.
Introduction to Vue.js Props [video]
PwC tells new staff they can choose what hours to work
I was tempted to sign up and try using it for our daily scrum standup conf calls for fun. But after thinking about it I'm also terrified of the possibility that my account or data could be compromised. Imagine the damage someone could do by calling up a relative, posing as me, and saying that I'm in trouble and need money or something?
+1 our states are even worse!

If you’ve ever been to China to see how people live (if you can call that a life) you see the hypocrisy in that.
Show HN: Rebout.me, build nameplate sites with CTA buttons and export feature
The western media also loves to report instances of rape and murder in the West.
> Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency, by how well they reduce energy gradients across time.

Reducing energy across time is just a rewording of efficiency. It's still not a goal in and of itself, at least not in the context of a society.

Going to the moon was not reducing energy gradients across time, nor 'entropy maximization' as you have reworded it.
That is because companies are now considered as money-making black boxes. Human agency at execution level isn't relevant.

However if you consider a company as a means to a shared endeavour, then human agency becomes extremely important.
This wasn't my experience of Rome at all, but then I was there in March and it wasn't chock full of (other) tourists. We stayed in an area called Trastevere which was slightly out of the centre and which I'd recommend.
If it helps any, I read that a DPO is only needed for companies larger than X number of employees. I think X was like 50 or 100. And that the DPO "role" could be fulfilled by anyone.
I wonder how many of the administrative staff are in fundraising. That should at least be net-profitable to the university.
I think you're right, but I have a somewhat less dire view on this.

I think that large companies optimize for a fundamentally different outcome than smaller companies, like startups. Large companies became large by applying a successful business model, something that startups are still lacking. If you have a working business model and stable cashflow, any change is potentially dangerous and can take down the company. So in contrast to whatever the marketing material says, rigidity and inability to change is actually an asset for large companies. This means the more inflexibility is added to the organization (e.g. by imposing a Book of Procedures that can never be abolished, employing people with no real power to change anything, or self-selecting a staff which is, put blatantly, incompetent to change), the longer the organization keeps existing. Until the market changes fundamentally, that is.
That's quite an engine - I just looked up a picture of it https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DQv24mYUMAAmvQs.jpg
Safety Critical Project for Linux OS
Effective motivation letter writing tips (with example)
That you view it as a joke shows the problem.

Bonuses and gifts are a real problem, and is recognized as taxed income here in Sweden. Just a few weeks ago I had a similar situation at work where a coworker said "I would be fine if they just gave it as a bonus to every one", so discriminative gifts is very noticeable for those not being in the receiving end. Gifting one group might feel very accommodating and inclusive for them, but it is no different than raising the wages based on religion identity no matter how one tries to dress it up.

If a company want to discriminate and gift a selected people based on gender, race, religion or sexual orientation then naturally they don't need any gigantic transparent democratic process. They can just do what past discrimination has done, flying as close to the law of illegal behavior as they can. I don't agree with it and I find it wholly immoral.

And yes there are conference and people who has learned to be less discriminative when doing outreach programs. However allowing men to enter a conference is a rather low bar, just as it would be if the genders were reversed. My personal line is if Grace Hopper has "only if you identify as women then..." in the way they operate. Looking at the scholarship application it does seem to say that both men and women can apply, but given the image on the site it seems that only women has ever been awarded scholarships. If there is a unofficial rule that only allow women then that is discrimination as any other.