skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You fundamentally misunderstand how licensing of copyrighted work works.

That's quite the accusation.

I'm not going to repeat myself further. I suggest you read my existing comments regarding this matter, in particular https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17869267
The thing I find really hard to understand from a business perspective is that bullshit jobs are the low hanging fruit from a cost saving perspective. Why do they persist? What drives managers, teams, companies and cultures to accept bullshit in their environment. What drives the happiness of the bullshitters themselves. Coming from business I understand it's partially senior management does not care Enough. They've got real problems on their hands. But every now and again a No bullshitters should pop up and say stop this local incident of BS. It just does not happen. I'm one of those that tries to make senior management aware of total time and energy sinks in the corporation. Often it just doesn't click and I move on. Why don't cultures change (fast) enough?
What else do you expect people to do there?

Most people are fully aware that what happened there is a tragedy. Most people also have an instant-no-thought habit to smile when having a picture taken. Is it really any better for them to take a picture and be solemn? Is that enough or do they need to express deep sadness for these pictures? Would others claim these sad emotions are just for show anyway? And if so, should we expect people to just not take pictures at all at the WTC memorial? And if so, at what point in time can we start taking pictures at a place with our normal happy faces?

People are there. They are happy they are there, even though 'there' (where ever 'there' is) may be a place that causes them to have emotions on the sad part of the emotional spectrum.

Think of funerals. It's a sad place to be (perhaps sadder since the person who died is someone well known as opposed to a lot of unknown people, but I won't judge either way). Family and friends are together, which usually makes people happy. It's a mixed bag of emotions. If someone happens to smile in a picture there it's probably more to do with habit of smiling for pictures or happiness to be with family and friends (perhaps first time in a while) than it is for being happy the deceased is deceased or for social status boosts.
In Amsterdam, you kinda have to learn the language to live for real with locals (though many stay years there and don't).

Compare contractor pay with US. Contractors have to pay their own taxes, health insurance etc.
Dyson gears up for electric car testing
I would absolutely sub to this.
>that the president uses a private medium like twitter as a seemingly primary channel to communicate with the nation

This has happened several times in the history, as new technologies became common. Newspapers, radio, (live) TV, social media. Each expansion into the new communication channel caused major change in campaigning style, and (re-)connected the candidates with the common citizen, as the new medium owners had relatively small influence on popular opinion by themselves [1]. Also each time the political old guard was caught by surprise, still focusing on the medium of yesteryear, very much like the 2016 presidential elections.

It's worth noting Obama was a social media savvy candidate and to large extent his campaign pre-saged what went down in the 2016 elections.

[1] IMO all the Twitters and Facebooks owners still have relatively less sway than the TV and older media.
The creation of bullshit jobs probably comes from a combination of 3 things:

- the primal psychological need to show that we are busy to the tribe, to prove that we are useful and carry our weight in the group. Those who didn't in early times where expelled from the tribe, ridiculed, etc.

- the quest of certain individuals for status and power over other individuals, meaning a middle manager will want to be a manager of 10 persons and not 4, so it will keep hiring to fill all positions regardeless of true need - its his social status and his career, and not his money

- the huge amount of automation introduced in the last few decades, making many jobs unnecessary.

There have always been bullshit jobs, just not that many as today.
> High-locality of reference can be achieved in any language that supports unboxed types, it doesn't require C (even a very high-level language like Haskell supports this).

You often also need correct alignment. Cache-line or page. Your unboxed access across two pages can cause two TLB misses, L1 misses etc. Not to mention two page faults.

Sometimes you need to ensure two (or more) buffers are NOT aligned in a particular way to avoid interfering with CPU caching mechanisms.
I would say, atleast from the people I meet, that there is less drive to maximize income. Once you have enough money to rent a nice apartment or house and spend some money on holidays and hobbies, most people I know don't really want any more money or not that much more.

It also helps that labor protection laws are rather strong here and when you look at the US, it's horrible in comparison and not to mention the potential healthcare/other costs that could eat up your wage (I guess with total comp you mean including stock options or something like that, I've rarely seen that here, people prefer to be actually paid).

That and moving to another country, possibly permanently is quite difficult and taxing.
Real Engineering did a cool video on electric planes a few weeks ago.

https://youtu.be/VNvzZfsC13o
Software documentation 101: Introducing a technical writer
>Direct supervisors? I don't think someone inventing or enforcing a procedure like this is trying to satisfy investors.

You'd be surprised. There are a lot of procedures and changes changed when a company tries to attract investors...
There's a term for this. Chestertons fence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence)
I would say the culture of bemoaning anti-intellectualism is strong in America.

Seriously, the motivations for anti-intellectualism are generally tied to the degree that intellect is valued.
But the article isn't about the disease, it's about the struggle for diagnosis. What disease she eventually turned out to be diagnosed with is almost an afterthought inn the article, despite what the original title implies.
Doesn't work out of the box with tracking protection in browsers enabled. So I don't see any color and I guess I don't have to.
I don’t disagree to starting low but definitely listen to people who knows where the good stuff is. Trusting your network is more realistic than having tested everything you get. In the perfect world I’d run around with a lab in my pocket sure....
"In 2017–18, Stanford is a $6.3 billion enterprise." http://facts.stanford.edu/administration/finances

Takes a lot of people to manage that much money.
It is interesting how this article assumes programmer skill has little overall business impact, whereas PG famously argued the opposite. Does the conclusion hold without this assumption?
Cheap "balloon gas" is 50% helium, 20% oxygen and 30% nitrogen. That's cheaper overall, and also safer when people decide to breathe it in to make silly voices.
This is my view as well, from the same industry. However, the quality of the tools available in C to deal with its issues far exceed those in any other language. I would love to drop C from all my systems, but the alternatives simply aren't there.
The Tower of London is technically a palace, but yeah, Royals generally didn't live inside the square mile. The Palace of Whitehall in Westminster would have been the main London area residence at the time of these maps.
Any other companies on this site ?
But he does want to help the patient, does he not? But to write something else would be to take the burden of proof into his hands. "Obligation" also makes it sound like he's forced to do it, it's more like without further tests which would inconvenience the patient, he can't be sure the patient is reporting the truth (even with the patient in front of him, he wouldn't be able to objectively observe pain, and he can only ask and believe the answer).

But the note fixes the stupid problem of "The rules say no special chairs without a doctor's note"...
”But next time I need stitches I think I’ll just opt for the super glue in my workshop...”

Super glue aka “Dermabond”
https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/874047-overview
It's also tax efficient. Taking out $2.5m would first incur corporate tax, then dividend tax.

They initially sold equity of the business, only incurring capital gains tax in their personal name. Now they buy back shares and destroy those shares, so their stake increases again. They bought back shares with taxed capital within the company, but without incurring dividend taxes.
Romanization/anglicization can be tough for many languages. Thai for example has vowels that do not have an equivalent in English, and presents the added difficulty of being tonal, which means even if the pronunciation is anglicized, the tonality will be lost. Former example, the name of the former king of Thailand was typically written "Bhumibol Adulyadej" but the pronunciation is closer to the alternate "Phumiphon Adunyadet" and neither really hits all the notes in the way it actually sounds when spoken (although I admit I can't think of a better way to write it in the English alphabet).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Bhumibol...
> I’m not sure why the government wants didi to shutdown

You finally mention it. Without the government wanting it, this story wouldn't have broken. It seems like the c. gov could easily hide hundreds of murders.
> different country

If you are in a different country than US I wouldn't worry at all. I would just avoid using the name "Slack".
Can you explain how you figured out that these were the right generalization of the golden ratio? Were you doing a literature search? Just experimenting?

BTW, in the past couple months I have directed several people who were interested in spiral phyllotaxis and the like at your page. I think your sequences could make for some interesting art projects.

Personally I plan to try them out for dithering, picking well-spaced colors for diagrams, picking points in a region when trying to optimize a map projection, etc.
Everyone up the chain of command is wasting someone else's money. Ultimately it's stockholder money, but the stockholders are actually giant retirement funds, and the fund managers who use the voting powers don't actually have their own money in the fund.

Wasting that money does bring the status of having a bigger organization, more direct reports, etc. Saving the money brings the questionable honor of being the manager whose team shrunk by 25% in a year.

The only corporations where efficiency still is key, are the ones where the owner-CEO is still able to keep an eye on the whole operation.
Out of my depth here. Why are tanks of Kerosene safer than tanks of hydrogen? Pressure?
I have had a middle manager tell me that they where not cutting down the team, because he wanted to be a manager of 5 people, just like that.

The problem is that teams in large organizations are not run by the company owners themselves anymore, instead they are run by a middle manager whose job is to run the team.

The middle manager has no incentive to cut down too much on the team size, as that would risk his career, perceived social status, and even directly its job.

If a team of 10 all of the sudden becomes a team of 3, maybe there is no need for the middle manager anymore.

Also it does not look well on the CV to be a manager of a team of 3 instead of 10 people, so its not good for the manager career to cut down the team too much.

If the team size gets reduced a lot, the manager will be asked to do non-managerial tasks again, which would effectively mean a demotion.
It may have been unfair of (a limited number of) people to presume snark when you didn't intend it, but your edited version of the comment was super-snarky too and panned the entire HN community.

You could have just said "hey sorry all, didn't mean to sound snarky, here's what I meant...", and a great discussion could have ensued.
The author has a track record of intellectual humour, particularly with a political bent to it. I'm trying to decide if this article is unintentionally ironic or just pretending to be unintentionally ironic.
A fake billionaire is fooling people on Twitter
The Wikipedia article on "clickwrap" have reference to 10 different cases clickwrap license upheld by court.
Ask HN: Pair Programming Interview
Hi,
Previously I am attending test engineering based on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17850955 and now they invite me for second interview. The pair programming interview, what should I prepare for the interview? since I am never do this kind of programming technique.
I was like WTF at this and had to google it. From Wikipedia...

"Academic staff: 2,219

Administrative staff: 12,508 excluding SHC

Students: 16,430"

Oh how far western civilisation as fallen to end up with the statistics above.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University
Amazon Sales Estimator
> the benefits of some automation vs. no automation greatly exceed the benefits of some automation vs. better automation

Contrary to that claim, it's been my experience that bad automation can be much worse than no automation. There is usually some hard to define quality threshold below which all efforts just make things worse.
From the comments it looks like we have a more interesting question than the article's.

Why do humans frequently/occasionally dislike smart people?
I think that the point is that it isn't enough evidence to make a diagnosis. The article expands on why it is inappropriate for a psychiatrist to make a recommendation related to back pain. He's not just "the doctor", he's a specialist with a license to practice a limited set of medicine.

What should a psychiatrist write on a doctor's note if his patient claims to suffer from cancer, no other evidence given than the claim itself? Now, depression, that's something a psychiatrist can legitimately diagnose.
Yes, using an open (infinite) one dimensional low-discrepancy sequence in conjunction with a space-filling curve such as the Hilbert-curve has been explored. For example by Owen [1]

Niederreiter himself has a beautiful paper that includes a section on weighted low discrepancy sequence [2] where he also cites several references within it that might be of interest to you.

[1] http://statweb.stanford.edu/~owen/reports/extgrid.pdf
[2] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.614...
> The thing I find really hard to understand from a business perspective is that bullshit jobs are the low hanging fruit from a cost saving perspective. Why do they persist? What drives managers, teams, companies and cultures to accept bullshit in their environment.

Typically, at least in large organizations, the manager is interested in increasing, not decreasing, his budget. Since everything that happens in modern companies is very opaque (i.e. how much actual value is created is not clear for people outside a given business unit), the budget size/headcount is often used as a proxy for value. So, according to this logic, the bigger the headcount, the more important for the company the manager must be, so he can then negotiate a raise, bonus, or a promotion for himself. I agree with Michael O. Church here - managers in tech are mostly one-man PR firms (managing their own reputation). That sucks, but that's the result of our current workplaces in tech getting so complex that judging actual merit is close to impossible.
For embedded systems I mostly go with "dynamic memory allocation of any kind is evil" and that solves a lot of issues already.

You can still overwrite memory but it suddenly became much less likely.
Your advice is terrible, I'm sorry, it's just awful. Your advising the use of drugs as 'safe' which present various dangers, you're advising eyeballing MDMA to know what's right, and now you're basically saying to trust your supplier.

This is all very poor advice.

Get chemical test kits, use drug testing services where they are available, be cautious.
I know more European devs who live and work in the Bay Area than I know Americans who live and work in the Netherlands. And I'm in the Netherlands!

There's clearly more people being drawn to SV than away from it. I bet salary is a major component.

I fully agree with the GP. European tech bigco's need to get their shit together and pay competitively.
He's a medical doctor. He's qualified to diagnose back pain and recommend (professionally, not just personally) the patient tries using his own chair. As I understand it the AMA would be OK with this, while they wouldn't be OK with, say, me (not a medical professional) writing the same letter and presenting it as a professional diagnosis.

He knows the limits of his abilities and wouldn't recommend the patient take 2 weeks off work, undergo back surgery or prescribe opiates. If any of those were in the discussion, he'd tell his patient he really does need to see a specialist.
Yes, but is enough for them to compete with people who want to stay here.
Not quite. People invest in VC funds exactly because these returns are not correlated to the market (well, they sort of still are).

It's diversification; people investing in these funds are generally NOT looking for similar returns to the public market.
They are personal ;) luckily I now don’t take everything I read for truth and had the guts to look at the risk/benefit in person. Few who ever did studies had any real exposure to what they write about or have the insight to get near the relevant data to make a proper study. First hand experience beats that anyday and having seen more than most I can not recommend any recreational drugs perhaps more that once but keeping it to that is insanely difficult so I’d say you have to be in a specific pet if your life to even try. By I regard Changa as medicine that few would ever use recreational but it’s also not for everyone.
otoh me giving someone 6 figures and having them lose it is much more meaningful to me because:

1. It's my money, not money someone has given to me to invest

2. It's a pretty significant part of my net worth. If I was worth $100 million and gave someone $100k and they spent it all without any return, I doubt I'd lose much sleep over it. If I do that now it would be very hard to get over.

I'm not really disagreeing with you here, but the emotions at play are different I think.
Use some moderate leverage I guess, i.e. 130% of capital.
I use monitors as a surprisingly good heuristic for measuring the values of an organization.

If you make your rockstar ninja unabomber programmers stare at a single 24" screen all day, you're basically paying for Wayne Gretzky and then skimping on skates.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=changa+hypertension
Here's the updated link:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1l3bXAv8JE5RB9siMq36-...
Terrible title. It's not remotely news that C is dangerous. This talk seems to be about ways of mitigating the dangers. Why not call it "Mitigating the dangers of C" or something else that is less of a tired cliche?
The only support C is giving you for this is that it has sized unboxed types (and raw pointer access). Even then, you'd have to trust the compiler and take measurements to be sure.
When you're spending more time/money sending cease and desist to people trying to make your product better than _actually making your product better_, you need to re-evaluate your priorities as a business.
It’s a matter of scale. The number of people like your Swedish couple was much lower than the number of people like them today. Film wasn’t free like Instagram is.
Real estate is also illiquid. Would you prefer 10% IRR in property, or 8% IRR in the public market? I would personally pick the second.
And here I thought it was bad that the university I went to grad school at had a 1:1 administratior:faculty ratio.
Ah, when bullshit jobs come up, sometimes the measure is "if this person disappeared, how long would it take for the world to notice?". This article is interesting to me because it applies a slight modification, "if this task was eliminated, would systems be more efficient?".

In some ways this is a good question to ask, but much like a statement in legacy code, it's sometimes unclear why a rule exists until after you remove it, and then it's too late.

If only there were unit tests for real-life bureaucracy...
> For embedded systems I mostly go with "dynamic memory allocation of any kind is evil" and that solves a lot of issues already.

Yeah, bare metal systems often don't allocate at all. Although one sin they often do commit is using same buffer for multiple purposes. What could go wrong...

Perhaps even more common is allocating a buffer on stack and writing past bounds somehow. Also DMA to/from stack is usually not a great idea...

Above things sound dumb, but can easily happen when you build your abstraction layers and use them carelessly.
Wow. Software from 1993 still going strong.
Does anybody even understand half of it?
Efficient market. Spherical sheep!
There are insults for smart people in many countries.

In Britain, for example, there's a whole attitude about anybody daring to appear smart, well read, etc that's combined with class putdowns and terms like "pretentious wanker" and such.

Or, what americans would deride as a "nerd" for Brits it would be a "swot" (but it's meaning I think combines nerd with teacher's pet and bookworm).

French have "intello", a derogatory term for intellectual types. Greeks have a similar connotation "kulturiaris" (and a term for nerd/geek that's "spasiklas").

In Spanish, where the author says he couldn't find a term for "geek", they have "empollon".

In Italian the same would be secchione.
Buffer's current salaries:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1l3bXAv8JE5RB9siMq36-...

Personally, I think the salaries are more than reasonable. A senior engineer with a $175k compensation seems fair enough.
Your OLED display doesn't have a lens though, so you would only see light differences
Not really, as it is proven almost on daily basis.

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=memory+corr...
I am reading Charles Darwin recounting of his travel on the Beagle, and in Argentina he mentions the Gaucho diet that is essentially only eating beef and drinking mate.

From wikipedia [0]

>The gaucho diet was composed almost entirely of beef while on the range, supplemented by yerba mate (erva-mate in Portuguese), an herbal infusion made from the leaves of a South American tree, a type of holly rich in caffeine and nutrients.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaucho
One thing I wondered is if there’s a way to tweak this (e.g. by skipping values in one direction) to have better region filling (with respect to Euclidean distance) when the aspect ratio is not square.

Try sliding the top slider at https://beta.observablehq.com/@jrus/plastic-sequence to see what I mean.
I'm a C coder first and foremost and I strongly disagree with this mentality (even though I know it's extremely pervasive in our circles). "Footguns don't make bugs, coders do" is technically true but if we could keep the footguns at a minimum and only get them out of the locker when truly necessary instead of having them spread all over the place all the time I'm sure it wouldn't hurt.

C is a very useful language and one you basically have to know if you're interested in low level software but it's very, very far from flawless.

If you look at many high profile software vulnerabilities of late (heartbleed, goto fail, etc...) many can be traced to the lack of safety and/or bad ergonomics of the C language.

We need to grow up as an industry and accept that using a seatbelt doesn't mean that you're a bad driver. Shit happens.
Would you take a smiling photo at the Lincoln Memorial. It is also a monument to a murder victim.
Maybe it's simply that companies aim for a certain aesthetic, and letting people bring random chairs in would go against it.