skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked at Microsoft for about 3 years as a product manager and as an applied scientist. Most of the people I worked with were passionate, worked long hours and knew their shit. What drove me to leave eventually was that I had little leverage in deciding what to work on so had little control over what I'd become an expert in.

Right now I'm working solo on a strategy game inspired by the Lebanese Civil war and platforms to make running reinforcement learning algorithms in different environments much easier. TBH, I'm not sure if things will work out but I feel a lot happier and find some comfort in knowing that I'm learning many transferable skills.

As others have mentioned in this thread, I think of this experience as buying out my freedom for a couple of years with a hope that I can extend it should things work out. Contract work would be ideal but I'm still figuring out how to meet good potential clients in my area (Core ML + Data science + Infra)
> It's not scientific in the least.

It's not purporting to be.

> This is textbook LessWrong. It started off interesting, but then started using this experiment to justify a pet social theory.

One other thing that's "textbook LessWrong" is the understanding that "anyone can invent a post-hoc rationalization of what's going on, but until you propose a test it's not worth much". It's like, half of what Eliezer wrote was about this.

This post is not a scientific paper, it's just some commentary and a starting point of discussion in the community.
When a social engineer I meets a social engineer II the better social engineer gets the upper hand. In this case it was not the hacker.
Recessions are a normal part of the economic cycle. In most developed countries there is one every 6-10 years, so of course one is inevitable.
The Law of Rent is about the cost of leasing the land from the owner of the land. This is not the relationship between tenant and the owner of the real estate.

It's not the tenant who is looking for maximum productivity from the land, it's the real estate owner renting out places to live. A tall tower housing more people paying individually lower rent is more productive than a small house housing a single affluent person. Unless building is restricted artificially, supply increases until demand is met fully, which leads to price competition and ultimately rents that are as low as they can be.
In the US. Compilations of facts do however often merit protection in the EU, both under the Database Directive and national copyright laws.
Telemetry is simply gathering of factual information. And it's not produced by a human. There is no copyright for something produced by machines or animals, so far.

You can consider copyrightability of something produced by intelligent machine (human like), but that's a whole topic in itself and not even the case here.
You've had this at tech jobs? I've definitely never had to track time at any of my tech jobs (nor have I ever been eligible for overtime .)
Yep. But it's not presented that way, because bullshit. Same numbers, completely different conclusion - but important data that would reveal the bias left out of the article.
FYI Nikola Tesla had similar views on eugenics as well.
Do you apply this logic to any other media? Do you buy all your films directly from directors in open source stores in oggs vorbis format? I mean watching YouTube videos would clearly not meet your requirements, neither would watching Netflix...

I think it is unfair to the artists as you are using something that is entirely out of their control to justify not supporting them.
^^^ I had the same thought process. I spent a few minutes clicking around the site to figure out the catch to the open-source library that is the only product of a company with a $$$$ domain.
Interesting how many slots where open for each promotion round /board (in Uk terminology)

I have been in a similar situation at British telecom where the competition was even more intense.

In systems engineering (where most but not all the engineers and developers sat) you would have 16-20 promotion slots from MPG2 to 4 every 15/16 months.

Several hundred people would get through the paper sift to even get an interview - as my boss said get an interview the company was 100% sure that you where capable of performing at that level I had three successive boards and didn't get it.

MPG2 was the entry level grade BT had a super flat structure. Some people where so desperate they would join payphones to get a promotion.

More savvy ones joined the mobile side as they where known for having serious grade inflation
The "OG account" stuff is fascinating. ( see e.g.
https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/43ebpd/the-long-weir... for screenshots of forum or https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-... ).

Also fascinating is that the only functional support channel is "write a blog post and hope a lot of people upvote it on a news aggregator".

Two really interesting trends there.
Since most humans inherit exactly half of their DNA from each parent, it should be pretty obvious when 50% match the mother and the rest doesn't match either parent. So long as enough locations are checked, the probability of getting such a result by chance mutations could be made extremely low.
Ask HN: Employer Merged with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company. What's Next?
As mentioned in the title, my employer just merged with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC)[0]. These types of mergers seem like they're new so I had trouble finding any details about other employees that have gone through such a merger. I'm interested in knowing if anyone else has gone through a merger with a SPAC? If so, what was your experience?

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/spac.asp
The locale is "the region as announced publicly," and anyone who's in a position to use this information is going to pay more than one person to start digging. It's a crowdsourcing problem.
DNA technique that caught Golden State Killer is more powerful than we thought
Thanks for that thoughtful reply. We've been upfront with our kids too. They understand as well as a 4 and 3 year old can that most Mommies have eggs inside them that grow into babies, but their Mommy got an egg from another lady. :)
Don't copy that floppy

With its very own horrible rap video with Flight Simulator in the background.

https://youtu.be/up863eQKGUI
Does this make it possible to get closer to David Hogg's and Dustin Lang's "theory of everything"? (Is that the same D Lang as in the Celeste paper?)

That is the idea that a catalogue is released as a complete model of the sky, rather than as a table of intensities and coordinates. (https://arxiv.org/pdf/0810.3851.pdf)
Google requires at least 2 ways of 2fa protection. You can enable a third one and disable the phone completely.
The balance of power involved makes is inimical to negotiation for many classes of employees in the United States. And because people are more important than businesses, this is something of a problem.
> I also run XMPP server for friends and family and actually all of them are very happy with it. With Conversations this entire experience looks like any other modern messenger.

Does Conversations do something extra to support sending messages to people who are offline? If so, how well does it work? Because that's what I find to be the biggest gripe people have (myself included) with XMPP.
Amazon famously did this to their warehouse workers: https://www.theverge.com/2015/3/26/8280309/amazon-warehouse-...

Some of the workers most affected by this sort of tactic are those that have the least understanding of the contracts' enforceability. Feels like there should be some kind of recourse for this kind of thing.
5 Key Google Analytics Reports for Clients (Real Examples)
>In fact, "formal" clothing and couture has long been a way to show you're on the way up, not that you're there. Old money doesn't try to keep up with fashion.

It's my job to deal with lots and lots of tremendously wealthy people (mostly billionaires). They usually wear formal or semi-formal clothes, or occasionally polos, etc. They do not wear Balenciaga, any of them, ever when I see them, in business environments or casual ones. On average they are older, but even the younger ones I know don't. In NYC the people I see in Balenciaga, Rick Owens, etc., work in fashion, or are European tourists.
Considering how much money is on the line, it's laughable to think they can prevent fake reviews of real restaurants.
Craigslist is an interesting comparison for friction/UX. Still looks like it's from the early 00's, but has stayed just usable enough on all contemporary devices that it never went out of style.

The only friction to the end-user is the same email/password request every other service makes, but you want to use CL because it's the de facto place for listing your apartment or whatever.
Start with iOS or Full Stack Web?
I’m just starting my career in software engineering. Should I dive into iOS or Full Stack Web?
Actually it is deeply cynical I have seen:

People aggressively going for promotion and as my team leader said "but he hasn't done any real work for 6 months".

I saw some one going for the first management level spend a million pounds of share holder money and 15 man years redeveloping a system in oracle - Because having a project worth > 1 million and with more than 10 staff was a tick box for promotion.
Wow, that mirrors so much of my computer learning experience. I grew up in Eastern Europe and my parents made a huge effort to buy me a local clone of ZX Spectrum when I was 10 years old after I was exposed to these computers (and computers in general) because of the local computer club for children (all state sponsored, since it was a communist society). It was love at first sight like you said and all I ever wanted to do.

Then learned everything else on my own with whatever sources I could find (resources from the computer club, magazines, books, etc). And took part in programming contents. These were of all levels, there were town level contents, then the winners would move to county level contents then the winners going to national level. I made it to national level for years after having that ZX Spectrum clone at home. By the time I had some kind of computer class in my education path (high school then later on college) I already knew all that they were going to each. At least it made those classes easy :)
GATTACA here we come. People discovering and discriminating against genetic traits.
I don't know much about the actor model. One of these days, I should look into it more. It's possible that there's a large overlap.

The basic idea in agent-based modeling is that you have a bunch of different types of objects, which we'll call "agents." Each agent has its own independent state, which typically includes location and one or more other variables. So far, that sounds like regular ol' object-oriented programming.

However, there are some differences. First, you have all agents of one type act at the same time, at the tick of a clock. You can then say, "Hey! All doctors! Move in the direction of the closest sick patient." You can similarly say, "Hey! All patients! If there's a doctor next to you, then you have a 30% chance of being cured." Then you create a population of doctors and patients, randomly infect some proportion of the patients, and run the model.

The code for what I've just described is very short and very readable. And it does away with the need for loops. You basically describe the action that a class of agent will take at any given moment, and then tell the agents to perform one or more actions.

Again, it makes much of the programming simple and easy to understand. And yet, you can write pretty complex models in this way.

For example, I implemented the Autumn model ( http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/models/Autumn ) for NetLogo (because my eldest child was asking why leaves change color when we lived in Chicago). So I created a model in which each leaf has some randomly set values for each of the chemicals that affect color change. Then I let the user adjust the temperature and rainfall. The leaves changed colors as a result. It didn't take me much time to implement, and turned out to be a great learning tool.

Agent-based modeling isn't great for everything, but it's great for many things -- especially for modeling complex systems.
Depends on what you want to build first ?
What's also interesting is that if you put a large enough bunch of strangers in a room and get them to play a game (or even do some work), they'll quickly divide into groups and start showing the "us vs them" dynamic.
Oracles in real time – data visualization on the command line [video]
If your goal is food poisoning, then yes
> Since most humans inherit exactly half of their DNA from each parent, it should be pretty obvious when 50% match the mother and the rest doesn't match either parent.

Assuming the other parent is human, or even from the same tree of life, that's not going to happen, because the actual parent will share some DNA with the purported parent; you'll never get 50% match the actual mother, 0% match neither the mother nor the putative father.
I would argue that for certain kinds of problems, agent-based modeling is easier to think about and work with than object-oriented programming. It's not a matter of your programming experience, but rather what you're trying to model and how.

I've heard great things about Julia, but haven't ever used it. Yet another thing that's on my list...
Further to that point, the article pretends it's a global phenomenon that's occuring. It's not. Venture capital has barely budged in the developed world. That growth is almost exclusively isolated to two countries: China and India. The growth in the rest of the world is very modest as a share of the global total VC.

Just look at the expansion in China since 2005, as one would expect, it represents the extreme majority of all VC expansion globally. The story should have actually been framing the premise as: China's dramatic economic expansion since the late 1990s, in which it added ~$80 trillion in cumulative economic activity over 20 years, has resulted in a lot of venture capital activity. They went from 1% of global VC activity, to 25%, in roughly 20 years (12x that of France now) - that's the primary story.

Or put another way, since ~2006, the US has bled only three to four points of its global share of all VC to 190 some countries, and roughly 24 or 25 points to just China and India.

That wouldn't make for nearly as attention-getting of a headline though.
> > If the UN didn't establish air superiority during the Korean War, an entire country would have lost its freedom and would now be under a dictatorship.

> This is a little bit silly. South Korea was ruled by various dictatorships for decades after the war. North Korea still is. In South Korea today, you have one of the most vibrant economies in the world.

Sorry, but you're more than a bit silly. South Korea was ruled by dictatorships, post Korean War. However, this was a transitional period to today. In South Korea, you don't have camps where entire families are sent, basically to die, because someone said the wrong thing.

One half of my family is from present-day North Korea. My grandfather was a physician and entrepreneur. He had to move the family south because he could see what was coming. My mother remembers being smuggled in a pitch-black compartment of a freighter. She also remembers walking down the road with the family's belongings strapped to her back. A stack of bills, thick from wartime inflation, likely saved the life of my grandmother.

I and my sister wouldn't even exist, were it not for the Korean War and US intervention. All you have to do, to see the difference between the Koreas, is to look at nighttime pictures from orbit. All of the vibrancy of present-day South Korea was enabled by the intervention. The amount of human happiness that was allowed and the amount of human misery that was avoided by that is vast.
Facet has been in business for many years, so we have several long-term, repeat customers. We've just pivoted into this business model in the past couple of months because we we're getting overwhelmed with new projects and couldn't hire full-time devs fast enough. So instead, we thought we would see if there was an untapped pool of extremely high-quality devs that just wanted to be freelance. Turns out there is!

We get new projects weekly and our network is sized to match. We want make sure the number of opportunities we find covers 75% of our developer network. Our network is smallish right now (less than 50). If demand for joining exceeds our project capacity we will implement a wait-list for joining until our project volume catches up.
Here is much better page on topic:

- official landing page (with trailers) https://www.snap.com/en-US/news/post/introducing-snap-origin...
> adopted a policy of technically firing everyone from any startup they acquired, and then re-hiring them immediately under the same terms

Hmm, interesting. I know of a recent case in New York State where one company acquired another, but selectively retained its employees. The acquiring company thought that it was simply not hiring everyone, rather than firing anyone. One of those people sued for unemployment, and the court found that the acquiring company did in fact have to pay unemployment for the employees it "did not hire".
Shakedown – bash DSL for http testin
With every sentence, my envy of the keeper’s life grew.
That's the point: to make you view each clause as a liability rather than something to stuff in there just in case it turns out to be useful.
Broadly speaking...didn't we lose just the after tax profit that companies made? Of course there's an opportunity cost but this is FedGov, not exactly known for using tax dollars as best they could /should.
This is called Npe (not parent expected) and iirc 10% of tests have that result.
Not much to complain if you are shorting it :P
Ship launched cruise missiles for close air support? I'm skeptical. F-22's are better for air superiority, but the F-35 was designed as a bomb and missile truck. Potentially, it could do that job very, very well.
Exactly! :)

I always wanted to jump ship so I could work on my own startup, but was afraid cause I had no idea how to find work as a freelancer, and was totally not the sales type. I figured there had to be more people out there like me.
Staying Within Your Budget–Use It or Lose It
Optimistic Offline-First Apps with Vuex
>Instead, you're going to get errors from the clients using version 2, because server version 2 was rolled back. You have to roll back the clients as well then.

This depends on the update. If indeed the field was optional, you won't. A common example would be a field that is necessary for a new feature, but without which everything functions just fine, or functions with a minor degredation in experience.

But more importantly, you want to decouple features from api versions and communication protocols. It should be possible to enable an feature without rolling out a new version (for example, via a flipped flag). So a degraded communication protocol shouldn't actually impact anything. The application worked fine an hour ago, adding a new field won't break it.

>You have to roll back the clients as well then.

And if the clients are phones?

>Or you could have client version 2 know how to automatically convert to server version 1

This requires communicating with the server beforehand. Why should I have to roundtrip to negotiate which api version I should use? And what happens if you want to modify the protocol that you use to decide on api versions? Its turtles all the way down.

>because you're know what version the server is on, and you can convert your client parameters or even behavior to fit version 1.

So now, before I can roll out a server update, I need to roll out a client update that can make sure to negotiate back to a degraded experience until I update the server. Then I have to wait until that new client is rollback safe. Then I can update the server, then eventually I can update the client to remove the shim code. That's the "strict ordering with appropriate soak time" issue that you're still running into.

This has cascading consequences, each server/client update dance has to be mostly atomic, so you can only really do one of these dances at a time, and all clients have to be in sync. If a deep dependency service wants to make an api change, it has to wait until all of the clients are prepared before updating, and if any of those clients is the server in another context, they have to wait until everyone is ready.

That's chaos. And I don't want to do that when the other option is "update the server whenever, as clients upgrade, they'll see the improved service". You avoid the dance. It moves the initiative of an upgrade from the client to the server, and this is a good thing, because there are more clients than servers.
Its interesting that they are not clamping down a "self" employed barristers, I wonder why that might be.

I suspect IT contractors are not seen as real professionals in the British class structure
>NEVER remove a file you did not create

Seems like common sense, but Microsoft has been doing this for a while. In Windows 7 (not sure about later releases) the OS runs a 'Desktop Cleanup' periodically that deletes shortcuts to network locations it can no longer connect to. God forbid your network drives don't map one day and Windows decides to nuke all your desktop shortcuts... this actually happened to a user I was doing support for and they were understandably livid
Where did this People's Party comes from? Sounds very newspeak-ish, considering they only push through legislation benefitting large corporates.
While I find your perspective interesting I disagree with some of your conclusions.

> It's effectively cap to enforce equality of outcome.

It isn't so much to enforce equality of outcome as to enforce equality of income. What you are experiencing is to a large extent being on the wrong side of inequality. Just that isn't income inequality, but rather things like wealth, real estate, inheritance and education. Inequalities which people in Sweden largely aren't aware of, or accustomed to. If you had arrived 10 years earlier you would have, at least to a larger extent, been set for life. Other than that I can certainly see your perspective because it is almost impossible for a "salary man" to catch up in Sweden.
With Consumer DNA Boom, Data Can Identify Those Who Never Tested
Any advice for someone 3-4 years into their career with the option to work on something that's a "good thing for the world" or something that is more technically interesting and will be better career-wise?