skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rascoff explained that Zillow really has “no skin in the commission game” when it comes to what real estate professionals get paid, comparing Zillow to information provider WebMD.

Not accurate at all. For one, Zillow could do about 1000 things to promote competition among realtors, but it doesn't do that.

It could remind people that in 1950, the Supreme Court ruled that putting a hard-coded "6 %" on a real estate contract is, in fact, illegal price fixing.

It could remind people that "6 percent" of a sales price often equates to a much larger number when it comes to equity lost (e.g. if you have 250K equity in a house worth 750K, the commission amounts to ~ 21.3333 % of your equity.

It could remind Realtors that attempting to get people to sign contracts that they refuse to negotiate on is coercion, and it could help people sue Realtors who participate in cartel-like practices.

But it doesn't do that.

For those interested: The Supreme Court case from 1950: UNITED STATES v. REAL ESTATE BOARDS https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/339/485.html

Factual findings of the Court

Enough has been said to show that under our decisions an illegal price-fixing scheme has
been proved, unless the [339 U.S. 485, 489] fixing of real estate commissions is not included
in the prohibitions of 3 of the Act. Price-fixing is per se an unreasonable restraint of trade.
It is not for the courts to determine whether in particular settings price-fixing serves an
honorable or worthy end. An agreement, shown either by adherence to a price schedule or by
proof of consensual action fixing the uniform or minimum price, is itself illegal under the
Sherman Act, no matter what end it was designed to serve.
How to Mass Unfollow on Twitter
Setup: Drew DeVault
In analogy with the advice in the article, married people should regularly go on dates with other people, just to make sure that their value in the "relationship market" doesn't sink too low (and to avoid unpleasant rebound after a divorce, which is always a looming possibility).

It doesn't feel quite right, but I cannot entirely put my finger on why. I guess you could argue that employee-employer relation is like a relationship with a psychopath, so the above is in some way a "practical" advice. But then perhaps there is a lot more social issues going with that conclusion (companies are psychopaths) than just job promotion.
Totally agree with what you have said. I've been through W2 job interviews that lasted a total of 2 hours. One phone conversation and one in person, offered job on the same day with no waiting games played. This is 100% the exception to the rule.

I would remove multi round interviews with 7 different people and multiple calls backs. The in-person interview should be one and done, just like a music audition.

Why? Because a company can fire me on day one if they want. The idea that we should put $10,000 worth of man hours into screening someone before they begin working, when employees are still legally interchangeable seems kind of like a charade to me.

Employees don't like to see their colleagues fired quickly, but if it's for a deserving reason (candidate couldn't do the things they said they could do in interview) then the team really will move on quickly.

When you're paying out $120,000 a year for people to flip bits, the team accepts that turnover might occur a little bit more frequently that corporate middle management.
eh? I dunno about hoarding, but I have feelings about eating.

At least for eating, most people don't operate rationally; can you tell me how many calories you ate and burned today? yesterday? I can, but I have been putting a lot of effort into this for some time now. most people don't know what they ate yesterday, unless they eat the same thing every day. Most people operate on instinct. I've operated on instinct for most of my life, too; I was super skinny as a teenager, healthy in my early 20s, then growing into overweight but not obese in my late 20s and early 30s... then obesity set in during the mid to late '30s

This really was pretty steady; my strength changed a lot; during that period my bench press would go from 50kg to 100Kg and back again multiple times, but my weight just continued to very slowly increase.

Clearly, whatever subsystem decides "I'm hungry" or "I'm full" is tuned to get me to eat just a little bit more than I need to maintain my body. And it's pretty good at it. If I work out? the more I work out, the more I want to eat. working out without caloric control simply doesn't work to lose weight for me.

I've been counting calories in and out (and trying to run a small long term deficit without otherwise spending a lot of effort on what I eat) for some time now. I have gone from a BMI of 31 to a BMI of 26 in the last year or so. This after trying a bunch of "eat this not that" diets, which have never worked for me. But I have been... slightly hungry for the last year or so, and thus I think about food and my relationship to food a lot.

My theory? My theory is that my farming ancestors found it advantageous to eat a little more than they needed when food was around; that it was better to carry that bit of a belly around all the time if it meant that you wouldn't die if you didn't stash away quite enough grain for the winter.

(As an aside "just eat less" "stop when you are only slightly hungry" also doesn't work for me; that ends up with me eating way less than I need to for some reason (I need to come within 20 or 30% of my maintenance caloric intake, from experience, or after a few days I enter a semi-fasting state where I'm tired and can't focus - I'm guessing this is also the farming ancestors. "Oh, there isn't enough food stored? Maybe you should take a lot of naps until this year's crop is ready to bring in")
There's Life on the Moon China's Lander Just Sprouted the First Plants
My dream job would be:

-Modifying genes, biotech.

-Building intelligent and powerful systems.

-Building fb like system that is so powerful that it can manipulate your behavior using your data.

-Data Analytics (Working at Cambridge Analytica)
Here is the answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stallman&redirect...
Future of Civilization Doesn't Depend on Elon Musk Denying Himself Sleep
Now we know what the placebo is ... </joke>
I would argue that it is better stated as:

Job security is the number of job opportunities you have, not your current job title.
The transparent ones are visible, but what about the deniable ones we can't see?
Nowhere I worked has this been a C-level position (granted I never worked for giant companies like MS, Google, Amazon).
Is this something a competitor might do?
I wonder what difference intended collectability has on the value if any.

All three tried to exploit those to inflate the bubble. Given the strategy seems more toys first than limited platinum collector's edition - which doesn't really have much demand over the baseline. I would expect an overleveraged by speculators market to collapse eventually but far slower - akin to the decline in antiques as many new buyers shun them as white elephants.
The estuary from which Maldon sea salt is harvested was also used for cooling nuclear reactors from the '60s until 2002 [1], so microplastics probably aren't even its most interesting feature.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradwell_nuclear_power_station
Yup, desalination doesn't require adding "chemicals" to the water. It works using heat, electricity, and osmosis membranes[1]. I'm not sure why the article took the tone that it did.

[1] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2011/ph240/parise2/
That works fine if the owners are invested in preserving the resource.

This doesn't square well with publicly traded companies who have to ensure their operation is maximally profitable in the short term. They'd pump the place dry, then find a way to turn sand into money.
> yeah but the category "plays games" is too broad, rivaled by "reads blogs".

Plays x game on y website at z time of the days however should tell you something though.
Magnetic North Pole Has Moved. What You Need to Know [Inforgraphic]
I was in a similiar-ish situation.

I was a manager and told to make redundancies, because we were 'overstaffed' (which we weren't) I couldn't do it. They were my friends. Who do you choose? The young guys who can walk into another job straight away but are the best workers? The guy with a wife and kids who was pretty lazy and would have struggled to get another job? The guy who just remortgaged his house to pay for his divorce? etc.

So, I told them. They went to the directors, and the directors denied it. Then everyone thought I was a complete ahole for 'making things up' and the directors were furious with me for telling them.

So, my advice, for whatever it's worth is take care of yourself first. Run, don't walk, run. Get yourself another job, soon as you've done that, then you can tell them if you want.

But telling them before you've taken care of yourself is trouble, your bosses will be mad and that could get you axed a whole lot faster than you planned for, and your co-workers may not believe you and if they do, you'll all be applying for the same jobs so you lose out.

Edit: An afterthought though, is don't quit too soon, you don't want to miss out on potential redundancy pay!
I thought that CPR was largely about getting CO2 into the lungs to trigger a breath reflex.
Yes, well-being is only measured in the short term. How many people do you know who will readily admit they spent too much time looking at a screen when younger?
The pic of the bee in that Wikipedia article is amazing. From that linked article:

> A bumblebee with a transponder acting as a non-linear junction for tracking the animal by way of harmonic radar.

That looks like something out of a James Bond movie!
"Job interviews help us grow professionally."

I disagree. In most places job interviews mainly test for your ability to pass job interviews. So if the job title you're going for is interviewee then maybe. But if you see yourself as a developer then interviewing is not going to improve your professional abilities.
I would have thought depth of market would be the problem.

Presumably no one bought the set, which is why it wasn't selling for very long. If you buy 1000s of sets you run the risk of Lego increasing production to compensate. Second you can't just sell all your sets at once. There might be demand for one set at $28. What about 2? 10? 100? So even with a 'winner' you may be only able to sell them in dribs and drabs, and even then only at an average of $14.
Seniority, in some companies, is how long you've been at your current title compared to other people with that same title. It has nothing to do with either of the things he mentioned. Then there are the "senior" titles. But there are a number of "senior" titles that are junior to other non-senior titles. All I can say for sure is that there are a lot of interpretations of the word, and saying that it is one thing and isn't another is really just saying, "When I think of the word, to me it means one thing and not another." But that's just the vote of a single random blogger.

Maybe what he meant is just that, "Having a higher title does not necessarily mean that you are qualified to work at every company at that title."
I have an unopened one as well. Currently I'm weighting the utility I would get from building it versus a 11% monetary gain...
Turbulent Water Drag helps the humble hagfish slime predators so quickly
Maybe I'm weird but I found neither job interviewing nor online dating (which I haven't done in close to a decade, as I'm in a long term relationship) unpleasant.

Certainly some interviews/dates were, but most were not.
I'm not sure if I'm morally OK with advising companies to interview multiple candidates for a job. It might be good advice for the interviewer, but it wastes a lot of the interviewee's time (and potentially money).

If I was interviewing for a job, it would probably take 6-8 hours across finding the job listing, parsing the requirements and responsibilities, and researching the company. So maybe $600-$800 total plus disrupting my schedule. Plus maybe another $1000 in travel expenses.

Asking random interviewers to spend that time just so I could feel good about my company would make me a low-key sociopath.

Snark aside, companies have a huge upper hand over potential employees right now (especially when an employee is out of work and needs the job). Anything that tips the scale back toward the employee is a net positive. Regardless, I don't think many employees have the time to spare to interview for 3 jobs a year.
What's your favorite desktop Linux distribution?
Perhaps the issue is that solar farms are more susceptible to sabotage, simply by taking up a much larger area?
But mental accounting probably does not lump the stocks/bonds portfolio together with the hobbies.

Also most people actually don't have any stocks or bonds, it's held by pension funds who certainly aren't Lego investors.
Two hours reviewing one resumé is way too much. A few minutes should be plenty of time to decide whether or not to start the interview process with a candidate.
A true senior isn’t even really thinking in terms of specific languages any more and if they were their knowledge is a decade old. They have been doing company-specific things for too long.

Haggling over language minutiae is the hallmark of a junior no matter how many years experience they have. Especially considering how very, very similar Python and Ruby are...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_range
As a person who also interviews people, it should not take 2-3 hours to read a resume. If you're spending more than 30 minutes on it, I have no idea what you're reading.

Spending 3 man-weeks finding the right candidate is an easy win over spending 3 hours finding the wrong one and 12 weeks training, remedying bad behaviors, and building a case for termination.
Of course you could do that, but you can do that with or without index funds. The two are orthogonal.
I certainly find I also learn a lot more about people, management, conflict resolution, prioritisation, and many more "timeless" skills (more timeless than python, anyway) the further I get in my career (currently 17 years in).
Sure, but passing job interviews helps you grow professionally.
This is what it is all about; you believe in software to be free in a RMS kind of way or it is just a marketing gimmick. If you want software to be free, you do not care what Amazon does with it. That is clearly not MongoDB. They used FOSS as marketing tool and timed it well (it was a horrible shitshow of a product but many drank the koolaid; no idea what it is now, I will never touch it again) and now have to please investors. That is fine but let us not put this on ‘the big corporates’ please.
If it is decelerating toward us it will have to be dumping significant amounts of hot propellant at least roughly in our direction. You can't obscure that with known physics as far as I'm aware.

If you're going to involve unknown physics, the theory becomes a lot more unlikely.
I think a better fitting analogy for relationships would be:
Married people should ensure they have independent friendship circles, hobbies etc. to ensure they don't end up becoming too dependent on each other and unable to function separately.

I'm not sure how well this maps to the article but have heard this advice before. Of course, never having been married I can't speak of its efficacy.
Giving that people are overusing drugs, I think you should let people the ability to eat sugar pills when they have the flu instead of going for something building bacterial resistance or having side effects.
We tried BlueApron and enjoyed it for the better part of a year. Easy sign-up, impossible to cancel online.

Out of sheer spite for this dark pattern, I went onto their site every week (via a paid search click) for over two years to cancel the next few shipments until they re-activated their (already existing, but not navigable) online cancelation form.
It is not a total waste of time of the interviewer's. They may learn something. Plus you may decide to take an offer.
Slack's new logo and identity
Different process, but interesting:

https://www.radiotimes.com/news/tv/2018-02-09/blue-planet-vi...
Totally personal opinion, but they're more likely funded by private corporations that want to influence society to buy more of their product, or slush funds of lobbying money similar to how the Kochs fund PACs in the USA. Mercer family funds, etc.

People who have vested interests in organizations such as Saudi Aramco maintaining the status quo.
Seniority and number of job opportunities have little to do with each other. There's a high demand for developers with 5-10 years experience, and also for 1-5 years. There is less demand for those with 30 years experience. Are they more senior still? Yes.
Thanks ollie <3
A while back in the Netherlands, there was a plan to use the saline gradient between salt and fresh water as a battery.
It was briefly in the news, and then I never heard anything, but perhaps that is the idea?

The energy from desalination goes into creating a fresh-salt gradient. It stands to reason that some of that energy could be recovered from the gradient between the brine and the sea water.
You can't really correct for the chromatic distortion (purple effect) as it is not simply a color correction, the IR light bends differently through the optical elements / lense. (The diffraction coefficient is different for different wavelenghts of light). Thus you have to filter the light out to get rid of the effect.
> Job interviews have nothing to do with job seeking. Job interviews help us grow professionally.

I infer that this write isn't a native English speaker and I think I get what they're trying to say. But come on. Obviously they have something to do with each other.
Pocket listings still pay both halves but are often discounted down to e.g. 5% instead of 6%. The agent tries to spin the situation as a discount to the buyer and seller as they "save" 1% on commission. One of the main justifications for why the agent "deserves" a 3% cut of the deal is that they are working to represent you and safeguard your interests. That can't happen when they're representing both sides. It's as perverse as a plaintiff and a defendant using the same lawyer to save 1% on legal fees.

In a given market area there are literally thousands of real estate agents. Even with a 1% discount off the top, what do you think the odds are that the best offer on the market just so happens to be a listing that your real estate agent just so happens to be the listing agent for?

Real estate is a racket.
Yes, I’ve worked on systems that use Kafka to do exactly this...
Transformer-XL: Transformer Plus RNN to Get a State-Of-the-art Language Model
The irony of people saying essentially "Dropbox could have done this just by using open source tools" on hackernews, where people famously announced the Dropbox would fail because it was easy to reproduce using open source tools entertains me.

Maybe, just maybe, the engineers in question considered mature open source tools and decided they didn't serve their needs.
As a parent I want my daughter to have a wide variety of experiences. So if she spends all her time on any one activity I am going to encourage her to swap it around and do something else. If she spent all her time playing guitar I would probably take her guitar off her and tell her to read a book.. if she spent all her time reading a book I would take it off her and tell her to go outside.. If she was outside all the time I would tell her to come in and play a computer game..

It just so happens that what she wants to do all the time is play computer games, so that is the thing I have to keep steering her away from. I'm not convinced it is the screen itself that is harmful, but it is definitely the thing that stops her from wanting to do anything else.
> Although I am not sure how it actually plays out in practice.

Radar reflectors are generally legally required on sailboats where it would matter. Offshore most sailboats are outfitted with AIS transceivers and it's legally required in many places for commercial ships.

When not in a port, large ships will often adjust their course slightly to avoid coming too close to a small sailboat even if they're in a shipping channel (if there's reasonable space to do so). With AIS the ship can see exactly where the sailboat is, its heading, and its speed, so it's pretty easy to avoid it. They'll do the same based on radar data if that's all they have. It's common for both boats will tweak their course slightly. Personally, if it's possible, I usually try to adjust my course early enough to avoid a large ship having to react.
2-3 hours reviewing a candidates resume before giving the go-head to schedule an interview? That seems like a lot of time to review a resume.

I spend between 30 seconds to 2 minutes reading a resume before deciding to pass or to schedule a 30 minute phone screen.
I think this is more the other way round: Bolivia is desperate for something with world market value to export, so they're seeking investment for lithium mining. https://www.americasquarterly.org/content/others-snub-bolivi...

It's a very poor country.
I can't help but roll eyes at screen time as the newest neo-puritian trend. Mainly because it is so damn meaningless without the /what/. It is like trying to lump pulp novels, newspapers, comic books, hard core porn and textbooks together but even worse.

I worry far more about the cyclic "must find new sin and moral panics" trend continuing. I am frankly wondering if it is a biological derangement of life stage akin to impulsiveness of teenagers or reactionary nostalgia of elders.
Gotham – omerfaa – Zeyrek Münzevi
Can we feed a future population of 10B people a healthy diet?
Looks like a pretty solid place for software project management, not that I know too much about it.
and now are CEO of a Forbes 100

At most you are talking about 100 people. The simple pyramid structure at most companies means most people are front line grunts. That’s the reality for the vast majority of the human race. Promotions are limited by the availability of high level ‘slots’ to be filled. Gaining skills and a new title while doing essentially the same thing is not an actual promotion.
However, getting rejected for jobs, especially if it happened at the interview stage will help you find the direction you have to go to grow professionally. If you listen to why they rejected you and can infer what they're hiding beneath a veil of politeness, of course.
It's not the same thing, unless the company is holding interviews for a nonexistent job. Or if they're interviewing somebody that they know they won't hire anyways.

I don't think anybody would defend that practice, so what makes it OK if I'm doing it myself by leading on some company that I don't want to work at?
> You are ignoring all the people that had a career and now are CEO of a Forbes 100.

Oh no. They are ignoring 100 people. This is terrible and the whole premise is invalidated.

> Everybody start somewhere and go somewhere.

This is generally known as "ashes to ashes, dust to dust."
The /e/ project is trying to do something like that https://e.foundation/
In Western Australia, a desal plant was built a few years ago [0]. At the same time, a wind farm [1] that offset the power use of the desal plant was built.

[0] https://www.watercorporation.com.au/water-supply/our-water-s...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_Downs_Wind_Farm
> Again, the operational overhead of Jenkins is unfortunately very non trivial.

Not to mention the overhead of running Jenkins at the kind of scale they're talking about here. We're not talking about small numbers here.
I always called it the "right of weight".

https://medium.com/@wacht043/right-of-weightt-73ce08f67d98
What's really warming the world? (2015)