skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is what worked for me:

1) Stop working after work hours. Read a book, meditate and hang out with friends or family instead. Passive consumption doesn’t help.

2) Get on a bike and ride ( hiking or other outdoor exercise worked as well)

3) Quit my job and started doing something I enjoy more (for me it was audio).
> Inflation will eat most of your savings

What? This is why investment advice for retirement generally revolves around allocation into stocks and bonds while leaving only an emergency fund plus regular expenses in more liquid assets like savings accounts. Inflation will only eat your savings if you fail to invest. If you want to talk about risk, well, inflation is why a total failure to accept risk is extremely risky!
Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?
If we look at the current programming languages & frameworks, there is a trend away from dynamically typed languages and monolithic high productivity frameworks like Rails. Considering new famous languages, Go, Rust, Kotlin, Swift, Nim & Crystal, main focus seems to be on static typing & AOT compilation to improve performance. There is a definite push towards adopting functional paradigm mixed with OO, which seems to be a push towards improving accuracy and parallelism. However, there is little groundbreaking in order to increase programmer productivity by a huge margin. (Not discounting the memory safety and other improvements, but they seem incremental.)

On the other side, there is a definite shift towards "backendless" applications, where frontend talks directly to the DB, either via autogenerated ReST or GraphQL APIs or via proprietary tools like Cloud Firestore. This is good for MVPs.

Frameworks like React & Angular give you decent building blocks to create SPAs, but the learning curve & effort required to create ambitious applications is very high.

There is a proliferation of "Low Code" frameworks which allow you to design drag & drop UIs & connect them with APIs. But, it feels like going back to "RAD" tools for the late 90s which led to a lot of spaghetti code. Also, some of these are prohibitively expensive.

One noteworthy change is UI design products which are trying to produce the code from UI Mockups. Relatively primitive at this stage. A breakthrough here can definitely be a big productivity booster.

Another productivity booster is Cross-Platform frameworks. It's already here, tried & tested. We know the trade-offs well. It requires a huge amount of effort to create & maintain a cross-platform framework. Big companies are already tackling this.

Considering this background, what do you think will be a breakthrough innovation in programming which will enable programmers to deliver ambitious web/mobile apps at a very high speed.
While that is a good fit for this comment, it _does_ fit in this thread as well. Others are talking about how common terrible support is, where getting money back for a terrible product requires invoking the court, etc. The GP posted an example of _excellent_ service, the kind that most vendors should aspire to -- and included notes that doing so doesn't seem to have a big impact on the bottom line.

The counterpoint is, if your product genuinely is terrible, the cost of such a guarantee would be too high to bear.
A dosage of Dan Peña
Previous related discussion (with links to many other previous discussions):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17433908
Oh, I understand all that, but the two arguments made earlier was that culture had nothing to do with it (I'd say religion is in fact part of culture), and that societies move towards having two kids, which doesn't seem to be the case, it would appear that it actually goes lower, much lower.
I subscribe to Netflix but still torrent all shows because it is more convenient and higher quality.
Site appears to be down.

Here's a similar article: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/02/05/whatever-you-pa...
David Graeber, the author of the book Bullshit Jobs, walked out of the room twice when Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant confronted him with pitfalls in his reasoning.

https://www.volkskrant.nl/columns-opinie/-er-is-een-ongeloof...
It seems like there's a lot of wiggle room for what is a bullshit job or not and the book takes a pretty expansive view of it.

So many of the jobs listed seem highly useful, but yeah bullshit at times, but the same job very much not bullshit at other times.

I get the concept, I don't think it is wrong that these exist. I do question if anyone could really accurately identify what jobs are bullshit and what aren't and that makes me wonder about the overall concept here.

I sort of agree with his philosophical conclusions, but still I'm not sure how it plays out exactly and not sure basic income and such really would change anything, at least as far as people's choices and such.

Granted I've only read a handful of articles and this wiki article about this so there may be a lot that I'm missing.
I greatly admire Warren Buffett. Sure, you wouldn't want to emulate a failed marriage or poor diet, but to me his positive qualities go beyond 'a lot of good'.

It's not his practice of reading income statements you may want to emulate - rather it's his focus and enjoyment of work.

It's his ability to ignore the naysayers and trust his own judgment - whether that be about the clothes he wears, the relationship he has with his wife, or the stocks he buys.

It's his approach of helping others - by explaining his investment decisions, supporting the Giving Pledge and of course by being so financially generous.

It's his approach to business - dealing honestly with employees, suppliers and shareholders, trusting others (eg. buying a billion dollar company on a handshake) and publicly admitting his investment mistakes. This contrasts particularly strongly with Donald Trump's approach to business.
I've read the book, there is a distinction between "office manager" type secretary and people who are paid to sit next to a phone which only rings twice a week.

The book isn't only about the job itself, but our constant need to "look busy", even though there isn't anything to do, and most importantly, how these structures develop. He coins the phrase "corporate feudalism" as an explanation, meaning (to oversimplify) that people at the top think that other people at the top look powerful when they have lots of people below them, so they need to create a lot of jobs just to have people to be the boss of.
Googling that domain name there are a bunch of headlines like "Acme corportation paid 0 tax". It seems to be part of their usual shtick.

The site loads, but really slowly. I feel like it has been slashdotted maybe.
This boils down to "If you don't create something then you are more likely to hate your job", which is why he can claim that maintaining bad code is bullshit.

Companies are financially motivated to have these kinds of jobs, and if we only use that metric then we could say that almost no job is bullshit, but that doesn't mean people enjoy them.

That said I'm weary to extrapolate those ideas into any specific plans to change society
Wow, you've changed my mind. I'm going, my friends complain about every place they go. I usually enjoy most places when I don't have unrealistic expectations.

If I were to go in 2019 for a trip similar to yours, could I still sleep out in the desert by an oasis? Your trip is pretty much what I wanted to see too.

How many days did you spend there total? Money (estimate)? I know inflation is a factor here since it was 15 years ago.
Another option is assisted suicide or suicide once you can't take care of yourself.
Just go to duckduckgo.com and search for anything with the word stream on the end.
The book makes it explicit that it is talking about "receptionists and front-desk personnel at places that obviously don’t need them." The example provided is that of a Dutch publishing company at which the phone rang once a day, and the receptionist's task included keeping a "candy dish full of mints" (mints supplied by another person), winding a grandfather clock once a week, and "managing another receptionist's Avon sales."

It goes on to state that the receptionist at such a place is required as a "Badge of Seriousness" even if they have nothing else to do.
Why not just increase sales tax? Or make sales tax sector by sector. Since they are almost a monopoly, it will come out of their own pocket mostly.
This was an interesting tidbit as well from another analysis [1]:

This year’s survey also included a question about how long people had been programming professionally. 1 in 10 Clojure users have over 20+ years of developing experience; 49% had over 10+ years of experience. In comparison, only 42% of JVM developers have that much programming experience.

Clojure having a higher than average percentage of experienced developers directly contributes to the quality of the language and the ecosystem around it.

[1] https://jaxenter.com/clojure-2019-java-8-functional-155236.h...
Ask HN: How did you change professions?
Context: 32 y/o programmer, never really liked professional software engineering, loved CS in school though. FAANG

I didn't really have a lot of forethought into my career and now I'm at an impasse. The only move I can see myself making is into engineering management, but are there other career tracks that don't necessitate me starting from square 1? I would like to take a stint at PM however it seems the career path for that is very bifurcated from engineering. You either start pretty much right after an eng BS and maybe 1-2 years experience or you start right after an MBA. If anything it kind of seems my 10 years of engineering experience puts me at a downside?
My Favorite Tech Articles for 2018
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> The docs actually state quite clearly that developers are discouraged from replacing class components with function components.

Could you link to where it says this? My understanding is that hooks are intended to be the new best practice, and ideally all code would use hooks (which the React team believes are overall better than class components), but the React team doesn't want to force migration pain on everyone. So as I understand it, it's not that a class -> hook refactor is "discouraged", it's more "don't let this be too much of a distraction, and don't feel obligated to rewrite old code".
Nitpick: You can do this in Firefox or any other browser, as well. It's the Google search engine that provides this functionality, not the browser.
>Furthermore no one would set up those maintenance tasks because they’re focused on the product not on making sure the office is functioning properly....

Hmm.

Not trying to get in between you guys arguing, but I'm just throwing this out there because I thought possibly it might help. Maybe you guys aren't really disagreeing so much as using different language for different positions? Just from my point of view, it SOUNDS like what you are describing is more of an Office Manager. So maybe in some organizations Office Manager is the same as Receptionist in terms of job title? (I do hope you were PAYING that person at the level of an Office Manager though, and not a simple receptionist. That's kind of shady if you weren't, because that person was doing a great deal of work.)
Agreed. Graeber brings up some valid points about how market systems which should make economies more efficient sometimes fail to do so due to elite's/manager's self-image enhancement practices. On the other hand, I think that Graeber is heavily biased due to the fact that he is an academic who probably has not had a job that required operational excellence
China's 'investment' in Africa doesn't benefit Africa, from what I understand. They build entire towns of imported Chinese labor and take all the money out. Last I read about it.
Not specific to philosophers, but Contrapoints has a good breakdown of why the term "postmodern neo-marxists", which JBP uses a number of times throughout the book, shows a complete misunderstanding of modern philosophy. [1]

Not related to 12 rules, but Cuck Philosophy goes into JBP's lectures where he references postmodernism and again appears to completely misunderstand the fundamentals. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LqZdkkBDas (probably NSFW)

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU1LhcEh8Ms
It's because they're still carrying forward the massive amounts of debt they're spending in upping the count of their original programming.
This made my day. Thank you for the link!
Maybe it would be better stated as a "shoddy approach" to fixing business problems with technology.

Some examples might be:

- Overengineering. I worked for a startup that committed to a $20k/mo multi-az setup with mass redundancy for what was essentially a lightly trafficked static website.

- Not-Invented-Here syndrome. Different place spent months building out a custom shopping cart and checkout solution for sales b/c they didn't really like the built-in options. Full on high priced design team (not a person, a team), UX folks, front end devs, trying to get PCI compliance on their servers (a huge task), etc. or they could have done what Tesla did and just used Shopify - https://shop.tesla.com/us/en.html

In both those examples, there's no need/value to the work being done over similar solutions making it a "bullshit job".
Stop competing. Life is more or less meaningless. One of the ways some people cope is competition. You don't have to be high-performance. No one except the people profiting from your labor really care about your high performance. The work you are producing is being put into the dustbin of history more quickly than you realize.

I quit my job. Had some garage sales. Went on some road trips. Now I freelance. I can work hard for good clients, and when the project is over I can take a couple of months off.

I work remotely in a relatively low cost of living area. I have one car and a 800 sq ft house. Life doesn't have to be that hard.
Getting professional help (namely Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) to have a more positive perspective on my every day life.

A bad work/life balance will make your burn out fast but many don't realize bad mental health will lead you there just as fast.

I feel like the term (burning out) is just sugar coating depression because that's more sexy to talk about.
On first release in Ubuntu, Gnome3 was still fairly unstable (that was 17.10 I believe). Apparently they fixed some of those problems in following releases, unfortunately I can't confirm that. The design stayed the same and it's not ideal, especially when used on small screens like my travel laptop Thinkpad X230 (12"). If you are still not convinced just take a quick look at Ubuntu Mate. You may like it.
German tech startup Raisin raises $114m for its “deposit-as-a-service” platform
It's giving me 404 with the robot drawing.
I sent the article URL to Pocket, they seem to have it cached in their system.

I made a copy of that through 2read, here's the IPFS cached copy
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmWAz8WZsufXPJFCWaneCt4QsvxiYumUQjZgpt2...
The hotel room analogy is almost correct.

Hotel rooms usually provide a small safe for which guests can pick the combination. There is also a secret backdoor combination or master key that lets hotel staff open the safe.

This creates an obvious security hole : if the backdoor combination is easy to guess, or a copy of the master key falls into the hands of unscrupulous employees or ex-employees, then the contents of the safe can be stolen. As a guest, there is nothing you can do to reduce this risk.

Now, imagine that a hotel found a solution where locked safes are destroyed and replaced at almost no cost to them, and could give up on the backdoor. Burglaries involving the backdoor would vanish, and although this slightly increases the risk of losing your belongings by forgetting your combination (since the hotel can no longer open the safes of forgetful guests), it's a net improvement in security.

Ten years later, the hotel community has reached a consensus that safes-without-backdoors are the Right Thing to Do. The state then mandates that all hotels should be able to give access to the contents of those safes to the police. But they're not saying that hotels have to use a backdoor combination or master key, so they're not really asking anyone to reduce the security of their safes...
Studies [1] have been done, and from what I can see at a cursory look most show a negative correlation, especially for female IQ. I think the disparity between high income to low income counties in the US would show this relatively well.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2013-boutwell.pdf
'Capacity' to do 'good' (even per your definition) is so strongly reliant on the environment that one exists in, that I do not think you can defend your position in a rational manner. I also find it mildly offensive that your comment, and that of Spandrell, implies that smartness is measured only in IQ. High IQ is only a predictor of high test-solving abilities.

What's more, people living in poor countries and outside of cities aren't 'incapable' of doing good. They are often poorly educated, lack role models, lack good parenting, lack a good peer group, and fundamentally, lack opportunity and a financially stable childhood. Virtually all of it is structural injustices thrown their way through the roll of a dice.
A hundred years ago, we didn't have many of these jobs, but people managed to live. We've automated most of the actual production jobs, but instead of having more free time, we have telemarketers, and everyone still works 40 hrs/week minimum.
I burnt out 6 years ago and still haven't recovered.

I'm 33, and I haven't been able to find a job in the past 2 years.

I've pretty much given up on working in the mainstream economy.

What makes me most angry is that all those years people made money off of me and exploited my tendency to work blindly to exhaustion.

I sure as shit not going to work for crumbs anymore, the 9-5, the whole work to live mentality so many of my peers have.

It means that I'm going to have to do things that are socially reprehensible but make a great payday.

I justify this for all shit I've taken for the past 15 years.

When society fucks you, you fuck it right back and profit off of it. This is what YC taught me.
Depends what you are looking to get out of it, I never used to eat breakfast, maybe I was always just unsatisfied with it, but in a way I was unwittenly doing intermittent fasting. It certainly helped me maintain a healthy weight and I'm seemingly healthy by all metrics but for those that need the nutritional benefits to start an early morning and just feel good about getting up in the morning that's the real benefit when you have a routine to stick to.
In the long term capitalism and free markets should weed out any jobs which don't create shareholder value. At least that's the promise of the system and there's plenty of evidence which shows that this is what's happening. I'm curious which counterpoints the book offers.
Wasn't aware, thanks friend!
After the Storm
(read the cached version) I'd like to see figures on how much of that $22 million was re-invested in the workforce and economies which surrounded Netflix's productions. Those figures would be key in any personal judgement call I'd make on the report.
Sales tax is a tax to the consumer. I fail to see how that would affect Netflix at all.
Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people's approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

-- Tao Te Ching, chapter 9, Stephen Mitchell translation (http://taoteching.org.uk/index.php?c=9&a=Stephen+Mitchell)
For DuckDuckGo users, simply use the !cache bang.
Always been Army ration pack Biscuits Brown to me.

...to be clear, I kinda liked those things. Kinda.
I think you're both talking past each other a bit. The difference is between maximizing short-term gains and maximizing long-term gains.

The thing about investing is that you can take advantage of maximizing short-term gains and get out before the investment would crater. So taking advantage of a non-sustainable business model is fine if you can get out before the bill comes due. This is rational, but not sustainable.

If you're running the company, and you care about it, and its employees, then you want something sustainable in the long-term.
Even though intelligence is negatively correlated with fertility rate, it is positively correlated with survival rate of offspring. The net effect is not clear.

Apart from that, when you differentiate between men and women, the correlations turn out to be different: while women still have a negative correlation, for men the correlation between IQ and fertility rate turns positive.

See for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
I really liked your description of The Dave Ramsey Show. That's exactly why he's not for me.

Totally agree with you on Marketplace though.
Sales tax most places in the US are segmented. My grocery tax is different than my gas tax is different than my alcohol tax is different than my iPhone tax.
There is a lot of talk about increasing taxes on wealthy companies & individuals in the US as of late again. Whether that's a good or bad strategy I'm unsure.

Either way it seems that well paid accountants are easily winning the arms race on how to avoid taxes. I'm curious if a government can actually win that race.
>> it is true that groups with higher birth rates in spite of having middle class lifestyle tend to be religious.

I doubt that very much, that has not been my experience, my colleagues, or my relatives.

In fact, I wouldn't even agree with the point that religious people tend to have bigger families.
> The names that are "easy" are typically names that stem from the English language.

To be fair, most "English" names don't actually stem from the English language, they've just been thoroughly domesticated (Michael, for instance, or Schmidt).
Half Life: The Decay of Knowledge and What to Do About It (2018)
"He has specialized to an extreme and is taking advantage of the rewards of that specialization and natural talent in a unique way."

Gates is another one of those people where most forget that his grandfather was a multi-millionaire, his mother was a director at IBM, and he had access to one of the first computers in the world.

I.e. he is not an example of a self-made person, so anything he says is not really applicable to anyone looking to "make it."

P.S. The last paragraph is all I am saying - I have nothing against Gates.
oh no! we could use that money for bombs in yemen or for sending the troops to the border. how will the govt function without it :(
So they found/caught/exploited an opportunity to pay no taxes this year. Is it a permanent thing thanks to new tax laws? It's pretty easy to see that they have paid millions in income tax in previous years: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/nflx/financials
No, frustrated reaction to irrational “what if everyone did this!!!???” concern trolling.
Please don't bring those ridiculous and naive leftist thoughts into HN.