skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked in Shanghai for a couple years for an international company. If you go somewhere with western managers (or Chinese who worked in the west) the management may not be much more hierarchical than in the west. If you can, start work at a non-Chinese branch of a company with offices in China and then transfer, as expat packages are often better than what you'd get if you were hired as a local. China has something called 996: 9am-9pm, 6 days per week. If you don't want to work such hours, you'll have fewer options in the tech industry.

Personally, I think how much you enjoy it will depend on how much you enjoy Chinese culture. From my experience, expats who stays "expats" forever, only hang out with other foreigners and don't learn the language, are less satisfied than people who integrate more, have local friends, learn the language, and enjoy things like KTV and hotpot. The locals are generally quite pragmatic and in some sense libertarian, in that many will do what they can to skirt laws and regulations that get in their way (which at least in past was perhaps necessary for survival in the corrupt, oppressive conditions there). So if you like "hustle", you'll like it, but if you think Uber are monsters, laws are made to be obeyed, or principles trump pragmatism, then you probably won't have a good time. Also if you're insecure about your appearance you may not enjoy it there; people can be very frank (like, a colleague might observe "wow, you've gotten fatter, what did you eat?"), and many job listings require a photo attached to the resume. Similarly people are more comfortable mentioning racial stereotypes than Americans are, so if (often well-meaning) racism bothers you then again, maybe better not to go.

Reasons to work there? The food is amazing and there's so much variety, the sheer number of people and opportunities is greater than almost anywhere else due to the population size (more people --> greater absolute number of people at the tails of any distribution --> there are some really awesome people there), and it's extremely safe. Things like delivery and transport are excellent due to economies of scale. There's also a lot of personal freedom there; the government aside, normal citizens will generally leave you alone and mind their own business, and won't e.g. call the cops or child protection when you let your child play alone outside. If you have kids there they're also much less likely to develop a drug or alcohol problem, should that be a concern; drug use is much less common there, and although the legal drinking age is something like 13 there generally isn't a binge drinking problem (maybe because the kids have too much homework).
I feel like I'm the only one who likes open-plan offices.
> The French Revolution was a period of far-reaching social and political upheaval in France and its colonies beginning in 1789. The Revolution overthrew the monarchy, established a republic, catalyzed violent periods of political turmoil, and finally culminated in a dictatorship under Napoleon who brought many of its principles to areas he conquered in Western Europe and beyond. Inspired by liberal and radical ideas, the Revolution profoundly altered the course of modern history, triggering the global decline of absolute monarchies while replacing them with republics and liberal democracies.

Similarly you could wrestle control out of the hands of the wealthy if you wanted to... it's just a question of what will replace that and not make it worse, i.e. Venezuela.
"Minor nitpick, but these workers have 6 figure salaries in SF. In fact, firefighters often make 200k+. "

... and are on-track for a very nice pension ...
How is home ownership a tax shelter?
UNCOL and TIMI reborn.
Nearly all Bitcoin trades are fake, apparently
weight...

Though maybe "wait" is appropriate for a thread on time management?
The US has a number of explicitly anti-democratic institutions (the electoral college, the senate) that almost certainly wouldn't be devised if you were starting fresh.

I mean, can you imagine proposing tomorrow, "in rural parts of the country, let's give people 3x the voting power of those in urban parts of the country"? And yet, here we are.
> Google was sending search traffic to smaller blogs all the time... until they didn't

Is this actually the case / is there data to back this claim outside of generic google bashing? The sole reason I love my discover weekly is I find music I've never heard of, and I can listen to my friend's discover weekly to get new music from their genres. Only supplying big name music would defeat the purpose.
This matches some of Greg Clark’s descriptions of a preindustrial Malthusian economy in A Farewell to Alms (https://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Arms-Ernest-Hemingway/dp/068... or see his lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYJJlnyDpps). When the population is limited by scarce natural resources and the technology to alleviate the scarcity does not exist (or is forbidden in the case of San Francisco), then virtue is vice and vice is virtue. For example, disease increases mortality, leading to increased average incomes, so he argues that the dirty Europeans had higher average incomes than clean Japanese.
> eating out western-style

There's your problem, LOL.
Only for built-in elisp, as part of the build process. User configuration (including packages) is reloaded from scratch on each start.
Wall prices don't matter at all, it's all about real estate space. Actually at a big Co I was working at they took out the walls to fit more people.
>After interviewing everyone from a professional juggler to a building surveyor who worked out of a garden shed, Holliss found some common disadvantages and negative impacts: mental health suffered (anxiety, stress, depression), isolation was rife (not being in a team), and it was hard to have self-discipline (proximity of the fridge and biscuit tin; not enough exercise; difficulty in setting boundaries between work and life).

My working from home experience has been the complete opposite. In fact, these tend to be "negative impacts" I've experienced in open-office environments.
Sort of.

If it's a liability to say nasty stuff about the employer and most of the ex-ones throw some heat the nearest possible conclusion is that the truth tends to bow to statements that are observed as outdated and controversial by present employees.

It just can't be a smear campaign against just that one company.
American Employers Are Hung Up on Hiring PhDs
Should we prosecute a shopkeeper who sells alcohol to an adult knowing that adult is buying it for someone underage?

Do we prosecute bartenders who serve alcohol to people who are drunk and they know are going to drive home?

Yes we do.

Stupid laws aren't always stupid.
It cripples the economy overall.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/opinion/housing-regulatio...
Off topic question- but this is always something that interested me: do you have any blatant examples of a high level politician solely choosing a product to accommodate a donor?
Ask HN: What’s the API you can’t live without?
I’m looking into different uses of 3rd party APIs that you use to replicate your data locally and how companies use the data. These are the ones we keep syncs of internally:

- Shopify - lowlimits, inconsistent schema
- Recurly - pretty easy to use overall
- Facebook - easy once you get into it
- Sendgrid - nice API
It's mostly like that with telecom providers too, where there is not a lot of competition between the big players.
Well, this video and universal basic income in general, for one: https://www.thenation.com/article/a-basic-income-would-upend...

It is true that you can find conservative thinkers who have been in favor of UBI, but it is not a generally-conservative idea right now. The general conservative idea remains to try to "get government out of the way" of the economy and let the free market provide people with jobs. I don't see conservative sites talking about UBI in positive ways; I see it as a generally liberal idea where one of the arguments the liberals are using is that some conservative leaders have written about it positively in the past. (Which is a valid enough argument.) "Nobody" "knew" that certain conservative thinkers had written positively about UBI until it was picked up as a liberal, left-wing idea and somebody found those arguments.

(Note I am merely mentioning certain arguments, not making them.)

The Koch foundation has also been fairly vigorously anti-Trump: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/koch-broth... , including opposition to the immigration restrictions from certain mainly-Muslim contries, a relatively liberal perspective. Whether or not you consider some of the other mentioned positions "conservative" starts getting down into some weeds. (i.e. "Is Trump conservative, and is opposing Trump therefore anti-conservative?" is something you could write a lengthy essay on that would largely come down to "it depends on which definition of conservative you're using", and would really be more a springboard for examining the relevant definitions and how they differ.)

I'm not saying they aren't often in the position of opposing liberalism (which I think may be more accurate than "being conservative"... there are more than two sides to the world), but it's not 100%, either. It's more complicated.

Nor am I particularly defending them here, either. I'm not a huge fan either, just for different reasons than most people here. Again, going back to "there's more than two sides in the world".
I have a bachelors and Masters (2013, with Non Linear Dynamics as MS thesis) in Physics. Have always loved the field and the mathematical rigor involved. However, chose a strategic consultant job as the pay was very lucrative. Got disillusioned in a year and pursued a masters in CS/AI and worked after for an year in ML. Started a company and got acquihired into an engineering managerial role after.

Looking back perhaps one major regret I have is how far and fast I am moving away from fundamental sciences. I don’t think I can leave the bay area or coding anytime soon, but nonetheless, I have started to look out for ways to stay involved with the world of physics in as many ways possible

(OP here)
Quite amazed to see the number of physicists here and it is very heartening to see so many of you doing so well in such a wide variety of fields. Especially since during my college days physics was considered to be a slightly dangerous choice from a job/career growth perspective
In light of all the controversy that's being discussed here, what should I install today on my phone if I care about security?
There are other violent and hateful separatist groups based on race, that are non-white.

I wonder, will these groups be removed as well?
Yep, just like....wait for it....UCSD Pascal.
Every time this topic comes up there are a bunch of HN people saying open-plan is "clearly the worst" and that they want cubicles back. Note: this is hardly scientific. It's just your personal anecdote, ok, you don't like being around many other people and would prefer a cubicle or private office. That's fine.

However, don't discount the fact that other people exist that, gasp, actually like open-plan offices. Like myself! I'm one of those more sociable engineer types and I love the open plan bullpen at my current company, I love the bantering and conversations we have there, and I love that due to our social nature we have built a really cohesive TEAM that likes each other and supports each other. The atmosphere, friendliness, and fun, simply wouldn't be as great if we were all in cubicles or separate offices.

So now you have my anecdote too, which is of course not science. But I know there are plenty of others like me (unless I'm some sort of engineer unique snowflake out of the millions out there, which seems unlikely).

Instead of simply condemning "open-plan" as the "worst," why not try and understand why it works and helps some people and teams and why some others don't seem to like it. Maybe it's personality dependent, maybe it depends on the exact size of the open-plan area, there are hundreds of other factors that could make a difference here.
I have a dollar that says all platform difference issues will be solved by just doing whatever POSIX does and expecting the host OS to figure it out if it isn't already POSIX. Whenever you try to abstract away arbitrarily different implementations while retaining their non-common functionality you either end up reimplementing one of them and expecting the others to work around it, or you end up forcing the programmer to bypass the abstraction anyway and implement logic for each implementation.
There was another discussion here 10 months ago after Zach Holman's post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17181046

Sort of a summarization of most of the ideas here is:

* for clear instants like a system log UTC makes sense

* for times in the past (far enough in the past that you know your current TZ rules are correct) UTC makes sense.

* for the immediate past (near enough where your rules might not be correct) you might want to store zone as well.

For all cases of times in the past, remember that you're trying to record an instant. An exact unambiguous point in time that is the same irrespective of who is looking at it or where they are. For this UTC makes sense - people who see that instant converted to their local timezone are noting what their clocks would have shown at that instant, but everyone who will ever see it is always referencing the same instant.

FUTURE times are very different. There are times at which you want to reference a future instant, at which point you can just use UTC, but most often what you really have is "this is what I expect to see on my wall clock when this thing happens". That is a very different beast, because nobody knows what the timezone rules or geopolitical situation will be when that thing does happen.

You need to recognize the use cases where what you mean is " I expect to see XX:YY:ZZ on my wall clock when this happens" and just record that information as is, including as much information as you can about that wall clock - possibly which timezone it (currently) uses, where it is (in case the timezone itself changes) and then convert to an instant at the last possible moment, or keep updating your instant based on changing rules.
> This "colour" means colour charge.

Color charge is essentially as charge. I.e. instead of having +/- you have A/B/C. Except you also have Anti A/B/C.
No, this is a really bad attitude. I cannot stop them from selling out or doing whatever they will, but it is probably a good thing for people to "chastise" or "shame" people for selling out to activities that bring absolutely no net positive value to the world (and in many cases very much a net negative). Same goes for working in fintech and stuff like that.

Plus, the parent never even "shamed" anyone, they just said it makes them sad that a person they admired is doing SEO of all things.
MIT: Sand man – models of sand and granular flow
> Also, every time humans try to "share and share alike" like this -- socialism, communism, etc -- it winds up going bad places.

How do you reconcile that with the quite successful Scandinavian (and to a lesser extent Canadian and other) examples of quite left/socialist leaning societies?

I hear this argument ("It just doesn't work!") quite often but it sounds to me to be just parroting far-right propaganda, and selectively looking at evidence that supports that line of thinking (eg russia/china which have a lot of issues that aren't really tied to the left/right spectrum).

[edit] I actually like the reasonable approach you're taking in the rest of your comment :) I'm just picking at that one statement as I see it fairly often and really have a hard time understanding it.
As someone on the left and someone who has actively participated in multiple socialist parties in the US for years, the opposition to UBI from the left (DemSocs, Marxist-Leninists, various flavors of anarchists) is because we see it as a way for the ruling class to gut social programs instead of supplement them. The idea of "guaranteed income" argued for by people like MLK was a way to abolish poverty forever.

Here's some MLK quotes on it from his book Where Do We Go From Here: https://medium.com/basic-income/mlk-on-guaranteed-income-bfd...
> I think it amounts to rich people imagining they can cut a small check and make poor people shut up and go away rather than giving them real rights

This reminds me of the dystopian option in Manna http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Do the 400k+ engineers at Google still work in open office elbow to elbow?
Yep, Tor catches this even now.
Thanks for mentioning this. I came across this page which discusses the theory and practice of timezone databases. https://data.iana.org/time-zones/theory.html
AS/400 TIMI comes to mind, and CLR as well.
Are you saying that you want find a business model with potential that is being fudged by the silicon valley slackers, who only care about work life balance and spending quality time with friends and families, and try to get that built in Taiwan where you can overwork and exploit desperate workers. Talking like a true visionary.
you can. Just add more arrows.
Sorry guys. Between the CEO's doing whatever he did to lose the trust of the CTO (whose credibility this whole thing rests on), and the CTO having zero regard for his customers and having the gall to tell us to install a new OS ourselves for our own safety after we paid him to offload the trouble of handling security for us, you get no more of my business.

Obviously I'm an angry customer. But I want to be careful about what I post. So I'll add that I'm open to being shown that I'm wrong about any part of this.
I find monthly billing of usage based services to be very user unfriendly:

* I pay for 100,000 queries even though I made only 50,000.

* I need to upgrade as soon as my usage goes over the plan limit. And then, I need to remember to downgrade.

Be fair, charge by usage.
Visa/Mastercard have a rule that you can't charge extra for using a credit card. If you find a business doing so you can report them and they will get the credit card facilities yanked.

But you can always offer a discount for cash. So some places do this to get around that rule.

If you're buying in cash you can try ask for a discount. If you're not asking you will get charged the same price they can't offer it out of the blue.
Probably.

The rich live in San Francisco, the wealthy live in Napa Valley / Sonoma County. Can't fit a helipad, two tennis courts, putting green, and an olympic size swimming pool downtown.
I've flipped through it before, but didn't remember it being very enlightening (note that I didn't read the full thing and do all the excercises). I'll have to give it another shot. Thanks for the tip!
No. design patents only last 15 years. Coke's bottle design I believe is protected under trade dress/mark, which allows Coke's unique design to be protected in perpetuity.

https://www.upcounsel.com/trade-dress:

"When deciding whether to obtain a trade dress trademark, a design patent, or both, you should first consider what each protects:

Design patent - protects the design of a product giving you exclusivity over the design for a certain period. Even if you don't manufacture or sell the product, you are still protected by a design patent.
Trade dress - protects your investment in marketing and advertising where you have created a particular image for your product, and consumers exclusively associate that image with your product.
As design patents and trade dress protect different things, the requirements are different for both:

Design patent - the design firstly has to be new and cannot be a variation of a design that already exists. The design must also be ornamental in nature, rather than purely functional. That said, it can have some functionality.
Trade dress - a trade dress must be something that is distinctive and connects the consumer to the product, i.e. the consumer instantly recognizes the source of the trade dress. Unlike a design patent, it cannot be functional in any way. Design features that have a function should be protected with a design patent."

Do note that all of Apple's 'trade dress' claims were thrown out because of their failure to meet "non-functionality"/ornamental requirement.
The OP just said it would be hard to do that query (regardless of performance) and I'm saying it's totally capable.
At $50k a Year, the Road to Yale Starts at Age 5
If that is practical to use, it would open an entire new field of applications. Constrained devices currently consume roughly 50 times that much during transmission on 802.15.4 or BLE. While there are sensors who are used for 10 years on a coincell, they achive this by spending most of their lifetime in deepsleep at under 1uA with disabled transceivers.
For the EU, a reform should be more than enough. Get us back to a single market and expand that to include the US.

For the UK, if the genocides, empire building etc isn't enough, this won't matter either.
MIR, Raduga (mostly children's fiction), Progress (popular science, if I remember correctly) - these publishers were really cheap in 80s and 90s India, compared to similar books in terms of content, printing and binding. Perhaps that's why they were such a favourite. I used to frequent a bookstore solely devoted to these called Vostok. That bookstore is long gone.

I still have many of these, some gifted by relatives, in my shelves today.

These days, at book fairs and on sites like OLX, certain unscrupulous sellers have taken to selling whatever such Soviet hardbacks they can find at astronomical prices. To be fair to them, it's a supply and demand problem.
Do you think (HN) that this incentive boost will mean more people who're working on fringe risky ideas will get the energy and persistence to keep going? Will we see a bump in 10 or so years of innovations coming from people who would have otherwise given up (had this award not been given)? Hard to measure of course, but what's your hunch?
No time, busy reinventing VMs.
Even the people who do the hard engineering? In most companies the number of people who do that work is pretty small.
I don't see how the countdown timer can fail to reach zero when the conference starts, if we have calculated the correct number of seconds between now and the conference, and do not change the conference time based on whether or not daylight savings time is canceled, to preserve it apparent local time.

If we decide that the conference's start may be a moving target based on changing DST rules, then our coutdown timer cannot smoothly count down. At every tick, it has to evaluate the amount of time left to the conference start, and show that. The conference start's local time is always converted to UTC based on the current rules; when the rules change, it jumps by one hour and so the countdown timer adjusts itself at the next tick to show an extra hour.

You can't smoothly count-down toward something that starts at X or at X + 1h, and you don't know which until later.
Depends on the company size and how long they have been around. Based on experience, I will always ask the following at a smaller company:

Have you ever been close to missing payroll?

Depending on the answer, make sure to find out when was the last time they missed.

It is very stressful to work at a place that has cash flow issues. They may very well be honest that they are on the cusp of big deals and/or funding. But wouldn't you want to know if there are short term issues before you start?
A quick update! The podcast has moved to its final home at https://brex.com/thefoundry

We also have a new episode up with Warby Parker CFO Steve Miller — and an associated insight thread at https://twitter.com/brexthefoundry/status/111061791165413785...
Check out the new Razer Blade 15, good aluminium build, battery life & keyboard(save for shift key position).
> assuming 7% growth

That's a big assumption, and doesn't take into account the reduced spending power (cost inflation) during that time.