skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many years ago I was working for a small consulting firm and had a stretch of time with a lot of overtime; aka "crunch time". Since these were billable hours, time was tracked daily, even if they weren't all actually billed. The tracked hours varied over the ~6 month span, but ranged from 55 hours a week to 93 for one week. Of course not 100% of the time was spent on actual work but it was pretty close.

The 93 hour week was pretty much: go to work, eat meals at desk, go home, work from home until bed time, go to sleep, then repeat. But in general weird things happened during that time, probably due to a combination of stress and unhealthy habits. For example:

- I've never been a morning person and struggled to wake up before 9 all my life. During this time I woke up early to meet with the client early in the morning. After some time I'd habitually wake up 15 minutes before 6, which was when my alarm was set at. Also due to lack of sleep I'd always be pissed that I was missing out on 15 minutes of sleep too.

- I was sleep deprived but didn't feel sleepy at all during the day. Granted I did consume a lot of coffee, but still. Adrenaline?

- Got drunk really easily. Part of client facing work is drinks with clients every so often. I used to be able to drink 4-5 beers and not show much effect externally. Towards the end of this period 1-2 drinks and I'd be slurring.

- Perversely, things were often times "fun". The team got really close to each other and we actually looked forward to going to the client office to do "battle".

Definitely not sustainable nor healthy. I got pats on the back and some token raises / bonuses but I've since learned that going above and beyond like this is not worth it. The hit to mental and physical health is just not worth the small amount of extra money and (possibly) career advancement.
That's like saying every YAML or JSON dialect is a new language. Sure, but not a full-fledged "programming language". QML is quite nice to work with, and well suited to the problem at hand.
I am not familiar with the research, and don't have time to review it right now. However, it seems like common sense to me that there are some factors beyond intelligence that matter such as motivation, interpersonal skills and character traits.
"If it bleeds, it leads" has been a common refrain for TV news programs from decades ago. It's not new, although the mediums have shifted.
There's one thing here that I don't really get here. Take a look at this paragraph, on page 18:

> There are two primary threats to the validity of our interpretation of the results above. [...] A second possibility is that young people’s responses are reflecting social desirability bias; that they are providing responses that they believe will be viewed as positively by others (e.g. that they know various mathematics concepts, that they work hard at school etc). Both of these possibilities could lead to a spurious correlation between our bullshit index and the various other psychological traits investigated in the previous sub-section.

Huh?? What on earth does "bullshit" mean if not, y'know, giving socially-desirable answers rather than correct ones? (I mean, that's basically roughly how Frankfurt defined it.) Social desirability bias isn't a separate thing interfering with your measurement of bullshit; social desirability bias is bullshit (or rather, a cause of it).

I am quite confused as to how the authors are conceptualizing "bullshit" if their notion of it apparently excludes social desirability bias as a separate thing. That seems to me to be quite different from what anyone else means. I think some explanation is really required here.
Internal referrals are great. The problem is that, if you increase the fee too much, it's going to get harder and harder for employees to prioritize referring someone they know would be a great fit for a position (and get a nice spiff in the process) versus randomly referring people they vaguely know on the off-chance they'll get a multi-$K payout.
This isn't really evidence at all, but it's well known that as people age, it becomes more difficult to new memories, than it is to keep old ones[1], which is why you regularly get old people mixing up their current loved ones with old, dead people; and why "you can't teach an old dog new tricks".

If the passage of time in the human experiences is largely a function of the memories we make. It's not at all surprising that things seem to go faster as we age.

[1] There's common-sense explaination for this, but I don't think the exact mechanism is understood. It is widely observed though.
The Fortnite Skin Creator
and a spot of bicarb. It means you don't have to use as much sugar to make it palatable.
Protect your Wordpress wp-config.php file against pirates
Above average vs most in the eorld are not same levels of outliers.
Ask HN: What’s the important problem you want to solve using computer science?
As technologists, we are among the privileged where we can push human creativity to the next level.
Apart from day to day job, I am interested in the problems you want to pursue in your life time using your skills
I left Accenture upset by a number of the practices that I saw, even though I largely worked with very good people.

I also was definitely overreacting when I wrote the above, as I am currently dealing with an issue with an overseas contracting team at the moment, and used the above comment to blow off some steam. I apologize for the vitriol.

Monte Ray is the new facility they were building when I left. I'm happy to hear it might actually be a good building.

When I left, it was explained to me that on Monday mornings, many of the Mexican development team were driven via school bus over the border to work in the SouthWest, and that as a result, American hiring was going to be at least temporarily frozen, and that they would be responsible solely for WPF applications.

The line about un-airconditioned buildings and notepad is how the office we were working with in India was described to me by the manager in charge of that team on my project.

I thought, given the similarities of those two stories, that conditions would therefore be similar to the Mexican office.

I apologize for the mistake, and am happy to hear that I am wrong. Apologies for the incorrect comment.
At what point does the difference in weight become entirely irrelevant? Is a 3lb laptop vs a 2lb laptop even within the margin of error of how heavy a backpack feels? That's gotta be close to the weight difference of whether or not I had lunch a given day.
Go monkeys go. Even title make me laugh.
One of the things that we sacrificed was what today we would call "end-user programmability" but which should really just be called "using a personal computer." Hypercard was a UI builder, a way for regular people to program beyond the strict limits of the software given to them, and a hypermedia platform whose "applications" could be easily distributed. To do most of the things that Hypercard could do on a personal computing system of the early 90s on a system today requires someone to learn a full fledged programming language
How the NYT uses Slack to send out news push notifications
I assume you're getting downvoted due to the Apple advocacy in your second paragraph, and hopefully not for your first paragraph. I entirely agree with that. I wish I didn't have to be cynical about things like this, but I just don't see the market for this device, and when it comes to social-network-like things, you need a large market for network effects to kick in.
It bricks the device. See these previous discussions.

[1]: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dnsop/WCVv57IizUSjNb2R...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19170671
Hi there Calvin :) any chance we could get some actual data of what people are using? thanks!
Amazon was neutral?
The answer is part of the first link in the article (37 hours).
Jesus, you would think a billion dollar company would give a shit about it's customers.
I empathize, it's hard realizing that bureaucracy is stronger than you are, even tho you're so much smarter and ethically stronger than all of it's constituents (and that your plan is dead simple `do what's right, no qa'). Burn'em office buildings up is what i say. And become some kind of handcraftsman (farmer, construction, mechanics, convenience X). I'm no joke :) The core of the problem here is "management" not "industry".
Maybe HN is something he browse during the evening to relax?
It sounds basically the same as the French technique of confit (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confit).
>Isn't the answer... most industries? My understanding is that large companies in all domains are heavily populated with executives and managers who came straight out of business school and into a leadership position.

That's really not true. No one goes from MBA to a CxO leadership position at a large corporation. To pick 3 random examples:

CEO of McDonalds managed one back in 1993 and was the CEO of two other fast food restaurants

CEO of Caterpillar started in 1980 out of college at a company Caterpillar eventually bought.

CEO of CVS started out as a pharmacist at a drug store in that was acquired by CVS in 1990.

Someone in a leadership position typically will have spent decades serving in roles with increasing responsibility in their industry.
Please define what you mean by "hit piece." Are you simply saying this is unfairly negative or are you implying something more nefarious?
Step 1: Launch company to monetize open source hoping to get rich in IPO.

Step 2: Be shocked when Amazon uses your open licenses exactly how they're allowed to

Step 3: Write angry letter about Amazon monetizing the project you were trying to monetize.

Open source isn't meant to be a get-rich quick scheme for founders to generate cheap buzz off their 'free' project. It's literally designed to be forked and used in whatever way the user/developer sees fit. You can't just unrealistically hope that a large company won't exploit it in whatever way they can.
Any statement of the form "[Racial identifier] men/women/people are [criticizing adjective]" is per se racist.

If one wants to argue that wide-ranging systemic racism is worse than incidental one-off racist comments, I totally get that and I'm inclined to agree. But trying to redefine "racism" to exclude racism against a certain group is not acceptable.

1984 was a cautionary tale, not a how-to guide. If a proposed method of political argument requires redefining the English language, that should give one pause.
> 1) I want to write a GUI code once

> 2.1) I want to ship something that looks the same on Windows / Linux / MacOS

> 3.1) I want to ship a small and efficient binary

well, with Qt I write my code once, which looks the same on windows / linux / osx / $nicheos and the result is fairly performant - I've got tables with tens of thousands of elements which update at rates greater than 100hz and the UI does not bat an eye. I'm not even using the GPU-based scene graph (QtQuick) but instead uses the CPU-based raster engine. Here's the software I'm developing : https://github.com/OSSIA/score/

So what is missing ? For what it is, the binary is relatively small (and I also link against LLVM and a few other large libraries, and am not even doing global static linking + LTO...).
Does this help? https://outline.com/XNLYLg
I ordered one from Amazon...It is surprisingly serviceable
We are in a pocket of high order/ low entropy (not high entropy).
I see. TIL and thank you!
> Like Bill Gates licensing MS Basic before he had written it.

That's actually an interesting case because, although he didn't have MS BASIC at that point, he knew he'd be able to deliver it by the time he needed it. So, was he really faking it?
What if one's mind is racist/xenophobic?
can confirm. It took me a long time to confront my own suspicion that the so called tenured faculty around me are not as technically inclined as you'd think. Most of the line work is done by the grad students. Meanwhile the faculty plays a different game, maintaining an image, keeping the money in the wheel, "staying in the game." The primary skill of a tenured faculty is salesmanship, the most valued trait of a grad student is docileness.
So that's what the letters were for on phone keyboards.
Mach2: Turn on undocumented Windows 10 features and experiments
Amazon warehouse tracking auto fires people without supervisor involvement
Not terribly impressive when you phrase it like that. I can make a machine that shakes up a bunch of words. But then if I pick out the words to make a poem I haven't invented a poem-writing machine
>but that's also all a plane needs to do

Quite the opposite, there are common scenarios when the plane needs to deviate from pre-programmed course or otherwise can't rely just on an autopilot. All of them are handled either by higher-level automation (eg. ILS for landing), or by pilots themselves. Unsurprisingly the hand-over is signaled similarly to what Tesla does - audible and tactile cues for the pilots. A pilot can also initiate take over at any time by the way of flight control inputs. Lastly, regardless whichever automation is active, the pilot in charge is held both morally and legally responsible for the airplane and passengers or cargo, and expected to turn off the the automation when proper.

All in all Tesla's "Autopilot" already does more than an autopilot does. And while I'm somewhat pessimistic on how quickly it can become better than humans both statistically and also in rare scenarios, there is constant progress by all major vendors.

Common scenarios for an autopilot to be disconnected, or to initiate handover:

- collisions avoidance; the air corridors are busy places, and maneuvering to maintain safe distance from other planes is expected

- take-off and landing, though those can be performed by higher level automation

- pattern holding around the air-port, where course change is frequent

- re-routing to avoid severe weather or handle emergencies

- handling major turbulences (autopilots have limited maximum rate of change for safety reasons)

- loss of instrumentation, due to icing, foreign object ingestion, malfunctions; a common setup is "2 out of 3 sensors need to be in agreement"

As you can see, the equivalents of some of those scenarios are already handled pretty well by self-driving cars, like self-parking, or collision avoidance.
> Redis, maker of a popular database management tool, changed its licensing terms to prevent AWS from offering Redis functions ... When someone subscribes to the original Redis via the AWS cloud, Redis gets the fees. When someone uses AWS’s own “Redis service,” AWS gets the money.

Naive question: Why not change the license so cloud providers have to cut a % of those fees with Redis?
> I'm pretty sure I cannot name the company

So I'm assuming it's Monsanto, then
The equivalent of Ctrl-w in emacs is Ctrl-Backspace. It's more common to want to delete the word you just typed instead of the word to the right of the cursor.
Was it really that bad? The only time I had it fail computer-side was when I noticed a staple on the magnet. The charger itself is shit, but that's a problem with Apple's shitty wire shielding and I'm sure their USB-C charger will also split open, fray, and break every 2 years of regular use.
Most people doing weekend trips don't suddenly abandon their day to day eating habits and start eating jars of peanut butter and mayonnaise.

ADDED: That wasn't intended as snark but my observation is that most people on weekend dayhike trips or even multi-day backpacks maintain fairly conventional eating habits even if they're not energy/weight optimal. I certainly do.
Please explain why you feel that should be the case; a statement is not an argument.
Litigious food makes my stomach turn.

There's plenty of incentives in the market to innovate in the GMO space without legal protections, as there have been for thousands of years. Absent those protections, GMO development would probably see more cooperation innovation without hurting the speed of innovation.

Regional protections for product labeling make a lot more sense (vidalia onions...) and improve competition while still benefiting large growers.
They are in Houston and Dallas, in the proper industry as SW dev.
Studying math is the best way to improve your logical thinking abilities.
I learned how to learn way before graduating.

The waste was close to total, but this is only obvious in hindsight. Given the information I had at the time my choices were rational.
Metabase raises a Series A
What would the equivalent of the Cloud to Butt extension for "AI" be? I get annoyed every time I see this word now and I'd like to alleviate that.
The Happiest Cats on Earth
Jacques Herbrand (2006)
Or, have painting robots reproduce images generated from a neural network, then feed those images back into the neural network. Rinse and repeat. I imagine the results would be similar to running a sentence through Google Translate over and over again.
The nanodegree will never be the deciding factor when I consider granting an interview. At best it's a minor positive signal, but I'd certainly never consider it a negative signal. I know people who do and I think they're gatekeeping.

If the mention of the nanodegree fits into a broader narrative corroborated by other parts of the resume that this person is a self-learner, then I consider it favorably. I think the way I would describe it is that the nanodegree says this person "tried," but I need to see separate evidence that this person internalized the material.
> I've done GFX programming for years and scene graphs are almost never the right answer.

Interesting, why would you say that ? I saw a bunch of projects go from "more-or-less smooth at 1080p" to "buttery 120fps smooth at 4k" by migrating to UI toolkits with a scenegraph architecture.
I absolutely love this project.
If you can bill $200 per hour for 75 hours a week for a year, though, maybe you'd be willing to do that for a year or so just in order to never have to do it, or any other work, ever again.

Of course, if the client actually has to pay $200 per hour you're present, it's exceedingly likely that the overtime culture will stop overnight. It's obvious that it isn't working already, once the company actually pays for it as well, it is bound to stop.
I don't understand this trend of outraging at incompetent merchants as if they've caused anything more than a minor inconvenience - talking about "my money" and going so far as to claim you were "defrauded" [0] - as opposed to simply following your card's dispute process which will predictably set the situation right. They sound a little less friendly in Canada, but seem to have the same shape - dispute the charge, receive a new card, some months later receive a closure letter that you scan for your records, done.

I can see it being stressful the first time if you aren't aware how it works, which is why I'm writing this comment. But after going through it, it should be fairly clear that this is just a routine part of the payments system. Hearing "take it up with your bank" from a merchant's customer service is actually a nice thing - it means you don't have to waste more time trying to straighten things out with them directly.

The process is definitely an annoying artifact of basing a payments system on 23 digit (76 bit) widely-shared-secrets. But keep in mind the whole thing is actually friendlier than an irreversible (eg Bitcoin) or even worse an assumed-to-be-foolproof system would be, and I say that as a fan of bearer instruments.

[0] McDonalds is the party that was defrauded.
Election Meddling: Facebook Removes Populist Pages Days Before Spanish Election
Joining your camp. I go to the grocery to buy food, not cutesy-pootsy marketing kitsch that somehow turns a chore into an "experience". And if the store does stupid stuff to make an identical list of items take longer to buy and transport back to my home than it took before, it is adding time cost to the money cost, while also making the store seem more crowded. It is reducing the value of me going there in the first place.

One thing that really irritates me is "lifestyle aisles". I do not organize my shopping list by whether the food is "ethnic" or "health-conscious". To me, hoisin sauce is not "Asian foods"; it is a condiment. It's the same as Worcestershire sauce, barbecue sauce, ketchup, or mustard. Canned frijoles negros are exactly the same as canned black beans, so why are they in different aisles? If I want Cap'n Crunch and also a gluten-free hippy cereal with a happy gorilla on the box, they should both be in the same aisle. Put the lo mein next to the spaghetti, and the golden syrup next to the sugar, and the matzoh next to the Wasa. I shouldn't have to bounce between different random aisles to complete a shopping list organized by the type of food, rather than by the type of person who typically eats it.
it's very easy to realize how it can damage or ruin a project. it reveals once you need to implement a big feature to address some new business needs that can be critical for the company to survive. you have large code base and you should not break something. the clock is ticking, the rivals don't sleep, the market doesn't wait.

or you can just waste all the time firefighting with consequences of bad software.

it's not the only factor, but it can matter. the majority of companies i worked suffer from this. what really mitigates the problem is that competitors have the same problem on average.
Or where an AI can tell if they're playing a human or a bot.
Because then AWS would fork from a version of redis with a more permissive license and only support a subset of functionality moving forward.
MongoDB tried that and got pounded by the community
This issue here is with new "Open Source" software companies earning revenue through hosting as opposed to simply providing support / custom feature development / etc.

It creates a conflict of interest when others want to host it, since it takes their revenue away. However, in my opinion anyone should be able to compete on hosting/support.

This revenue goes back into funding development, but places restrictions on how the software can be used - making it "Open Sourced, Closed Service Based Hosting" or something like that. Inotherwords, we need a new name for this type of software.

My question is - if AWS simply made it easy to spin up an elastic search cluster, but didn't offer a specific API/Service - whats the difference here? Very little.
This isn't really true. The wholesale networks are operating at speeds that make this kind of sniffing impractical. I'm not saying they don't ever siphon traffic for LEO or other reasons, but not for privacy-violating/ad-targeting reasons. DO probably is running 40gbps alone with each transit provider, plus sending traffic over peering circuits, so it's just way less practical.

So what you are suggesting isn't actually true, and it's hardly hypothetically even possible.
> we were running 10 AWS servers - to serve a mostly static website and handle a few hundred REST API calls each day.

You could do taht with 2 instances and dropwizard (https://www.dropwizard.io/1.3.9/docs/)
Ask HN: What do to about a boss who assigns the same task to multiple people?
This isn't a problem that I'm having personally, but I'm getting this complaint from my coworker (about our mutual boss) and my girlfriend (about her boss).

They say that the bosses will assign them some task, then never follow up on it. But when they get to actually completing the task, they find that the boss has assigned it to someone else, or finished it themselves.

Assuming that my coworker and girlfriend aren't lazy or incompetent and are acting in good faith, what might be the cause of the managers behaving this way, and how can they manage the situation for less frustration?