skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What most enterprises think is DevOps is different from what dsr_ wrote.

They have admins that maintain their pool of servers.

They have developers that are fluent in the stack of their application.

They decide they need to have some of that cloud, containers, CI/CD stuff.

Turns out they need people who can write code that builds their programs, tests their programs, packages their programs, provisions cloud infrastructure, sets up that infrastructure, deploys the packaged program on their infrastructure and finally monitors its health and performance.

Most of their admins say they are not programmers, so it's not their job.

Most of their programmers say they are there to write Java/C#/Python/JS, so it's not their job either.

They find some people who don't mind learning all these things and call them their DevOps team.

In a not perfect, but generally just world this team disseminates their knowledge across both programmers and admins, making both aware of each other. Programmers now think about the infrastructure they need, admins now think about the workloads their infrastructure runs.

In an unjust world, you end up with three silos. Programmers say their code compiles on their machine, admins say they have installed the new server, devops frantically try to build some pipeline that deploys that code on that server.
I think whether or not it was started as a joke is somewhat irrelevant now that over 4K people have signed up. It seems likely that at least of few those people will actually try to show up.

https://www.facebook.com/events/area-51-groom-lake/raid-area...
That mostly describes the popular use of the phrase "adults in the room" but the OP is using adult more as of an
omniscient mentor.
I watched a great series once on generating ~prime numbers which explained how to use number theory to check a randomly generated number for a probability of being prime. By using a bunch of weird rules, you can be ~99% sure it's prime without having to do huge computations.
> had no clue WTF was going on

Regarding the parent issue and disregarding companies for a moment.

Not sure what you mean exactly by having no clue. You mean things like the family finances / jobs / schools stuff or parenting rules or what to do with illnesses and stuff like that?

Because I think saying nobody has a clue is a bit harsh. Some people are indeed more organized and have a better grasp on their plans and outlooks. I wouldn't say my parents had "no clue" or could have afforded to have no clue about what was going on.

I often hear this and it's probably meant as some sort of encouragement or anti-impostor syndrome talk, but it can also backfire. There is indeed value in thinking about how your family is faring, whether the finances are working out, whether you should move for a better job. It would be foolish to say nobody has any clue, so doing anything without thinking about it will be just as good.
Probably cheaper than TV/mail advertising per-customer-acquisition or per-additional-dollar-o-profit.
I think they are best understood as the modern equivalent of circa 2000 era virtue signalling "I don't watch TV, we don't even have one in our house". Except now people do it online on HN because their IRL friends are sick of hearing them talk about it.
It seems to me that the ability to refuel at home is a good thing for rural drivers. Maybe they don’t buy Teslas, but this is a massive advantage when you don’t live near infrastructure. Autonomy will come last to rural areas, though. Maybe especially in California where they do really weird things with their rural roads.
This is one of those things that has been mentioned, used and worn out so much that you feel much cooler when you don't acknowledge it.
Shame it didn't happen sooner. Much much sooner.
Let's ignore the physical catastrophe of a cable at 380,000+ km long dislodging and becoming either locked in earth orbit or crashing into earth.

Let's ignore that.

What if the cable attached to the moon and then locking the other end to earth orbit alters the month's orbit? There was some stuff I read that the moon doesn't neccesarily orbit the earth. It's the earth and moon orbit each other. Essentially our orbit is significantly affected by our moon compared to other planets and their moons. We have a ton of wildlife that depends on the current orbit pattern. Wouldn't this cable greatly alter said orbit?

Plus, 380,000km worth of material? Along with they just hand wave that all failure will happen on the moon side and never affect earth... um okay? Because of testing?

This seems more like a joke paper in all honesty. Kind of like the paper based on Silicon valley where they dev an algorithm to find out how long it would take to give an audience handjobs. d2f ratio
I've heard that being successful in an O-1 visa application can be very location dependent. So you can be better off applying somewhere far away, rather than a convenient office.

Is this something your office sees much of?
Here's my pie-in-the-sky concept for an Etsy reboot:

1. Member-owned. There are so many details, but the idea is to align the company directly with the values of the members.

2. Grow by IRL social graph, with people inviting and vouching for new members. You can't sign up from the web, only from in-person contacts. Probably hardware-backed (Yubikey or whatever). Web-of-Trust... handwave!

3. Open business. Radical openness and honesty as in "Honest Business: A Superior Strategy for Starting and Managing Your Own Business" by Salli Rasberry & Michael Phillips https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22105625-honest-business

4. Minimum prices, high. Like a baseline of US$150. I'm seriously. The #1 problem most Etsy sellers have is they set their prices too low. The market should foster the idea in customers' heads that their purchases are deliberate economic decisions to support a given person IRL as an independent creative success. You also get a fantastic scarf or whatever.

5. Straight-up handmade. No compromises. This is a showcase and marketplace for artisans and creators.

6. Explicit focus on the growth and success of the members. Things like organizing free classes on running a business, maybe tied in with SCORE ( https://www.score.org/ ) or something. I think there should be an option for members to have public goals and meters for themselves like e.g. Kickstarter. I'd also like to have "plans" available to outline the paths to certain levels of success. Like, Plan A "Comfortable life in the country, plus good health insurance." to Plan O "Be the next Oprah".

7. Along those lines, there should be specific help for IP: developing it and protecting it, and paths to automated production. If there's a demand for your style or product the market should help you fulfill it, as opposed to having third parties rip off your designs and order imitations from rapid-turn-around factories. This has to be harmonized with the idea that the primary market is strictly handmade only. You shouldn't be punished for making something so popular it's pirated. The modern automatic economy should be a service, not a competitor.

8. There should be a kind of graduation when a member becomes successful enough on their own that they don't need the marketplace anymore. I'm not sure of the details here because I don't mean that they should be kicked out or anything like that, but rather that, once you've "made it", your role should shift a bit to where you're helping others reach their success.

9. All-in-all, double-down on the idea that we're really creating a viable new economy here. Emphasize tracking the supply chains and try to ground them in ecological sources. Have explicit ratings and discussions of the sources for raw materials. People who live off grid should have some sort of extra oomph, like badges to display or something. Promote sustainable, or better yet regenerative, economy.
Office politics and work excellence are the same thing most of the time
Even a customer "should" know that Slack is no small matter.

I worked in a support role for a big company. We had one notorious customer who was prone to just racking equipment, not setting it up, and calling in priority 1 support cases to basically have us configure it for them with little to no data / would not do what we said. (this was their SOP, and they're also a huge company...)

We used Microsoft's messaging service at the time and I had no idea that IT had configured it to allow people outside our company to message us.

So as you might expect one day I'm working another customer's "real" network down priority 1 case and I get a frantic message from someone I didn't recognize asking a vague question as if we were in the middle of a conversation. I assume this is some sales guy I never met frantically messaging me (some sales guys knew me and handed my name out as I was friendly and I'd help them out if I had time). But then I can't find this guy in outlook and suddenly I realize.

So I mute my mic and announce to my cube mates "Guys... X company is instant messaging me ..." The response was hilarious, managers came running, some folks announced they were shutting off their laptops ... it was immediately clear that this was an untenable situation.

Fortunately the solution was right in front of me. In another conversation I had a sales VP in on a chat for the customer who had a "real" priority 1 case. I told him that I was receiving instant messages telling me I needed to stop helping his customer and go help X company. Granted I wasn't actually going to drop him and I phrased the FYI in a way that made that clear, but also let him know he had some competition for my attention / our focus on his customer's issue.

Suddenly we had a Sales VP as an ally breathing down ITs neck to shut off outside access to the support team's instant messaging.
This reminds me of a mayor of a Canadian town that trialed giving homeless people houses. At first he was skeptical that they should have nice houses, then later realized it didn't matter.

Why should they have granite countertops when I don't?

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-...
New Google and Facebook Inquiries
Hi Peter - Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions! I've got some UK related questions... I hope they are factual discussion-related enough :-)

In order to sponsor people in the UK, a company must designate an Authorising Officer (AO) (https://www.gov.uk/uk-visa-sponsorship-employers/sponsorship...). I'm under the impression that this person is mostly a figurehead that signs off on things because the UK needs someone at the company to hold responsible, but that an immigration law firm handles pretty much everything immigration related as Key Contact and Level 1 User. What are your thoughts on how much it matters who the AO is? Eg must they be a manager?

Secondly, there's ambiguity about whether the AO has to be a UK citizen. After reading a good bit online and speaking with an immigration law firm, I don't think this is the case. Do you know?

Next, there are transparency concerns about designating someone as an AO. From what I understand, they would be able to see salaries of other people in the UK and some company financials (but nothing major that's not already shared with the UK and available on websites). Do you know what concerning info is shared with an AO?

Lastly, I know Brexit in theory complicates getting things setup to sponsor people in the UK, but should that prevent a company from working through the process over the past 12 months and for the upcoming 12 months? I doubt things are at a screeching hault at the UK "Home Office".

Any thoughts are appreciated, thanks!
No need to downvote this comment. It is a legitimate numerical computation question and one that has interesting answers as evidenced by this sub-thread. Not everyone knows about how computers do floating point arithmetic, handles large ints, or otherwise.
Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow Are Moving to CC-by-SA 4.0
That comment got away from me in length, so to summarize:

I've been an add-on developer for Microsoft's competing product since the TAP (beta) program for OCS and part of a few organizations who used it as their only telephony/messaging product but people used that product differently.

As part of a project between the two TAP programs, I wrote a dashboard site that provided stats about the operation of the on-prem installation, mostly centered around telephony, but included a lot of information about who was "tagging users for status change alerts" (without details, just rolled-up), IM-only conversations (this was tricky) and stats about interruption with regard to user's status. My personal experience was that we communicated more frequently via IM and had fewer "missed connections" on Teams, resulting in fewer escalations to less convenient forms of communication (and less of a feeling of being ignored). It is my belief that this happened because Teams provided rich information about the status of the user (and also didn't keep IMs around so you didn't expect them to follow-up later if they didn't reply in a few minutes).

Unfortunately, I have no such insight into Slack's back-end, but anecdotally, I am interrupted far more through Slack than I was in Teams and my messages go unanswered far more often to the point that in Teams where I positively relied on status before sending a message, I don't even look at it in Slack because it doesn't help me to decide whether or not I'll be better off picking up the phone or e-mailing.
Hi Peter, thanks for doing this AMA!

Do you have any insights on whether getting an L1-A got more difficult with the current administration, and if/how the kind of documents/evidence needed for it changed recently?

I'm asking because I just got my L1-A renewal rejected (after having it successfully renewed 2 years ago), on the grounds of insufficient proof of my position being managerial. My I-94 expired and I don't have another visa, so I had to leave the US – and it's awful for my startup! Timing couldn't be worse.

I'm applying for a new L1-A, so any insights on my question above, or any advice on how to maximize my chance of getting it as quickly as possible, would be super welcome!
Just the irrationality and pre-determined nature of some of the decision-making. The process can feel like a shell game at times. That being said, I think that we understand now what USCIS wants now and are able to provide this and still get approvals even if we have to battle frequent and rough requests for evidence along the way.
We are planning to hire someone on h1b with priority date for green card as 12/22/2009. Do you think this person should be able to get green card with next 2-3 years ? Thanks for taking the question.
Yeah I'm not sure why the slack good / slack bad discussion warrants as much discussion as it does.

It's just a communication tool.
Either it works for you personally, or it does not. I don't think it deserves a weekly HN first page discussion though.
I'm pretty sure half the reason why they do it is to inconvenience/disturb the other customers there.
My advice:

1) Focus more on assisting your peers with their work. This doesn’t mean telling them what to do, but look for people who are struggling to keep their head above water on work that you know how to do well, and help them out of that place.

2) Let people win. Not when it’s important to you, but know when you’re in the “I’m right but this isn’t going to sink our project” place and let them have those wins. It will help take their “make sure that one stays in line” radar off you. Bonus points if you can make them feel like you learned something from them.

3) Quit. I don’t mean right away, but if you’re not generally enjoying your workplace, for ANY reason, or even for NO reason—quit. Some of this is basically like dating. When you don’t like someone, you just keep looking. There are more fish in the sea, as they say.

4) Remember that disagreements are fundamental to collaboration. There simply isn’t time to reach consensus on everything, even in a zero asshole environment. So teams are built on sparse networks of trust. There are likely a very small number of bottom lines that hold the org together. Everything else is a “nice to have”. Keep that in mind, and if you want to feel valued at a high level, you’re going to need to figure out what those bottom lines are, who is trusting who to watch them, and how you can help them long enough to become part of that trust network.

5) I heard a quote recently that I’ve been thinking a lot... Paraphrasing: “The master doesn’t convince anyone she knows the right way. She just works, and her work is flawless.” Just something to think about when you’ve got an assignment that doesn’t quite match what you think the ultimate strategic goal should be. You can still execute at a high level and feel good about that.
> One of the unfortunate realities about the housing crisis is that you need crappy shitholes if you want complete housing coverage

A more unfortunate reality about the housing crisis is the idea that we need crappy shitholes because wealthy elite want their own home prices ever higher out of reach from normal people.
Product-Minded Software Engineers
I played this game as a kid and usually ended up writing key bindings so I could directly control the tank. But, it was so fun to experiment with different strategies.

Thanks for reminding me of the name of the game because I loved it and could never remember what it was called.
I would really like to hear more from the author of these pages:

http://www.cobolgoldmine.com/

http://www.coboloncloud.com/
In order to deploy this successfully, the attacker would have to know that you used a random string...how would they know this without having access to the string itself?
US prices are a joke and are multiple times higher than in other places, e.g. Poland - you can get 50GB/month for 12$. Even better there is special promotion now and it's half of it for 6 months .. 6$/50GB.
On top of that this is not sth like 12-months contract and you can cancel it any time.

At the same time I am living in Bay Area paying close to 100$ to Comcast for landline connection because my discount promotion has expired and AT&T is not providing service to my address.

https://www.play.pl/resources/pdf/2018/Cennik-Oferty-Play-NE...
While I do agree with you, I wouldn't be so quick to cast out numerology as a thing of importance. Hippies are pretty decent at sniffing things out, even if they explain them in totally insane ways.

EDIT: If you're opposed to this comment, I request that you explain your reasoning. Making the assumption that happiness is of any value, there's actually quite a bit to dig into here.
I really don't see that. All the service centers have their issues and quirks but we're still able to get approvals with all of them and taking largely the same approach with all of them.
Zimbabwe's trillion dollar notes are quite popular with numismatics. On eBay, single $100 trillion dollar notes go for $10-30+ American dollars! I think the most rare ones are $20 trillion dollar note, though.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/may/14/zimbabwe-trill...
Sounds like Stalinist-era barracks to me.

I am amused, but not surprised to see us rediscover all the 'greatest' ideas of the USSR.

I'm assuming that the next one will be 'papers, please, comrade'...
Wish I could upvote this 10 times.
> we have a rule that certain ticket discussions should go into a ticket itself

The last three companies I've worked at had the same rule, except with no exceptions. All discussions get recorded into the system, precisely for the reason that you state -- so there's a historical record of what was discussed, what was decided, and why.

Any "external" communications, such as with email or IM, are expected to be copy/pasted into the system so its permanently recorded in a useful way.
I was wondering the exact same thing. Who hides and who seeks? I'm guessing that it's more like people go in small groups and do it within their own group but just with the size of the Ikea store being the fun factor. Or maybe they team up against another group of equal size to see which group can find each other faster?
Yes, I have read that the reason Soviet housing blocks were generally 6-9 stories was that the planners found it to optimize density. The other main benefit of Soviet style housing was that there were large green areas between buildings, which we don’t have in a lot of American cities with similarly sized apartment buildings - here they will more commonly have a very small courtyard, bigger parking area, and otherwise go right up to the road.
Ketogenic Diet – A review of the evidence on efficacy and safety
So this is the result of what I call "technical democracy".
Or consensus driven management. The adults are there, but their opinion is mixed with everyone else.

This is the symptom of an industry that do not value experience and even oppose it.
Ugh, that sounds awful. I've maxed out at 4, but I only belong to Slack channels for customers that I work with.

I had taken this as a huge plus in my circumstances -- having them separated in their own space per organization allowed me to decide what set of rules I use for replying very quickly vs. when I get a Round Tuit, but that's a very small problem to fix if I had to manage credentials for 15 channels!
It's the same as with parenting - you can't really learn these things from people who've done this before, you have to learn them by doing it yourself. A large portion of potential parents put in a lot of effort to read up and learn stuff before their first child, but that's really nothing compared to what they can learn from actual experience; when rising your second/third/etc child, everything you'll use will be from the actual experience with previous children and just a minority of useful things will come from the initial vague guidance of others.
25% fuel saving seems like a small saving compared to the cost of building such cable. And of course, the saving up to geostationary orbit would be zero...

I don't think you have your maths correct, either.
That the interest in a single unified online identity is not merely exceptional in its association with Silicon Valley, but a specific subset of the Valley: power-brokers and corporate heads.

There are of course exceptions -- rank-and-file tech workers who have drunk the cool aid, and some outside tech who think this is a Good Thing (often for Others but not Themselves).

Ascribing the fixation to SV is, again, generally accurate.
Some 10 pct of the US doesn't even have access to DSL.
https://broadbandnow.com/DSL
I am glad someone brought this point up. It reminds me of the story of Drexel Burnham Lambert and Michael Milken.

Connie Bruck's book on him and his company* provides good context for how and why Milken and his junk bond raiders and the Gordon Gekkos were able to upend corporate America in the 80s. It's because the prior couple decades had fat cat CEOs and middle management that coasted on empires founded by the prior generation. Gekko's speech about Teldar Paper's middle management was not an inaccurate metaphor. There is a trend now that executive tenures are getting shorter, no doubt in part because many are now held to higher standards than many in the 60s and 70s.

There are founders who start companies with bad intentions of using the company as a financial vehicle to funnel money to themselves with as little work as possible, as opposed to founders who start companies to create external value for humanity. The first set of founders and CEOs should be constrained.

All that said, I am still pro-Long Term Stock Exchange because there are issues with the quarterly cadence and high-frequency trading. Don't know if LTSE will be the solution but I support experimentation.

* https://www.amazon.com/Predators-Ball-Burnham-JunkBond-Raide...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/business/dealbook/ceo-ten...