skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There was a project to convert a PDF to a website that enabled millions to get health care, so yeah maybe grunt work, but grunt work to give millions of people access to health care ( and not theoretical million, we kept metrics and had a score board ). However that wasn't me, I was tasked with moving the VA out of its 300+ data centers and into the public cloud providers. We designed and architected the cloud deployment for the entire VA ( the worlds largest hospital chain, insurance company, and benefits organization all wrapped into one ). We had to throw out the plans that the AWS and Microsoft Engineers presented us with because they were trash and wouldn't actually work and then a handful of engineers from the USDS designed the system, showed the VA how to use Terraform and Ansible to provision and secure their systems, deployed it, and got an ATO for it. If that weren't enough since one of the values of the USDS is "Create Momentum" we took one of the "mobile applications" that was almost non-functional and running in a legacy data center costing millions, and used it as a showcase as to how you can take a legacy application and move it to the public cloud to both improve its usability and reduce the cost by a factor of 10.

People who are driven by personal gain, and comfort will never make it at the USDS. The work is hard and thankless, its exhausting and there are never enough people for the amount of work that needs to be done. The hours are long. You have no tools, and really odd and limiting restrictions you have to deal with. If you are concerned about any of those things stay away, you are not good enough to join. You need to have unquestionable technical credentials and the mental fortitude to deal with whatever gets thrown at you. You have to be able to stand up to Secretaries, Generals, Members of Congress, and Presidents and tell them what should be done. Its ok if you can't do it there aren't many who can, but if you can you will change the world.
The Thinking Ladder -- Wait But Why
Shared because this series is interesting, and this chapter is particularly interesting to how we attempt to take in information at Hacker News, that is as "good scientists" rather than, say "sports fans."

Of course, I'm mopping it all up without really questioning it - nodding my head and accepting it all as a great metaphorical model of how our brains work. But I'd love to hear nuances that point out improvements to this model (or outright flaws.)
I mis-remembered the statistic a bit. (Sorry too late to edit, but breaking down the numbers here.)

7% of journalists identify as republican, versus 28% identifying as democrat. The majority identify as independent: https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/05/survey-7-percen....

So 80% of journalists who disclose a political affiliation identify as Democrat, and 20% identify as republican.

To put that into perspective: nationally, 27% of people identify as republican, versus 29% as democrat: https://news.gallup.com/poll/15370/party-affiliation.aspx. Among the general population self-identified republicans and democrats are roughly evenly represented, but among journalists democrats outnumber republicans 4:1. I would expect the independents to break along the same proportions when it comes to voting.

Another way to look at it is to compare journalists to various demographic groups: https://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-party-af.... Journalists are less likely to self-identify as republicans than: urban voters, jewish voters, millenials, asian voters, and hispanic voters.

That is particularly interesting because journalists are more likely to be white and male than the general population, or democrats as a group. Therefore, their party identification is particularly unusual when compared to other white men.

On other metrics: a Texas A&M poll of finance journalists found that 58% described themselves as very or somewhat liberal, versus 4.4% saying they were very or somewhat conservative: https://www.dailywire.com/news/462-financial-journalists-wer....

Nationally, however, 37% of people say they are very or somewhat conservative, versus 24% who say they are very or somewhat liberal: https://news.gallup.com/poll/188129/conservatives-hang-ideol.... That makes the polled financial journalists 2.3x more likely to self-identify as liberal, and 1/8 as likely to self identify as conservative as the general population. That means the ratio of conservatives to liberals is 20x higher in that pool of journalists than in the general population.
"The Spinner* sends you an innocent looking link. This link is sent to the target via text message. When the target presses the link, a cookie connected to the link attaches itself to the target’s phone."

Is this legal? I never click on links sent via SMS.
IIRC long ago a US RTG ended up in the ocean due to launch failure, only to be recovered and sussessfully re-launched on a new satellite.

These things are tough! And also expensive, so you might as well reuse them once they shrug off the rocket exploding under them.
I couldn't tell...
Smoking kills 40k people, per day, in the US? That number seems off. I don't think there are that many births in a day so we'd be losing a lot of people.
40,000 people per day? Seems a little high.
I'm fairly certain it is not known for sure that Juul isn't killing people. It actually seems to come up often in terms of nocotine products people who get sick are using. That could be just due being a popular brand, but the company is obviously very shady and I wouldn't be surprised if they turn out to be part of the problem. Current regulations seem to be very minimal and not sufficient to establish safety. At first I thought it was overreaction, but I can see why the CDC is saying maybe don't vape for now, especially if you start to have any lung issues (which seems to be about what you are saying except for the last part about Juul being safe).
In other news, Windows 10 declared "unusable" by Apple spokesperson.
I don't have the stats in front of me, but my recollection is something like (using the same base number for Phone Screen but our rates):

Applications: 5000 candidates; ~20% pass rate (vs unknown)

Phone Screen: 1000 candidates; ~50% pass rate (vs 40%)

Technical Test: 500 candidates; ~40% pass rate (vs 25%)

On-site interview & reference checks: 200 candidates; ~50% pass rate (vs 40%)

Offer: 100 candidates; ~80% hire rate (vs 60%)

Hired: 80

So by some arguments you could say Firebase was 2.5x as selective (40 offers vs 100). With a funnel like this, even small changes to the percentages end up having a larger overall effect.

Unfortunately, we don't have the Applications number from the blog post, though he says "we considered a great deal more applicants than that [1000] on paper." I suppose a "great deal" could be anywhere from double to 10x...
> If you don't like it, blame the USDS, they're the ones that use this language: [0] "Our staff comes from all corners of the technology industry, nonprofit world, and government to serve ‘tours’ of service, bringing a steady influx of fresh perspectives into government. Tours typically last between six months and two years, with a maximum length of four years."

Thanks for answering the question. So it is, in fact, a conscious decision by the USDS, which doesn't reflect well on their work culture IMO.
Seems likely that other people feel the same.
> Is there a better way to blockquote? HN doesn't have anything like Markdown's '>' for quotes/blockquotes.

Yes, there’s a better way. Please refer to the parent comment in this discussion [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21020162
Whoops, misread a stat! Corrected, it's 1,300
We shouldn't expect the companies to be "fair&transparent", especially given the documented evidence that it's unprofitable. It's really the job of the governments to impose fairness rules. E.g. in Europe you don't see prices without tax - I believe they're not legal.
I'm fine with blaming the USDS. There's no need to invoke military concepts, the Peace Corps calls their service intervals "programs."
I found this website really weird, with no "About us", so I searched some more.

"Elliot Shefler" (some publications put his name in quotes) is a co-founder, but he does not want to appear in photos and online profiles himself. He is Turkish-Jewish and spent most of his life working in ad-tech and online gambling. He claims his algorithms were developed by an agency with links to the Israeli military (this is repurposed military/PSYOP technology?). His whereabouts are unknown, circling between Germany, London, and LA.

In 2018 the price was 29$, now its 49$. Elliot claims $5.1 million revenue for 2018. Most customers are men, most customers want to initiate sex with a target. Nobody follows up to complain if it wasn't successful, since they are very much part of the conspiracy to manipulate. Elliot plans to share information with bigger advertisers: "A woman who wants a target to propose to her, would be in great proximity to a person that is in the market for an engagement ring".

This service is illegal in Europe, due to data protection and anti-tracking laws. The site has about 10 employees and one British company who works the contracts with bigger companies.

> “The value is in retention, not in the acquisition,” he said.

> He related a story about one insurance company he was commissioned work on, where he would target the insurance agents at the company to “brainwash and manipulate” them and change the perception of the company itself with the goal of retaining those agents.

> “We planned a similar campaign with a big pharmaceutical company that was targeting doctors (not patients—doctors) with articles about the benefits of a certain medicine.”

> ... if he feels the same targeting tools he leverages for The Spinner could be vulnerable to possible misuse, his response was matter-of-fact:

> “I would prefer using the word “effective” instead of ‘vulnerable.’ The answer is: highly effective.”

Very, very shady.
I don't see why not. The "toilets" in old-style camp outhouses are often called benches, and indeed they are pretty much benches with strategic holes in them.
Whoops, corrected! it's 1,300, as per CDC https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast...
What was improper about the execution of runaway trim by either LNI610 or ET302? Those two cases are different. LNI043 and LNI610 are also different but the similarity is 4 of 5 pilots didn't recognize it as runaway trim. And does it? Boeing says it does, but saying things doesn't make it true. It's much more aggressive than the kind of runaway trim pilots are trained for.

So again, what was improper? Especially ET302 where they absolutely did run the checklist rather immediately and by that time it was already in a mistrim situation.
> What did you do with your life?

Unrelated to the original topic, but I want to point out that this question and it’s cousins are a massive red flag for me.

Being content with life is hard. For many people who are still in the early stages of figuring it out, this question is poison.

It attacks a specific insecurity and is always only used to recruit young people into a workforce that is otherwise hard to staff (militaries, rebel causes, government services etc)

When “what have you done with your life?” is replaced with “Do x, and your life will be more meaningful”, the advertising tactic becomes more visible. But the people who want to find such answers must seek therapy, not enroll for whatever job opportunity is being nefariously advertised.
Sorry, but what is wrong with working for the US military in the grand scheme of things? Would Russian or Chinese military be a preferred option?

Certainly seems to me to be far preferable to working for Facebook or Google or something like that.

Whether she is a nobody or not, it should not come as a surprise that for 99.(9)% of humanity, all of us here, as well as RMS are just as much nobodies.
Eh, Supreme Court justices, court of appeals judges, and district court judges are all lifetime appointees. Part of the theory for that is to decouple their decisions from a fear of political backlash like they might face if they had to get reelected.

Despite their many failings, I actually think this system works pretty well, and I'm always impressed at the reasoning behind supreme court rulings --even those I don't agree with.
I don't disagree with your points, but i would point out that better research in agri-science and more competitive markets has led to more issues in the supply chain. Are the heavy metals left from the nutes killing anyone? Not at the rate Vitamin E is, but do know they are harmful.

People put scent agents on flower(ive heard of pixie sticks being used to add "grape/berry" scent), as well as other chemicals to make it appear a certain way. These things were probably not happening in the 60. So we don't know the real long term dangers because these issues havent been around long enough.
When considering additional regulations, the weight of biased political workers should have zero weight. Advocacy is most often a defensive action against business killing overreach.
I dont care about fashion too much, I care about code, maintenance and community quality more. It is in my opinion the only way to build good and sustainable development teams in the current environment. Contrarian opinion I know..
By unidentified they probably meant unidentified to anyone without a clearance.
You could sit on the floor. That is definitely not a chair.
zfs is really a study in cli ergonomics. It has a quite idiosyncratic CLI, which one might assume is a bad thing. But the CLI is so well thought out that learning this new "language" is quite intuitive.

btrfs uses a more traditional command, subcommand, args setup, which by itself is not a problem, but the actual command and subcommand structure is a dumpster fire to be charitable.

Try managing large groups of snapshots without custom tooling. The whole thing makes me sad really.

btrfs has a lot going for it at the architecture and disk format level (dedup is actually something theoretically useful, while the zfs design was flawed from the start), but the implementation has just never made it.
I mean, not taking debit makes sense for them, to be fair.

With a credit card, they can place a $2,000 hold on your card. If you've only got $100 in your debit account, it makes it a lot harder for them to recoup costs if you damage the car, above all for someone international. The whole point of debit instead of credit is you can't spend more than you have (usually). Car rental is in a pretty unique category of purchase, to be honest, in that they're trusting you temporarily with equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars.

(Debit card holds do exist sometimes, but can be much more limited than credit card holds, and may have additional international restrictions.)

I've never heard of charging extra to allow it though. I guess they ran they numbers and calculated the actual additional risk they're exposed to?
> I mean, they can't really 'invest it' since it was their money in the first place.

By extending someone a line of credit, they are investing some percentage of that line of credit as their money, because they have to have money on hand in case the person decides to use their credit card. They obviously don't have to keep the whole balance of every line of credit they extend on hand, because most people won't max out all their lines of credit. But they do have to keep some percentage. That money is invested, but only pays out money if the person uses their credit card and then rolls over a balance to accrue interest.

But let's say someone uses a credit card, and then someone disputes the charge (these are different people if the charge was fraudulent). The credit card company holds that money in escrow. While it's in escrow, they don't pay it to the merchant, so they still have it, and they don't count it toward their customer's credit limit, so it decreases the amount of money they have to keep on hand. However, they're still charging interest for it in the case that the charge is found to not be fraudulent. So their investment is paying off.

Now where this gets tricky, is now that money is invested, because they're charging interest for it, but they know they won't have to pay out that investment until the fraud investigation completes. So until then, they can invest it again! They always have to keep some money on hand in preparation for a fraud investigation to finish, but there is always some amount of money being tied up in escrow for ongoing fraud investigations, so they can invest that money twice.
How would you rate yourself on spatial intelligence?

I'm sure there was a time I could say exactly what you did but I am not 'normal' with respect to being able to reason about objects. If I help a friend move I am forever re-packing their car to reduce the number of car-loads to one less than they thought they needed.

They try to debunk 'learning styles' routinely but the fact of the matter is that certain media are much more comfortable for many people, and 3-D is bad for certain modes of reasoning. But perhaps as importantly, it's bad for some forms of tooling. For example, "show me the difference between the model now and a year ago when we first discussed this." We use tools like this as a kind of 'isomorphic projection' of something that has way more than 3 dimensions so we can figure out the 'shape' of things.
It's not an uncommon topic here on HN that people give up pay or other things to work at a "mission driven" organization, like SpaceX for example, where pay may not be as great and hours might be long etc., but you get the feeling of doing important work. In short, that work fulfillment is in demand, so organizations selling it can "charge" more for it by paying employees less.

And from the sound of it, the USDS is attracting good talent. What you're saying is that they need to put in more effort if they want to attract you. But you may exist at that nexus of talent that is good, but also wants to be wooed a bit. There's a problem with that though: It wouldn't be selling the reality of working with the USDS. As a group they may be great, but you're dropped into areas, like the VA, that may be dysfunctional. They can't try recruiting people like you who want the slick office spaces and amenities and fancy recruiting events, because you're not a good fit for the environment you'll be working in. Your work would be part of the effort to improve that situation, but it takes people willing to put up with it.
Damn, now I'm ashamed of myself - it's since forever that I'm using rsync... :)

I think that when I tested this with rsync a long time back I did a similar mistake like this one https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28819379/block-level-cop... (doing a sync not over a network) and/or this one https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3nhx0p/rsync_block_l... (doing a sync by adding/removing some bytes instead of just changing their values, as it would happen in the preallocated img-file of the VMs).

I'll test it again - thanks a lot for the info!!
Some amount of TCP handling needs to be in the kernel to handle arbitration of the shared resource (namely, connection tuples). Once you've already handled IP defragmentation [1] and looking at the structures to get port numbers, and associate that with a userspace file descriptor/process, you've already got all your cachelines primed, and you may as well finish processing the packet, before handing it to userspace.

[1] boo hiss; I wish the spec was simply to truncate overlong packets at the MTU, and indicate that with a flag; the peers could then figure out what to do when a packet arrived that was shorter than its original length. Handling it in-band would mean it was more likely to arrive. Instead we can fragmenting it, which is icky, because defragmentation sucks; or we can drop it and sending an out of band message to the sender, but that message may not make it (and often doesn't). TCP could very easily adapt to 'i sent 1480 bytes of payload, but my peer is only acking 1472 each time, maybe I should send 1472 --- much easier and quicker than I keep sending packets and they don't get acked, maybe i should try sending smaller packets 15 seconds later.
Must have misunderstood, he had the initial commit for AltStore this May. It's Delta he's talking about.
The person setting this up gets sent the link from The Spinner, and then has to figure out how to get it loaded on the target's device. Texting it to someone who trusts you (enough to click on a link anyway) is one way to get it done.
You understand a Venn diagram just fine though. It's the same sort of problem, just generalize to n dimensions and use a clustering algorithm, or decompose an overly complex problem into multiple clusters.
The way they hire people you can only stay there for four year max. After that you are required by law to leave, so it very much is a temporary job. So to describe it they use that term as it pretty accurately describes what you are signing up for
It's not regulated because it's not a popular topic yet. People always try to find rational reasons for why other people care about stuff.

The world is not a meritocracy or a rational place. It operates just like a giant high school. No one cares about Telegram's money simply because no one cares. The cool kids haven't started talking about it yet. That's it.

It actually is similar to Libra and other projects in lots of ways.
Care to quote the passage? Its 60 some odd pages long.
I want to be able to define my own custom sort function:

* Ignore items that do not match what I searched for

* Ignore anything which is not in stock

* Ignore anything with less than 100 sales

* Ignore anything with less than 4 stars

* Ignore anything with too few negative comments

* Plus some kind of ignore filter for "leave us 5 stars and get a free charger"
exactly. it needs to be moved to the front sides of buildings, not the back alleys.

my brother who is pretty anti-cannabis visited recently so i took him to a dispensary, his mind was changed once he saw how it was all being ran and that rules were enforced, etc.
They’re certainly wrong about Scheme. They used MIT-Scheme to count keywords, when they should’ve used R5RS Scheme or newer. R5RS has 20 keywords + 4 if you add support for macros. With define-syntax you can define many special forms such as let, let* etc in a smaller language so may be the actual number is much smaller!
Nope, the excessive authority given to MCAS in combination with the hard to rewind trim (particularly at high speeds) were a mousetrap to be sprung. There are many ways to trigger this mousetrap. This is not a chain, this is a cluster with many chains hanging from it.
I just don't get why businesses are so afraid of outsourcing critical business functions like payroll to a random startup.
Show HN: A tweet that retweeted itself
I'm just saying that if E.Ts who can traverse interstellar distances are visiting us, they are using technology that we have absolutely no understanding of or conception of how it might even be possible. The only analogy for this is comparing this to the interaction between uncontacted stone age tribes and modern civilization.
My argument is that progress made by asking people to work for less than what they are worth for a large institution like the government who has the resources to pay people a fair wage, is wrong on first principles.

If your entire operational model relies on taking advantage of others, asking people to make huge personal sacrifices because you don't want to properly fund a program, there's something wrong.

It's the classic "ends justify the means" argument.
Tiny question about lox : does it support arrays ? I understand it might not be that interesting as a concept so its removed from the example language to keep it smaller, but I was wondering if I missed anything ? If not, how would those be declared or implemented ?
There was no mention of false information being involved.
You underestimate how powerful suggestion / propaganda is. If you keep getting told you're a worthless person, eventually you'll absorb it into your own psyche.