skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> these days most of them will do business over email.

This has been super convenient for me. I email the guy at the lumber yard, "Hey, I'm thinking about doing X. I think I'll need these supplies. Can you get me a quote?"

He responds with a price list, maybe some substitution suggestions, and we barter back and forth a bit until I say "Yes, please order that for me." Then if it's a special order, he'll say, "Great, I'll let you know when it arrives."

It's a very satisfying process. Plus I always send pictures after I complete the project, which I think both of us enjoy.
I remember viruses where spread easily through emoji packs for msn and other messengers back in the day.
This quote is fantastic:

> In 1992, Roy Hall, a 46-year-old minister, bought a royal blue Hickey-Freeman jacket at Unclaimed Baggage. When he took it home, he noticed the name “Whitey Ford” — a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Yankees — written inside of it. Informed of the find, Ford asked for his jacket back; Hall decided to keep it.

Who cares if it’s true; the minister is like, “return a lost article to its rightful owner? Nah.”
Junk bonds are hardly the only form of investment, and certainly not the safest, if your goal is to ensure someone's retirement. Moreover, corporate debt is at high risk of mass default in a market downturn such as the current one.
> social media platforms are extremely durable until the next hot new thing comes along.

This is exactly why I sold my Facebook shares a few months ago. The next Instagram might not sell to Facebook so cheaply, or the sale might well be blocked by regulators.

Having said that, I still have a large position in Twitter because the brand seems a lot more durable.
The latter chapters of "The Innovators" by Walter Isaacson did this well I thought. Just finished it and highly recommend.
Monitor growth stocks from Yahoo and import to Google Spreadsheets
Agree they are using this context for eigenvector without going into detail. Another way I have used PCA and/or cluster analysis as an analogy with a group is to get them to put all the questions, product or service features, or customer benefits on large sticky notes. Each person generates as many as come to mind in a 5 to 10 minute period.

Then taking turns each person gets up and places a couple of the questions or features they have generated on a wall or whiteboard, briefly explaining what they mean while also placing it relatively near or far in conceptual space from the items that are already up there.

As you get further along, you invite people to start reorganizing the sticky notes talking about why they think some of these questions are more or less similar to others. As they explain their reasoning you start hearing the underlying latent dimensions, the organizing vectors.

When the process is all finished you have what looks like a cluster analysis. Then as a group we name those clusters. This qualitative dimension reduction exercise often has the result of getting a group of people talking about the question or feature space in a common set of reduced labels and gives them a common framework.

I found these techniques very enlightening to use with product groups as we prepared to use research techniques to capture a Voice of the Customer.
I think in the old days you had as many kids as you could and expected them to look after you in your old age.
One example of crazy protection I've seen recently is this piece in Paris: https://danielfeau.com/fr/archive/annonce/3495936 it's has no archtectural value, has no history, has been abandonned for 30 years, is really in bad shape, in the most central part of the city, and doesn't even have the same style as surrounding streets... but the rules are for the new buyer to restore it as it is: can't build anything new, can't change shape or size, ...
I mean, sure it wouldn't be
nice to have a pink/green ultra-strange new building there, but there are ways to make something nicer than what is currently there
Entrepreneur Has Given $1B in Loans to SMEs in Asia
It's the easiest lottery right now.
The optimal strategy depends on the timeframe in which you're looking for the employee to provide a net contribution and how long you expect them to stay, among other particulars.

If you're scaling up quickly or employing a bunch of people to immediately work on a new project, and expect them to stay an average of 2 years, you need preexisting experience.

If you're in a company where people stay on average 4-5 years and, and there's already a well established team with a good set of conventions and technical leadership, a generalist is probably a better call.
I personally would respond to an email. Or, rather, ask the recruiter to send an email to the person I rejected to even meet.

The common answer to this question is, it would take way too long to answer these thousands of candidates that are applying to your position. Obviously, that's nonsense unless you're Google or Facebook.

At huge companies, I suspect CVs just get lost in the system somewhere when they don't have the correct keywords for automated parsing. In that case, you'll hear no response because no human has seen the CV.

At smaller companies, I honestly don't think that a response of "we decided not to go further with the CV, but thank you for applying, and please, feel free to apply to any other positions for different consideration" would be too much to ask.
Big Tech buys innovation and shuts it down or absorbs it.

Think for example all Alphabet products that came from acquisitions: Youtube, Picasa, Android, DoubleClick, reCAPTCHA, ITA Software, SageTV, Meebo, Waze,DeepMind, Fitbit...

They have also bought something like 50 ad tech companies and 20-30 web search companies.
> not order wood for delivery - whether from your local hardware store or a lumber yard

I just had 45 1x8s delivered from the local lumberyard. After they dropped it off, they said, "We have some more in stock still, so if you find any that are bad, let us know and we'll swap them out. They all looked good to us though"

Having now gone through all of the wood, they were spot on. It's great wood.
> BigTech has a huge yearly R&D budget. In fact, with two years’ worth of R&D, BigTech could recreate the Apollo program.

Why? One could argue that advances in AI and Quantum Computing are at least as significant as landing on the moon, and of more value. Big tech investment has pushed the field forward significantly.
I can see missing a single keystroke as quite a believable typo.

Alternatively, I can also imagine recruiters just following familiar patterns for increasing "required" experience levels as they "level-up" the job description as a crutch for articulating requirements. But the problem here isn't the recruiters, they are just instruments. They often shouldn't be drafting the initial baseline JD at all and should never be posting the final one without approval.
>meme arrows
> The uber wealthy have an even easier time of hiding their property in this case, and the mid wealthy react much worse (violently) to private property forfeits than to the usage of printing press

The uber-wealthy are the major beneficiaries of money printing, they are going to come out of the stimulus ahead. And people probably wouldn't be violent, it would be about as difficult as collecting taxes - ie, not that bad.

> This is very old bullshit, and thinking like this leads to parties trying to be cool by hiring people from industry with the consequent terrible results ( this trope is so old its even parodied on yes minister).

Being unable to identify that the person who they hired is, effectively, scamming them is a clear sign that they are financially incompetent. It isn't hard for someone with a good grasp of accounting to figure out if someone else is bettering or worsening a financial position. Particularly for government work which is neither novel nor commercially risky.
Google needs improvement on self awareness w.r.t. open source. They used to be better at generating good will in the community. They've certainly done a lot to make many people needlessly unhappy in recent years. It's like a fat cat who owns the whole cake, yet claws the little guy for wanting a few crumbs.
> PC Gamer recently measured some actual latency results. They found 60-80ms was fairly standard for lag between input and on-screen events: https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-how-stadias-input-lag-compares....

So, I just made the following experiment. I filmed my screen and mouse at the same time, then grabbed a window and flicked as fast as I could.

On my 120 Hz screen the window starts moving within five to six frames (at 240 frames per second video) of the mouse moving, meaning an end-to-end latency of around 20 ms.

Windows 10, nVidia graphics card with hardware scheduling, Ryzen CPU, using the cheapest 120/144 Hz screen that was available at the time (<200 €).
This is definitely one of the biggest things holding back female applicants, as they are statistically more likely to have imposter syndrome.

However, it holds back a lot of people who simply do not know that job descriptions are bullshit. Being bold is one thing, being a compulsive bullshitter is another. You probably do not want the latter on the team, unless you work at IBM specifically.
Transcribers – Data Entry at TransPerfect – Work from Home
I'm skeptical about languages getting type systems in version 2. Python has a type system (MyPy) and it's pretty mediocre in practice, because all the major frameworks violate it with abandon, and the maintainers seldom bother to add types after the fact.
This is pretty much me. But less focus on sunlight and more focus on sleeping at the same time.

Also exercise helps.
One of my neighbors mentioned that they were offering triple time to work the 4th of July at the factory he works at. He didn't want to work, and thankfully there were enough people interested in the offer that he could have the day off.
Similar anecdote, I started developing apps for the iPad as soon as it came out (2010). Around 2014, a recruiter didn't want to give me a senior position since "they usually look for people with 8+ years of experience". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> It’s actually impressive that some groups can all gossip together about the one person that isn’t there, and somehow all expect that they are the exception to that rule (e.g. nobody hates them behind their back). I honestly do not understand how those relationships are supposed to work (but they do, or all of them are just deeply unhappy about the whole thing but don’t know how to leave).

I felt the same way until I read ‘Sapiens’ (yes yes, I know it’s something of a meme book around here), where in a certain section it is pointed out that gossiping is one of the most efficient ways to disseminate information in social groups without creating direct conflict.

To be honest, I still largely feel the same way. I too don’t understand how people can be so incongruent as to talk shit behind people their back, but somehow operate on the mode that this doesn’t happen to them (they wouldn’t like it
if people talked shit about them, so why do it). But, I’ve largely come to accept it, and even mildly participate. Apparently it is an important social construct, so by joining in you don’t seem like you are disapproving of the behavior and judging people for it.

One nice thing about male platonic relationships is that ribbing on each other with harsh jokes is commonplace, which allows to perform the same function as gossip but now in plain sight, including the person it is about. And because it is packaged as a joke it is both less hurtful and still allows the plausible deniability for either party to evade direct conflict.

I think this is also why women gossip more and do it in a much more toxic manner: they don’t have the same social culture of ribbing on each other, necessitating more and harsher gossip.
You're underestimating the amount of friction at most companies. For all your recruiters to use your measly google sheet, it has to be encoded somewhere on your intranet, a memo has to be sent by the director (whom you have to persuade that this is the correct thing to do) that there is this sheet, and you then become the point person to approve all the job ads because "you took initiative in the area."
I would agree on the macOS point right now, but big surs design style leans heavily towards a style that would probably work quite well with it.

I would only want it as an option, I would in no way want it to be the only option. I just think the different cursor types could benefit different types of applications.
I genuinely believe people who don't see the colourblind society as the ideal are so deeply racist that they would froth at the mouth at any MLK quote that they didn't know came from him.
I think so, I haven't seen a way to configure it and it seems to happen by default in new projects
MS has adopted the release-early-and-let-user-test-it policy since years ago. I remember that Power BI was barely usable (missing a lot of basic features) until late 2018/early 2019.

They also adopted the seeming good policy to ask users to vote for future bug fix/feature requirement, which of course leads to more feature release than bug fixing. But then this is the norm of software development nowadays so I really don't think anyone can change it.
The brain is always a fun comparison. It's this crazy super-scalar architecture that can do thousands of trillions of primitive operations per second (petaflops), yet with pretty terrible latencies: propagation through synapses on the order of single digit milliseconds, individual neurons only fire order of 1 time per second, input processing latencies in the hundreds of milliseconds, and primitive "logical" algorithms like "how many numbers can you count in a second?" netting out to "less than 10".

So we end up in this state where what the brain does well computers are still (comparatively) terrible at, and what computers do well the brain is (comparatively) terrible at. We're slowly bridging that divide, with e.g. TPUs focussing on larger volumes of low precision operations happening in parallel, but we've got a long way to go yet.
If you suffer particularly bad insomnia, I encourage you to do a sleep study. It was life-changing for me.

I was able to discover that I suffer from narcolepsy, a rare but nonetheless real condition. It's not at all like most people think: you don't randomly fall asleep during the day. But your sleep schedule isn't really a schedule so much as a stochastic random walk.

Even if you don't have a rare disorder, there's a good chance a sleep study will benefit you. For example, a coworker said that a CPAP machine was similarly lifechanging.
> why aren't the owners looking for them there?

Some people live far enough from Alabama that it's inconvenient to visit the store every couple of days to check.
If I wanted to apply, I’d just evaluate the definite integral of Km(t), the number of Kubernetes systems I managed at time t, over my lifespan so far and put that on my resume as my years of experience.

E.g., if I had 6 systems for 3 years, that’s 18 years experience on the resume.

PS: I'd only do this on resume copies sent to companies with obviously impossible experience requirements like this one. For companies with experience requirements that are actually obtainable, I'd just put the usual number of years of my lifespan I've worked with the technology.
Location: Helsinki

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: UX design (customer journey maps, user flows, wireframes/wireflows, information architecture) UX research (interviews, observations) UI design (responsive web, native)

Résumé/CV: https://bit.ly/2OgQVTd

Portfolio: anjapetrovic.com

Email: hi@anjapetrovic.com
No, it's just HR being HR. They don't know what they want.
They haven’t built the Apollo program or anything like it because the profits available there are. It large compared to other places.
Going fast is not the only metric to use to hire someone. To use your example, you might be a great driver that can go 60mph on the snow but you drive the same way when there's traffic on the street, you're basically unaware of the problems you can cause.

This is true in the same way on engineering. Too many kids deploy feature and release it in production without testing or without accounting edge cases that at scale cause massive problem to the user base. While this could not be a problem in a startup it's a big issue in traditional corporation and where error are not an option (you wouldn't consider giving the software of a medical device to somehow who has demonstrates skills but don't know what issues may cause)

Like an African proverb says: If you want go fast, go alone. If you want go far go together
>> dominic @casiotone · 13h
>> unless his job is "maintaining a worryingly high level of white supremacist comments" no he does not

I remember, when I was in high school, I read a book about arithmomancy, an occult practice that basically consists of adding up, dividing etc numbers until you get to a result that has some esoteric significance.

For example, if you divide 300, the number of the Spartans in Thermopylae, by 100, the number of years in a century, you find 3, 3 is the number of the holy trinity, therefore the sacrifice of the Spartans at Thermopylae heralds the Lamb of God, who sacrificed himself to bring on the glory of the Trinity in a new aeon of the human spirit. Something along those lines- you basically do some base arithmetic and jump around meanings and symbols like a little frog from lillipad to lillipad.

Anyway, after I read that book, I started experimenting with my date of birth, specifically the day of the month, let's say it was made from the digits in XY. After spending a whole week obsessively (but how else) deriving all sorts of deeply meaningful, mystical insights about the relation of XY to the month and year of my birth, the births of my parents, my friends, Jesus Christ, Olaf Palme and Gina Lolobrigita, of all people, I started seeing "XY" e v e r y w h e r e. Like, I'd go to the loo and my eyes would idly scan the surroundings and find the two digits, XY, on the back of a shampoo bottle, or I'd see them aaalmost forming in the foam at the bottom of the bathtub, or the steam on the mirror, or wherever really. It took me a while to get over it. XY everywhere!

What does this tell us? That if you look for something hard enough, you will notice it to the exclusion of every other detail around it, even if every other detail appears with the same frequencey as that one thing you're seeing - and you're seeing it because your entire mind is actively looking for it.

Aye, you got it: confirmation bias.

So with "white supermacist" (or sexist, classist, genderist, whateverist) comments on HN. There's always someone who thinks HN leans one way in whatever polarised debate. Then there's always someone else who thinks it leans the other way. Because HN doesn't lean either way. It's just, people come on here wanting to find a certain opinion that they absolutely want to do battle with. So they lower their visor and through its cross-shaped slit they see what they want to see. And notice nothing else.

So, "HN is white supremacist". Honestly.
This is obviously the correct way to do it. I say "obviously" sarcastically because you'd be surprised how many companies just don't understand this or have policies that disincentivize reality.
oh yes, without a doubt, I'd noticed that in some cases, and eventually, if/when they 'crack', it's just a tiny sliver of a hairline crack in one which lets air in and produces that same loud feedback squeal. ouch!
FWIW, I use cheap dollar store headphones - $4-5 - with white noise from the phone to sleep. they typically last 1-3 months.
Sadly the decision to switch products is usually made by the finance side and stuffed to the tech side, and tech side VPs/Directors are happy to enforce that because they don't use Slack/Teams very often.
> In a new research paper, Thompson and colleagues argue that it is, or will soon be, impossible to increase computing power at the same rate in order to continue these advances. This could jeopardize further progress in areas including computer vision, translation, and language understanding.

It was always inevitable for a new "AI" technique/algorithm to plateau. You'll eventually run into a wall with AI approximates. Until we reach General AI, this will continue.
I assume it's on the front page because the majority of HN applicants have at one time or another seen job listings with impossible requirements as prerequisites. "Minimum 12 years Rust experience", etc.

The unstated half of this is that the honest programmer would say, "Well that's clearly impossible, I should either let them know or not apply," while the sleazy programmer tells the recruiter with a straight face that yes, he has the requisite 10 years' Swift experience, and gets the job.
I agree, works really well for us. Above all, no javascript!
Something I have never seen a good answer to or explanation of: what is an "appropriate" debt or leverage ratio for a healthy company?

Obviously, a private company with hundreds of millions in stable recurring revenue shouldn't operate debt-free -- debt can be a useful tool, even if only as a rainy-day tool for situations such as the recent pandemic.

In other words, corporate debt -- and especially low-interest and covenant-free debt that is secured using recurring revenue -- seems like a capital allocation (corporate finance) tool with a set of trade-offs relative to cash and venture investment. But, how much debt is "too much"? I feel like those of us who work in software can sometimes forget that for most industries, venture capital isn't even an option, which means debt can be one of your only growth financing sources of capital -- and even for those in software, some companies are not venture-fundable but might still be debt-fundable.

It's clear that the PE firms that load up billion dollar companies with billions in debt are just playing a speculative finance and asset strip-mining game. But, it would be a shame if we invested all of this time, money, and regulation into a robust "financial capital banking sector", and we can't even rely on it for capital that businesses can use to create jobs, service customers, and smooth the rough patches in the economy.
I don't understand how people can look at the near-zero price and wage inflation and then claim America is suddenly going to become Zimbabwe without going through an intermediate phase of "slightly higher inflation", like 5 or 10%.

Besides, the use of gold has no bearing on "M2", which is quite important in the modern economy.

And all the classic hyperinflation cases were forex-driven: either the country's exports fell below their ability to import necessities like food and oil, or (in the case of Weimar) they were forced at gunpoint to hand over gold.

So long as the US continues to produce enough food and oil domestically, it's very well insulated against hyperinflation.
After I had worked as a software engineer for about 5-6 years, struggling with impostor syndrome during portions of that time, I decided to apply for a job at Google mostly just to see what would happen. Guess what happened? They ghosted me. Nothing. No 'thanks, but no'. Just nothing.

I remember that it I felt embarassed and was frankly a bit ashamed that I hadn't received a reply. It took a while before I realized that I had in fact gotten ghosted as well. I waited for a reply from them for weeks. My self esteem took a definite hit from that. This was about 5 years ago now, so I've since gotten over it - but it changed my perception of Google as an employer from a place I'd be lucky to work at, to a place that I would have a really hard time applying for a job at again.
Misleading how? You have one platform that already allows crazy privacy violations natively, and you have another platform that you suspect might some day allow similar levels of privacy violation, yet you champion the privacy stance of the first platform.

Makes no sense to me.
Wrong job recruiter for recruiting the job?