skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you paid attention to the behavior of USCIS employees over the last 4 years, notably towards people with backgrounds in predominantly Muslim countries (as the author of TFA appears to be)? It's not so much that you're wrong, more that it doesn't matter that you're right.
I’m mostly suggesting the money isn’t well distributed, and I’m pretty sure that’s due to the misaligned incentives. If we incentivized outcomes we care about, I suspect more money would come naturally from the results.
You may call the problems "interesting", but the political solutions I've seen so far are far from interesting ...

Yes, we're in economically difficult times (well, most people who are not in IT), but this is from an intellectual viewpoint not a much more intriguing problem than, say, global poverty, or climate change. And so it's not like there is a shortage of intellectual challenges. This crisis, therefore, doesn't add much in that sense. Yet it does take away a lot of freedoms that make life interesting.
>Sorry. It didn't address the concern.

Feel free to elaborate so I can clarify.

>The conclusion follows the premise, but the premise is extremely rarely true.

This is exceptionally naive.

>Just because it is within my company makes it no different from a medium sized company providing services to another company who is involved in evil, even if those services are not directly related.

Agreed.

> you work for a payment processor and provide services to my company, then your own logic would make you as complicit as I am.

Agreed.
Because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Loss_aversion_and_th... &
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_(sociological_concept)
You couldn't be more wrong.

The US Army shipped 12 _BILLION_ dollar in cash, multiple cargo flights to Iraq filled with pallets of nice fresh stacks of cash.

but they care to avoid dollarizing conquered countries? LOL.

They just want control over soldiers finances, so that there are no black markets, no soldiers buying drugs and paying hookers, becoming targets for petty crime, or selling weapons/ammo/info.

Dollarization of other nations is in the US national interest, read up some congressional transcripts.
Mobility in entry-level jobs isn't as bad as you make it out to be (I worked plenty of these as recently as a year ago).

There are zero jobs in the world without a dark side. Or as you say, "blood on their hands". Even the tiniest non-profit, village bakery might accidentally source ingredients from exploited farm workers in 3rd world countries, or pay tax dollars which goes into US war efforts.

The only reason we're having this conversation is because it's trendy to shit on FAANG companies. For any other case people would rightly say you're holding them to an unreasonable standard.
I did weekend classes in elementary school which were two hours, during which our teacher would not let us go to the bathroom. Parents eventually complained and so in exchange for being able to go pee, we were no longer permitted water during the two hours.
I keep seeing people talk about "nepotism" at Big Tech companies. Is this really a thing? Or are they using it loosely to say people who know influential people get better positions within the company? Which, btw is true of any company. That's part of what office politics is about.
By going through the thing where you place it on a flat surface?
Two minutes into that pitch, any and all major fashion corporations will kick you out the door. I spent significant time trying to crack this nut - the fashion industry culture at it's core is luddite, that and any tech that is not 100% transparent ain't gonna fly.
Thanks for that, I initially read it as “Low Earth Orbit” which didn’t make much sense.
This is a 'literate program' - most of the contents of the single file are explanation, not code. It includes an introduction to Lisp and an introduction to ARM assembly!
That did take the heat off a lot too. Whatever happened after Trump won would probably last until temperatures fell to below freezing at which point only very committed people would be out there, which isn't the millions in the streets we saw over the summer.

It's hard to say how much property destruction there might have been, but tbh I don't really care because property is replaceable.
From my experience, most of your ideas have been implemented in different ways in the academic procedures as best as they can.

1. Funding agencies and universities don't make decisions. Only individuals in those institutions do. And I don't know any individuals who admit to doing assessments based on publication counts. They'd be openly mocked for such an archaic way of thinking. The only people who seem to openly obsess over publication counts are Ph.D. students.

2. Agreed, but output can be measured in different ways besides traditional academic publications.

3. It seems like this is already done, through recommendation letters when people apply, and in external letters during the tenure process. I see the opposite outcomes, whenever I've seen someone with fewer but better publications compared against someone with more but weaker publications, the first is always preferred. Because it's easy for someone to make the case "Person 1 has fewer paper but they're more impactful and they choose riskier problems, an excellent trait" versus someone to make the case for "Person 2 has more papers in quantity so are more productive." Unless of course it's not clear that person 1's papers are actually higher quality, in which case the original premise doesn't hold.

4. This is already the primary factor from what I've seen. That's the whole point of job talks, publications listed on CVs, etc. I've never seen a tenure-track hire without people reading some of the papers listed on the CV, and discussing the presented work in the job talk.

5. Half of the funding agencies now say they're looking for risky ideas, the word "transformative" has been a common part of NSF vocabulary for decades. Originality is one of the NIH core criteria factors, as is criteria about the Investigator themselves. How panelists interpret the criteria is more social and political than a technical thing.

Anyways, maybe we probably just live in different academic worlds, but I don't see as much blatant expression of the biases you are describing, and feel like the major goals of your ideas have already been implemented which has led us to the current situation. Maybe not everyone buys into them, but as you say there isn't a way to get a bunch of individuals to follow orders, so the only change that's possible is changes to process which has already happened. I don't agree that we need to add additional bureaucracy like rating applicants on "did they disparage mathematics", which I find extremely problematic.

Even the last idea in your edit is already done in every way possible. The MacArthur award, Turing Award, Nobel Prize, various prizes, etc. all give an absolutely top researcher money and prestige, so they can do their thing.

I think the best way forward are social solutions, rather than procedural. Convince minds, rather than add bureaucracy.
Sociophysics has not been met with a wide welcome in management studies, perhaps due to its approach to proof. It requires a lot more work than popular hand-waving.
It will be interesting to see whether physics-derived tools and approaches will lead to improvement in social studies in regards to current critical concerns.

It is unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) a far-away in the future area for me, as just applying viewpoints outside of the mainstream to experimental research in management has a lot of low-hanging fruit with potentially significant impact.

That could be one of the benefits of the humanities aspect of management studies, it is well justified (though not popular) to take a humanitarian (and thus biased) stance towards improving the well-being of employees.
Interesting. Makes me want to get my hands on one. Feasible for a hobbyist or no? Tried searching on eBay but didn't get many results.
> Class met at a specified time and place, and nobody paid much attention to who was there or not

At my university, attendance at lectures and tutorials was optional and no attendance was taken (for most subjects). Most people went to the lectures but attendance at tutorials was much more mixed. I tended to skip tutorials a lot.

I remember one year I promised myself "This year I'm going to turn up to everything". So I went to the first tutorial for one of my CS subjects. The tutor asked us "Is there anything you didn't understand from the lecture?" We all said "No". He said, "Then why did you bother coming to the tutorial?"

Then he told us he was trying to teach himself quantum physics as an excuse to not work on his PhD thesis. He asked us if anyone knew quantum physics. One guy in the class was a physics major and offered to give the tutor a quantum physics lesson. The rest of us just left. And the tutor would have put that down on his timesheet and got paid for it.

I didn't bother going to any more tutorials for that subject.

In hindsight, maybe I should have complained, I probably could have got that tutor in a lot of trouble. But I didn't.
He could literally just call it "benzedrex" instead as that is the name of a nearly identically acting but otc stimulant you can grab off the shelf at any walmart lol...
If we’re forced back into the office, myself and many of my coworkers I’ve talked to might find another company. I think companies will experience significant turnover if they roll back remote work.
Our principal refused to let students leave campus, as a student had gotten in a car wreck over lunch and died at a previous school.

So, there's some logic there. They are nominally responsible for you during school hours.
Kids derailing people's meetings are funny as long as you aren't party to it. Just like people getting splashed by a passing car on a rainy day is funny, as long as you aren't party to it.
No, it's not about the risk per se. As you point out, investing in a company involves risk, however, there is prospect for generating value that corresponds to said risk.

Shorting (exactly as with gambling) creates risk with the hope of gaining money, without any corresponding value being created. Not only that, shorting exposes three parties to the risk of a stock or asset (the shorter, the original owner, and the new owner). When engaging in regular stock buying and selling, there is exactly a single owner at a given point in time, and the risk is transferred accordingly with only one party being exposed to it at a time. Why is the former dangerous? Because it can easily trigger chaos in the economy when many people are exposed to the risk of an asset, when none of them truly own it (not dissimilar to what happened in 2008, selling debt for debt triggers this sort of chaos as well).

Not to mention that shorters profit off the misery of others (exactly the same as interest bearing loans, another parasitic and immoral practice). Shorters wish for the collapse of the stock price. This is unnatural and destructive.

This is a good article I came across that discusses some problems with shorting: https://practicalislamicfinance.com/2020/02/17/short-selling...
a) 90% of everything is junk

b) that's what you get when you start optimising for paper acceptance
Secret history of Windows Format, by original Microsoft author
It's the only way to tell the story. Of course it's an uncomfortable read, how could it be different? IMHO this should be indeed picked up by a journalist though. It's not an engineer's job to write catching stories.
That's not the case for offshore though. In these farms 6MW+ are the norm for the last 4-6 years. Most under construction at the moment ~8MW+. If you look at under consideration / planning status ones they are 10MW+ (eg. UK North sea's Dogger Bank phase A and B are 13MW planned for 2024)
I've never seen someone with a CS degree and no coding ability. Lots of them weren't taught anything else about software engineering. But most interviews don't test anything else anyway.
Yeah: I'm not religious, but I really enjoyed his writing style & his angles on things as simple as "rules" or even children's fairy tales. Definitely spurred a lot of re-thinking of my own biases/priors, and anything that has that effect is usually at least fun to read.

I think people can pick up the gist of his rhetoric via secondhand sources (eg. "Chesterton's Fence", or simply the idea that Christianity is good), but I think the actual writing and style of his arguments is like 70% of the magic (and more interesting to me than even the substance he's trying to get across).

I stumbled upon it this year via a random link to a specific page in this online version, and basically just felt compelled to read it start to finish: https://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Gilbert_K_Chesterton/Orthodo...
I agree, but I am assuming she has sufficient proof of her allegations to stand up to any case of defamation, liable, or slander.

"Truth is an absolute defense to libel claims, because one of the elements that must be proven in a defamation suit is falsity of the statement."
iPhone Settings You Need to Turn Off Now
Yes L6 level. Work in ML infrastructure, non politics, non ethical debate, I just help companies to implement ML, nothing fancy or "evil" some customers working in Healthcare, which actually brings positive to the world.
Best HN post ever.
I've worked at a FANG for a decade and it's basically my dream job. I'm not trying to level up, so I don't work that much, and it provides my family and I with more than enough money to do whatever we want. For example last year I took 4 months leave without any complaints from management, or concerns of budgeting, and traveled around western and northern europe. What's not to like? Maybe my difference from the author is I don't look for emotional or intellectual fulfillment from my job - it's something I do so I can have the freedom to pursue those goals outside of work.
> and reputation intact

I'm staying at [large SV company] for now BECAUSE OF their reputation of hiring smart engineers, so that I will be able to hopefully get a gig at a more employee-friendly company later in life. New grads that were in my position often don't have much of a choice, and being offered the ability to pay off my student debt almost immediately at 22 seemed irresponsible to pass up. It's been 4 years and my mental health has degraded for sure (and the work I am doing is not glamorous in the slightest) but my savings are piling up and the thought that this is only temporary (and will give me a nice financial cushion) will keep me going until it's unbearable.
If it's antithetical, why do open source projects tend to have cute little mascots?
> It is expected that we do at least 15 - 25% overtime without compensation

Is this still a thing as a developer in the western world?

If any of my managers proposed this, I would laugh, then say "ah wait, you're serious?", and then laugh some more.
Yeah. I think if you got delivered a hamburger in a restaurant that had just been sitting for 15 minutes, not under heat lamps, you'd be complaining to the waiter. I think we sort of internalize that our food is going to be getting colder etc. as the process of eating it goes on and we don't really think about it. And, as I noted elsewhere, something like soup dumplings or dumplings generally (unless you pan-fry them at home) are going to be pretty meh too in general.
Comments here suggest you're in the majority with your experience, though I wonder if there might be a little participation bias with regard to strong memories of such bad policies.

As a contrast, at my school the policy was far more reasonable: you still needed permission to leave, but if you didn't abuse the privilege—using it every day, or disappearing for half the lesson—the teacher wouldn't give you any grief.
You are the exact kind of person that would gladly embrace this culture. Maybe you should have finished the article, you would have seen a mirror.
/Library/LaunchDaemons disagrees ;)
> As a Sr SWE (~5-6 years of experience) - you're expected to have an influence on the direction of an entire team. You have input into setting OKRs and idea generation is expected for this level (especially at Amazon, not as much at G from what I've seen).

FWIW as a non-yet-Senior-SWE at Google, I have input and influence in OKRs both for myself and others on the team. This depends a lot on the particular work though. I work on internal infra, which is driven less by PMs and external market things, and much more by engineers proactively identifying areas for technical improvement and user pain.
They may hurt you, but even worse, they will make you hurt others. You will be complicit in their ruthlessness. Privacy dragnets, union busting, monopolistic behavior and lobbying, faux-slavery of gig workers in domestic warehouses and actual-slavery of workers in foreign factories, answering to nations committing actual ongoing genocide — this is only possible because highly skilled individuals like yourself chose to work for them, build their war chest, or even directly contribute to these efforts.

This is the highlight of the article to me. We software engineers are paid a lot of money and gifted many cushy benefits to ignore the negative impact of our work. Just read some of the other responses in this thread for examples!

My question to those who feel this way: do you need that second property? That new car? If you were less insulated from the negative externalities, would you make the same choice?

Not all of us are driven solely by a paycheck. I know I could be earning 2-3x times more at a company like Facebook, but I chose not to because I want to sleep at night. As I have gotten older I've started to learn what actually makes me happy verses what I am told should make me happy. Endless consumption and unfettered capitalism do not make me happy. I can achieve the standard of living that keeps me fed, sheltered, entertained, and saving for retirement without working for a megacorp that hurts people less privileged than myself.
Fair enough, but that's just really shitty consultants. These days practitioners (the ones I run into anyway) are quite conscious of process overhead. It helps that many are into Lean as well.

FWIW, shitty agile consultants have had plenty of pushback too, with comedy sites like https://www.halfarsedagilemanifesto.org/ being set up to point out their buffoonery. I do suggest laughing in their faces when they pull out tripe like that. Sometimes their excuse is, 'well, we don't work for a startup, we're a
regulated business' -- well, it's still tripe, there are plenty of regulated businesses with lightweight agile processes.

My favourite piece of writing on this, in fact, comes from the US Defense Innovation Board, and is called "Detecting Agile BS"[1]. Their recommendations may not 100% work for your organization, and that's okay -- tailor it with an eye to outcomes for your team.

[1] https://media.defense.gov/2018/Oct/09/2002049591/-1/-1/0/DIB...
It is indeed tricky with anger as it is easy to be consumed and overwhelmed by it.
It has more to do with ethnic divisions within afghanistan and being near major powers russia, china, india, iran, etc and now the US. Japan is mountainous but eminently governable.
Here's a few observations from 25 years in tech including megacorps:

1) is what you do core to the business?
2) is the company a growth leader? QoQ, YoY, market share, revenue etc.
3) is the company innovating organically

2) and 3) have a fairly big effect on culture. People are busy making shit happen, there's enough exciting projects and career advancement opportunities going around. There's no risk of downsize (firings) so there's less politics it's more about how well you produce.

At some point the company gets too big. Organic growth slows, reorgs happen culture slides, "A" player's leave and it just perpetuates.

Once company can no longer sustain the growth shareholders demand organically, the culture and quality of job experience slides. That's a good time to bail.
This is a cursory and opinionated, unfounded claim saying 'never' and 'boring'. Who are they to decide beforehand about something that doesn't even exist yet, based on a highly subjective matter (boring)?! Also this 'never' thing is just a joke, have they measured the goodness of comments on voting and resulted in 100% 'no good'? This kind of 'reasoning' about vote comments is pretty empty, equals to saying: 'because I say it so!' :/

Knowing the reasons is quite important in fact. Part of the discussion and understanding, learning.
Their report that the sun was to their right as they rounded the Cape helped cement skepticism of the achievement.
Watch out with that strategy on Upwork. I recently got stung by someone who did a great job with a small task and billed a reasonable amount of time. Once I gave them the real work, they subcontracted it (without approval) to someone who didn’t know what they were doing and billed 40 hours per week until I realized what was going on. The code was useless and Upwork basically told me to go fuck myself when I complained.

Fiverr is good for logo concepts if you filter out all but the top rated sellers.
Ask HN: Crypto wallets are the weakest link. Alternatives/Ideas?
Cryptocurrencies gives you the freedom to be your own bank. But if you loose your wallet (hardware or software), you are pretty much f*

Leaving currency at the exchange is akin to trusting bank/third party.

What are your thoughts. Is this problem solvable?
Seems yet another return of Cyrix, this time under a communist flag.
inhuman is a strong word just to talk about schools that were built on the cheap, especially schools that, at the time of constructions, were required because there wasn't enough schools building available.
>I don't believe innate talent exists. Other than that some people are mentally quicker, or have faster reflexes, or are physically more capable -- "general" things

I don't understand how this distinction is supposed to work. If someone has exactly the 'general natural inclinations' that fit to a certain activity, it seems asinine to not call them talented in it. Sure, they won't be skilled in it unless they actually put in the work, but they'll comparatively have an easier time with it.
Let's also not forget some preventative measures. E.g.:

WHO estimates that around 7 million people die every year from exposure to polluted air.

https://www.who.int/news-room/air-pollution
This is not accurate. You can report bugs, etc., on the community forum here, which has open registration:

https://discourse.phabricator-community.org/
That doesn't particularly matter if it violates the HN guidelines.
I remember Farmville best as the answer to the quiz question, close to the height of its popularity:

"What's the second most popular farming simulator game on Facebook?"