skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was confused by this article, to be honest. I can't speak to Graeber in particular but I've read many articles about the idea of bullshit jobs and in general, the theses I read had little (although not nothing) to do with how people felt about their jobs -- it was more about the actual utility of them, in the sense of there being a bureaucratic administrative elite who are largely unnecessary and serve mostly to increase their largesse at the expense of those below them ("the MBAization of America" to reluctantly quote Musk). If anything, I think the idea is that people in these positions overvalue their positions.

I don't want to advocate for this idea necessarily, just that I think the "bullshit jobs thesis" might mean something different to different people. The Economist article closes with an admission that "part of Mr Graeber’s thesis turns out to be correct," discussing the adage that "people leave bad managers, not bad jobs." Many variants of the bullshit jobs thesis I think propose an increase in bad managers, who are part of a larger unnecessary management structure.

I guess overall I felt as if the Economist piece was missing a few things.
It's good it wasn't deleted, but disappointing that he winds up editorializing it with his quip.

I've come to not expect much more from HackerNews. Sometimes http://n-gate.com/ is the best summary one can ask for.
Here’s the thing: public officials created procedures with estimates based upon who qualifies. If you qualified and didn’t take it, you actually created inefficiencies in the system, and slowed down rollout.

Source: friend in high up gov in CA
> "Any post that challenges dang will likely get voted down."

While this may be the case, the comment you reply to is a particularly poor example on which to hang this comment. It's a snarky, insubstantive insinuation, regardless of whom it's in response to, and was edited to complain about downvotes.

> "Still it's sorta good that this post wasn't outright deleted."

It's likely it wasn't flagged and removed because it was in response to 'dang, as he is generally leaves responses to his comments in place even when they're quite bad, even if he doesn't follow-up with a reply in what I take to be added transparency.
And yet here we are, digging ditches for private companies all day long.
But then he couldn't subtly minimize or delegitimize it.
I am chill. You're misinterpreting things.

It's perfectly reasonable things may never go perfect. However. Things become sketchy when Dang changes the title and pins his own opinion at the head of the comment section.

Gossip and news are literally the same thing. It feeds and lights up the same areas of the brain. It's hard to say whether this is gossip or news because from this guys post it looks like he got kicked out of YC for trivial reasons. It can potentially say as much about the reputation of YC as it does about the guy who got kicked out. That sounds like news to me.

>Cherry-picking statements and acting like this is not appreciated.

You know I make a huge effort not to cherry pick anything. But it's inevitable things are usually interpreted this way because of the medium of communication or my own trouble with articulating the meaning of what I say. My experience is that when you "think" someone is cherry picking words on HN, usually he's not doing it on purpose and that's how he actually interpreted what you said.

Look carefully at what I wrote. The only thing I am doing here is presenting a valid opinion that goes against the grain of public opinion. There's nothing else going on yet it's exploding into some kind of drama where you're telling me to "chill".

Consider the fact that the bias lies with you. You interpreted my comment as not "chill" when I'm literally just calmly typing my thoughts. I am calm, but why did you insert emotion into my words where none initially existed? Because you are biased. My guess is that you injected hostility into my words because my opinion is simply against your opinion.

It's normal human behavior to interpret a difference of opinion as an attack. I point this out to you so you can better understand yourself and to not classify a unique opinion as an attack. This is my interpretation of what's going on with you and I think it's pretty accurate.
I personally don’t think Python type hints are particularly useful for solo projects, but are very useful for communicating the intent of my code to others.
> the ratings themselves are total horseshit and are running industry joke

Any further references to this? I’d love to have something I can send around internally. The people running Tenable tend to treat these numbers as gospel.
> > For example, jobs may be created as a placeholder for otherwise unused staffing budget.

> I don't think it works like that.

I'll split the middle. Sometimes it works like that, but not nearly as often as proponents of the narrative say it does.
The mean value as t approaches infinity.
These doses are ones that otherwise be thrown away. At that point, it is more ethical to give a shot than not. The situation others are discussing is not that.

Giving context as someone who has worked on COVID vaccination sites. The above isn’t common knowledge so can be misconstrued.
> while not standard, writing a shader to decode is not hard(admittedly if you know shaders)

Ah, the old "Step 2: Draw the rest of the owl" scenario.
> Worst case you get banned

Worst case is they call the local PD who are having a bad day and want to point a gun at a black man
Wouldn't giving a date on the last bounty also increase agricultural output?
>They've obviously carefully tuned their check out staffing so that the lines are always long. This is such a constant that it has to be intentional, and they're doing a good job of it.

Macy's has a similarly annoying policy. They deliberately keeping their cash registers unmanned, which they apparently tell their employees is to "avoid intimidating customers" so you have to stand around waiting or seek out an employee manually. I thought my local Macy's was simply understaffed, but since learning they do it on purpose I've decided never to go there again.
Can you clarify if this is sarcasm or not.
Walmart has some weird cultural issues that make store operations hard to adapt. It’s a pretty miserable place to work. They hire anyone, turn them out quickly, and have weird work rules for things like gathering in a group.

Target’s pickup operation is superior in every dimension. They made the decision to put it front and center, and their employees seem happier. It takes <3 minutes to have a Target person drop stuff in your car, Walmart requires scheduling and is usually late.

The other issue they have is that their logistical operation is best in class for retail, but not so good for shipping.
I have no idea if those Intel employees had direct experience with Itanium or they merely drank the "Itanium is bad" kool-aid. The hardware was pretty bad in the early years but Intel fixed those problems (speed, power, feature size, etc.)

At the end the problem was timing: We didn't know how to write compilers that could figure out micro-scheduling in advance so software couldn't take advantage of the Itanium, and when AMD64 came out and added a bunch of registers and did all that nasty instruction reordering and speculative execution in realtime on-chip everybody said "just use that." Nowadays compiler writers have a much keener understanding of static analysis and almost certainly could take advantage of the chip. And vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown would never have happened because all that optimization would have been done in the compiler where it belongs.
Okay, that criticism is legit, but they also have a point, and more importantly, they have docs, tooling, and cross-compiling experience. When you're implementing the basic C machine, or kernel, or drivers on which every other tool chain ever conceived at some level relies on for new architectures and hardware, you are operating in the most constrained setting of just about any programmer today. It is different, and you have to think different because you're trying to make sure you're getting the foundation right.

When the docs exist, and are accurate they can somewhat hide behind "get better programmers"; when they aren'the some can be even moreso, because there is nothing worse than trying to drive poorly documented hardware. It either works or it doesn't.

T. QA guy amongst a bunch of dev types who regularly points out how they do a great job implementing the wrong thing on a regular basis, and helps shape process to make that harder.

The fact they come out in Rust threads has more to do with Rust's evangelist types running afoul of the long standing love of "things that work". Somewhat in the cowboy camp's defense, none of theach no guardrail's type ever turns down a good static analyzer or test suite once you figure out how to get it smoothly integrated into their process. That's where I think Rust gets their outreach wrong.

Don't try to sell development on a brand new lang to learn and replace what they are using. Use the lessons you learn with making that lang, and improve the tooling they are familiar with. We don't have an infinite capacity to learn a new lang and library ecosystem every 6 months to just keep doing what we do. Once you get savvy enough with C and where the spec holes are, you've gotten to a point where you've gotten insight into how things actually work many levels more accurately than just about any other programming toolchain, and also onenjoy of the only languages completely divested of licensing lock-in on the planet.

There is also the point that you can'take really argue against C's effectiveness. It's always the first code to be made functional on any new silicon. I'm interested to see if Rust supplant's it, but I'm weary of any language that's heavily reliant on LLVM as I'm getting more savvy on how licensing risk tends to play out in the long run.

You can't beat the immortality and ubiquity of GPL. It is as close to the unrevocable toolbox from the public domain you'll ever get.
One thing true at all times and places: there is plenty of bullshit to stuff every category you can think of, with more left over.

Bullshit that doesn't benefit employers, bullshit that doesn't benefit customers, bullshit that doesn't benefit governments, bullshit that doesn't benefit citizens.
Maybe I should rephrase. The point of the question is about initial non-responses.
The fulcrum of the Economists argument gives away their bias. They say that “asking people if their job contributes something meaningful to the world is a high bar indeed”. That made me laugh out loud.
'dang may have pinned the comment to the top to make clear that he had changed the submitted title to the tweet and be open that he had done so. From what I've observed, pinning comments in this case isn't uncommon.

Edit to add: as 'Nicksil kindly pointed out, 'dang made clear he didn't do this in this case.
Its the unpredictability to having their world view challenged that I called out and already clarified. Those are completely related thoughts separated by punctuated. There's no point in trying to find other metrics I didn't specify at all.
His defense was:

> 1. I went to a neighborhood clinic in Oakland, CA that's literally next door to my house, I can see the church from my window. Paul lives in NYC which is on the opposite end of the country.

> 2. I asked them about eligibility and told them I don't clear CA guidelines. They told me it's first come, first served with an ID showing I am 18+.

I am not buying this. Why would they even go and ask for eligibility when they know very well they are not eligible?

The only reason would be to hope to find a loophole.

The whole vaccine situation in CA was an excellent test of character. They failed it.

Not surprised that a YC founder thinks that rules apply only to others and not themselves. The antisocial gene is strong in this one.
Grid is not the successor to flexbox. They’re different layout techniques that were invented at much the same time (though grid took longer to mature) for different situations. Flexbox is one-dimensional plus wrapping, while grid is two-dimensional. Now in practice, most applications of grid could be rewritten to use flexbox, but there are plenty of layouts that can be achieved with one but not with the other, both ways.
> you don't shop at the lower cost store, because the greeter was having a bad day and was not nice enough to you

People at Wal-mart have a bad day all the time. It's about the customer service. I have less anxiety knowing that if I do run into problems in the store, the staff would be more approachable.

> what class you are and should have shown more reverence

I didn't read the original comment this way. It sounds like you are projecting a bit
You're assuming the truth of one side in the matter, with very limited information.
Memorial Day Sale – BedInABox Coupon 2021
I appreciate your comment but I think you make a mistake in treating "facts" as if fact-discourse is somehow different than political discourse. I don't mean 'there are no facts' or 'truth is what you make of it' or anything like that. Rather, the problem is one of selection. There are infinitely many facts. Selecting the facts that serve your purpose and omitting the ones that don't is not only a political choice, it's the quintessence of political discourse.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

While I certainly agree (if I hear you correctly) that truth matters and there is such a thing as loving the truth for its own sake, I don't agree that public discourse can be divided in the way you posit. Quite the opposite.
It isn't math so much as objective measurements that are necessary to have science. So I'd say the ability to impose math on those measurements is a necessary but not sufficient condition. One can produce garbage even in hard physics with bad theories and poor experiments.

Humans have way too many variables for anything beyond the most crude theories to ever be rigorous in my opinion.
Before I clicked the link I knew it was going to be a purple monkey, and I resent my brain for retaining those neurons vs any of the countless useful things I’ve forgotten since the time when this software existed.
This has been the story for the last 8 years at minimum. There's nothing new here. They have still found a way to survive and grow during this time.
> I don't think there was a way for the public health authorities to create an explicit rule about neighborhood residency without inviting lawsuits.

Zuckerberg Hospital in SF was offering vaccinations to targeted zip codes ahead of schedule, and they were verifying residency.
why? can't maker implement blacklists?
I was more of an "AOLHell" and "Anarchist Cookbook" kind of kid.
Let me take a wild guess here… you do _real_ work?
> The workplace is inherently political; it consumes the vast majority of workers' waking hours for years, and decades.

Where are people working where the vast majority of their waking hours, for decades, are spent at work? At least be honest, these articles about bringing politics to work are talking about people in comfy tech jobs working 8 hours a day, not wage slaves in coal mines and factories working 12 hour days.
You can really see the jpeg artifacts on that map if you zoom in enough to really read the smaller location names. It’s too bad that they used that much compression on it.
Thanks for your balanced comment. I should clarify that while I do believe I think for myself, that's not to suggest that all woke folks don't. Although I'm sure some don't.
Bank information does appear in some other lesser know reporting agencies - but savings aren’t “credit” so it’s understandable they don’t appear on a credit report.
Original tweet is from March
It's not the best choice, it's Spacer's Choice!
I Built a Lisp
>'dang may have pinned the comment to the top to make clear that he had changed the submitted title to the tweet and be open that he had done so.

But he hadn't as was said in this very thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27401409
>For there to be a competitive market in jobs there should always be as least as many jobs unfilled as there are people who want to work - which represent the two tails of the market.

Why should both sides be equal? Easy counter-example: I'm sure everyone on earth would like an iphone (demand of 8 billion) but the supply is far less than that.
Because vulnerabilites arise from programmers making poor assumptions.
Or the more cynical people are more likely to feel alienation (not because alienation causes cynicism - though it does - but because cynicism causes alienation).

But ideal workers who are neither naive nor cynical - how do they see the situation?
Not sure how to what you're responding, but governments also do compete. In particular, according to one popular interpretation of history, Soviet Union did fail to compete with United States precisely because it was filled with useless make-work.
If spying is tomorrow's only viable "economy" we are in trouble.

This is why "Big Tech" is a joke. Spying, like legally selling opiates, is not a legitimate business. It does not matter how much money can be made doing it.
I use the Tools > Time Range feature constantly. It's extremely useful.

I don't know if quotes prevent synonyms, but verbatim mode should.
Ah, cheers! I stand corrected.
Amazon followed their path and they also started to have issue: with their image.
Indirection is irrelevant on its own.

What would be the impact if that job and/or person disappeared right now (aside from personal relations; on the job, business, organization)?

Would they be missed for more than the candy jar they stocked on their desk? Would something critical go undone? Why? Was their job as a pass through (notify Alice that Bob is done)? Was the job a meaningful check (verify Alice's work then notify Bob)? Is that verification mechanical (a sanity check that can be automated) or does it require expertise (huh, that widget won't work in that gizmo, there's an issue documented at...)?

Obviously, low/negative performers disappearing can always improve things, but usually by the work itself being dispersed to competent people. Assume a competent person in the role, is it actually useful and providing value that would be missed if they left?
That's completely arbitrary. Why not 0? Why not exactly 4?
Every time I hear people talking about "grocery store margins" the numbers get smaller and smaller, and I suspect "Hollywood accounting" may be behind some of the numbers people are thinking/repeating.

I can say some of the shops around here have always been pricey, but a Lidl came in to town and manages to undercut every other store by around 30% on pretty much every comparable item. Overall, stores making 0.5% profit simply doesn't add up. We've got more new chains moving in to the area, existing stores moving (merely half a mile away for access to better demographics), and this is all costing tens of millions in construction alone. Note: I realize that other regions may have store closures to balance this out too - some areas boom, others shrink.

I can not believe multi-billion companies would be putting up tens/hundreds of millions to chase after these minuscule (and apparently shrinking) profit margins. Maybe I'm wrong. Or perhaps this meme of "grocery stores never make a profit!" is wrong, or at least overblown. A quick check up of a regional store indicates their net profit is somewhere around 2.3% of sales volume - not stellar, but not terribly close to 0.5% either.

EDIT: bit more info/breakdown on the subject: https://thegrocerystoreguy.com/what-is-the-profit-margin-for...

EDIT 2: FWIW, on your $200 example, the company making 'only' $1, it's probably more like $4-$5, but that's after all other expenses (labor, inventory, insurance, advertising, etc) is factored in.
Firefox (Ubuntu) wants to download it instead of display it...
Are you suggesting that's common?
Binance CEO Lambasts Elon Musk for Irresponsibly Manipulating the Crypto Market
I understand I can say no but this is the only Walmart in my routine that isn’t a super center (it’s a “neighborhood market”) so I don’t yet want to get banned from there. I am planning to start shopping at somewhere besides Walmart in the near future though.
This is not Graeber’s argument. Most people responding to the survey talked about the role itself, not the overall ethics of their profession. A society of writers still needs someone to sell the pencils. What’s crazy is how many people are in vestigial make-work roles, divorced from any kind of meaning or even commercial transactions.
With the low cri fluorescent lights.
I’m one independent contractor doing engineering at one farm. I’d be surprised if I was even on whatever list was used to estimate what must be tens of thousands of farm workers in CA. In fact farm workers are so often undocumented they cannot have an accurate tally.
... and the Soviets beat NASA to space, both in getting a satellite in orbit and in getting a human in orbit.

(There's a bit of inherent Great Man Fallacy in figuring out the contributions of the Nazis, because while on the one hand von Braun did lead the design for the rocket that got NASA on the moon and the Soviets failed miserably at their equivalent, on the other hand, the Soviet rocketry lead who was behind their two previous successes died in 1966. There's an argument that they would have pulled it off if he had survived, but more generally, there's an argument that people other than von Braun were perfectly capable of competently building rockets, and in particular that they could do better work than the Americans while under Soviet-style politics.)
This, in my opinion, is the largest role of government in a capitalist society. Capitalism is not sustainable without guard rails. By design, a company will always pass costs onto society if it can.

The government has an obligation to ensure negative economic costs are paid by the producers and consumers of goods and services.

An example of this would be Walmart for years relying almost exclusively on Medicaid benefits for their employees healthcare. Walmart is hardly the worst company in terms of passing economic costs on to others or future generations. But, the point is, that unless the government forces a company to pay the true costs of doing business it's always going to result in market distortions.

It's a design flaw of capitalism, which is actually easy to correct within an equitable political system. However, this is much more rare than it ought be.
They are better than Amazon. You can filter search results on Walmart so that you don’t see third party reseller Aliexpress garbage and only stuff sourced by Walmart themselves.

Last I checked, Amazon had removed that option as of maybe a decade ago, and they commingle inventory so they do not assure me of any supply chain integrity.

And they are more expensive for any dense, heavy, especially liquid products.
Wars are strictly negative-sum. Nothing is made, much is destroyed.

Armies are as bullshit as anything ever. The only reason you have one is that they have one too, and vice versa.
Once, as a child, I grabbed the phone behind the counter, hit the PA button, and requested a cashier at our section. It worked! Probably wouldn’t go over so well as an adult, though.
Full agreement here. Drives me nuts when I see a Docker image for something that should be a simple zip file and some basic deploy or build instructions, but I can see why people prefer it.
What is MPN? That's not a core product or service I recognize.
"Shut up and dribble."
The basic problem is that people undervalue data about themselves. They don’t imagine the kinds of conclusions that can be made, or the consequences.

It’s been more than a decade, but I was impressed by this research from Allessandro Acquisti that suggested people valued their data only in the pennies.

When 25 Cents is too much: An Experiment on Willingness-To-Sell and Willingness-To-Protect Personal Information, Jens Grossklags, Alessandro Acquisti, Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS), 2007