skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The underlying assumption that the rich don't deserve to spend their money however they want. Why can't you just celebrate success and encourage people to emulate the successful?

Well let us look at these rich people, on the Forbes 400 richest list. So people can celebrate success and encourage people to emulate the successful.

#1 Bill Gates - had a million dollar trust fund from his bank president grandfather, mother on United Way board with president of IBM
#2 Warren Buffett - father was a congressman, grandparents owned a chain of stores in Nebraska
#3 Larry Ellison - after a middle class upbringing, he was inspired by a 1970 CACM article and proceeded to hit several home runs over the the next few decades
#4 Charles Koch - inherited an oil company
#5 David Koch - inherited an oil company
#6 Christy Walton - inherited Wal-Mart
#7 Jim Walton - inherited Wal-Mart
...and the rest of the Wal-Mart heirs...

Aside from Larry Ellison, all of these people were to the manor born. Telling people to "emulate their success" is ludicrous. Plenty of people are paid good money to tell us why we should "celebrate success" for these people, and should try to "emulate the successful". Anyone who would actually believe these people's press clippings is clearly a fool. They have the same kind of "success" the czar in Russia had - they were born into it.
go ahead kids, downvote me. I love it. I eat it for breakfast.
So he did. My apologies.
Yeah, the sum of the numbers on the board goes up by at most four each turn.
> Google isn't special. They're just a well known consumer brand, and all that marketing is what's got into people's brains. Coke is just sugar water, it doesn't make you cool. It just puts fructose corn syrup into your stomach.

It takes you a while to get to this mindset as a technology worker. Everyone's motivation is different though.

I'm 31, have 13 years of experience, and keep getting rejected by SpaceX for a Linux Admin job at launch operations Cape Canaveral. Yes, I'm overqualified. Yes, I'd be taking an enormous paycut. But I want to help send rockets to Mars damn it.

It's not always about the money, nor about the work. Sometimes, you're simply irrational about it.
Well yes, if we stopped doing stupid things than we might be able to bear the cost of the trip. If we stopped doing stupid things...

But it's also a lack of will because we don't have a rival as formidable as Russia threatening to beat us to the punch. Well, at least not at the moment. Russia looks more and more like it has the desire to play the role again - the desire, but probably not the ability. And if that's true, there's always China. In fact I wouldn't be totally surprised if China's increasing interest in space were the thing that finally got Americans to Mars.

But failing that, what's going to get us to commit the resources to a risky mission like travelling to Mars? A trip whose only reward is first saying we've been there, and only down the road a few decades the ability to colonize it and mine its natural resources?

The only thing more powerful in the nation's mind than projecting military power is money...and maybe that will be enough to get us there....
The best interviews for Software Engineers I've been a part of, on both sides of the table, were those in which a certain level of preparation was expected.

If I ask you random language questions, that you've not prepared for, I am not selecting you for being a good developer, but by being good at remembering language minutiae, which you could always google anyway. Now, if instead I hand you 2000 lines of code 2 days in advance, and tell you that we'll be working on them during the interview, I get a much better approximation of what you can and can't do in a real life scenario. Can you become very familiar with a tiny codebase quickly? Can you really analyze it critically, and tell me where it sucks? When asked to fix bugs, or make code changes, can you make the changes actually fit into the existing structure, or are you going to want to rewrite the world?

If you'd get a very different result in an interview if I gave you the questions I was going to ask an hour in advance, then I am not testing work skills at all. You don't hire a juggler by seeing if he is good at playing basketball, you watch him juggle.
Upvoted for elegance.
Huh, on Android Browser, the toast flies but the the toasters just animate in place.
This doesn't seem very good:

Panel Type, Surface: TN

Viewing Angle: (160° vertical / 170° horizontal)
I think 39" is an awesome size for a monitor.

First up, I'll say I'm really not bothered about pixel density on a desktop machine. I love Retina on my laptop, but I never notice it's not there on my iMac - it's too far away from my face.

39" lets you do the wonderful thing I do with my secondary monitor right now - push secondary applications off to the side.

I imagine what I'd do with this amount of space is have my text editor and a browser window roughly in the middle, and have terminal, Git, chat, etc peppered all around the outside. Even with a 27" I'm constantly hitting the sides right now. My main monitor can't do more than text editor + browser effectively.

You get loads more productivity from additional space, I think for two reasons: less app switching, and being able to see EVERYTHING you're working on. Like taking over a fresh desk when you need to knuckle down on a task. In action films, when it gets serious, they go to a clean desk and unroll a giant map. Having a huge screen is the same thing.

I imagine in a few years programmers and geek types will have, maybe, a 60" curved display that takes up most of the desk.
Why Silicon Valley’s Success Is So Hard to Replicate
I believe this[1] is the paper (paywalled).

From the abstract:

>we deposited 572 bags with uncontaminated dry leaf litter from four species of trees in the leaf litter layer at 20 forest sites around Chernobyl that varied in background radiation by more than a factor 2,600

Depending on how much variation there is in microclimate and soil type within their 20 locations, I could believe that they could get some pretty convincing results from 572 bags. Especially if, as it appears from their claims, the effect of radiation is very large relative to background noise.

On the other hand, the senior author:

* is not an expert in any related field as far as I can tell

* has been known to fabricate his data [2] and engage in borderline misconduct during the data analysis and writing phases as well [3].

I'm agnostic.

[1]: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00442-014-2908-8

[2]: http://news.sciencemag.org/2004/01/ecologists-rocked-miscond...

[3]: http://bio.fsu.edu/~dhoule/Publications/mollerreview.pdf (large PDF)
Stories like this make me very glad of the system we have in Australia. You can choose to have your Univertity fees just automatically paid by an interest free loan from the government (it's like a five minute online form to sign up for), and then you just pay back 4% of the loan on each tax return if your salary is over $51,000 (you can choose to make voluntary payments over the compulsory rate, or if you make less than $51,000 - you even get a 5% bonus if you pay over $500 - for example, make a $1000 voluntary contribution and they take off a bonus $50 off the loan).

Pretty good scheme to allow people to be educated (which is generally a net win for the economy) without being shackled by ever-growing debt from the start of their working life.
A never ending source of amusement -- clickbait links to try to make you watch videos. http://duckworthy.tumblr.com/post/79723912468/doctors-inject...
Don't forget that the two touchpads can still be configured to work as dpad + buttons.
... diseases that affect the poor in other countries. As an organization funded by US tax dollars, NIH is primarily responsible for advancing the health of Americans. It's not an international charity.
I have found I often agree with Michele, but I think she makes some basic errors in this piece.

1) That most power is in the hands of a few people, who at this moment are primarily men, does not generalize to mean that most men have any power over most women. Most men, most women, at work are powerless. Bosses, leads, vps from other departments -- they have power and they are frequently women.

2) She frames the problem as one of active male behavior and passive female behavior. Women are acted upon. Men at work want sex or romance -- I guess women at work do not want sex or romance. It may very well be that at work she does not want sex or romance. And my guess is that at work most men do not want sex or romance. But there are some men, and there are some women that do.

That's not to say that her path out may not have some virtues.

I do think it would be good for everyone to turn the knob back down to 10, or 9, or perhaps even 3, and talk about the issues of sex and romance and sexism at work, while recognizing this isn't a problem of "Men" and isn't a problem of "Women" but is perhaps a problem of "homo sapiens in the 21st century".
900m is well within the reach of even a decabillionaire. Especially one who wants to be famous.

Consider also the billions thrown around for acquisitions.

And consider that the rovers were on the national news for months. What's that kind of PR worth?
You default and they stop adding any money to your debt? That doesn't sound right. If I tried that I'm sure they'd be adding some 30% late fee every month.
There are other streaming videos on amazon that you still need to pay for, even if you aren't a Prime member. The "free" amazon prime videos are the ones that are $0 extra if you are Prime, instead of $1.99 or whatever.
You're kidding yourself if you think Google is "just a well known consumer brand"...
If only there was some magical way to put multiple dwellings on the one plot of land :)

What you really are saying is you want a large house on a large plot in a location of your choosing for cheap.
Curation, Sharing and Helping: Why You Should Build Communities for Your Web App
Bizarrely I've actually found that having a large single display makes me less productive as a programmer as too much head movement is required to see everything and I prefer to focus on a single file at time to keep everything mindful.

In the cases that I do need to compare two files side by side at the same time or have documentation open I have a secondary monitor for the additional window.

I've also learned that having a monitor that has the correct dpi ratio verses screen resolution verses screen size is more important than cramming the most number of pixels into a specific screen size. Especially if you want to avoid eye strain.
I haven't tried the 28" monitor because it suffers from the 30hz problem as well, so instead I got the 24" Ultrasharp (~$200 more on amazon) and it's amazing. It supports DisplayPort 1.2 so it can do 60hz. It supports HDMI as well, but not the newer version so you are limited to 30hz if you want to use HDMI.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HALPPM0/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
When you accept the terms of agreement

I'm not a Facebook user.

Whose user agreement governs the use of my data on Facebook?

Dittos for Google or other data aggregators who acquire data from elsewhere. And/or ignore the explicit stated preferences of users. And/or change the rules governing data use post-facto.
> File the lawsuit

That's not how it works, at least not in California. That is if you use the equal employment opportunity system. You go through arbitration first. The two sides have to meet and negotiate an outcome, someone is there to help the process. Likely it will be settled there with money exchanged unless there was never any enough evidence for it to go to arbitration. Once there is arbitration, both sides have to compromise. If this fails, then you can file a law suit. The arbitration will be part of that I imagine, but I've never seen how the process works after arbitration. I think usually fixing it in arbitration is the norm.

You don't still have to work at that place to file the grievance. So this individual can still do that. I think if you've gone public with your accusation you are less likely to have success at arbitration because I would think at least.

The amount of money I've seen exchanged is usually a few months salary. You have to come in with a big number though, because you will be pressured to bring it down.
users are volunteering their information to Facebook.

Not those whose data are shadow-profile generated, or is provided by others.
My dad used to love that screen saver. And then I worked in the building that was formerly occupied by Berkeley Systems (the company behind the flying toasters...)
Eh, this article doesn't really make sense....

Basically the author defaulted on their student loan instead of deferring and makes an argument as to why it was a good decision for them.

The reason I say it doesn't make much sense is that, imo, it really glosses over just how big a deal defaulting on a loan is. While the author is talking about themself, a naive individual might get the idea that this is the right choice for them, when it almost certainly is not.

Trashing your credit and not being able to take out a house/car loan is a pretty huge deal for most people...

Just keep in mind defaulting on a loan isn't something that you just _do_ and then _undo_ with no consequences(other than saving on that interest lel)...

That shit stays with you for at least 7 years and if you're trying to get a loan for anything having defaulted on your only loan ever... Good luck.
2048 in exactly 2048 bytes of C, counting blanks and newlines (a bit of a cheat to use indentation to push it up to 2K).

https://gist.github.com/datatravelandexperiments/9578313

Needs C99 and curses; e.g.

cc -std=c99 2048.c -lcurses

Note: This is pretty awful code, but I'd rather go to sleep than use up the blanks to make it cleaner. Don't write like this.
Microsoft was bootstrapped from an initial investment of about $5000, as I recall. Hardly uberwealth, and no VC.

I worked for a contemporary of Microsoft at the time. We had better technology, knew microcomputers upside down, had better everything, except had no vision. And that company was booted from nothing.
This is simply not true. I am a Google employee, and I conduct both actual software engineer interviews and what we call "lunch interviews" (in quotes because it's kind of a silly name). For the latter, my only communication with the hiring team is for scheduling. I find out where to meet the candidate, and where to take them after lunch. That's it. I don't even know how I would leave feedback for a lunch interview if I wanted to.

The only way in which the "lunch interview" is an interview is in the reverse direction: it's the candidate's chance to ask all kinds of informal or random questions about Google. Other than that, it's really just a chance to give their brain a break, because let's face it, interviewing is stressful and doing six interviews in one day is pretty exhausting. It wouldn't be much of a break if we were testing them while they ate.

I guess if a candidate did something egregiously bad while we ate lunch, like jump kicking me or something, I'd probably go out of my way to track somebody down and tell them. But other than that, lunch is just... lunch! :)
Your link does not work for me. What works is what your parent suggested: searching for the title and clicking on the result.
Right, being a company filled with some of the best and brightest engineers in the industry working on technical challenges of massive scale makes Google just like any other company.
Sure, the facilities for statistics and plotting are well exposed. But all the features you need for 'general purpose' are in there too, and they aren't awkward to access (at least, relative to anything else).
I'm asking this question of all SRE's in this thread: How did you develop the necessary skills required for an SRE role? It's my dream job but I feel I'll never be intelligent enough. My current job in an ISP NOC doesn't give me tons of room to develop the skills required for an SRE role, I script/code and create small projects outside of work, but the entry level for SRE just looks so high compared to what I feel I could ever achieve.
Your apologism is incredible.

"Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.."
As I am unable to boot into any OS or installer, how can I change the partition type?
Perhaps the most unsettling part of Michele's observation is that it is not clear how to get around it. Calls for gender neutrality in the work place are a bit like asking for world peace. There is no neutral, so long as sex and instinct are involved.

When I am tasked to work one-on-one with an attractive female co-worker, shit gets cloudy really quickly. I'm a happily married man. I telecommute. There is no reason for these situations to be awkward. But yet, here we are. The gray zone certainly exists and it will be a very tough nut to crack.

Basically, kudos to Michele for calling out the uselessness of public shame sessions, and advocating a new tack. Because the old one sure as hell wasn't going to get us across the finish line.
> Most of the information in the Wikipedia text is in the language, not in the 'actual' knowledge.

Exactly, I see the same problem. With the current rules, this is just a challenge of text compression.

I believe compressing the knowledge in the Wikipedia would be more akin to extracting meaning with NLP into a highly-normalized dataset, and then compressing that. From an AI perspective, this is more close to how our memory actually works. Unless you're savant, you don't memorize the actual text of a topic, but the inferred associations, which compress much better, although lossy.
How is Google anything more than a well-known consumer brand?
At a high level, would you want to be working alongside that person as a teammate? If someone were to write in the interview summary, "the candidate is really bright, but arrogant as all h*ll; I wouldn't want him/her to be on my team because he/she would be incredibly painful to work with", that's a pretty strong signal to the hiring committee.

So someone who spouts off racist, or presents as a brogrammer (i.e., cracks sexist jokes or throws around terms such as "gang bang", etc.) --- definitely not Googley.

Of course, it's harder to detect the more subtle forms of "someone I wouldn't want to have as a teammate" in a 45-minute interview. So more often than not, what I end up putting in that section when I do interviews is "no issues noted". The good news is that many of the more nuanced forms of "googleyness" are hard wired into the culture, and so new hires tend to pick up on these sorts of things through osmosis and seeing how more senior engineers behave. Things like gathering data to back up theories, and not just making assertions, or writing code very defensively and with a heavy emphasis on testing, etc.

Of course, these highly desirable attributes aren't unique to Google! In an ideal world, these sorts of things would be the base level of what would be assumed by all engineers across all companies! Unfortunately, those of us who have worked on many companies know this is not true --- and there will be a few bad apples inside any company, including at Google. But on the whole, I have to say that Google's hiring process tends to do a much better job weeding out "engineers I'd rather not have on my team" better than what I've seen almost everywhere else.
Most likely because a user uploaded something that Google didn't like.

Google Adsense is pretty strict on the pages that you can display their ads on. If someone uploads a pornographic or offensive image to the site and theres a Google adsense ad on it, then Google will ban the entire site.
> They have the same kind of "success" the czar in Russia had - they were born into it.

Oh brother. Most of these people started out in life ahead of the average person, sure. But you know what, they all took what they started with in life and worked their asses off to build it into something even greater. I'm sure for every person on this list there's ten people who started with a silver spoon in their mouth, and through sloth and weakness blew everything. Some probably wound up on the streets.

And have you looked into the family histories of these successful people? How many of these families started off with members who had nothing, who worked hard and made it? Does it invalidate their original success that they were smart enough to build a family culture which preserved and built upon success? Oh, I suppose that's another thing we shouldn't bother trying to emulate.

But hey, let's not bother trying to build a representative sample base for our snide claims eh?

Bill Gates may have come from privilege, but then he built on that - he brought computing to the world, introduced untold economic efficiencies to every single industry on earth, and produced more economic growth arguably than any other single individual in the last century. Buffett again worked hard, made smart bets, took risks, and it paid off. Ellison you admit invalidates your hypothesis. Koch I'm not familiary with. The Waltons have obviously been working diligently because last I heard Walmart was a powerhouse that millions of Americans choose of their own free will to shop at every day.

Comparing Bill Gates and the others on this list to a blatantly parasitic ruling class extracting resources from the toil of slaves through a monopoly on state violence is just plain, unforgivable idiocy.

I would expect better from the audience of a website devoted to the idea that anyone who has a valuable idea and works hard can make something of themselves.
Are you from the USA?

This is basically a form of strategic default. Because the debtor hasn't renegotiated their loan(deferred) and has stopped paying for their loan, they defaulted(breached contract, failed to meet obligations, w/e).

Because there's no contract, they don't charge interest, but they do hit your credit score and go after the money other ways. In the USA your credit score determines your eligibility for future lines of credit, loans, etc....

In addition defaulting on a loan allows the debtor to garnish wages, tax refunds, etc...

It is EXTREMELY RARE that a situation would arise in which the cost of interest on your loan would exceed the cost of a defaulted loan on your credit report.
Question for folks who have 4k resolution on a smaller screen (like 28"). Isn't most text (like text on websites) IMPOSSIBLY SMALL to read? My laptop has 1080p res and is 15 inches, and my goodness I can't read anything without Ctrl +'ing in Chrome until things are at least scaled at 125% (I generally use the web at 150% though). 15 * 4 = 60... (as 1080p * 4 ~= 4k), that means I'd need easily 80+ inch screen to be using 4k screens. How in the heck would you deal with things with 4k on a 28" screen?
1. Which is why I have to estimate risk from incomplete information. Which is a pretty common thing for people to have to do in real life.

If I'm in an unfamiliar city and someone I don't know says "Hey, watch out for that alley, several people have been attacked there recently," I wouldn't know whether it was true. But it would be pretty stupid to decline to take any precautions until I could perform my own plot of crime statistic data by location to assess the truth value, don't you think?

2. Actually, they have a history of problems with women that they were trying to repair. Which is why she was trying to turn the company around on the issue and evangelize it in the first place. Did you read the article?
There are indeed many administrative rulings that are not made by judges, but instead by executives in government.

That internet service providers are not common carriers is just one example of an administrative FCC ruling.

Administrative rulings matter a great deal to the daily operation of government and how citizens interface with their services.

It has been and continues to be a major cost in terms of time, effort and resources for news organizations to drag every administrative ruling in front of a judge.