skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Working in such an organisation and being in the middle ranks (Manager), I may have a reconciling view to offer. These huge organisations (I see partners mentioned so I will assume big4) are not pioneering innovators (even if they try to appear so) but powerhouses of mediocrity. You can be brilliant and it will be appreciated to some degree, but most probably the passion that comes with your brilliance will be subdued by the layers of mediocrity between you and the mediocre leadership.

In partnerships, this is even more accentuated by the fact that there is division of power by design, so even if a visionary leader appreciates a vision you still have to convince the partnership which is mostly a matter of PR rather than quality of idea. I can relate to the graduate, but the fact is a brilliant graduate will be too anxious to demonstrate their skills which does not help them see the reality. It is not a matter of personal skills, there are brilliant people sprinkled in the organisation at different levels, but a matter of organisational culture that builds on commoditising ideas.

In a big organisation the skills are averaged out and it is the greatest common divisor that can be commoditised. There are more brilliant partners than graduates but the aggregated soup is tasteless. And by the time you are a partner you make enough money to not care about the spice you add to the soup but about the measured KPIs that make up your contribution (sales.)

It reads more like a rant, but I am glad to give more details on specifics. Just to address the title, it is not that firms don't want you to be brilliant at your job, it is that they could not care less unless it is a client that focuses on your brilliance. And the situation with clients is very similar but I will not address it here.
How Apple's Tim Cook Explained Away Poor iPad Sales
You can't imagine? When it's right there in front of you? I said if you want to judge the core by the fringe then you could judge the entire anti-GG side by Zoe Quinn's actions. smacktoward objected to my description of ZQ so I backed it up.

"After all, she wasn't involved in anything remotely resembling "journalistic corruption""

Riiight. So her relationships with the five guys who just happen to be senior games journalists is a lie is it? The leaked emails of the Game Journo Pros mailing list is just a figment of my imagination is it? The mass censorship at Reddit, Kotaku, 4Chan, RPS and Polygon didn't happen did it?

"I also think that taking the words of an ex at face value is something very different from "her own words"."

You're an idiot. He provides specific proof on the very first page that the logs aren't doctored. Neither has she denied a word because, well, she can't.
I know, this dates back from emacs 21.3. I wanted to know if someone had the time and skills to replicate the experiment with 24.4
Or just link to an existing fund with a pretty great track record and truly heroic volunteers: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/
Great guys! Waiting to try it! Make sure to make it easy to use:))
You make it sound like Facebook is a 10 man operation where everyone gets to make decisions and have an impact on the outcome of company initiatives. Trust me that's not what it looks like when you're on the ground floor.
You can't commercially sell the bots, but their output is fair game. Think of it like a GPL'd compiler. This seems reasonable to me.
There's no evidence that Ebola can't evolve into a sharknado, destroying flying 747s with a whirlwind of teeth. Should we also be concerned with this possible evolution?

Ebola has been researched extensively for 40 years. We know pretty much exactly how it spreads. It's not airborne. We also know why certain viruses are airborne and that Ebola is not such a virus nor could its structure evolve so that it becomes one.

If you read the article again (you probably should), maybe this last point will become clear to you.
Mainly the prestige but all four of those are good points. There aren't many places where you have an opportunity to do things for the sake of doing them, most places either don't value technology or don't have to budget to investigate new and interesting technology. I love the place I currently work and love the people I work with, however I don't want to be doing line of business crud apps forever. If I could get a good wage in academia I would but it seems much less likely than getting a job at one of those companies I listed.
Here is a style for K (http://nsl.com/papers/style.pdf) 1995. Interestingly, most of the concepts still apply.

I believe the audience is developers using K in a commercial/production environment.

The biggest differences, compared to Arthur's style of writing, are:
* Less code on each line
* A separate comment column on each line
* Nominal use of spaces for readability
The most important, significant data that this outbreak of Ebola isn't airborne as the term is medically used, and as you're suggesting it might be when you talk about "droplets containing the ebola virus could go long distances, or even dry up leaving a airborne particles" is that we are familiar with pathogens that do transmit like that, and Ebola transmits at a much lower rate.

I count that data as "evidence".
For anyone thinking about ordering their first supply to try, forewarning they are backlogged. I ordered mid-July and was told it would be 6 - 10 weeks. I just received an email last week telling me it will be another 6 - 10 weeks.
Without knowing how those studies were performed or analysed we can't really put those numbers in their proper context.

"EI positively predicts performance for high emotional labor jobs and negatively predicts performance for low emotional labor jobs" (from the paper linked in the article you cite).
It's lisp man, of course you can have it both ways. Code is really data, your program is actually your environment, your editor is actually a giant lisp program with a built-in lisp interpreter. Or is it a lisp interpreter with a built-in editor? I dunno. I'm off to install this release :)
Reference counting, type checking, converting iteration over lists or ranges to more efficient code. In general a lot of error checking.
He's a libertarian. A real libertarian argument would be something like this: "People should not expect to receive unconditional support in the event of losing their job or suffering financial hardship. People should factor such risks into their financial planning. Any unconditional support structures will weaken the incentives to prudent financial planning and lead to massive and society-wide problems of systemic dependency and economic maladjustment."

Unfortunately the logic behind this argument is poorly understood and widely resisted. People who advance such arguments are typically perceived as arrogant, callous, and entitled. So I think Marc is indeed dodging the bullet by trying to softly suggest alternative ways to perceiving these issues, as well as trying to encourage a change in perspective to notoriously-oblivious Americans on how their polity actually stacks up in global terms.
This is an interesting point, but I think the source (the graduate now working at one of the "most prestigious employers in the world") may be affected by a healthy dose of the Dunning-Kruger effect[1].

First of all, as a 22-year-old it's easy to feel like 2-3 years is an eternity. It's also easy to undervalue the attributes that the more senior employees possess, as one simply can't see them.

"Brilliant" and "Best" are not necessary synonyms. The first seems to me to mean standing out from the crowd, thinking differently, challenging the status quo.

Those are valuable, possibly even essential traits. However, one can easily waste a lot of energy spinning wheels trying to do those things at the wrong times -- a mistake I am very personally familiar with.

My sense is this graduate will spend a few years disrupting things a bit with mixed success. In 5-8 years, if they are as bright as they think they are, they'll have a lot of insight on new skills that they weren't even aware of at play in their seniors' interactions. I hope also that the graduate retains most of their original brilliance, so that they can begin to make a serious difference with a matured, balanced perspective on what their peers and seniors have to offer.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
CloudCannon Raises $500K to Make Designing Static Websites Simpler
Exactly.

It's easy enough to understand this applied to fast food, but I get the impression other industries would rather not believe it to be true.

Thing is, I think it's clearly evidenced in tech by every "I went through two days of interviewing on algorithms and distributed systems to hack on PHP boilerplate?" story. Tech might go to the trouble to select for brilliance, but they aren't necessarily using or paying for it.

Further it's readily admitted by folks like a16z [1].

"Thus software itself becomes the driving force of leveling the ability to write software to solve problems. This is a good thing: As software becomes a high-impact, low-skill trade, we decouple the technical ability and experience needed to write tricky software from the ability to solve problems for people."

1: http://a16z.com/2014/07/30/the-happy-demise-of-the-10x-engin...
Optifine dev on performance problems in Minecraft 1.8
think this was largely on javascript techniques. I liked slots and signals but never saw it much in JS
I think while this point of view is indeed very true for the large majority, larger companies combat this job hopping, by encouraging internal job switching; ie. going from one area of business to another, which is closer to getting a new job, than getting a promotion. This ensures that the company doesn't waste time in getting a ext. employee to get accustomed to the culture. But that's really the essence Human Capital Management (HCM).
I am however not so sure, how widespread this practice is, maybe you guys know?
It's all open source. Here's HHVM: https://github.com/facebook/hhvm. What's stopping you from working on it now? For all intents and purposes you would be hacking on it with them.
I didn't infer any judgement being made. I read it as an example of a common level of security knowledge, not a criticism.
H.G. Wells' Interview with Stalin Helped Change the Principles of Liberalism
well then Elon Musk himself is "incredibly naive".

http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-ted-talk-on-tesla-...

> First of all, he said, burning fossil fuels in a plant to generate electricity is more efficient that burning them in a combustion engine in a car. Because it is large and stationary, the plant can use the fuel much more efficiently:

> In a stationary power plant, you can afford to have something that weighs a lot more, is voluminous, and you can take the waste heat and run a steam turbine and generate a secondary power source...

> Even using the same source fuel, you're at least twice as better off.

> Part two of Musk's argument is not based on numbers, but on the fact that electricity can be produced from renewable sources, most notably solar power:

> We have to have sustainable means of power generation anyway, electricity generation. So given that we have to solve sustainable electricity generation, then it makes sense for us to have electric cars as the mode of transport.
ITM POKER BANKROLL MANAGER
It's close to the assumption I operate with.

For a sufficiently large business, it's important to be stable/robust -- that is, to be able to withstand change. A business that's heavily reliant on individual brilliance across the board has the disadvantage of potentially collapsing if enough brilliant people leave without training equally brilliant replacements.

Yes, you want some brilliant people specifically in R&D / innovation. You want brilliant people overseeing the entire system. Brilliant people in key positions might improve your overall efficiency by an order of magnitude on a particular project -- but you don't want the whole project to fall apart just because Joe moved out of state or Jane went on long-term maternity leave or Jake was hit by a bus.

Microsoft does have a world-class R&D department, but they also have a lot of average code monkeys and average janitors and average HR people.
3 Surprising Facts About Small Business Loans
Please be sure to improve on the state of clojure error messages. It would help a lot.
If you need it, cabal takes an option --allow-newer which can selectively or globally ignore upper bounds, in case the package owner specified too tight a bound
That's pretty much how negotiation works.

If a company doesn't give me the raise I want, I accept an offer from a company that does give me the raise I want: "Taking my toys and going home"

If you say "Well, I don't agree with you, however, I'm going home and leaving my toys here for you to play with" then you'll probably end up at home without any toys.

Taking your toys and going home is your BATNA. Hachette has a shitty BATNA and is hence losing the negotiation, because they don't have any toys Amazon wants, and hence Amazon doesn't care they are going to go home and whine to daddy Krugman that little Jeffery isn't sharing his toys.

It's 2014, taking words from a text file from some author, putting them into a PDF isn't some kind of miracle that warrants 90% of the cost of the book.
How Wiretaps Work
I would say they are less innocently confused and prioritize money/benefits over working on interesting tech.
Apple Pay according to TL;DR Wikipedia
Some Gotchas that got me
Employees also want predictability where the pay comes from the system and not from your direct boss. Bosses are perishable and the system is not.

Anyone who choose to take a job accepts this.

Real brilliance - creativity - requires you to embrace the unpredictable. That section of society are the inventors, who are willing to face long odds and do what they want.

The system works only for its survival. It is not interested in giving you a wholesome life.
we're talking here about "the future". The Volvo engine described will be ready in 5-10 years. It is very feasible that a $25K electric car is established within a timeframe like that.

the range issue is essentially a different problem with electric cars, as you charge when you're parked. Charging can be done anywhere the electric grid is present, it's just a matter of access being established appropriately.
You don't understand what rpython is. RPython is a statically typed subset of python which compiles to C. It also has code in it for generating a Jit.
I see what they've done there with the color coding (all variants on Christian being blue) but that is totally unreadable. I'm not colorblind but the only way I can identify what is being shown is by counting the stripes and legend entries (second stripe from the bottom is the second from the bottom legend entry). I swear "Protestant (Black)" and "Jehovah's Witness" are literally the same color.

Are graphic designers no longer hired for this sort of thing? Or do graphic designers no longer care?
For anyone that is interested in testing out the new git repo: git://gitorious.org/emacs-transition/review6.git

It is remarkably fast compared to the bzr repository. ESR's conversion takes 10 hours to complete.
Did that $100K/mth wipe out their entire monthly AdSense revenue? If you sell enough stuff that you can lose $100K/m in affiliate fees, it seems to me that display advertising revenue would be a drop in that bucket...
> Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

Absence of evidence which would be expected (more likely present than not) if a phenomenon existed is, in fact, reasonably viewed as evidence of the absence of the phenomenon.

(Absence of evidence which would indicate the presence of a phenomenon but which would not be expected even if the phenomenon did exist is, OTOH, not evidence of the absence of the phenomenon -- or, more accurately, is only very weak evidence.)
Love the discussion. Will write a long response because I don’t have time for a short one. In regard to the first paragraph can you name any examples? The most regulated industries have the most power. Banking, energy & utilities, healthcare insurance are all examples. Can you name one sustained US monopoly that has existed without government assistance?

2nd paragraph. Uber might transfer risk to workers but without uber these workers wouldn't even have jobs as taxicabbers due to the cost of fees/regulation government applies to taxi services. I find it ironic the employees are complaining about a company they voluntarily work for, and arguing against the practices that allow the company to exist and employ them. Uber has ample competition so I wouldn’t say they exactly wield power— they are trying to fight the consolidated power where their competitors are in bed with the government whose laws provide a barrier of entry to the existing inefficient industry. Same thing is happening with Telsa. Whenever a transformative company enters an industry, the existing players lobby government for regulation and/or to enforce the regulation already in place. Throughout history it has been 1.big company(ies) establish huge market share in an industry 2. Said companies lobby government for regulation that prevents new entrants. RR, coal, automotive, finance, health insurance, utility industries have all done this.

3rd paragraph. This is ridiculous. Government’s role is to serve the people. Government knows better than the people? The government needs to protect citizens from themselves? How would they determine when an “unelected body” gains too much control over people’s lives? The fact is the free market determines winners and losers and is the most efficient way to allocate resources. Transactions only occur when both parties think they’ll benefit. No one is forced to do anything. To think the government knows better than everyone else is naïve at best and destructive at worst.
You have misunderstood. Rpython compiles to C and then to a binary. There is no python bytecode there. Only pixie bytecode being interpreted by the compiled binary.

It also has a Jit engine inside it.
- Glenn Fine, Dept. of Justice Inspector General

...seems like there could be some bias with that source.
General indications are that the US is more than twice as religious as anywhere in Europe (Poland might be highest, catholic countries seem to have mpst persistence of religion). We are atheist, muslim, or generally not bothered.
Awesome. Religion is poison, and it drains country's resources. Go on Google Maps to your favorite city and type "church". Be amazed by all the tax-free businesses spread like disease.
At first I was going to say it looks fine, but after looking at it again you are correct. Its hard to tell, what is what with the blue.
Ebola Hoax: 100% REVEALEDCNN+NYT Caught Using CRISIS ACTORS MUST SEE
This shows that younger generations are less likely to be religious, but there's no indication that they will not become more religious as they age.

The best "proof" it provides for the assertion is this:
> According to GSS, “unaffiliation” actually increased for all age cohorts over the past few decades, but most dramatically for the youngest among them

So maybe we can say America is (very slowly) becoming less religious, but it's still over 70% for the youngest age group listed here
Umm, I don't think you understand fully what it is. it is using rpython which is a meta tracing jit. pretty magic if you read about it.
Grey = not religious

Blue = Christianity and clones

seems pretty clear
Crunchbase is hacked
I think you're very wrong here. In-house recruiters also use Linkedin, I don't know why that would put anybody in the "high risk hire" category. I got my recent job through a recruiter contact on Linkedin and I'm pretty happy about it.
I would absolutely agree with that assessment.

One of the (potentially) negative sides of the same phenomenon is the acceptance of and tendency towards memes. They can certainly be annoying, but a strong flow of memes is indicative of a lot of culture and ideas bashing up against each other until some of the bits stick together in a novel way.

A cleverly applied meme comment on a Reddit thread can easily get hundreds or thousands of upvotes. Front page HN threads don't even get any meme comments, because people here know that their comment would be buried immediately, if not outright deleted (I admit to being much less familiar with the inner workings of HN than Reddit). Reddit threads are definitely a place of quantity over quality, but the sheer volume of creativity swirling around is bound to uncover a couple gems.

All of that said, I've never viewed HN as a place for ideas to be generated. This is a fantastic whetstone with some brilliant minds, but it can also be merciless.
Did you look through the rpython codebase too? Thats where the real magic is.
There is not much love in the Django community towards web2py (to put it lightly), but if you are interested in Django on GAE it might be interesting to give web2py (for which GAE is a native backend) a look.

The main complaints against web2py are that it is "un pythonic" because it automatically imports some things for you (from Jacob Moss Kaplan / django), and that it re-executes scripts leading to some unavoidable memory leaks in some (arguably, non-idiomatic, easy to avoid and extremely rare) situations (from Armin Ronacher / flask). I hope I have properly summarized and not misrepresented the core arguments - apologies in advance if I did.

Having used both django and web2py for commercial uses, and helping newbies on the web2py list, I would say that these complaints have no practical significance. In my opinion, web2py is simpler and easier to use; and if you need GAE support, it's there.
per the article, the volvo engine here will be rolled out in "5 to 10 years", so in 10 years yes I think the demise of the internal combustion engine will be well under way by then.
Nice post there, but I would like to ask a question regarding this topic. I hope anyone of you could enlighten his/her thoughts.

We offer a Free Trial, which is great but only when people actually activate it! We often find that potential clients (even those who are really interested and engaged us rather than vice-versa) literally don’t have the time/resources to devote to an evaluation. I would wager the next comment is “make the trial simpler”, so that it doesn’t take as long to get a feel for the product, but unfortunately the nature of our software and its complex application means that’s not really an option. Can you offer any thoughts? Cheers.
I suspect that is because touchID is required so no plain iPhone 5 support.
Only hylang has a lot of stupid limitations and problems like scope leakage.
Why the World Is Too Optimistic About China's Economic Future
I was about to say the same thing, since I know a fair number of people who experienced a "crisis of faith" at around 30.

However, the second chart seems to correct for cohort effect, i.e. fewer people are becoming more religious as they age than a decade ago
I am interested in which Christian variants are less popular with younger generations than others. That data is presented, but poorly.
What you're describing is not a problem with religion.
Your grocery store must have a terrible selection of beer. I home brew because I enjoy it. I'm under no delusions that my beers will ever be significantly better than the best I can buy in a store.

The idea that the hobbyist will in general produce a far better product than an industry of passionate experts is kind of ridiculous.