skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regardless of the author's ideology, this article brings something of value to software engineers: it is both to our and society's advantage if we stop building bullshit and focus on real problems. An engineer at Kittygram is likely to be working on a bullshit, ultimately irrelevant job, but few people would question the value of an engineer's work if he's doing groundbreaking medical software.

Of course, people don't always choose to have bullshit jobs, and getting to the level where you can build something of impact is not easy. I'm far from there myself. But I have the feeling many of us don't really look for meaningful jobs - truth be told, we don't even _think_ about these things.
In this case, there is also distributed ID generation.
My "aha" moment for that one was when I read Terry Pratchett's first Discworld Novel, "The Colour of Magic", I guess when I was about 12 or so. First I laughed my head off at this ridiculous word and then, from the context, I worked out what it meant. A lesson I've never forgotten, as I'm sure this one will be for you...
> Most of the "hard to decipher" identifiers become obvious if one knows the name of the airport rather than the city served...Grand Rapids, Michigan, has the Gerald R. Ford airport (GRR).

I would have just assumed it was Grand Rapids.
This is a really thoughtful counter-point and I appreciate the response.

The problem with it is that I don't see Tesla changing, or morphing into a "traditional" car company as it scales.

Yes Ford and the like are constrained by old business models and huge scale, but that's kind of the point. Tesla is not, and has the chance to scale and do things differently along the way.

I'm amazed at how they continue to grow (from roadster to model S), and consistently reveal products and technologies that seem genuinely very progressive and well though out. I'm also struck by their ability to address issues and controversies that like landmines, stand in the way of anyone trying to break into this very established marketplace.

I would love to have two horses in this game, Tesla and another to see how contrasting methodologies in the modern car market would play out.
Assuming I haven't misunderstood... the cost of launching 200,000+ nets into orbit would be high (in my opinion, maybe someone has a sneaky solution).

Assuming you could get each net (including guidance and propellant) down to about 1kg (not sure how realistic that is), and you can launch them into orbit for $4000/kg, then that'd be an expenditure of $800+ million not including R&D, manufacture, salaries, etc.

It'd also mean increasing the number of objects in orbit for while.
My perception of how fast a page loads is that if you show me an 'app loading...' splash screen, it makes me feel your page is slow and bloated. I react better to a blank screen with the browser's progress bar moving. I suppose it's because it allows me to shift blame away from your webpage to the quality of my internet connection.
Wikipedia tells me that lasers have been considered before to fight off the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
Perl Careers: (hire|get hired as) a Perl programmer
Maybe just in the States. E.g. pdx.aero => portofportland.com while yyz.aero => Blank page with "under construction" in the title.
The research paper seems to grossly oversimplify the matter of "cashing in" the fraudulent transactions.

While the authors claim to "appreciate that banks will have a number of security systems in place to prevent fraud", they seem to neglect that those systems should effectively render the attack impossible:

- There are limits for CVM-less transactions; not only in the application running on the chip, but also for terminals. I think that there is one limit above which a CVM (e.g. PIN or signature) is required, and another limit for offline authorizations. CVM-less high-vale transactions would not only be suspicious, but even non-compliant for most card schemes.

- It is not trivial to apply for a merchant account, and I guess that a new account would not be allowed to immediately withdraw recently acquired funds. (If it were that simple, magnetic stripe card skimmers could simply apply for a merchant account and avoid all the hassle with PIN skimming, finding vulnerable merchants or ATMs etc.)

- A merchant with a higher than average rate of transactions challenged by cardholders will surely be scrutinized even more closely.

All in all, the implemented failure mode of offline-authorizing all transactions in unknown currencies seems like a really bad idea and should be improved. The rest of the paper seems like speculation, though.

(Compare e.g. to Steven J Murdoch's work ("Chip and PIN is broken" etc.), where the claims have been verified with an actual payment terminal.)
http://www.shopify.com/compare/shopify-vs-volusion
IntelliJ IDEA 14 released
Graeber makes no distinction between "useful" as in: a) creator of exchange value to it's maker; b) creator of utility to it's holder; b) psychologically "meaningful" to the worker. And while the core of the article deals with the latter, by not making this distinction he dangerously suggests the two former.

As much I'd like to believe that managers are stupid, they're not crazy to hand out free money. If an employee generated no additional income to it's employer, there would be no reason to hire him in the first place. Similarly, if the holder of a good derived no enjoyment from it, it would be of no value at all to him.

It's hard to believe, for instance, that a "corporate lawyer's" work has no social value. The job of lawyers isn't even to win legal battles, but to avoid them in the first place. The job of a corporate lawyer is to ensure corporations are compliant with all the paperwork necessary to their operation. For sufficiently large corporations, they're a necessary condition for it's functioning.

For me, the only reason why his argument might seem personally intuitive is because the majority of things in capitalism are of no use at all to any given particular person, even if all of them are "useful" in some way. Paparazzi, dog-washers and all-night pizza deliverymen are useless for all but the people who demand their services. It's not hard to see why consumers would have little interest in contract law if they deal so little with it, and when they do, their job of understanding it has already been cushioned by a specialist.

I see little point in coffee shops. Nonetheless, people flock to places with well-developed service economies that offer such things (e.g. New York, San Francisco) along with dog-washers. Perhaps because they know they'll cater to their bullshit tastes too.
Glad that it's shared, the Economist talked about it last year, http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-m.... Don't think these jobs exist because there's some scheme to keep people free and happy "The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s)." Just that not many people actually build things. Currency and paper money also has a role to play here. I'd like to see that many people are encouraged to build things on a level playing field.
Likewise, I've heard people on several occasions call the US a 3rd world country because of its poor social infrastructure.
It can't be called incompetence if he makes the arguments he has been paid (and likely will again be paid) to make. The world is full of highly competent people who do exactly that, many of them lawyers. They're not called 'advocates' for nothing.

But this begs the question why otherwise self-respecting panels so often give a soapbox to propagandists. Perhaps instead of using the mindless daily news formula of pitting two self-interested views against each other to see who has better soundbites we should try to put rational, thoughtful people on the stage.
> frankly we can't have a society of people who only have specialist skills.

Out of curiosity, why not?

And frankly, isn't it already the case? Most people are unable to produce enough for their own survival today. They can't grow crops, build a home, even make their own bread. Instead they are specialists at project management, javascript or flipping burgers.
I'm not arguing that this is bad or wrong, I am only saying your statement that a society of people with specialist skills would not be possible.
Transparent Legal Advice a Reality for Startups with Launch of Legal Hero
Welcome to the world of programming. Here are some pointers.

1) Before blaming "Javascript bad parts" consider if you know the language that well in the first place.

2) The way you stated the problem does not make sense, and does not provide enough context.

3) What's "array"? If you refer to some specicic array, we need to know what you have in it. It could indeed be NaN.

4) If you're trying to say this happens with all arrays, then you're wrong. Here's a counter example from v8:

a = [1,2,3]
console.log(parseInt(a[0]))
=> 1

5) If the array is not initialized (empty), then of course parseInt(array[0]) is NaN, since array[0] is undefined.
> There are more musicians employed in this country than there are people in biglaw.

Is "number of lawyers employed at the 100 largest law firms" a good proxy for the number of corporate law specialists? I don't know that much about corporate lawyers, but it seems like a lot of them might be employed by corporations or smaller law firms.

Since there are somewhere around 1 million lawyers in the US [3], it seems reasonable to me that at least %17 of them would be corporate law specialists, making the original assertion true.

[3] http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pages/statistics.php...
I understand your point about managing nurse's jobs, but think about this: in the last century we went from doing manager's work by means of pen and paper to computers with software that can do planning, managing, accounting etc. Given the technological advances it should take less and less managers to organize jobs of the same number of workers. Mystery lies in the fact that we have more managerial jobs than we used to.
Workers in the beginning of the 20th century worked 70 hour 6-7 days weeks, now in many countries we are down to 35h / 5 days. In the next 10 years we will get to 30 or less, we are at a threshold of the 4 day work week that's why its taking longer to cut down on the work hours.

The 4 day work week will imply social changes, and therefore the resistance but it will come in the next 20 years.

The author understands that its a slow process and it takes time, but congratulations on talking about a taboo.

Concerning the value of jobs, in the Philippines, go to a restaurant: one guy comes and set the dishes, the other the glasses, the other takes the order, etc.

The root cause for this is I believe overpopulation unprecedented in the history of mankind.

Not to defend lawyers, but who would solve disputes? Everybody bashes lawyers, but the day an employer tries to make you sign an indemnity paper that is less than you have right, you are glad that there is a lawyer there to defend you.
What is brilliance, to you, then?
Statistics help in testing and validating an author's claims. Eloquent deductive reasoning can easily lead to wrong conclusions, which is why we need to test them with empirical results. This author in particular appears to put a prohibitively large value on physical goods over any kind of service. He dismisses the fundamental transition from an industrial economy to a service economy, simply labeling most of the new jobs as pointless. while his arguments might be convincing for a few jobs such as telemarketing, he appears to forget about the highly increased complexity of a modern economy, which requires people working in corporate law, financial services and the administrative sector. in my opinion those regulations weren't just invented because

The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger [...]

but rather because: 1) modern technologies require a more extensive management (with an entire workforce dedicated to maintaining them). 2) because globalization creates a much more complex framework for corporations (different local laws). 3) there are much more financial options available today to both individuals and corporations. a small company from Utah can today raise money from investors in Abu Dhabi and an individual from Europe can invest in Australian mining companies - just to name a few examples. this range of services is unprecedented and requires an accordant workforce.
I made a video compilation of 50 startup founders discussing of their ideas
Critical WordPress vulnerability
My last upgrade only cost $99, didn't know the upgrade to new versions was this much.
That is exactly how you conduct an investigation. You gather evidence establishing cause to search, get a warrant to conduct the search and get your evidence.

When the police seize your property, you're going to be compelled to provide access, or you'll be held in contempt until you do.

It does make to harder for a traffic stop to turn into a fishing expedition, but that's the point of the 4th amendment.
Death by Data
Visualizing the “Heartbeat” of a City with Tweets
Ugh. Diversity, or dragging along the baggage of thousands of years of racism into the 21st century. A smiley is yellow. That is not white, black or Asian. Giving smilies skin color is taking us back to a darker time.
The master device has the facility to create the subdevices which look like onrmal devices with soem config options missing.

I am not convinced that this is what they are talking about though...
I'd like to use this opportunity to ask: is it a technical limitation that users still can't search their timeline?
What Will Amazon Look Like When It Finally Grows Up?
While I'm collecting downvotes: wheren't many of them also white in India, even before the European expansion?
"After a while though, it killed me inside."

Did they supervise you too closely? My first job while still in school was being a network operator with maybe 5 hrs a week of real work (most of which I automated away or was just grunt labor install/cabling jobs) and maybe 5 randomly allocated hours of stark terror handling outages and disasters. I was instructed to look busy and professional the other 30 hours per week.

1) I "apprenticed" under the PBX operator and helped out with MACs and cable pulling and learned how to terminate and test ST fiber connectors. I had more formal telecom/EE training than the PBX op which was a little weird. I also apprenticed under our IBM customer engineer and he had be do all kinds of crazy stuff, which was kind of cool. The IT director got a little greedy about my "volunteering" for him, although if I had a better attitude about it I might have ended up working for him.

2) IBM manuals laying everywhere, taught myself some BAL from the books although the sysops wouldn't give me access. Also learned all about ATM. IBM mainframes had this weird crypto subprocessor with great manuals. IBM manuals, at least professional level pre 1990, were awesome, I'd suggest checking out bitsavers.org and reading some.

3) Taught myself motorola 68HC11 assembly, procomm/telix scripting. I read a lot of programming books.
I'd totally and completely voluntarily pay extra taxes if I knew it was going to be spent blasting junk out of orbit with giant lasers. Hell, I'd buy tickets just to watch.
Let's not forget about how much bullshit government adds to non-bullshit jobs...

My Typical 8 hour day

1979 to 2002 (before Sarbanes-Oxley):

7 hours: code
1 hour: overhead

2002 to 2014 (after Sarbanes-Oxley):

1 hour: insure rigorous Requirements documentation
1 hour: insure rigorous Test Plans (whether used or not)
1 hour: peer review (of devs I would have never hired)
1 hour: code review (for what peer review missed)
1 hour: answer auditors' questions
1 hour: status reports
1 hour: status meetings
55 minutes: bitch to boss
5 minutes: code
I am not going to deny anything you said, its almost 100% true. But I believe your missing an important "fact"(maybe).

That is its not really physically/physiologically/mentally possible to put in 40 hours of true "work". Not consistently anyways. So as much as it is we not truly putting in 40 hours, its the entire effort to be available for 40 hours IMO that you are getting paid for.
Another Racket friendly Emacs major mode is Greg Hendershot's racket-mode.

https://github.com/greghendershott/racket-mode
One of the pie in sky ideas that gets floated is a large aerogel object that can slow down/trap the particles without creating a bunch of new ones.

It would be put in an orbit that crosses orbits with a lot of debris.
Exactly. We should have statistics as well on how many times are the police expected to find something on black people more than on white people.
His point is that there is no way to provide statistics on the number of bullshit jobs.

For example, I worked at a company where we made networking software for some military radios. We had a "Hardware Engineer" that fixed or returned radios that had stopped working. From all economist metrics this was not a bullshit job. He was using his engineering degree to do engineering work.

But in reality he added nothing to the productivity of the company. He actually reduced the productivity of the company by taking 3 days to do 5 minutes of work. I stopped using him and did it myself when he was at lunch. It is impossible to get metrics on bullshit level because it includes lots of nuances. For example, i'm sure this guy and his manager would say that only he was capable of doing the hardware work because he took a 1 hour course on electrostatic discharge.

It would take a lot of evidence gathering for me to prove that this was a bullshit job and once I did prove it his manager would have immediately assigned him some new responsibilities making my previous data worthless. This is a big problem with macro-economics. Economic Job data is limited to Salary,Title,Hour worked. It doesn't tell you much more than that.
If you have a Roku there is an Air Mozilla channel. Direct link to the channel https://owner.roku.com/add/VMFAG and details about what has been tested at https://air.mozilla.org/roku/
Technical analysis is far from useless. As an active trader, it's the best tool I have come across. I'm sorry, but to say that it is useless is to admit pure ignorance, or to admit your failure to grasp the concepts and understand how to apply them visually and correctly.

People do apply techniques incorrectly, yes. They can get confirmation bias from it, yes. However, that does not invalidate successful traders who trade primarily on technicals. Keep in mind that a "tool" is just that - but not used the same way by everyone - and "this means that" isn't a blanket rule that always works as described. Everything is part of a larger structural puzzle. Also, HFT algos will eat your lunch if your hold period is too short. I don't hold a position for more than a week, MAYBE two, but never less than 45 minutes - and as a retail trader, that makes a huge difference in P/L ratios over time.

Through my trading experience I have continuously used less fundamentals and more wonky technical techniques I have come up with. It has given me a massive edge over whoever is on the other side of the trade, and has pulled me quite a long way out of debt and into making a nice living doing it on the side. The side of the story that you don't see in the endless "get rich quick" trading schemes that promise to teach you all of those super awesome secrets is that anyone who knows what they're doing isn't spending any time teaching it to the masses.

But, to get back on topic: Well done with this site! It's a great beginner guide to understand what a lot of the basics actually mean. Babypips falls very short.
From one of the comments at the bottom of the article:

http://www.bullshitjob.com/

Some of these are pretty amazing.
I agree with you. But only if you are a motivated person. It saddened me when I had to give up on them by founding out that they (most people, even the close ones) are not motivated due to fear, laziness, and disbelief in own powers and possibilities of improvement.
I started a business in 3 days, here's what I learned
The Two-Hour Rule in American Business (2008)
It's not a sync service, it's a backup service.

The flow is directories on your machine > BackBlaze.

Anything in the other direction is manual.
I am not sure what you guys mean by “session id”—an identifier for the session, or an authentication mechanism? I have used systems where the session id was auto incremented, but there was a separate signature (in the cookie) verifying that the user “owned” that session.
Tomtom multisport cardio watch has gps and heart rate in the wrist.
Hands-on with the Kano: The Linux kit that wants to help kids love coding
IntelliJ 14 Released
Just put a tools ruler on a chart and you can see the future. Easy as that. And wrong.
I don't think those rationalisations hold ups. The facts of workforce expansion and productivity & efficiency gains can't simply be shrugged off by "overpopulation". This is intentional political policy, nothing else.
You'll often get consecutively numbered runways that are parallel if there's already a C/L/R on that heading.

For example, DFW has 17L, 17C, 17R, 18L and 18R all with the same magnetic heading (176/356). Everything really is bigger in Texas. :)
But what is the empirical basis to things like Fibbonacci retracement levels ?
Nope, that is not correct. Insert is always (amortized) O(1). This is worst time. There is no “bad case”. You only need to be aware that a single insert might take longer. But that is not relevant in an absolute majority of cases.

“Append to it just slightly too many items” – this “too many” makes sure that you appended enough items so that the expansion amortizes to O(1).

That’s the nice thing about a complete mathematical proof – it doesn’t leave any dodgy edge-cases.
It's not quite that simple. Engineers at Kittygram might build a new, open source system for efficient object recognition which then revolutionizes medical imaging. ImportantMedicalCo, with its government contract to modernize medical records, might go over budget and out of business, having a chilling effect on investment in medical record modernization. People do think about these things, but they're hard to reason about.
IntelliJ IDEA 14
Attack Surface: Why I Unikernel, Part 1
As hammerzeit mentioned, a lot of bullshit jobs are there because of an arms race. Your competitors have marketers, lobbyists and corporate lawyers, so you need them too. If everybody fired 90% of their marketers, marketing dollars would go 10x as far, and things wouldn't change much.

Just take a look at marketing. It's an industry that's so big it props up newspapers, television, Google and most of the rest the web just as a side effect. You can argue that's a good side effect, but there are plenty of bad side effects like the invasion of privacy, cluttering up urban spaces, breaking up TV shows, et cetera.

This is really a case where I believe that governments should heavily tax the externalities. What would happen if taxes made advertising and other forms of marketing 10x more expensive?

Advertising would become much less common, but it would be much more effective due to its rarity, so that would approximately balance out. A bunch of bullshit jobs would be lost, but the government would have a bunch more money to hire people for non-bullshit jobs like building & staffing schools and hospitals, as well as reducing harmful taxes like income & sales taxes which also increases the number of jobs.

Google, the web, TV and newspapers would lose much of their income and would have to accelerate their shift towards alternative business models, but I would argue that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Reduced taxes would mean there is more money around for consumers to pay for entertainment.

Bad side effects like privacy invasion would be reduced.

Obviously it's not all good, perhaps there are better ways of reducing this arms race.