skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading this, I was reminded of the "B Ark" from Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: (1)

The B Ark is technically named "Golgafrincham Ark Fleet, Ship B". The Golgafrincham civilization hatched a plan to eliminate its society of its most useless workers, namely its service sector and its paper shufflers. The Golgafrinchans created a legend that their world was about to be destroyed and they needed to build three arks. In Ark A they would put all the high achievers, the scientists, thinkers, artists, and important leaders. In Ark C they would put all the blue-collar workers, the people that build and make things. In Ark B they would put everyone else: hairdressers, TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants.

The B Ark was constructed, loaded up, and launched first. However, it was automatically set for a collision course with Earth's sun, to finally rid Golgafrincham of these twits. And naturally, no A or C ark was ever made.

The presence of useless B Ark people in company settings has generated a lot of thought, including this person (2) who suggests dealing with them by "hiring another “B” Ark person to have meetings with them. Demand that accurate minutes are kept and that they should meet at least twice day until the problem is resolved" and engaging them in a useless, circular project.

1. http://everything2.com/title/B+Ark

2. http://infinite-shades.com/2011/02/14/golgafrincham-b-ark-wh...
>Well, to be honest in the United States employment is considered to be such a right and sacred duty that we elect politicians based on employment and even make modulation of employment a core function of the central bank.

Yeah, part of this is because few have inherited or other wealth, so without employement you just die homeless and hungry in the streets.
on the other hand, I'm currently using quite random IDs (firebase), and the URLs are just ugly: /jobs/-J_wBsKY4Rn1WgMPB7-_/operations/-J_wBsKf4-WYh9ohK7j8
Indeed. Refactoring means restructuring code in a way that doesn't change its external behavior. If we define bug as incorrect external behavior of code, then refactoring excludes bug fixes.

Refactoring doesn't necessarily even mean that the original code was structurally bad. When new features are added, code gets more complicated, requiring more abstraction. I like to abstract code via refactoring when we need it, not before. Then refactoring changes good code to good code. It's just that the new situation presents different demands to the code than the old situation.
So, essentially he has to add some bullshit statistics to his description of bullshit jokes...

I find those kind of statistics pointless. Most of the time they are based on incomplete data and as much guesswork as any rant.

An intelligent opinion on the other hand, based on observation and with a coherent point of view, is worth more than all those statistics (to paraphrase Alan Kay, who said "A point of view is worth 80 IQ points").
You can make people redundant in Europe, you just need to be genuinely making them redundant; if there's no more work for them to do and you can't afford them and they're selected in a fair process, then yes it's a month or two of transition and move on. This is true almost everywhere outside of the few remaining heavily unionised workplaces, of which the public sector is often one.

What you can't easily do is fire people for BS or discriminatory reasons. Oh, and everyone has healthcare so you can't use the threat of taking that away as a stick to corral them with.
> The answer clearly isn’t economic

I beg to differ. I totally agree with the paradox (with the advances in technology, humans should be working less) but the problem, today, is economic:

- In order to live you need money

- In order to obtain money you need to work (except for the lucky too few)

- Therefore, work needs to exist to provide people with money, to the point of creating "useless" jobs if needs be

How are you going to remove jobs if it so directly means no more revenue for those people ? The problem here is that we're conflating revenue with work. The only answer is to decouple them, and introduce something like basic income (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income)
5K iMac runs 30 fps only
Apples new 5K iMac runs with 30 fps only - so it is NOT made for cutting 4K videos.
Great lecture!!
I have a question: Can somebody list the names of founders from the slide at [26:14]?
If that's the case then we might see a production release sooner than later. Not from Mozilla, but something Samsung releases - perhaps an embedded browser component in some app.
>A perfect example are, in my mind, some of the reasons why node.js is taking off as opposed to say Java or C#...

New programmers rediscovering the (square) wheel?

>In JavaScript, since you can replace just about anything, and even call into functions with differing contexts, this makes testing even easier.

One should rather draw the opposite conslusion: that the above make testing even more necessary (and code even less robust).
Great points - but honestly, I could classify most of those as jobs. Want to be a translator, or a teacher, or an open source developer? We can all do those things alone, sure. But going (or remoting) to a workplace gives us a collaborative experience. And not to mention, not all people can easily motivate themselves to keep something going on their own, and need external pressure and motivation. The vibe I was getting was that my elders were afraid of devolving into couch potatoes, were they to leave the jobs they enjoyed.
Google Photos requires Google Plus. I do not want it. Google Shopping Express availability is very limited (nor available in my area, for example).

Agree with Netflix, but Amazon Videos has more videos. Eight out of ten, videos not found on Netflix were available for rent on Amazon.
What he seems to be railing against is hierarchy. It is easy to see what nurses do in a hospital. They walk around and treat the sick. The nurses have managers (or whatever they're called). These managers don't treat the sick themselves but they help organize the nurses. All the managers at the hospital are organized by the hospital administrator, and so on.

The higher up the hierarchy, the less obvious it is what people do. And with hierarchy, there is also more chance of waste and having a bullshit job.

But those bullshit jobs can come at almost any level. My first job out of college was at an environmental firm with extensive government contracts. The firm got paid for every hour they logged under my name on maintenance of projects that didn't require much maintenance except on paper. So the firm got paid for me showing up and doing nothing.

But I can confirm that it was horrible. At first I liked that I could come in at 10 and leave at 3. After a while though, it killed me inside.
When you get stopped six times more than any of your white friends even though you are not a criminal or engaging in any criminal behaviour.

http://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18410300

> British Transport Police officers were found to be 31 times more likely to search black people than white people in 2010-2011. Black people were 28 times as likely to be stopped by West Midlands Police and 21 times as likely by the Greater Manchester force.
You conflate several things and construct a problem where there is none:

* yes, auto-incrementing session IDs are bad and downright stupid. Noone ever does this (right?).

* information leakage about the number of jobs per month or similar is not a problem unless you're trying to maintain some sort of illusion about your company / web page, which hopefully most people/companies won't do (they have no good reason, unless they're crooks). Nowdays archive.org will take many snapshots of web pages, so will Google and any visitor can do it, so why try to hide something obvious?

In general, it's not an anti-pattern: it's fine for products in online shops, properties on real estate platforms, blog entries, etc.. To avoid it there would simply mean to make URLs longer and uglier with no good reason.
Any Firm Fixed Price RFP response (versus Cost+ or many other forms) considers the profit margin as part of the proposed contract value. Any company not insulating an FFP proposal with enough margin to absorb a few unexpected issues shouldn't be in business anyways, IMHO.
Continuity in Yosemite/iOS 8: Which network powers what service?
Right but by then the rule matching has been done - now you're writing code to distinguish rules instead of code to handle rules.

The advantage of a parser tool is, it makes the language constructs explicit in the code - here be assignment, here be for() etc. That has some value.
Bitcoin, Litecoin… How could digital currencies revolutionise the way we pay?
Yeah, makes me think of the owasp top ten, though this site's problem isnt really insecure direct object references (as all the postings are public) more like "making it easy to infer information about the target."

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2013-Top_10
This is not entirely true, I believe:

1. With server-side rendering browser can get HTML and display it before other resources are downloaded, parsed and executed (for JS).

2. In pre HTTP/2 world resource requests can be expensive, since browsers limit the number of outstanding requests.

3. Some users still use slow phones with slow and laggy network connection. Server-side rendering can improve experience for them a lot.
Basically, what you're saying is that any toy compiler example should be accompanied with a copy of the Dragon Book.
Disagree. If you model stocks as random variable, it doesn't matter which random variable you follow. Trading just increases the overhead.
The simple social rule that explains this is pecking order. One of the most basic human desires is dominance over others. When you have the money, you hire as many submissive minions as you can. "Bullshit jobs" are just an entourage. Then you display dominance over them by making them do meaningless work - the more humiliating the better. If you hired people that were actually useful, you'd be reliant on them so only get as many as you actually need to keep your organization from going under.
While there's a lot to debate in the article, kudos to Graeber for talking about a taboo.

White-collar employees 'work' (periods of focused concentration) a lot less than 40 hours. There are exceptions, and HNers may deny this fact (because the demographic is different or because the taboo is more powerful in this circle), but Graeber's inebriated cocktail party confessions match my own discussions with friends.

However... We've learned a skill, learned the job, and are available for 40 hours. Western culture really doesn't allow us to just show up for the 15-20 hours we really work and get paid the same salary as the 40 we say we do. So instead of going home early and cooking, working in the garden, bettering themselves, or watching tv, many show up to work and have strange meetings about nothing, conversations at the coffee corner, work unproductively on a tasks that could be done efficiently if they hadn't already been at work for 7 hours, or fuck around online while nobody is looking. It's great for eBay and Facebook, not so much for the kids in day care.

To some extent, everybody knows this. Employers are starting to tolerate working from home a lot more, which I think is a tacit acknowledgement of the situation. I hope that our culture can come to grips with this and acknowledge that most people in creative jobs can't really put in a solid 40 hours of truly productive work, while at the same time not condemning them to work as consultants with no savings or pensions.
Estonia is particularly switched-on, and there are small but determined communities in Romania and the Czech republic.

Italy is badly underestimated; the big Italian contribution people will know is the Arduino. Long engineering tradition in the north especially around Milan.

Spain is something of a disaster area after the property boom, but Barcelona seems to have the trendy/techie atmosphere that people admire.

France is probably closest to the stereotype. I knew someone who had to deal with ST Microelectronics (Nice) and they were as bureaucratic and ossified as you'd imagine. Somehow they still manage to ship stuff.
25 years is a very short time to rebuild a collapsed economy. We still pay for the East. Unemployment in the East is still high. We pay for pensions. There is payment between the German states, called 'Länderfinanzausgleich'. Not one eastern state in Germany ever has paid any money into it. There is some improvement in their financial situation, but it is far from self-sufficient.
> 99% of raw data is useless. Just as a rule.

Well, as a non-facebook user, I think 99.9999% of facebook data is useless :) But facebook is in the habit of tracking everyone's surfing habits across the web (through "like" links), and I assume they do more than just "increment a counter with it", even if they don't keep every single detail.
Could someone explain why this is a particularly difficult technical problem?
React.js: VelocityTransitionGroup, a replacement for ReactCSSTransitionGroup
> but honestly, I could classify most of those as jobs.

Ok, so maybe that is where we differ. A "job", for me, is "work I do for money". If I had a passive source of money that would give me the option of not working ever again (and fully supporting my family, and future generations, etc), even if I still "worked" on the same stuff as I do now, I wouldn't call it "a job" (as it would be completely voluntary and optional) but "a hobby".
How We Choose, Build and Launch Partner Integrations to Grow Our Business
Cry for help from the person running the CMS?
I'm not sure racism is the only possible explanation for that.
I agree with the sentiment of the article, but not with the majority of the points the author makes.

Most of the time, information catalogued and then URL-ised by AUTO_INCREMENT are public information that could easily be spidered another way. As the article noted it's not hard to look back at previous job postings (using the article's example).

So most of the time AUTO_INCREMENT is just used as an arbitrary counter / identifier which is just as guessable with other arbitrarily chosen identifiers. The linked blog uses /CCYY/MM/ URL to order the articles, then a natural string to specify a specific record, and that method could just as easily work for the record ID in the same way /AUTO_INCREMENT/NATURAL_STRING. But the question of whether you'd want to hide (or make it harder to guess) URLs for articles published to the public still remains.

Where AUTO_INCREMENT really causes problems is when you have information you don't want public. Such as session IDs. But in those instances, it would be rare to URL-ise them in the first place (bar maybe some AJAX calls). And as far as I'm aware, nobody uses AUTO_INCREMENT for session IDs anyway (they'd have to be pretty useless developers if they did).

There might be some argument against AUTO_INCREMENT for some user-submitted / community services such as PasteBin and URL shorteners. But even here, if the information isn't intended to be public then it either a) be hidden behind some level of authentication or b) shouldn't have been published online to begin with.

Security aside, the other point he raised was with SEO. However even that's not really an issue for the same reason his /CCYY/MM/ URL isn't an issue: sites that need search engine optimised will support a human readable string as part of the URL.

So I don't think his "Stop Putting AUTO_INCREMENT IDs in URLs" is really tackling the real problems and I think his example is very misleading. The real issue is people who use predictable (which includes guessable hashes) row ID's as identifiers for non-public data AND the issue with developers who choose to hide non-public data behind obscurity[1] instead of secure authentication. None of which has much to do with URLs in the first place (since incrementing session ID's are just as bad regardless of whether they're encoded in a URL, HTTP "POST" body, a cookie, or whatever)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity
How to Keep Publishing as CSV in New Google Sheets
The moral of this story is that you don't support a high-level executive that calls your users "sluts" and still keep your job as CEO. It was immensely bad judgment that made Rad a bigger liability for the company than whatever value he could provide going forward.
Simple file watcher
You Didn’t Build That: The Best Animal Engineers
It's taking an integer (representing an operation) and printing out the name of that operation.

First thing to say is that "* ++le" is the integer representing the operation to perform. This basically walks through the array of instructions returning each integer in turn.

Starting at the beginning of the line, we have "printf" with a format string of "%8.4s". This means print out the first 4 characters of the string that I pass next (padded to 8 characters). There then follows a string containing all of the operation names, in numerical order, padded to 4 characters and separated by commas (so the start of each is 5 apart). Finally, we do a lookup into this string (treating it as an array) at offset "* ++le * 5", i.e. the integer representing the operation multipled by 5 (5 being the number of characters between the start of each operation name). Doing this lookup gives us a char, but actually we wanted the pointer to this char (as we want printf to print out this char and the following 3 chars), so we take the address of this char (the & at the beginning of the whole expression).

It's concise, but not exactly self-documenting.

Does that make sense?

(I didn't downvote.)
Oops, wrote "strobe", meant "spot light".
Every time Google updates its apps, I hold my breath hoping they didn't remove some essential functionality without comment.

It's insane that Google retired this incredibly useful feature without even bothering to comment on it in the official changelog (https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3543688?hl=en). I'm also always amazed at how they completely ignore their customers on their own forums.

At least there's a way around this -- for now.
I hate that particular joke because of how it so casually blames the victim. Awful jobs exist in the system and people are crammed into them by economic force.
Fair point. One should be particularly wary of the lure of 'liveness' and reactivity. They are nice things to have but don't underestimate the expense in terms of performance, stability and complexity (events are spaghetti).
You don't have to have a massive random number - just one long enough to fulfil your goal. You then ensure uniqueness using your database. If your goal is just to allow sufficient addressability, then the random number needs to have enough bits to cover the maximum number of items you can ever conceive of creating. If your goal is to prevent people from typing in a random number and getting a valid page, you need to multiply your address space by 1/(acceptable probability of guessing).

Having two levels of random number is unnecessary - you should be able to access a job/operation combination with a single identifier.
Its great, another integration....
Just to nuance your 1) points about server side rendering, with pro-points :

• you only need html and css loaded to show content to your user, and js loads while the user is watching content, js has some time to be ready on first interaction.

• still feels slower than showing stuff with only html+css

• for pages content that changes a lot, if you rely on cdn for html pages, you need to update content with js on page load and you either ends up with a splash wait-while-we-are-loading or a blinking christmas tree.

• if your html is small enough, the cache checking round-trip is not that faster than loading content, while a JS rendering will need cache round trip AND data loading round trip. You can eliminate some html round trip with cache expiration, but at the expense of reliable deployments.

• still, JS rendering/update can be slower than server side CPU, especially on mobile devices.
In more professional settings certain job titles seem pointless but actually add a diversity of thinking that would otherwise be lacking. For example, you may not really need a lawyer to check something. But good lawyers have a knack of identifying logical inconsistancies and always find spelling mistakes which is useful. Or an IT expert operating in an office of social scientists will think about problems in an entirely different way. Sometimes maintaining a multi disiplinary team is more important than being 100% efficient on an individual level.
> By that definition the whole of Western Europe would be a socialist state.

Much of the US believes that to be the case.
Big title
Red Pill or Blue Pill? Choosing Between SQL and NoSQL
Nope, runs at 60 fps.

Please, don't circulate BS. From Extreme Tech:

Updated November 4: Sadly, it’s time for a mea culpa. On October 24 we mistakenly identified the iMac with 5K Retina display as having a 30Hz panel. The 27-inch iMac does indeed output 5K @ 60Hz — and to hit those kinds of frequencies, Apple used its own customized timing controller, rather than DisplayPort 1.2 (which can’t drive 5K @ 60Hz). More on that can be found further down the story.

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/192305-analyzing-the-imac-...
This reads like a classic Graeber piece, in that he's starts off by tackling some fascinating questions -- why are there 2x the administrative workers in the US as in Europe -- but then skips straight to the anarchist polemics.

Most of the jobs he categorizes as "bullshit" all share an element of arms-race components to them. i.e. if my competitor has really good telemarketers/lobbyists/corporate lawyers, I'd better have one too -- _or they'll beat me_. How is it that that reflects some sort of keep-the-masses-down 1% malfeasance?

To me, the tell that he defined "bullshit" as "jobs I don't like or understand" is that he lumped in actuaries with telemarketers -- does he think providing insurance has no value?

Similarly he writes: "What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?" There are more musicians employed in this country [1] than there are people in biglaw [2].

Ultimately, it seems like Graeber wants to return to a butcher-and-baker economy, where all our jobs are focused on directly providing services to consumers. That sounds charming, but makes as much sense as a world with all consumer startups and no b2b/enterprise startups.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/entertainment-and-sports/musicians-an... -- 167,400 musicians

[2] see http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pages/statistics.php... -- 70,000 lawyers in biglaw
Big title. Definitely not "anti-pattern"
The rise of astrostatistics
For perhaps 10% of the population, maybe less, what OPs parents said is true.

The other 90% or more of the people claiming they're bored would never do 40 hrs/wk of volunteer work... its just a socially acceptable way to say they can't afford it.

A good gauge would be to ask them if they'd do it part time or volunteer.

Some other reasons that aren't socially acceptable to talk about but are true, revolve around workers in highly capitalist sectors / hobbies can't have fun toys at home. My Aunt the chemical engineer can have a lot more fun at work than at home. Large machine tool operators who actually love the craft not the paycheck can't have a lathe bigger than their garage at home in their garage. Cluster operators. Large network operators. Some of the more exotic/modern corners of EE work.

What people say socially often has nothing to do with reality.
Discussing Man V. Nature with Diane Cook
>a little disconcerting, to be honest

Yep, this is yet another vector to assist in de-anonymization of people - especially those using machines that often stay at a certain, specific x-y axis tilt on some desktops, etc.
*I get the impression from reading articles similar to this one...