skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. The best managers I've ever had were the ones that completely shielded the rest of us from the absolute BS that always exist. Go figure, those were the companies where the rank & file didn't think political BS existed - surprise, your manager was protecting you from that!
How I Landed 5 Dream Jobs in One Month by Giving Away My Best Ideas
> I have moved some of them onto a simple VPS with DO for now but would like a better long term solution (i.e something managed).

> The main problem I am having at this point is that given they are NGOs money is a big issue and finding something that would work with their price range and isn't at the Godaddy level is proving to be a bit of a challenge.

These statements contradict each other. If money is an issue, you're going to have a hard time finding someone to manage an environment that small.

S3 + Jekyll are out if you need SSL. Have you thought about Docker containers on Digital Ocean with Cloudflare in front of the site (free tier comes with SNI SSL)?
The Turing test is a method for judging whether a computer has intelligence comparable to that of a human, or what's often called "strong AI." Strong AI is obviously a special case of AI, but most AI research isn't even particularly interested in developing a strong AI.
EVE Online has just about everything you just mentioned, and is doing just fine. I prefer the WoW model, and so do the majority based on the numbers, but there is still a lively community for that type of gameplay.
Handling emergencies is a big part of initial and recurring training for pilots. I can't speculate "why" pilots didn't handle the situation the right way but based on the Air France response to this crash I believe the main cause is too much reliance on automation and lack of actual hand-flying. Pilots found themselves way out of their comfort zone and it impacted their ability to make good decisions.

If you are interested to learn about "too much automation" problem there is a very good (and funny) talk given 15+ years ago:

http://vimeo.com/64502012
I used to use code based on Kendall Willets' code. His original site is offline. Archive here: https://web.archive.org/web/20110928135313/http://willets.or...

Line from the page:
"I just picked up a copy and it looks great! You are right about the whole approach and my stuff stinks." - Joe Celko, author of SQL for Smarties.
"But it's striking that even the simplest forms of life — the amoeba, for example — exhibit an intelligence, an autonomy, an originality, that far outstrips even the most powerful computers. A single cell has a life story; it turns the medium in which it finds itself into an environment and it organizes that environment into a place of value."

As someone who does work in this field, we're not that far away from a fully atomistic simulation of a single cell (with a couple assumptions about reactive force fields, quantum cut-off, numerical stability, time scales, yada yada...)
You seem to think that society deserves to be treated with benevolence, and responds well to it.

As a member of society, I have learned that if something is actually all that great, it will eventually become open source or be replaced by open source. Jeff Atwood had an article about this a long long time ago.

Society learns also from being punished. If people did not give away their work for free, society would learn more quickly that you have to pay people to work. Then society could benefit 1) from paying people to work 2) from having a claim on the work they produce.

They aren't going to learn if people keep bending over.
What are the best learning resources for learning about operating systems concepts?
You successfully caught a wave. This is to be expected in any area of programming.

RoR was propelled forward by businesses trying "new" technologies in the hopes that it would pay off in faster / cheaper software development. While RoR is not getting any less useful, the 5 year hype cycle of web dev has made SPAs and Node.js the new technology stack to experiment with.

My suggestion is to either secure traditional employment in the RoR stack, or move to the JS and Node.js stack. The former will give you a few extra years, while the latter will allow you to continue with the remote work you have grown accustom too.
(pure) managers don't attempt to solve technical problems because such action usually obstructs individual contributors. What's apparent here is the substantial difference in perspective between managers and ICs. Managers tend to see social equilibria and the network effects of tech problems. ICs can see much, much more deeply into specific (and usually key) aspects of tech problems. A lot of classic conflicts arise when ICs-turned-managers overestimate the depth and completeness of their comprehension and try to lead the technical effort rather than compliment it. Hence a lot of managers are 'uninterested in problems.'
I agree, although I'm older.

For me it was the Battletech 3056 MUSE.

I was in charge of a major faction (for BT folks, I was Thomas Marik). It was more than a 40 hour job, and on top of that I both had to still be a college student and maintain my secret character for fun having purposes.

I managed a group of people which at the time seemed huge (still large by modern guild standards, but not enormous), complete with resource management, politics (who gets the good stuff?), etc.

It taught me a lot, although it did lead to lesser grades at the time. And really, that taught me a lot too :)
While I agree that moving into management is just engineering human systems (hell, I do more management stuff than code stuff nowadays), it is definitely a skill. Writing "human code", by creating processes and things, requires you to be able to look at someone and understand their psychology, their motivation, their skills and understanding. It is best performed with the zen principle of Beginner's Mind, and other theory-of-mind type skillsets.

Not all coders have the ability to do theory of mind, because they're somewhere on the autism spectrum. I myself am autistic, and I've only learned this stuff through intense study. It was definitely a skill I had to get good at.

One of the most difficult things to do is understand what you personally are good at, to break down a skill you have and understand where it comes from, and what it looks like when someone doesn't have that skillset. Not to say that someone who doesn't currently have it will never have it, but they definitely will have to work on it in order to get there.

imho, there's a lot of skill overlap for certain kinds of people from engineering to management, and a lot of those people end up in management. This is why, to most managers, what an engineer is supposed to do "next" is become a manager. But this isn't everyone, and it's not even most engineers- so developing an understanding that what is easy for you is not easy for everyone is paramount.
I figured that out by teaching, and it took awhile to get there for me, so imho it's a non-obvious thing.
I tell my consulting clients that there are only three ways to make more money: get more clients, charge more, sell your existing clients more stuff.

Most devs are under-charging.

Getting more clients is expensive in terms of time and support.

What almost everyone forgets is that it's far better to sell your existing clients more stuff than to get a new client. When was the last time you called everyone you've worked with and asked them how they are doing, how things went after you were involved.

Get in the habit of asking them which of their friends might need some work done. It should always be your last question.
Only in copyright law does "The law is currently this" stand in as an argument for, "And, therefore, the law should exist in this form, or one even more stringent, for all eternity."

He is arguing the law should change, as it should. He advanced arguments, which you may dislike, for why it should. And you respond with, simply, "the law currently says this."
>It's hard to blame Elon though, he is just playing the game.

of course. Anybody is entitled to whatever break/deal he can get. It is just that government is [in the naive theory of "we the people"] exactly there to keep the playing field level/fair, to not allow big players to tilt it in their favor.
For me no game can approach closed beta UO. It was that perfect time of advanced for its time game and naive for its time player base. By the time open beta showed up the writing was already on the wall.

The promise of UO was limitless - a complete sandbox where anything could happen, but in a world where the Ahole didn't exist. Within a month it was obvious that wasn't going to be the case.

I still had tons of fun in the 2.5 years I played UO because I embraced the aholes - while I wasn't one of them I definitely played their game in an attempt to combat them continuously. For the UO players I was 99.9% red because often the biggest turds were blue, but really I didn't care - I only fought turds regardless of the situation.

It was still an amazing game, I have friends to this day that I met there, and many of them had specialized stories - e.g. the person who was an "interior decorator". That's what she did, she took in game gold to design the decor of your in game building. I haven't seen a game since where that was really a viable occupation.
I usually agree with most of Steve Jurvetson's writings, but I've got a few doubts about this one.

Factually, he's largely correct. For example, A F/A-18F Super Hornet can be flown between waypoints and use Terrain Following Radar coupled to the autopilot. The jet can also fly a carrier approach "coupled up" on autopilot.

Could a datalink control the mission computer on a F/A-18F? Quite possible. Could a X-47B fly autonomously onto carrier deck? It's been done.

Could a F/A-18 WSO(eg. non-pilot) program the mission computer and land the jet without manual flying? If the runway is equipped for ACLS (Not ILS) approaches, then yes.

Could a flight attendant program a 737-700 FMS and fly a coupled ILS landing? Probably.

Could the X-47B mission systems be integrated on a 737-700 and fly autonomously? Yes. Its relatively rare for a tower controller to wave-off a 737 because the pilot didn't fly a proper and stabilized approach. Its up to the flight crew to fly a go-around if they are not stabilized on approach. Are they going to start putting LSO (Landing Signal Officers) at JFK to wave off an automated airliner? Maybe...

If an X-47B looses its engine the chance of the jet ditching intact is improbable. If an F/A-18 has a dual engine failure its almost certain the crew will eject. If an A320 looses both engines due to a birdstrike, thats when Capt. Sully earned his paycheck and then some. An autonomous flight computer cant factor the rare emergencies.

There is probably large public support for getting rid of the TSA and having remote override for the FMS might work. Taking the pilot out of the cockpit isn't the solution to the TSA problem.
this is so gud
MMOs like this still exist and new ones are being made every few years. Don't give up hope just yet. Many of them cite UO as their main influence and inspiration.
I've been hiring Rails devs for the past year and here are my thoughts on the subject.

If you're a classical Rails dev (no frontend experience with Ember, Angular, or Backbone) then you should have significant experience on the backend in terms of building APIs, provisioning and configuring cloud servers, and scaling databases. Ideally, you've done this work at a successful shop that has reached meaningful scale to where you've learned where the framework works and where it falls down.

If you lack those skills, then you better hop on the tech treadmill and get in shape on the client side. Learn a frontend JS framework or get some native mobile dev experience so you can remain full stack. Just being able to just sling Rails Views around with jQuery simply doesn't cut it any more.
A possible new biological model for depression
Unless you're on satellite - and backhaul satellite costs are absolutely absurd, I would know - you're not costing the ISP a fortune because you FTP data at 4 AM.

The person being subsidized is the computer-illiterate person who uses no data except for during peak times and then requires several tech-support calls a month.
The MIT bot is around $20, however by replacing the Sparkfun Pro Mini with a clone you could save another $8 or so.
Natural selection does have a regard for simplicity, in that complexity has costs. Natural selection has very primitive hueuristics for achieving design: variance + selection. But once a superior arrangement is achieved, it succeeds. Presuming it provides an advantage in survival, reproduction, competition, etc.

Examples of retrogressive complexity among natural systems include the many birds and insects which evolve toward flightless variants in island habitats. Flying is a useful, but complex, and very high-energy adaptation. Where it provides a capability to out-compete other life forms (better range, escape from predators, more food-gathering capability) it's useful, but given risks presented (including being blown off an island in a storm, say), it can also be maladaptive.
So essentially managers are people sysadmins. They make sure everyone is working, try to resolve conflicts and ideally make sure that everyone is running the right tools. What would be a people engineer in that vein?
“This is EVE” – Uncensored (2014)
There's a ton of info on creating tiny executables for Windows' PE file format; here are a few examples:

http://www.phreedom.org/research/tinype/

https://code.google.com/p/corkami/wiki/PE#minimal_sizes

http://hugi.scene.org/online/hugi21/cosmalpe.htm

I don't know how much of it can be attributed to the popularity of the platform or its culture, but I've noticed the amount of information on making tiny executables for *nix systems (including OS X's MachO) is much less in comparison.
The brain is clearly marvelous, but it's not magic. It's a physical object with rules which govern it just like anything else. To think that we won't be able to crack the AI nut just smacks of insecurity on the part of the OP. We are, whether anyone wants to accept it or not, just meat robots.
Yes, demokracy is a mess. Better not tell the the stupid populace about important decisions, they'll just interfere. /s
Don't mean to offend anyone, but I think tone is usually the cause for something sounding "cringey"
What a surprise! You picked a fad platform and the work is drying up. I've been working several large platforms that sit on top of the JVM for years now, I charge over $850 (£550) and I've never struggled to get work.

I mainly work with big ecommerce platforms; Oracle ATG, SAP Hybris, IBM WebSphere amongst others. They are built using Java and have made me somewhat wealthy. No fads.
I can't really find work either. Looks like in general IT is just dying: http://tinyurl.com/phy8bw8
> she took in game gold to design the decor of your in game building. I haven't seen a game since where that was really a viable occupation

Second life
Why Natural Language Technology Is So Important for Ecommerce
I don't think you can make that kind of generalization. It really depends on the organization. Ideally neither position will pull an unequal amount of weight.

Remember that in many cases, the software developer has the same kind of weight on his shoulders; some bugs and errors can cause huge amounts of lost revenue, lost jobs, etc. Software plays no small role in the day to day operations and programmers carry a lot of weight on their shoulders, especially in companies that don't have strong testing and review methods (read: almost every company in existence).
So how do you feel about a pilot pulling the stick when hes aware of the stall? Thats still incompetence no matter how you try to turn it around.
I find bing( which is powering yahoo) pretty bad for technical queries. For normal searches, its fine.
Man that comment thread takes me right back to Freshman philosophy class. I particularly appreciated the notion of an Amoeba having 'agency'. Caveat the mechanical reconstruction and processing of the organics of DNA, systems have been built and discussed in Artificial Life conferences that not only have the 'agency' of an Amoeba but emergent behaviors in flocking, social adaptation, and mutual defense. And what does that say about intelligence? Pretty much nothing, just like all mass being attracted to all other mass clearly demonstrates the concept of gravity but says nothing at all about what gravity is.

But it is a lot of fun to speculate about.
I haven't noticed a particular decline in Rails jobs locally here in New Zealand. In fact, a company has been looking for a Rails dev for over a year and can't find anyone. I work in PHP, and there's quite a lot of opportunity. On the other hand, there's no Node jobs around, perhaps because of its infancy.
Downvotes not required - I'm raising a valid point about fads. At the time people were saying it was a fad. HN doesn't like these kind of opinions.
Or maybe Indeed is just able to scrape fewer job postings.
I'd rather be dumb and have free time than organize files every day and maintain my intelligence(not sure how this can really be quantified though)
Anybody know of any good apis to hook this thing into?
Thanks thats exactly what i was refering to. And its not the first time air france pilots fail miserably in emergency situations.
Yes, if I were a teenager and there were rumors that if you brought a black cat to the mountain it would change color, I know where I would spend my weekend. Combined with legends about horrible deaths to anyone who tried, it would be completely irresistible.
I think a wide-spread problem in this discussion is that people misinterpret the word 'just'. It clearly means "just meat, no magic". But what people mistakenly understand is "just meat, inferior to magic".
To misquote Cicero: O tempora o artis! Or if you want to go farther back, refer to the Phaedrus, when Socrates attacks writing (by citing Egyptian criticism as precedent!).

The fact is, since the invention of the water wheel automation has allowed us to become physically weaker. Some choose to work on their strength, others choose to use their time elsewhere (when in the past there was no choice). And this automation has liberated those who are not strong at all.

The same is true of the computer. There is nothing preventing you from developing the memory skills preliterate societies required, and there are even contests today of people who have honed (and probably improved) those skills.

Of course there are areas in which particular contemporary human skills will continue to be valued (perhaps plane piloting, until automation becomes good enough; perhaps piano playing simply because some people will prefer a human at the keyboard). But most such skills will be pursued for fun. I still like writing PDP-10 machine code from time to time but I hardly consider it a practical art at this point.

Instead people will continue to use the computer to extend human capability just as rockets allow people to "jump" higher than they could on their own. The "human-centered design" (as described by Carr, who should be ashamed of himself because he certainly knows better) is simply a condescending school of design. What's truly human centered is using technology to allow people to do what they want, whether it's to explore space or to write more bad memos and bad buildings, or simply passively watch more television.
Yep. In the Denver/Boulder area I'd say we have a severe lack of talented Rails devs with good experience. Between here and SF I get contacted for 1-2 jobs per week and I don't promote myself at all. Usually it's for mid stage startups looking to expand their team or hire a senior dev.

All jobs that I hear about are full time and not remote. For startups looking to build their team, having quality people in the office provides much more than what a remote worker can offer.
Rail systems aren't really comparable because, well, they're on rails. You have five more degrees of freedom when flying an aircraft.

A train driver's main job is to have good reflexes. Aside from opening the doors in case of fire, I can't think of a railway accident that couldn't have been prevented by simply stopping the train(s) in time. A driverless train simply needs an emergency stop button and a way for passengers to get out in an emergency.
Voar – a game of orbits
Investors Are Backing a Recruiting Revolution
I'm starting to believe (hard) AI should get the same status as politics and religion on HN. Those comment threads debating the true nature of AI are getting repetitive.
I also enjoyed this anecdote. This is a story I'll keep in the back of my mind as I progress my career.
They fixed it a few hours after my comment
They call it a "virtual battery" but that seems misleading to me - I don't see any way to get electricity back out, it sounds more like it just saves electricity consumed at peak periods by using, but they couldn't store more than they could use in the first place?
Rails is soooo over. The new cool platform is COBOL on Cogs (http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM), an enterprise-ready, full-stack agile paradigm.
agreed. packaged software is the gift that keeps on giving. hybris is on the upswing.
In San Francisco. There are about a million of them.
reminds me of http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/
You can reduce most things to not stopping when you should, but... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bernardino_train_disaste...
I thought it was Haskell on a Horse, no?

http://haskell.on-a-horse.org/
Why don't you have a search for jobs in Chicago?

It is a city where it has a strong yearning, connections wise and work ethic, to become a strong tech center. It won't be the next silicon valley but the results will be consistently good.
This company is looking for Rails programmer with more than +10 years.

http://www.strategic-options.com/insight/you-cant-have-more-...
If you're willing to move to Vancouver and work for an animation company on a 2D/3D animation pipeline in rails I may have a contact for you!

We've been looking for good ruby devs for a long time. They're impossible to find up here... Or no rails devs want to work on an animation pipeline.
Have you read the terms and conditions of your latest bank account? The level of forced-consent to thrid party disclosure may alarm you.
Welcome to the business, for better or worse. Technology stacks have a pretty short shelf-life with very few exceptions. I've been in the business 20+ years, most of it in Silicon Valley, and with few exceptions, like Java, most development platforms do not last even five years. It is one of the reasons I have experience with so much obscure stuff. I am constantly moving through technology stacks.

You might not like it but you need to follow the tool chains. Specific to your situation, I do not know anyone doing Ruby anymore for new systems. I am sure some people are but it is clearly on the decline. Continuous evolution of the tool chain is the curse of our industry. Right now, Javascript is probably much more valuable than Ruby.

If you do not like trading up, some skills are more durable than others. Over the long term, I've seen C/C++, Python, and Java retain their value better than most languages over the years. I think Javascript is likely to add itself to that list.

While you might find it depressing, a lot of what you have learned is immediately applicable in these other environments. You just need to figure out how they map, which is not too difficult. Going from Ruby to Python or Javascript is not that big of a stretch. In most cases, it is a weekend learning syntax and tool chain differences.
Statistics on anatomy of a rock song
Yes, agree with your point on how they become indistinguishable.
And, w.r.t RNNs, yes, probably we don't understand how they learn, but has that aided to process of how visual perception actually happens?