skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is it optimal for a hacker to work as a programmer?
When I was in the army my job mostly consisted of doing tedious data entry work in legacy software. After a couple of weeks I decided to program a script which would automate my entire job. I would show up at work 8am and leave 4pm without having done anything.

The legacy software would run in a RDP-like session and we had no privileges to run scripts or programs. My script would therefore run as a Visual Basic macro in Excel using the Win32 API to move the mouse and use SendKeys to enter text. After a while it was extremely advanced and handled all edge-cases of my work, making it more accurate than my colleagues. It's one of the best hacks I've ever pulled off.

My Lieutenant could not believe how quickly I got work done. This made me realize that I had to be more careful and make it look like it was me doing the work. My pay was fixed so there was no economic advantage for me to feed the script more work.

In retrospect this experience has made me think. Working as a programmer is perhaps not the most optimal economic choice for a hacker when you consider workload vs pay. You can not automate software development in the same degree that you can automate jobs that mostly consists of repetitive tasks, like brain dead data entry.
How to Bypass The New York Times and Wall Street Journal’s Paywall
Welcome to Tock: A ticketing system for restaurants
Show HN: TPBSTATS – Statistics on movies available on The Pirate Bay
They are both quoting Jack Welch, who called it the dumbest idea in the world.
I treat cultural fit as necessary but not sufficient.

In other words, it's the first question I ask myself (and encourage my clients to ask themselves). If it's a "NO", then don't pursue that candidate. If it's a MAYBE or a YES, then move on to the next steps (having other team members meet them; skills tests etc).

I've had clients in construction, and yes - they've hired based on cultural fit. Key criteria, such as trustworthiness and willingness to communicate, don't just apply to jobs in offices.

You make a great point about how to properly define the culture of your organisation. When I help businesses define culture, it incorporates a documented vision, a small number of critical values that are also defined (not just platitudes), and a strategy paper connecting those to behaviors which can be managed (managed up and managed down). Of course, many organisations simply view their culture as a foosball table in the corner and beers on a Friday every few months.
I mostly agree with you, however:

the size of the surrounding ecosystem

I think you underestimate the importance of this. Particularly if you have a complex and multi-faceted problem domain at hand, ecosystem and library support can be a dealbreaker, for which many people would sacrifice expressiveness and language power. Particularly so if the language is relatively malleable and/or dynamically introspectable, so they can sort of emulate certain higher language features just enough to be useful, while having abundant libraries, toolchains and documentation. It's definitely a valid trade-off.

In addition:

programmers appear to be far more interested in the ease of bundling together other people's work to get something built quickly and cheaply

This is primarily a side effect of software complexity. Starting off from first principles can be quite impractical these days, so stitching together others' work is becoming a common paradigm. I'd almost say it's the natural end result of abstraction itself.
The "dumbest idea in the world" phrasing borrowed by the headline didn't originate with some wild-eyed lefty or academic, but is attributed to Jack Welch, celebrated former CEO of GE.
UK - facepalm
Interesting to see the service rivalries in this thread. My dad was Air Force and he likes this plane.

It is an interesting challenge arming up for war. I recall watching nearly every episode of Wings (which was a Discovery channel show that each episode focused on a single plane) and was really impressed at how people thought about things. The show on the A-10 is on youtube in 5 parts (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM2KbwPMU18) and its worth a watch.
garbage "america is the best" article
Based on numerous reports, such as this one[1], Instacart Shoppers are currently being classified by the company as independent contractors.

Apparently, Instacart Shoppers are trained, set a work schedule with the company, have their work activities controlled through an app, and even wear Instacart clothing. While classification involves numerous factors, I personally don't see how any of this passes even one of the most fundamental, the "nature and degree of control by the employer" test.

Other on-demand companies that use independent contractor classification are facing class action lawsuits [2][3] over classification and given the general trends in the courts[4], there's little doubt we will continue to see the number of class actions alleging misclassification grow.

Putting aside the costs of defending and settling a class action, or paying damages in an adverse ruling, the real question for investors in any on-demand company that currently relies on independent contractor classification is what employee classification would do to the economics of the business. Think of this as an "employee stress test."

In some cases, on-demand companies are using independent contract classification to shift costs that have traditionally been borne by competitors in their markets, giving them an "unfair" pricing advantage. If they are found to be misclassifying their workers, their ability to compete on price will be affected.

In other cases, companies charge a premium for a service that offers convenience. If they are found to be misclassifying their workers and are forced to pay their workers as employees, the premium charged to consumers would either have to increase or the company would need to be able to live on reduced margins.

The effects of reclassification would be particularly significant for transportation companies. For example, in California, under Labor Code Section 2802, employers are on the hook for expenditures or losses incurred by their employees "in direct consequence of the discharge of his or her duties, or of his or her obedience to the directions of the employer." This includes expenditures related to travel/mileage.

It's going to be very interesting in the coming years to see which of these on-demand companies continue to thrive because I personally think it's inevitable that many of them are going to be forced to reclassify their workers as employees. I suspect some investors aren't giving this enough consideration in their due diligence.

[1] http://news.morningstar.com/all/market-watch/TDJNMW201411076...

[2] http://uberlawsuit.com/

[3] http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Handy-com-housecleane...

[4] http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-16/fedex-ground...
No, you didn't come across as supporting the detox industry. You came across as arrogant or lazy. Your own willful ignorance does not give you superior claim to reject the statements of others; which is what you did.
Should you upgrade to the Samsung Galaxy Note 4?
I don't buy the claim that older developers "forget" languages. Instead, our standard for what it is to "know" a language goes up and the number of languages we claim to know remains constant.

I've known some engineers to argue that the number of languages on a CV is negatively correlated to the quality of the candidate.
“It’s getting older and more expensive to maintain, and that’s the problem,”

(lol)

Joint Strike Fighter cost per plane: $618 million [0]

To paraphrase Bill Lind: what the pentagon says only makes sense when you realize that its purpose is graft, not war.

[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_...
Analysing Apache Log Files with Logstash and Kibana
Previously, there was an excellent discussion on Nick Kokonas' Tickets for Restaurants.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7853786
I don't think they were ever really decentralized except on paper anyway; apparently all five of the nodes making up the Stellar consensus were run by the foundation that created it.
I'm bullish on SpaceX when it comes to launch systems and vehicles, but to the best of my knowledge they haven't demonstrated any expertise in Life Support Systems.

The hardest part about getting to Mars isn't flinging a metal tube off the Earth. That part we know how to do.

The hard part is keeping people alive for 6 months there, 6 months back, and providing all the equipment necessary to do meaningful science on the surface.

This isn't to say that an adequate launch system isn't essential to the mission, but I would be very surprised if SpaceX developed life support systems independently and more efficiently than NASA. More likely, I can imagine a news headline in which a SpaceX rocket sends a NASA capsule and living module to an off-world mission.
Sums up proper design. Figure out the job requirements first, the design comes naturally from that. Trying to come up with a fancy design first and then fit that to some task just ends up with a glorified CAD rendering.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8706366
Instead of expecting people to change their taste and demanding re-education, find a way to give them what they want while also giving them what you think they should have.

I don't really expect them to change their taste. As I said, the actual situation is something we might reasonably have guessed: combining building blocks quickly and cheaply is perceived as more important than quality. Given that it's clear a lot of people will pay for cheap junk, that is a commercially sensible thing to produce.

I just find it sad that this is the situation we seem to have drifted into. As more and more things we use every day depend fundamentally on software, and an ever more connected society makes issues like security and scalability more important as well, I think the world would be a much better place if consumers were less forgiving of problems caused by badly written software and demanded better. However, the industry seems to have succeeded in convincing most people that mediocrity is inevitable and software that only works for a brief period or requires constant updates for maintenance is the norm.

What is perhaps more sad is that so many professional software developers themselves don't seem to know any better.

For example, part of this study examined attitudes to static typing and unit testing. We might reasonably suspect that a population interested in SaaS has a bias towards dynamic languages like Ruby and Python, so it's not too surprisingly that 62% said they saw the value of unit testing compared to only 36% for static typing. The disturbing thing is that both of these figures are so low, given that these aren't exactly controversial techniques and there is plenty of evidence that using at least one of them can substantially improve quality.

Another telling contrast was that when asked about what they enjoyed using, programmers heavily favoured expressive languages, yet when asked about which language features were important, features that offer more expressive power like templates, generators, higher order functions and macros were all rated much lower than OOP staples like classes/interfaces and inheritance. A majority saw little if any connection between higher order functions and objects, despite their mathematically provable relationship; a third didn't even understand the question.

When you have that level of ignorance of programming theory that really ought to be general knowledge by professional standards, it's not really about letting developers have what they want while also giving them what anyone else thinks they should have. They could already have both today, and they already say they want the benefits that would bring. They just don't know enough about the tools that are already available to them to get those results, and isn't that just a straightforward education problem?
How to write a killer Resume/CV
Pikmin: The Video Game Interview Question
The HN Pedantry Patrol never misses a chance to strike.
That's it. Learn to run on the balls of your feet. It reduces the shock to the knees by such an amount that I can't run in any other way now.
Previous discussion around this TL:DR

This is an optional filter provided by ISPs. Most are opt-in for existing customers; opt-out for new customers. They've been around for a long time for mobile users. Turning them off usually means visiting a web page and clicking boxes.

This is not a court-ordered ban - seen when torrent sites get blocked. This is not part of the IWF blocklist of images of child sexual abuse.
It’s definitely not blocked by Sky, I can get to their site fine. Are we talking about the default blacklist at an ISP level that you can turn off? I agree that it shouldn’t be there, but it’s not a ‘Great Firewall of Britain’ (the closest to that would be the Internet Watch Foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation )
NASA started out as a public works project, one of its explicit goals was uplifting (my word) the South, and after Apollo it became almost entirely a public works project.

So that $5 billion a year employing N zillion people became the real goal, not what it was ostensibly about.
>And there's really nothing inherent in view transformations vs. business logic that necessarily makes the latter sufficiently served by a weaker computational model

There is. View transformations are essentially configuration. As such, the ideal language for describing them is declarative.

To keep declarative languages clear, you need to make them not be turing complete. If they are turing complete they become unpredictable and difficult to understand.

Business logic requires turing completeness and usually requires mutable state.
> But one thing's for certain, being active certainly prolongs life.

you forgot to say "on average" here.
Letting other people define value for you sounds like an incredible bad idea.
Not completely unconcerned, PSF did donate $10k to PyPy last month, so they do recognize some importance for speed, even if it isn't CPython's priority.

(and PyPy does break some python APIs and expectations, speed does come at a small cost, after all)
It's good to see new MQTT servers. As one of the developers of IBM's product in this space I'd like to mention it:
http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/messagesight

I'm biased and MessageSight has existed a lot longer so it's not fair to compare them but if people want to see numbers our performance report is here:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24035590
(that report is for 1.1, the equivalent for 1.2 released a couple of weeks ago isn't out yet).

Good luck and a fair wind to everyone in the MQTT space!
If returns were in terms of dividends, with owners actually sharing in profits, rather than more easily manipulated and leverage level dependent capital gains, the problem would solve itself.

Make dividends tax deductible for companies (effectively treat them as big LLCs), eliminate the capital gains tax advantage, and watch sanity return to c-suite comp.
Just checked on my Three connection and I got through without any problems.
Is there any way to avoid being tapped? Is it legal for the PD to do this without a warrant?
> I don't know why shops even allow amex.

Because some shops _do_ have an Amex, and as an Amex holder, I prefer stores that take Amex to ones that don't.
I've been reviewing CVs recently, and there is a striking negative correlation between a candidate's amount of experience and the number of specific languages or tools they choose to highlight.

It's also quite striking how the younger and less experienced candidates often have a first page that is pure keyword stuffing now, while older and more experienced ones tend not to. My suspicion is that the younger candidates expect to have to get past a computer and then HR before encountering anyone who knows what they're talking about technically, while stronger candidates tend to start from the technically competent end via a contact in their network and only expect to deal with HR right at the end of the process to dot i's and cross t's.
PyPy breaks CPython APIs. Python language stuff is very well supported.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunde...

Would not surprise me...
I have been think about that too. Then investing would also be less of a gamble on the stock market.
Sorry wooster, but "time spent thinking" is utterly irrelevant. Why? Because the expression is meaningless. To have meaning it needs to indicate to what end.

There's a world of difference between (for example) "thinking about how to assert as much control over a limited resource for the lowest cost possible" and "thinking about how to manage a limited resource as effectively as possible given the broad range of needs and interests in the state."

Farmers have been thinking about themselves for decades. The policies we have as a result reflect precious little interest in the well-being of California as a whole.
Some discussion

http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2014/12/investing-...

http://www.businessinsider.com/gmos-montier-maximizing-share...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-03/shareholder-value-f...

like a lot of things in economics, a lot of things could have been going on during the switch from 'managerialism' to 'shareholder value' paradigm, so it's not necessarily true that it caused returns to go down. in context the effect Montier talks about is quite small. but it does seem clear that it didn't cause returns to go up meaningfully across the board.

in fact, the effect Montier cites seems to go away if you do a slightly more sophisticated calculation

http://3rdmoment.blogspot.com/2014/12/stock-performance-in-e...

there are a lot of studies that show companies where management has skin in the game do measurably better than companies where they don't.

that being said, there aren't data that would tell you, companies where the CEO will earn $1m or $10m depending on how well the company performs don't do as well as companies where the CEO will earn $20m or $200m.

edit: the question of impact of CEO incentives on stock performance is probably more complicated than what I said. I've seen a lot of studies that show that incentives impact management behavior. but probably most of those behaviors relate to short-term stock outperformance. whether those changes result in long-term outperformance is another question, and whether the incentives even reward long-term outperformance is complicated. https://hbr.org/1990/05/ceo-incentives-its-not-how-much-you-...
Persons F through Z. Almost none of them own any shares but half of them are regular customers and the other half might be interested.
I found regular running increases not only health but quality of my life as well. The article states that in an overt way efficency of walking compared to youth - you won't get tired when you get there. Honestly day without running for me - not to say wasted but lost in some way as my attention is dulled, body feels less alive.
Never mind the F-104 "lawn dart".
my understanding is that with the new non-steam electric driven catapults..they in fact can
I would be pleased if you took the program source code and the measurement scripts and published your own measurements.

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/play.html#languagex

But we all seem feel the same way about this, we all feel that we should sit on our hands and wait for someone else to do the chores we don't wish to do.
This article, like most others, overlooks the primary reason the A-10 has been slated for retirement for so long even though no one contests its effectiveness in its role. Due to the way the aircraft was designed, it has very limited upgradeability compared to most US military aircraft.

While the airframe still makes for a great weapons platform, the sensor suites, avionics, and countermeasures are obsolete, and not in a good way. They've been doing a lot of nasty hacks to allow it to support modern weapon systems and electronics but there are a growing number of important capabilities that simply cannot be "backported" to that airframe.

This has been increasing its vulnerability to more advanced threats and reducing its ability to deploy more advanced weapons over time. Its shelf-life has been extended by virtue of it being used in practice against adversaries with unsophisticated weaponry. This makes it immediately useful in practice but the military is well-aware that it would not be nearly as successful against a more sophisticated adversary and this is why they have been angling for an alternative.

It is a relic of the Cold War not just in its history but, unfortunately, also in its defenses and weaponry with no obvious upgrade path. Its survivability and effectiveness are predicated on being used against Cold War level adversaries. To replace it with something that could support the capabilities they desire, they would need to design a completely new airframe.
I think you misread the article and posted a garbage comment.

The article, while perhaps garbage, is "A-10 is best, despite efforts by others to end it". Point by point the author's narrative is clear:

"But it is heavily armored and wickedly armed, making it a ruthlessly effective weapon. And that is why, despite ongoing efforts by Defense Department brass to kill it, the Warthog is headed back into battle to help in the fight against ISIS."

"That makes the A-10 something of a zombie—it refuses to die. The Air Force wants to scuttle the 238 A-10s"

"The A-10, little more than a flying tank, is perfectly suited to the task and beloved by pilots and troops alike."

"The A-10 can take a ton of abuse, and continue flying if it’s lost an engine, a tail or even half of a wing."

and so on... The article is about the A-10 versus the Air Force brass, a continuation of the "Whiz Kids" versus the tried and true. The narrative is not "America is best".
Can't he just get everyone to sign waivers to access his property to go to the beach? Or display a if you cross his property people do so entirely at their own risk?
Is the USA likely to go to war against anyone with sophisticated weaponry any time soon? It seems like we're mostly interested in wars in the third world at this point, and the A10 seems pretty well suited to that.
it can be related to diet at least it was for me. increase in protein and fruits and getting rid of starchy foods gave me a leg up on it - not right away after adjusting your diet it can take some time to feel better. Gradual acceleration too can help. Speed walking may be the next step, at least it was for my dad.
it waits till the page is loaded (window.onload)

grabs all image urls of a page

checks which have .bpg extensions

replaces all these .bpg img tags with canvas tags

loads all the images with Ajax and renders them into the canvas tags
.75 USD or Singapore Dollars?
No, just the opposite. Think of low speed as meaning it can fly in spite of low relative air-speed. If a plane could fly at 20 knots, say, then it could take off with 0 runway length if the carrier is steaming at 20 knots into the wind. It would just appear to hover up into the air relative to the carrier.
> management has skin in the game do measurably better than companies where they don't.

Same applies to all non-managerial staff. That is why I love the concept of coops, and I'm sad nobody does them much because they mean empowering your employees to be maximally productive at the expense of "potential profits" for founders and shareholders.

All the incentive systems in companies are all bandaids trying to make up for doing things wrong from the start. If you want to incentivize them to perform to profit, then let them profit as well from the companies success, and they will perform.
Then do that.
For anyone just tuning in - links to all of this morning's talks are in the description of the livestream.
I feel like there's been a general collapse in trust in at least America in the past 40 years. Short-term behavior is a logical individual response to that. I smell game theory.