skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
nearly the entirety of what I do...

You are not even hardly alone. And while I suspect the PoV is prevalent in IT, it's hardly specific to it.

There's a guy who wrote a book about this so long ago that we don't remember his name. He's known only as "the preacher", sometimes as "the teacher" or "the gatherer".

It's Ecclesiastes, in the old testament of the Bible, and begins with "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity."

I'm quite an atheist, not religious, and generally not given to quoting scripture. I find this particular book exceptionally insightful.

Much of what you describe is in fact reality for most people -- we "follow the money for survival", but the purpose of it all quite frequently eludes me.

I started asking myself two or three years back, "what are the really big problems", largely as I saw that the areas in which they _might_ be addressed, both in Silicon Valley and in the not-for-profit world, there was little real focus on them. I've pursued that question to a series of others (you can find my list elsewhere, though I encourage you to come up with your own set -- I'll tip you to mine if requested).

My interest initially (and still principally) has been focusing on asking the right questions -- which I feel a great many disciplines and ideologies have not been doing. Having settled on at least a few of the major ones, I'm exploring their dynamics and trying to come to answers, though those are even harder.

It's been an interesting inquiry, and it's illuminated to me at least why the problem exists -- that Life (and its activities) seeks out and exploits entropic gradients, reduces them, and either continues to something else or dies out.

You'll find that concept in the Darwin-Lotka Energy Law, named by ecologist Howard Odum in the 1970s, and more recently in the work of UK physicist Jeremy England. Both conclude that evolution is actually a process which maximizes net power throughput -- a case which if true explains a great many paradoxes of human existence.

But it does raise the question of what humans do after we've exploited the current set of entropy gradients -- fossil fuels, mineral resources, topsoil and freshwater resources. A question Odum posed in the 1970s and which I arrived at independently in the late 1980s (I found Odum's version, in Environment, Power, and Society only in the past year).

But yes, it's a very curious situation.
> I'm 41, grew up playing with my Dad, who is now 74 and my Grandfather.

That sentence sure threw me for a loop at first.
select count(*) from property
where value similar to '%!important%'

=> 177119
I think it is a shame when trying to help people opens you up to liability. If that's not a sign that our society is too litigious, I don't know what is.
I wonder how much of this kind of thinking can be traced back to a persistent startup-culture problem: the delusion that the people who work for you are, or even should be, your friends.

If that's the lens you're looking at candidates through -- as people auditioning to be your friend -- of course you'd feel you're obligated to help them through their job search! That's what friends do for each other.

But the people who work for you -- and even more so, the people who have only applied to work for you -- are not your friends. You can (and should!) be friendly with them, of course; but you can't have a real, true friendship with them, because you have power over their lives that they don't have over yours.

Moreover, if you try to just ignore that power differential and relate to your employees like they're your old dorm buddies, all you'll find is that the power differential poisons the relationship. They'll constantly be second-guessing their own reactions to you, out of fear of negative job consequences. You'll constantly be second-guessing your own reactions to them, out of fear of appearing to play favorites. And they'll all be second-guessing each others' reactions to you, out of fear of someone brown-nosing their way past them on the career ladder.

It's the same reason why it's always a bad idea to date someone who reports to you -- you can never have the kind of relationship with them you have with someone outside the hierarchy you sit at the top of. Suspicion and jealousy and gamesmanship taint it from the moment it begins.

The solution to all these problems is to learn, understand, and internalize the distinction between colleagues and friends -- two groups of people you owe very different things to -- and then act accordingly.
I'm open to using something else. Both myself and my partner have abandoned Amazon as we no longer get items successfully delivered within a few days, usually it takes around a week... and we were both Prime members, living in West London.

Where Amazon screwed up is the home delivery network. It's terrible. I'm sure they pay their drivers by number of attempted deliveries per hour rather than number of successful deliveries. We live in a block of flats, and we just never manage to get a delivery within several days. Eventually the home delivery people figure out we have a 24/7 365 concierge, but that still adds another day to the actual delivery whilst we wait to be notified by the concierge.

This isn't even a once or twice thing. My partner is an academic and researcher and is ordering 2-3 books per week and 1-2 DVDs per week. Nothing got delivered within a few days of ordering, over a many month period. We have lost faith in Amazon so totally, that we no longer go to them for books, let alone anything else.

If Amazon offered Royal Mail, standard post... we'd both return.

As it stands, using Amazon is absolutely useless for us, nothing arrives when we need things and it's better to use almost any other supplier. Any supplier that uses Royal Mail gets a successful delivery within 1-2 working days.

How bad is Amazon home delivery in West London? Put it like this, Christmas 2013 we bought all our gifts from Amazon, Christmas 2014 we didn't purchase a single item from Amazon.

I don't believe we're a freak exception, so there's got to be a large market of people like us who will use anything other than Amazon if the shipper will just use the postal system.
It didn't seem like that to me - the time wasn't spent building the software but rather learning APL. So it was valuable to the students.
I agree when this is about suppressing opinions, but things are trickier when this is about suppressing disinformation. Pervasive propaganda that appears to be factual can easily manipulate the conclusions of rational adults. Of course, laws that attempt to suppress disinformation are probably ineffective and incredibly liable to abuse outside of restricted domains.
> Put another way: Whether $APP takes 0.1 seconds or 1.9 seconds to do something does not at all change what time I'm leaving at the end of the day.

But it does greatly change how annoyed you leave at the end of day.

Not to mention any noticeable delay in load times will quickly get people to start multitasking, which can easily change a 2s delay into a 2min delay. This can easily ... well it does make a difference.

I noticed this mostly while testing code. After clicking through the interface many times it can easily add up to an hour less actual work getting done that day.
This of course goes both ways. If you put on your resume that you have expert/mastery level experience in technology X, don't be surprised if I drill you on it.
"Not a fit" is another way of saying "We don't like you" in a strange way.

I stay far away from those sweeping personality statements personally.
Yeah, good luck with that. I've already had some extremely surprising interview results and tried really hard to get feedback from the recruiters. They would just keep repeating the same words: "Our policy is to refrain from giving feedback to the interviewees."
Possession and personal use, yes, but the channels for commercial production and sale have not been worked out yet.
with my Dad, who is now 74 and my Grandfather

Wow, that must have been a surprise. I wouldn't have thought that would be legal even in Missouri! But I suppose it could be worse...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYlJH81dSiw

I'm My Own Grandpa - Ray Stevens (with family tree diagram)
Completely wrong on both counts. It is quite literally a different game, and bluffing is arguably more important in limit than in no limit.
Can you shed more light/context on "trident + intel + cumulus". I'm familiar with cumulus but not trident.
Yes I am wary of using it being based in a different country. To fully understand the legal implication will be more work than the help I am going to get on the project.

I think it would be much more useful to have a meetup-style site to find people locally to work with, then let them organise between themselves if they want to start a company etc.

On the other hand for a pure opensource, no profit, MIT-licence kind of thing Assembly would be OK. The problem is Assembly wouldn't make money out of that model.

It maybe something that GitHub or Apache could promote though.
The problem is that, if their feedback is "you were a woman so we didn't hire you", then signing away your right to sue is a big problem. And you can't really know if their reason is legit or not until you sign.
I find th CRC collision story rather unbelievable.
User behavior when interacting with a program that responds in 0.1 seconds is drastically different than with a program that responds in 1.9 seconds; see [0] [1] etc. I agree it's not very meaningful to just compute the total number of seconds saved, but on the other hand, the productivity gain could easily be far greater than what that number suggests too.

[0] http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/speed-matters.htm...
[1] http://www.webperformancematters.com/journal/2007/7/10/accep...
Basically, "the cheaper the better." That's not how I evaluate food choices since it is so closely tied to health and so quality is important in addition to cost.

There are plenty of other times other than food when "the cheaper the better" is not true.
Yes, we could go far down that road, I just think Netflix makes for a poor example case. They have stirred up a lot of this discussion, which is not about them at all.

Furthermore, "configured sanely" would not be neutral, IMO. I'm in favor of regulating, but you just described why neutral networks are bad. ;)
3-year small study shows promising results from MS patient immune system reboot
>If you're trying to help them forward and give them useful tips for improving their portfolio and skillset, the conversation is almost exclusively positive and 9/10 times I get a thank you very much in the end.

No doubt, and I know a lot of US recruiters wish very strongly that they could have these kind of interactions with potential hires.

However, the difficulty of friendly, open interviewer-interviewee discussions like this is one of those unintentional side effects of otherwise well-intentioned anti-discrimination laws. It's a good example of why trying to legislate a problem away can sometimes make other problems pop up in its place.
You probably don't want to get one without a good reason: this uses x-rays, and you get a considerably-higher dose of radiation than something like a normal chest x-ray. As for other comments saying an older machine would be cheaper, etc., this is true, but older machines actually deliver more radiation.

All that being said, you can get modern CT scans cheaply in countries other than the US. In Japan, for example, there are ex-pat clinics that give comprehensive medical checkups, which include chest CT scans, starting around US$650, which is absolutely incredible compared to costs here in the States.
> I think part of the reason that people ask this question as a way of putting founders down is that they assume that startups are zero sum. That's an assumption born in certain models of markets, but it's completely wrong when looking at startups.

Which models of markets? As far as I knew, one of the fundamental points of modeling markets is that they aren't zero-sum.
It's also why companies do not apologize, except as part of a settlement. An apology is an admission of guilt, opening the company to liability.
Thanks for your feedback and encouragement! I'll try to shine some light on Cx. This comment has become a bit of a rant as a consequence, I hope you'll forgive me :)

Cx is not so much C-based as C-like, and the difference is subtle but real. It's a dedicated language looking like C (and yes, a bit like Java) rather than something based on C, because bending an existing language backwards and using a small subset of it just doesn't feel right. Same reason why not SystemC: SystemC is your typical design-by-committee/the-enterprise horror, it's verbose, and it's just a tiny, weird subset of C++ with a lot of templates. How do you know what you're supposed to use to get something "synthesizable"? Another big problem with SystemC, just like any HDL, almost all of them are mainly simulation languages.

We created something C-like to have something that most people would find easy to start using; the C-like "curly" syntax is familiar to any developer (even JavaScript uses that). Same reason to go with imperative rather than functional: it's the paradigm that most people are comfortable using (not to mention that functional programming is not really a good metaphor for what happens in hardware - after all, a state machine is a sequence of things that modify state). The article you linked shows an interesting approach, but I believe it will remain a niche, kind of like functional programming in software (possibly even more so given the large difference in abstraction level).

Yes the "new" may seem surprising at first, yet it has the same meaning it has in other languages: it creates a new instance of an object, it's just that instances are created and connected at compile time rather than at runtime. We could have done without it, but I've found myself confused about what goes first in VHDL and Verilog enough times that I felt it was needed :-)

I think I will write a blog post on this, and link it on Hacker News one of these days! And if you want to have a chat, just send me an email or a PM on our forum.
I'm not sure I understand why this makes ports harder.

Shouldn't it be possible to port to a new system simply by porting Go 1.4 to that system? Once that base version is ported, a script can build 1.4, then build 1.5 and any succeeding base versions until the current version is reached.

Of course, system-specific features would have to be added for each go release beyond 1.4, but that would have to be done anyway.

What am I missing?
I've lived in NY all my life, in both Manhattan and the Bronx. I also used to go to Staten Island weekly. Here are some notes:

* The Bronx:

I lived in Woodlawn. I think it's very interesting that it's one of the most affordable areas to live considering it was recently reported as one of the safest places in the Bronx.

It also has fair demographic diversity, is extremely close to public transportation (buses run through the area and it's all within walking distance of Metro-North, 30 minutes from Grand Central). I lived in a three bedroom apartment with all utilities for $2400 a month.

Really, great place to live. If anyone is considering a place in NYC with easy access to Manhattan that is safe and affordable, look into Woodlawn.

To contrast this, Riverdale is also a nice area, but it's technically not as safe (parts of it are wealthy, but most of it is not). The safest areas are the colleges (Manhattan College and CUNY Lehman are both in Riverdale and their campuses are the hubs of that area). Transportation access is about the same.

* Staten Island

Amazingly cheap, but at the same time, you can't get to any of the wealthy areas of the island without going through a slum. It's literally a stereotypical case of the wealthy living on the top of a giant hill overlooking the working class/poor who live at the bottom/outskirts of the island.

That said, the neighborhoods at the top of Staten Island, the most expensive area, were filled with mansions and were absolutely magnificent to drive through. Naturally, this was close to the large liberal arts college there, Wagner.
Tolerance as a concept is flawed. Why should you have to "tolerate" things? The very phrasing is combative. I shouldn't have to "tolerate", say, homosexuality any more than I have to "tolerate" the floral wallpaper at my neighbor's. It should simply be a non-issue. I've not yet met a guy I want to sleep with, but it's not like anyone's forcing me to do so. My "tolerance" is a non-entity and it's just odd to even discuss it.

To say you "tolerate" something implies you're against it, but you're gonna allow it to go on. Should I say I "tolerate" Justin Bieber? That'd be pretty arrogant of me to say. As much as I dislike his antics, I, as some random member of the public, should not be able to be in a position where I can be intolerant of him.

An enhanced focus on rationality, critical thinking, skepticism, rejection of magical thinking -- all these things will build inoculation against these particular shitty ideas.

Unfortunately, that also means dismissing religion, deriding modern politics, etc. But as a first start, getting rid of "freedom of religion", and instead focusing on freedom of {speech, expression, association, gathering, thought} wouldn't be bad. It'd cause people to think a bit more critically of what they mean by freedom of religion and so on.
And arguably in some respects this was a unicorn hunt amounting to making people jump through even stupider than usual hoops (responding with a 500 page manual!) to prove their aptitude for learning. I'm surprised that, to the extent I can make it out from rather small pictures, the applicants don't appear to be in the sort of age bracket generally associated with unpaid internships...

Difference is, it balanced an unusually onerous assessment with the unusual reward of a de facto guarantee that anyone persistent and smart enough to get through it all would get a job at the end. I hope it paid as well as they presumably thought it would.

There are a few companies out there with a desire to build an ecosystem on obscure or unproven technology that could and probably should experiment with elements of this as a hiring strategy. Getting the class to vote on who gets the [first] jobs is particularly neat; it both selects the most effective team member(s) and leaves the rest with the impression they weren't ruled out of contention by the hiring manager and therefore shouldn't be deterred from reapplying in future
How to write more maintainable code with the angular.js controller as syntax
It's a mistake to think that the only people who are addicts are the poor and destitute. There are plenty of addicts, perhaps the majority, who haven't managed to destroy their lives (yet).
> Say you created those doodads using your time, efforts and resources. Your doodads provide people some value. People usually buy doodads as recompense for that value. But if someone "pirates" your doodads, it means they acquired the value without fairly compensating you.

Like if they make their own doodad, after seeing mine?

I'm not entitled to compensation for being the first to do something. A society that sets itself up such that people who do something first are entitled to become rent-seekers for all eternity is dysfunctional.

> What if those pirates further shared your doodads with their friends

That'd be awesome. Unless they did a half-assed job of the sharing. I reserve the right to beat them bloody if they release the music as 32k VBR mp3s. I may murder if they're wma format.

No jury in the world could convict me.

Copyright used to encourage the creation of more works that would enter the public domain in less than three decades.

Now it's used to fund bribing Congress to get longer copyrights.

> If I were to guess, you have not "cultivated that idea" because you've never created something that people found useful,

Yeh. You'd like to believe that, because it's easier to see me as some filthy thief than as someone whose ideas might be correct. The former lets you just call me names and move on, the latter would mean changing your mind and thinking about issues like this critically.

Someday I hope that people like myself strip you of all political influence and make this part of the world a better place. You can go live in Singapore with its thousand year copyright durations and felony download laws.
C'mon, its easy!

http://a54.idata.over-blog.com/3/88/02/15/2010-101112/charli...

Note: please direct all death threats to my uni email.
I can see how you would do this for a technical shortcoming, but sometimes the choice of one candidate over another comes based on a personality judgement and who would fit better with the current team. How do you explain those types of decisions without sounding arbitrary?
> "They have had police officers there for a long time, too."

In fact, one of the police officers that was killed was present for the shooting because he was assigned as a police bodyguard for Charb.
Then there is the perspective from having heard "no":

1. Never believe anyone's rationale regarding their "no". They acted on instinct, and made up a clever story to afterward to convince themselves it was a rational decision. Or worse: it was some prejudice that they are consciously covering up. Or perhaps some internal reasons that they don't want to discuss with outsiders like sudden news that affects all hiring activity (but this news can't be made public yet: even the fact that there is such news).

2. Don't take it personally.

3. Never press people for more information: waste of time.
Highlight on mouseover would also help in this case.
Just because YOU don't remember it doesn't mean it didn't happen. In the ensuing time since four and a half years ago, other things than the singular event you linked have happened.

Those three companies definitely put forth a proposal with language designed to address 'fast lane' type of concerns, though that tired metaphor is very difficult to accurately apply, since internet traffic is more like water than cars.

Look, I'm not here to say, "Hey the market will take care of this and AT&T and Verizon and Google are Good Actors(tm)", I am simply stating that they came forth with a proposal whose only shortcoming was being restricted temporarily to wireline services. That happened, and at the time, everyone was up in arms about it only being wireline.

After that juncture, rarely was Net Neutrality discussed, esp in non-technical circles, until the Netflix debacle.
From a worst case cynical viewpoint, he got free labor and those people got free training. It wasn't like he chained them to a desk and then made them get jobs in PHP. Best case, it was a mutually beneficial relationship entered into rationally and with eyes wide open. Top applicants might avoid it but people trying to break in and show what they can do might jump at the chance.
Of course you are not obligated.

However if I ran a company I would have an eye on both the short term and the long term. It is good for the long term interests of the company to be loved (by customers, employees and the community).

Doing very cool things for people, especially when it takes little effort or money, is a great investment to create goodwill in the future.
Also, mold likes cold and damp.
Can You Really Reverse Hearing Loss? Drugmakers Try Gene Therapy
In the USA this is called "hipster racism" where you re-use racist slurs or caricatures to make a point about racism. But some feel that this is still unacceptable because the propagation of the racist imagery still hurts. I am not black but I suspect a black person may still take offense to the imagery of a black person as a monkey.
I'd really like to see PARRY (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARRY) run on a modern system: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/ai-repository/ai/areas/...
Factory farms are the big problem because they're the entire industry. There is absolutely no way to feed people at anywhere near the current consumption levels with pasture-raised animals.