skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am a consultant. I help teams perform better. So I get to travel to a lot of places, work in a lot of organizations, and "start over" with each new gig.

A few years ago I thought I would try something different. I decided that no matter how I felt each day, I was going to smile and be as friendly as possible to everybody I met. At times, walking through the hallways of the new job, I felt like an idiot. But I didn't care. I just smiled and tried to be friendly.

I know that many times I probably smiled and said hello to the same people twice -- as if I had never seen them that day. I know that at times I must have appeared simple-minded. It was a horrible feeling that first week.

Then something strange happened. People started smiling back. I would be working off to the side of a large room, and folks would come over and say hello. People -- I had no idea what their names were or what their jobs were -- would ask me how I was doing.

So I kept the experiment going. After a month, I had some really bad personal news and I know I came in to work very downtrodden. At this point, all of that "fake happiness" I had put in the bank came back to me. The anonymous people I had smiled at? They now made an effort to cheer me up. No effort was required on my part. If I came in upset, within a couple of hours of having other people smile at me, I felt like smiling back at everybody else.

This went on for a few months. It was one of the most enjoyable jobs I've ever had, and when I left, about a dozen people came over and told me that I had done a great job and they would miss me. (I just did my normal job)

Lesson? Smiles are very, very powerful social tools, even if they are forced. They cheer other people up, they cheer you up, and over time they provide some kind of weird social insurance that you can tap into when you're having a bad day. What blew my mind was that the fake part wasn't even important. Simply by trying you got all of the benefits.
How many letters do you have from your great grandparents? For me, it's zero. For records to be preserved, someone has to care about preserving them. For digital data, that means copying it forward to newer media now and then.
Evgeny Morozov: Socialize the Data Centres
Not only that, but you have to do something like

let primes = ... in take 5 primes

... if you want the computation to complete without hanging the browser. It would be nice if the REPL supported multi-line expressions.
Many Americans have almost no job security, you can be sacked at any time without a reason.

I'm only aware of it through HN etc; so I'll just point you to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment
I agree but how about you take the same car and it will take you from place A to B but instead you only use just 5% of the energy you used before? Witch electric car you would chose ?
downforeveryoneorjustme.com
I remember this director from a Big Company pitching that I join his team after I decided to maybe change jobs. His enthusiasm was insane and eventually I ended up accepting the offer (which was like 20% better than what I got in my old place) and on my 1st day I learned that the guy not only left but went with a bang, too. Having been raised in the Eastern Block I still can't help but wonder how Americans do it.
Any links to a source to this claim? I was unaware it had became possible to disprove a negative.
My favorite offer was $0 + less than 1%, while another place was offering 140k. The guy got irritated when I showed the math on how this was a poor offer.
Thanks for the tip on the Trove library. Even though I hate the JavaXML language, the JVM is really hard to beat for long running processes on a dedicated server. And the kids gotta eat, so JavaXML it is...

(have an upvote from an otherwise Java lang hater for being convincing)

Aside: I propose renaming the primary language for enterprise apps to just one word, "JavaXML" (zha VOX em el), since the two are essentially inseparable anyway. I wish the other JVM languages would get more traction in BigCo development.
Personally I think this idea of a terrible codebase that still presents a wonderful user experience is an urban legend. In 20 years I have never seen it. I've seen plenty of terrible codebases that limp along, with the staff constantly fielding bug reports from unhappy users. But never one with happy users that just happens to be ugly under the covers.
I have been a full time contract programmer since 2001 and at that time I was 22 years old. I have always worked hourly and delivered software per the clients requirements.

The last 2-3 years I have made more money than I have ever made and it was coded 100% remote (from Hawaii). I had one meeting at the clients place. Made somewhere around 180K and this was me full time with a part time developer subcontracted out which didn't actually bring in much additional revenue < 10%. It did bring throughput.

As of about a month ago I was let go as the top developer in the Saas company because I was deemed too expensive by the board. I am pretty sure the CTO didn't want to give up me as a resource.

All of a sudden I have realized that overseas developers have become a priority and it is my feeling that as an hourly developer my days are limited in making $80-$100/hr (corp 2 corp contract).

It is my feeling that I have 2 possible directions.
1) Start an outsourced overseas development company and use my 'Software Architect" title (which is so funny to me because architect is thrown around so much in software) and manage resources overseas.
2) Start selling software on a per usage basis or in some value add model. I believe both of them are solid bets however #2 takes more commitment.

At this point I think the reason salaries are topping off is because of the global market. That is just my take from being in the industry. Thank you.
My first guess is that, for customer liability (incorrect field repair could feasibly cause fire; the uncontrolled nature of field repairs may have affects on reliability later) and employee safety (careless tech could burn himself on battery) the carmaker does not want anyone except the assembly manufacturer or a special purpose facility to do this kind of work on the battery assembly.

So there could be additional motives besides parts distribution/service efficiency leading to the expert system ordering the service provider to handle it with a complete replacement.
Three Tiers of Package Managers
Network cards? HDDs and power supplies are my most common deaths in the server room.
I've thought about this in relation to Minecraft as well. In environments like Second Life or modding scenes for higher-fidelity games, the barrier to entry for content creation is higher. It's much more difficult to make something that looks good in comparison to everything else. Adding constraints to that "everything else" actually helps to encourage creativity, by enabling more people to meet the standard.
"We noticed the hot wallets dwindling but assuming it was members moving their funds off site during the DDOS, we loaded all the cold balances onto the site"

I'm a bit shocked that their tracking of their transactions was so easily broken as to prevent them from seeing that all the funds were being pulled by so few users.

Also, the part at the bottom where they basically post a wall of IPs and addresses seems like a weird way to move forward. Do they not plan on there being an official investigation?
Seems like whoever writes financial code in the future should treat it more like NASA code than startup technical-debt code.
This is unbelievable. How can this be real?
the Wake language was on here a few days ago, in the form of an article titled: The Rewards of Creating a Programming Language.

Other discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9040029
I personally prefer to partner per project. I think I should make it an acronym, PPP.

Giving away 30% of the project's net income for the lifetime of the project makes a developer more invested, and is better than giving away 2% of your company. The $$ comes quicker for the developer, and you as a company take on less risk. Vesting company options with a cliff can really screw a developer. Vesting equity in a particular app or project makes the incentives align correctly.
None of those drives show evidence of regularly-scheduled self tests. They must not really care about them.
There are also exits along they way via acquisitions that can produce good outcomes. But overall yes, it's true that it's quite rare for a startup engineer to become a multi-millionaire based on a few years work early in their career.

However it does happen and it's an opportunity uniquely available in the startup sector.

The great thing is you have a choice. You can go work for an established company and make $150k+ or a startup that you believe in and would have fun at and maybe have a shot at really big money 5-10 years from now. Up to you.
failure modes are all over the map. sometimes they just start dropping more and more packets, sometimes it "looks like it's working" but there's no layer 1 link light, sometimes it's incredibly high latency, sometimes the entire card just disappears from view.

this mostly happens with the on-board controllers. nics don't fail as often, but we do use high end nics (intel 10g and 4x 1g)
Hey! Creator of Wake here.

This looks like a nice language! Lots of syntactic niceties, and it looks extremely feature complete.

Nice work! I'm not surprised you learned a lot given how many features it supports!
Not comfortable sharing specific numbers, but check out Glassdoor for a range. The key to Google offers is realizing the value of target bonuses and restricted stock units. Typically a startup will offer you Common Incentive Stock Options. When they vest, you have to buy the shares out of pocket and pay capital gains on the difference in valuation, even though you have no means of selling them unless the company exits. The company can also exit via a sale, in which case if the sale is too low common stockholders get screwed (and they might do it intentionally to screw over ex-employees and grant retention bonuses to current employees instead). The reason for this is because "investors are putting up money" and therefore deserve preferred stock, even though they are asking you to take a significant salary cut for those common stock and that salary cut represents a far bigger portion of your income than the investment represents the VC's portfolio. Look up Liquidation Preference for more information on this.

Google gives you restricted stock units which you can sell immediately upon vesting (or hold onto one of the hottest stocks of the last decade). No need to pay any money out of pocket and risk getting burned, you can only make money.

As far as the Google interview, there is a massive amount of information about it which the Google recruiter will provide, but check out Glassdoor interview questions, Cracking the Coding Interview, and Steve Yegge's "Get that job at Google" post.

Linked-lists/trees are absolutely fundamental data structures so of course you should know them. Every single engineering interview at Google _requires_ a coding question, so yes there was whiteboard coding in every interview. I would highly recommend buying a whiteboard and practicing at home because things like space management and hand-writing matter.

A lot of the industry has copied the Google interview one way or the other so you might as well study for it even if you don't get the job.
Yea, many people look at SSDs with a dollar for longevity number, which is a terrible metric for them. In $ per IOP SSDs kill hard drives. The amount of IOPS you can fit in a 4U rack with SSDs is insane and destroys hard drive in performance per watt when you consider all the extra controllers, cases, and power supplies needed to get anywhere close to the same performance.
Chrome extension to tell you how good is the web article
This is truly genius engineering. Initially you would think hybrid vehicles must be more complex and less reliable than conventional vehicles because they have another system to fail, right? Turns out Toyota figured out a way to make hybrid vehicles structurally simpler, more reliable and energy efficient. Really well done.
There are certainly workloads that will wear out a SSD, random database writes being the most common. But that is only a very small portion of the storage ecosystem, not to mention that there are plenty of ways to retool SQL backends to not do random writes any more, particularly since it doesn't gain you anything on a modern copy-on-write style filesystem verses indexing the new record yourself as an append. So I expect this particular issue will take care of itself in the future. It's a matter of not blindly using someones database backend and expecting it to be nice.

The vast majority of information stored these days is write-once-read-never, followed by write-once-read-occasionally. I expected our developer box which is chock full of uncompressed crash dumps and many, many copies of the source tree in various states to have more wear on it than it did, but after thinking about it a bit I realized that most of that data was write-once-read-hardly-at-all.

In terms of hardware life, for servers there are only a few things which might cut short a computer's life, otherwise it would easily last 50 years. (1) Electrolytic capacitors. (2) Any spinning media or low frequency transformers. (3) On-mobo flash or e2 that cannot be updated.

(1) Electrolytic capacitors have largely disappeared from motherboards in favor of solid caps which, if not over-volted, should last 30 years. Electrolytic caps are not sealed well and evaporate over time, as well as slowly burn holes in the insulator. They generally go bad 10-30 years later depending on how much you undervolt them (the more you undervolt, the longer they last). Even so I still have boards with 30+ year old electrolytics in them that work.

(2) Spinning media obviously has a limited life. That's what we are getting rid of now :-). Low frequency transformers have mostly gone away. Transformers in general... anything with windings that is, have a limited life due to the wire insulation breaking down over time but most modern use cases in a computer (if there are any at all) likely have huge errors of margin.

(3) Firmware stored in E2 and flash, or OTP eprom, rather than fuse-based proms, will become corrupt over time. 10 years is a minimum life, 20-30 years is more common. It depends on a number of factors.

Other than that there isn't much left that can go bad. All motherboards these days have micro coatings which effectively seal even the chip leads, so corrosion isn't as big a factor as it was 20 years ago. The actual chip logic basically will not fail and since the high-speed clocks on the whole mobo can be controlled, so aging effects which degrade junction performance for most of the chip can be mitigated. I suppose an ethernet port might go bad if it gets hit by lightning but I've never had a mobo ethernet go bad in my life. Switch ethernet ports going bad is usually just due to poor parts selection or overvolting which would not be present in a colocation facility or machine room.

In anycase, there is no reason under the sun that a modern computer with a SSD wouldn't last 30 years with only fan, real-time clock battery, and PSU replacements.

-Matt
This is true if you intend on running an exchange properly and not being a highway robber posing as a travelling dentist.
Good memory!

Yeah, I had posted that to Reddit, where it didn't do too well, but someone posted it here where (for some reason!) it did much better.

Figured in addition to the story of creating Wake, I'd post the home page so people could look into it more!
Who is doing the merge commit? In every project I've contributed to, that's the automatic part by the code review system. If you can't trust that, then you are screwed in any workflow.

If you're talking about merges into an outstanding pull request, then that's a non-issue because any changes will still show up in the diff against the target branch/repo.
Life in a post-database world: Using crypto to avoid database writes
In terms of uptime, HN has been hosted on a single server (until recently... I saw mention of a failover server). If you are just looking for a lightweight site to load, example.com is great.
Particularly, the two-dimensional map layout (no room-over-room) is much easier to make maps for.
"Do they not plan on there being an official investigation?"

How do you officially investigate someone stealing your monopoly money?

Where is the FDIC insurance? Exactly what are they suppose to tell the police? The FBI? ... oh thats right, nothing, because they are not a bank, and the only thing "stolen" was some ones and zeroes off a hard-drive.

Seriously though... where is the police report on this? Or any of the other hacked bitcoin exchanges for that matter?
To be clear here, what the poster means is that piecemeal database writes of, say, 128-byte records can cause a huge amount of write amplification, so 100GB/day worth of database writes can end up being 1000GB/day worth of flash rewrites. This issue largely goes away if the database backend appends replacement records rather then rewriting them in place, and uses the index to point to the new copy of the record. At that point the battery-backed ram the RAID system has combined with the appends results in much lower write amplification and a SSD could probably handle it.

-Matt
I made the mistake of studying for and taking the Canadian Border Services exam, where you have to discriminate between fake and real smiles. I got perfect on that section. But now I can't un-see it. Fake smiles. Fake smiles everywhere.
Stephen Covey wrote a book along these same lines, First Things First [1], which advises to first define your roles in life, such as developer, parents, home owner, and so on, then identify the priorities in each of those areas, and schedule those things into your week first. He gives the "importance/urgency" matrix which is helpful for identifying which things you should be focusing on. After you have scheduled the important things into your week, you can schedule the unimportant items.

Having said that, you still have to make choices and stick to them. For this, you need to look at the science of habit change, which a good book is The Power of Habit [2]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/First-Things-Understand-Often-Arent/dp...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Habit-What-Business/dp/08129...
The tinfoil hat in me has to wonder if there's some reason all these exchanges are failing so extravagantly.
> Interpreted language inspired by Python, Ruby, Lisp, and so forth

For a few seconds I wasn’t sure if this was a pun with a reference to the Forth programming language, but it’s not.
What do suspect when someone injects pretty strong opinions into a slide and presents them as factual in a major project like this?

What do you think would happen if there was a slide that mentioned that the culture around UTF was mainly about misogyny so they weren't going to support it?
It doesn't matter if you're storing bitcoins or roflcoins or pictures of kittens: in most places, maliciously accessing somebody else's computer system and stealing data is a crime.

The government investigates stolen "ones and zeros" all the time. The FDIC provides protection for users, but the lack of FDIC doesn't mean that no laws apply.
I'm not sure that financial prizes give much of an incentive either way for people trying to stop aging.
Ask HN: How to build user experience for mobile applications
I am developer more specifically a back end coder but when it comes to developing front-end for user i am not very well in it. I have develop a android app in my spare time which let user

1- Location based search on Google map

2- subscribe for live tweets on a particular location ( also send tweets analytic i.e. no of tweets, top tweeter )

3- Sign in/ Sign out/settings and other about us tabs

I have completed the functionality but looks very simple because of front end. Is there any guide or tips available about How to create user experience in your app which keeps user interest in it. when i use apps develop by GOOGLE, APPLE and big giants they looks completely different, every layout, button and everything used make perfect sense

ANY TIP HOW TO MAKE APP MORE USER FRIENDLY
Thanks
I'm taking up some Italian, but I don't think it has anything to do with it. He could have said Sagittarius of Sagittariuses. No guy I know makes it a point to announce their "astrological sign" in any kind of conversation. Your experience may be different, but that's mine.

As an aside, I think writers should try to stick to their core competencies. This looks like someone trying to write an article around an observation and came up with nebulous reasoning, hoping it would be a fun read for everyone and that people would chalk it up as a social commentary and move on, use it as conversational fodder. (ie. "I read in the NYTimes such and such, ha ha, don't you think it's funny...)

Unfortunately, lots of these writers lack rigor and seem to go with their gut on things. It's the easy way out. It's surely easier to meet deadlines that way, but the product leaves a bit to be desired.
Nice work! What was the motivation for creating the vivaldi language?
Interesting, my experience has been the opposite. On the west coast I find that people from San Diego are, on average, a bit more cheery than people from Seattle. Similarly, the average resident of New Orleans seems to have a rosier outlook on life than the average Manhattanite or Montrealer.
"So what is the application of this?"

I remember a grad student friend in my college days telling me that when mathematicians present their work, most of their peers never understand it and this is always the safe question to ask!
Exactly... From my perspective, their plan worked perfectly.

1. Open an exchange.
2. Collect real money in exchange for fake money.
3. "Get hacked" losing all the fake money and keeping all the real money.
> Where is the FDIC insurance? Exactly what are they suppose to tell the police? The FBI? ... oh thats right, nothing, because they are not a bank, and the only thing "stolen" was some ones and zeroes of a hard-drive.

This is a slippery slope. How do you think the Federal Reserve pops money into existence before they go on a QE tear? The bits ("ones and zeroes") pop into existence in their account, and they start buying assets/mortgages/whatever.

Currency only has value because of the shared belief that is has value.
Where are you seeing these numbers from? What stage of startup? If Uber offered you 1% equity and $60k/year you'd have to be an idiot to turn them down at this stage. If an unfunded just-an-idea startup did, you'd never take it.

Basically: you can't evaluate equity in a vacuum. It's entirely company-and-stage-of-growth-dependent. Those offers might be awesome or terrible.
Why not limit the use of drones with weapons all together?
Silicon Valley billionaires are getting older, too.
I agree. Classy and humble. And considerate.
There is another project called Vivaldi, a new web browser. It's been featured on HN a few times.

https://vivaldi.com/
Www.office.com/setup, 1-800-982-1603