skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I heard some of the information that came out of the rule making committee about this time last year. The FAA has the idea that they need to control this as fast as possible, while doing what they can to slow the explosion so that it remains under constant control.

Part of me wonders if the background check (TSA Screen) is just something to weed out people who are on the fence about getting the certificate.

I do applaud some of what they're doing except for the weight classes they have assigned. The 55 lb and under is a huge range. They are making safety rules based on a contraption between the weight of a desktop computer or a toaster. I'm not sure a toaster falling on your head from 500 feet would kill you, but a computer falling from that height surely would.
> Is it the "the dynamism of Western capitalism" that causes people to pretend to like their job, or is it the scarcity of good jobs, which forces workers to engage in an exaggerated pantomime of missionary zeal?

Where in your choices are the people who love their work?
I am not sure how this aligns with Snowden's objective of making NSA's mass surveillance known to the public. Disclosing this kind of information doesn't really support the objective at all. This is the kind of information that doesn't provide any value to the public, or the objective for that matter, but can give the NSA some grounds to say Snowden is really just a spy.
It is taking more than 30mins since I noticed it.
Is hardware (motherboard, CPU, memory) that good nowadays that one can expect it to last 30 years. I don't think it's designed with that kind of lifetime in mind.
> I think she brings up a few good points, but she

Although the article might feel like it could have been written by a woman, its author Paul Jaskunas is a man.
Got it. My bad. I improperly combined your comment with the criticisms of Baumeister I read that disagreed with him but didn't say why. Sorry about that.

By the way, I meant normative means they want to change it, whereas positivist would be merely describing a system. Baumeister seems more positivist.

I definitely agree that Baumeister didn't engage with feminist talk on this issue. I think he was responding to public discourses on issues like wage gaps, which don't necessarily correspond to more nuanced feminist narratives.
Amazon.co.uk is down/suffering performance issues
> In your view, should it be left up to the individual, who wishes to give, or should the decision be someone else's?

As a private citizen, wishing to donate their money-or other resources, I believe it should be left up to the individual to decide. There are edge cases, such as donating money to support illegal activity--such as "terrorism", or if the donation will be counted towards tax benefits.
Shortly after their "communist revolutions" both the USSR and PRC were still practising something not very different from feudalism.

Totally unsurprising, given that their "communist revolutions" were revolutions in name only, and happened in conditions Marx had spent decades explaining why would not lead to successful transitions to socialism, much less communism (first, as far as I know, in "The German Ideology", 1845, Part I, section A, 5: " And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces [...] is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced").

Both the Bolsheviks and the CCP quickly re-established near feudal structures in response to opposition or failures - soon only the titles and names were different.
I don't know why this is considered a revelation. We all know we face "friendly" as well as "unfriendly" actors spying on us as well as our spying on them.

One doesn't simply trust people/nations, you have to have out of band methods to confirm things when your nation's stability and the stability of the planet depends on having reliable information.
I've never seen base salaries in the Bay Area at $140-$160k. It's more along the lines of $120k-140k on average for well known companies. The ones you've never heard of barely crack $120K.
10:49 AM PST We are currently experiencing elevated error rates for the AWS Management Console in the EU-WEST-1 region.

http://status.aws.amazon.com/
Data Scientist Shares His Growth Hacking Secrets
I think Jim Carrey pointed one obvious thing about laughing in his hillarious way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRyYT62VZdY
Gunshot at 0:57 http://youtu.be/XUy8lELWhJg?t=57s
An artist friend of mine was mass-defriended on facebook after a vitrirolic angerpost about religion. Everybody there knew his opinion on religion I know for a fact many agreed with him, but they didn't want anger and unpleasantness thrown in their faces. This has undoubtedly affected his ability to get work in the future.
Not really. If you feel compelled to rent a one bedroom apartment in the West Village or Williamsburg maybe.

There are plenty of cheap, low crime places to live within the city limits with access to the subway and local supermarkets etc. They might not be the center of hipsterdom, but they are affordable.

In the Bay Area, Caltrans trains do not go south between midnight and 5AM. Same with BART trains leaving San Francisco. This was a problem when I was out there. New York is not like this - PATH, LIRR, Metro North, and NJ Transit have trains running at all hours. There are plenty of affordable places with a 20 minute commute to Manhattan, and even more within a 25 minute commute, and more within a 30 minute commute etc.

I see people move to NYC, insist on living in a nice part of Manhattan, then complain how expensive their apartment and groceries are and how small their apartment is. There are plenty of nice, cheaper places they could be living if they were willing to be part of the dreaded "bridge and tunnel" crowd.
JS2PNG – Hide JavaScript inside Images
Commercial Drone Rules to Limit Their Weight, Speed and Altitude
That's a good point, and I agree that I expressed my criteria poorly.

When I'm saying 'the codebase is terrible', I'm talking about front-end code for a web app that is a convoluted mess of jQuery written by someone who is clearly not used to writing javascript, and quite possibly a bad developer even in the language they are comfortable with.

Even if they're decent at whatever their primary language and 'domain' is, the front-end side of things is such a mess that it noticeably impacts performance and the ability to work on the app well before even the MVP is done.

I've worked with front-end apps (and even websites) that were multi-megabyte monstrosities that loaded multiple versions of jQuery, hacks upon hacks to make things work, and not even the simplest of optimizations (lazy-loading images, 'browser-side' caching, etc).

I've worked with jQuery-only front-end apps that took more than a month to build, did only the most basic of things, and were almost impossible for me as a contractor to work with. I would rewrite the whole thing in either Backbone or some variation on the react/flux approach in, at most, two days, and be able to get the in-house developer up to speed in another one to two days if they were capable and, perhaps more importantly, willing and remotely curious.

In part this has been due to the current speed of development in browser technologies and frameworks/libraries, and in part it's just part of working with in-house developers who have no love for their job or have other things that they prioritize (35+ with kids, understandable!).

Usually this level of horror only presented itself in older, more established companies with 'legacy devs', but I've seen similar issues with (web) startups that hired without knowledge of the domain.

So, to be clear: getting the job done is the priority. I've worked on Backbone projects where I would've loved to use the latest and greatest, but happily worked with stuff that I would consider, in front-end-hacker-news-hipster terms, old-fashioned. And I've come to realize that if you have clever developers with curiosity, you can get a 'front-end app' done that isn't pretty, but works well. But too often, especially in the 'cheaper' startups with little founder-level technical know-how of the domain (front-end), I've seen things go very, very wrong.
For me, a simple litmus test for a quantum phenomenon is: Can it be turned into a proposal for an experimental determination of Planck's constant? It doesn't have to be a great experiment -- determining h to within an order of magnitude would satisfy.
Thanks for an interesting comment.

I wonder if it's true that the unemployment rate is coming down to reasonable levels. As I understand it, the unemployment rate that is typically reported excludes people that have given up looking for work.

I don't know if this is correct, but let's say that you had an economy where there were no jobs available. Precisely none. Over the long term, the unemployment rate would have to drift down to almost zero, as more and more people realized that there were no jobs available and gave up looking for work.

As regards the sentence you ask about, I think I am one of the people that does not look at his work as merely a job. Perhaps it's because I do try to distinguish between my work, my craft, my trade, from the other aspects of who happens to be paying my invoices.

Thoughts?
Museum Rules: Talk Softly, and Carry No Selfie Stick
This place isn't on 55th Street, is it?
I wasn't clear enough separating his useful work from his feelings on feminism, and my initial post was vitriolic toward him. I can do better next time.
> The number of compiler bugs is a bit scary.

I see similar lists for GCC when a branch is underway. I'm actually impressed with the number of active contributors, and I find the design very compelling. I'll be keeping an eye on this project.
Average is often very different than median...

If we were talking about CEO pay or some other value that doesn't have an effective upper bound, average would be meaningless. But we're talking about salary for RNs. There aren't many RNs making more than $250k, so you wouldn't expect the average to be too far from the median.
See other threads e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9053552
Monitoring Streaming Video with Riemann, Tensor and OpenCV
http://zandronum.com/ comes with Doomseeker, which will find multiplayer games. I don't play it that often, but every time I've been on there's always been at least one deathmatch with 10+ players on it.
Yes, but it's hard to explain succinctly. TL;DR: the Afshar experiment does not actually show what it purports to show. It's a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand. The reason is the presence of the lens, which supposedly creates an image of the two slits, but in fact does not. What it really does (which can be demonstrated mathematically) is create an interference pattern that looks like an image of the two slits but really isn't. So it is not the case that because it looks like a photon went through one slit or the other at the end of the experiment that it did in fact go through one slit or the other.

If you're interested in the details, Feynman has a good explanation in "QED: The strange theory of light and matter" using a mirror rather than a lens but amounting to the same thing.
Here in the Czech Republic, there is no forced smile. It is not a part of the culture, people generally don't do it, and people here generally see americans (especially americans) as fake, superficial, and insincere.

I'm a bit on the fence about it. Central Europeans, including Czechs are a rather gloomy bunch :-) especially in the winter. Americans are definitely more cheerful, and it is not fake. Ok, sometimes it is but generally speaking Americans are in fact more cheerful and optimistic. Ok, Czechs have five centuries of being conquered and subjugated of course, so let's not draw too many conclusions.

In terms of smiling strangers, well, I'd like a bit more of it than we have here in the Czech Republic (where there is very little)
In Silicon Valley, my startup offers over the past two years have ranged from $160-250K with 0.5-0.75% equity.

Here is the best writeup on startups I've ever read:

http://www.geocities.ws/drhenke/startupmemo.htm

I expect to hear how tone deaf and pessimistic the above advice is, and said pessimism will lead to this post being downvoted, but I have found it most helpful. It meshes with my own philosophy that the only startups I'd choose over a well paying BigCo position are ones that offer a founder's position with 5+% equity. Risk should be proportional to reward.

To put this into perspective, a friend of mine was the 20th or so employee at a startup that was eventually purchased after dying and coming back to life over a decade or so. In exchange for a decade of his life and going without compensation for nearly a year, he got ~$400K. A nitwit co-worker who had 50x his equity in the original incarnation that died and who had nothing to do with its resurrection and its eventual purchase got ~$20M on the basis of having a 3-letter title in that original startup. Don't end up like my friend.
I've used Traceur before, how does this project compare? (With an implied "why duplicate the effort?")

Oh, duh, I found it: https://babeljs.io/docs/compare/

Supports more features than Traceur and doesn't require a runtime library. Ok, that's a clear improvement :-)
Neurosurgery attempting to treat mental illness is called "pschosurgery". It tends to be a bit chilling to read about, and not really popular these days.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosurgery
Young people don't really want to live in Manhattan anymore though and neither do young families. Brooklyn is way too hip and Manhattan isn't enough space.

Everyday expenses, like food, are still quite a bit cheaper in Manhattan than SF. Even if it's just an issue of tax rates.
I mean, this is server hardware. One of the major differences between server hardware and desktop hardware is build quality. I've got a ten-year-old 1/2U rack server sitting in a closet that I bought for pennies at a surplus auction that still runs great.
Charlotte Williams, illegitimate daughter of the 5th Duke of Devonshire?
I think you'll find that those aren't the only two possibilities.
You're going to work for a company that built a framework on top of another framework, in an industry where framework life span is about 6 months and you don't see that as risky?
I know that the company 'Eternit' has roof tiles called 'Solesia'; real 'shingles' I haven't seen in real life myself, but one of the first Google hits is http://www.dowpowerhouse.com/ .
I don't know if you're trolling, but it's not easy to find a $200k salary in NYC. Where are all of these companies with "reputable market rate salaries"? Can you name five of them? I'll apply today.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/new-york-city-software-eng...
There's an interesting debate in the comments about Mr. Musk's personal goals -- gives some good insight to the rest of the piece. TL;DR -- cares more about Mars+mass EV adoption (see: open sourcing Tesla patents) than about the cash; money-as-means to get to Mars and get humanity "off" carbon. With the read I say.
Isn't this any oxymoron? "It acts as a continuously variable transmission (CVT) but with a fixed gear ratio"
It's a rule of thumb to keep my gambling addicted brain from getting carried away. Mentally treating options as $0 helps me focus on expected value and to ignore the tiny sliver of probability that would result in a huge jackpot.
Any word on what Manual will be doing now? Is he going to work with pfsense or OPNSense guys?
Excoin exchange's Bitcoins stolen, will be shutting down
How much do you get paid now ? Thanks for your insightfull post.

Also were you asked about linked lists / trees during your google interview? Did you have to write code on a white board?
Snowden's objective was to let journalists decide what to publish and what to redact. He has stated many times that he does not want many of the docs published because of legitimate threats to natsec. This story was a revelation many months ago albeit but It revealed that the NSA was sharing its data gained through FISA court orders to Israel's ISUS, the third most aggressive intelligence agency against the United States. http://i.guim.co.uk/static/w-620/h--/q-95/sys-images/Guardia...
It's a collection of some of the best rants from the Unix Haters mailing list that existed in the late eighties/early nineties. The people that were on the list usually had experience with operating systems that were more advanced than Unix. Constructive criticism was never really the point of the mailing list.

My point was that the parent's suggestion that anyone who criticizes Unix obviously isn't smart enough to understand it is just flat out wrong and offensive.
Octopus robot? Where are my laser beams
The guys from Propellerheads made Reason
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzLT6_TQmq8
https://www.propellerheads.se/reason
Not saying i'm a big fan of the soft...
Lesbians do it better (FLASHMOB)
FAA proposes to allow commercial drone use
> The majority of building projects are simple and predictable

The waterfall approach you are advocating can work on simple projects and indeed it's how most digital agencies operate. However it starts to fall apart at the seams precisely on large enterprise projects and it's no coincidence that agile came from experience on these kind of large projects.

It's worth noting that the proponents of agile and post-industrial approaches are not '20-somethings who don't know how the real world works' but people with extensive industry experience such as Alan Cooper.

> The effort is certainly NOT spent on design work

While I'd certainly agree that there is a lot of boilerplate and wheel reinvention out there, that does not represent effective development. Software development by definition is the practise of creating automation.

The mindset of much non-technical management today is frequently one of Henry Ford era industrialisation whereby processes are designed and carried out by developers in a form of mechanical turk model - for example just about any large scale outsourcing project.

However, if you take a look at a car production line today, that human work is automated and done by robots in darkness. Efficient software development is supposed to look like this - the developers designing and creating the production line itself, not manually creating the end product.

We see this better use of human labor and subsequent raising of the skills bar reflected in the job market with demand shooting up for all kinds of design roles, from architect to UX.

> Re. planning fallacy, what of it? It doesn't make estimating impossible; once you are aware of it, you account for it in your estimates

That's the whole point of the planning fallacy - it occurs even when we take it into account. There are supporting studies here and it's simply incorrect to say that this is non-scientific.

> It seem actually observing and measuring reality went out of fashion sometime in the 90s.

Are you really advocating that time and motion ever turned out to be effective at growing or even saving businesses? But seriously, agile delivery tends to be associated with an excess of observing and measuring if anything.
Wow, I’d never heard of this, but apparently it’s a thing. I just see the photo as blurred and that’s that; my eyes don’t try to adjust, maybe because the blurring just seems flat on my monitor. Do you happen to suffer from migraines or vision problems?
To my knowledge, the most common guarantee target is 5 years. Equipment can last much longer or much shorter, both as a function of chance and of workload.

30 years would be exceptional if the machine spent its life at the 5-year-target load.
Notably, the men at the bottom are considered failures for failing to acquire a wife. That's also one of those things that feminism takes issue with. Poor males are not saints; they just aren't in a position to actually change the overall status quo.

If wife acquisition stopped being an indicator of success in China, you'd have a lot fewer men being considered at the bottom.
There are several reasons contracting is a popular route in the UK for techies:

1. Tax advantages, the 13.8% employer's payroll tax is avoided by be being employed as a contractor and taking your income as a dividend.

2. Tech career ladders are pretty specific to the tech industry and London just doesn't have the medium and large tech companies you see in Silicon Valley. So you hit the ceiling pretty fast and in order to be valued for your skills you pretty much have to become a contractor. This is not so different to working in tech in a non-tech organisation in the US.

3. The National Health Service means you and your family are not reliant on your employer for health insurance. Individual health insurance is super expensive in the USA. Most people I know who contract in the US have health insurance through their spouse's employer.

I ended up moving to CA because of the career opportunities. I'd probably be better off contracting in the finance world in London, but most of that work just isn't very interesting.
As a fierce advocate for information density on Hacker News I can pretty well guarantee you it will never have annoyingly huge text.
Ha, five centuries! We Slovenians have had 12. From 828 AD to 1991 AD.

But yes, us Slavs are a gloomy bunch. But only on the outside and only to strangers. Particularly Americans. Whenever I'm in the States I commonly get accused of being emotionless and of having a deadpan face. At the same time, I feel everybody I meet there is a clown and I always make sure to tune down their enthusiasm. If an American says something is super awesome and the best thing ever, it's probably kinda okayish.

Anyway, the interesting thing I've found comparing Slavs to Americans is that while Slavs are weary of strangers, they open up much sooner. You can be friends with Americans for months and years, but if you haven't gone to the same kindergarten together, you will never be a true friend. Whereas with Slavs, you could have met at a bar three hours ago, and already you're confessing your deepest darkest secrets to each other and are practically best friends.

Source: having lived in the States for some time

PS: to be fair, most Europeans I've met both in Europe and in the US share this immediately friends trait. So far none of the Americans I've met have, possibly because of The Big City effect.
Even PayPal was bootstrapped partly with what he made off a previous startup.
No, I'm not confusing anything. I can see why you would believe that, based on what I assume you made as inferences.

There are plenty of mobile and web apps that are network bound in this day and age. Many games, for example. That's just the obvious choice of example.
> However, I was very surprised to find that they were making hires at the intern pay rates with even fewer perks.

I'd be pretty surprised if that was true. I took an offer similar to my intern pay, but between my private office and high quality health insurance, it actually ends up being a lot more.
we don't exactly run the biggest operation, but in our experience the most common failure items in thousands-of-years-of-cumulative-uptime is network interface cards (or on-motherboard network interfaces) and hdd's.

RAID controllers fail left and right. we keep tons of spares around.

ssd's fail few and far between, cpus basically do not fail, and memory can go bad but it's exceedingly rare and easy to fix. psu's fail but are easy to fix in modern computers as well (slide-out, redundant, etc.)

having said all that, heat is the primary killer of hardware. if you run a lot of equipment in a dense environment, get a laser thermometer and find your hot spots and fix them with some industrial fans or move your gear around. once your stuff gets hot anything can fail in weird and mysterious ways.
AMERICA READIES FOR WAR
In terms of cultural comparison, I find that the Anglo-Saxon culture is more about making friends, not discussing iffy topics etc. While as Czechs we will totally argue. Maybe that's where the gloomy/smiley split comes from.