skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a problem caused by people making poor choices rather than a problem with loan financing.
Someone just needs to capitalize on the complexity and make something to manage all the profiles, inboxes, and apps.
Former Google engineer claims she was sexually harassed
"Also distorting our sense of danger is our moral psychology. No one has ever recruited activists to a cause by announcing that things are getting better, and bearers of good news are often advised to keep their mouths shut lest they lull people into complacency. Also, a large swath of our intellectual culture is loath to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity, and Western society."

Steven Pinker in 'The Better Angles of Our Nature - Why Violence Has Declined'.

Pinker makes a convincing argument -with extensive references- that things are getting better. That's no to say that violence isn't still a problem, things have improved though.

What is the collective toll of inducing FUD in our society?

But then... if there's humans tweaking the algorithms machines will just say whatever we want them to.
Okay then. So, you were explicitly told:

>that Z should be allowed to "continue to devote his full attention to work which he is well-suited for."

So what was this work? What did the person saying this have in mind?

(I cannot possibly imagine anyone saying that with a straight face, if they meant that he is totally incompetent but is the boss's son-in-law. If your quote/paraphrase is anything near accurate, the person must have genuinely thought that z was making an excellent, albeit different type of contribution. He took time out of his day to tell you that. What could he have been 'well-suited for'?)
McDonald's did get better, and did get menu focus. The problem is that all those franchises aren't part of the McDonald's franchise system and are called In-n-Out Burger.

Except for the prices, the menu at an In-n-out [1] looks alarming like the original McDonald's menu [2]

1 - https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5349/7048945907_6890107167_o....

2 - http://s.hswstatic.com/gif/5-failed-mcdonalds-menu-items-6.j...

when McD's kept their focus, they grew. Here's their menu from 1972, some 30+ years after they started http://cdn.iwastesomuchtime.com/5112014023433.jpg

I can't even find where the beverages are on a modern McD's menu these days.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dougalug2005/3176399858/

In-N-Out's branding [3] even looks like McDonald's 1960s logo [4]

3 - http://typophile.com/files/In-N-Out_Burger_6481.png

4 - http://goodlogo.com/images/logos/mcdonalds_logo_2465.gif

Importantly, the food, when served [5], carries branding and colors through to the product, which looks pretty much like what the marketing pictures of the food looks like [6]

5 - http://soupbelly.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/DSC_0324_thu...

6 - http://www.wpromote.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/in-n...

Adding in a relentless focus on quality and most of the In-N-Out burgers I've been to have been packed with customers.

McDonald's is trapped in serving a market that grew up with their product. Their burgers are more or less the same as the ones I remember when I grew up. They keep adding halo items to the menu, but the burgers haven't kept up with the times and growing competitive market. They're also trying to keep prices artificially low, you can still walk in and get a burger for around $1.

Mcdonald's needs to figure out how to adopt and mimic the In-N-Out model as much as In-N-Out was inspired by the McDonald's model.
Dropwizard 0.8.0: Java framework for ops-friendly, high-performance web services
You love someone if you take care of them (or are taken care of). That's about all it takes. And it is not required that one of the parties be a child.

Biology matters, but not as much as care.
Just because the number of legal positions is computed doesn't mean we're anywhere close to "solving" 18x18 Go, right? What's the utility of computing the number of legal positions?
If you really want it in Node, it should be refactored to use node bindings to the libgit2 API instead of exec(). Using exec() the way you currently do introduces synchronous code. In reality, this would be much simpler in pure shell w/o the node dependency :)
"Me with a patent and 25 years of innovation in key major products like the playstation network?"

You might be an excellent engineer, but this is a terrible pitch for yourself.

A software patent is meaningless to most software developers. Most software patents are nonsense. Many of us are listed as inventors on plenty of silly patents, and that isn't very impressive. To me, the mention of a patent in this manner is a negative signal.

25 years of experience is nice, but just mentioning that is hard to differentiate from the case of 25 times 1 year of experience. Just mentioning that work was done on something like the PlayStation network is in itself not very impressive: need to spice it up with some actual details.
> A coworker, having overheard the conversation, stopped at my desk later, and explained to me that, if I had pressing engineering issues, coworkers X and Y would be excellent senior systems engineers to address them to, but that Z should be allowed to "continue to devote his full attention to work which he is well-suited for."

What the hell would he be suited for in that case? Sweeping? Mopping?
I don't see how this is an oversimplification. Airing thoughts are different from bullying only in so far as who hears them. This can be seen from the fact that nearly all uni harassment policies define harassment based on the "victim's" perception of being harassed regardless of the intent of the "perpetrator." Furthermore you can't bully someone who refuses to grant you power over their emotions, you can call them as many names as you want but if they just laugh at you and move on then good luck.

That people can be affected by words that people write about them and feel bad as a result is sort of taken for granted (I usually go on a rant at this point about how insane I find it that people willingly grant others power over their feelings but that doesn't usually go over well). The fact that someone can now hear what other people are saying about them is the least of the problems. Spreading rumors behind someone's back can be far more damaging not only to the individual but also to the community as a whole. The fact that anonymity lowers the threshold for public expression of thoughts means that things that were previously aired in private in closed circles are now visible.

From the perspective of someone who cares about their community the fact that I can now see hateful behavior is critical for taking action to prevent REAL harm that can arise from group think. The fact that people are far more likely to agree with something (eg by voting) than actually state it themselves does exacerbate this problem, but upvoting of hurtful comments is a community problem and reveals that something fundamental has broken down in that community and needs to be addressed at the level of the community. I would even argue that it is worse than thoughtless or unthinking: it is habitual, and that makes it even harder to combat.

As a final note hateful speech is something that you don't only want to address when someone is offended by it. The fact that someone is not bothered by being called names does not mean that the behavior of name calling does not need to be immediately addressed and corrected. Right now the only time this happens is when someone complains which is an absolutely horrible system.
Only got two wrong [bragging!], and both were sports commentary. but then again I'm not really a sports guy.

Either way that was impressive... I could imagine in the future your phone/tablet scans your favourite websites and generates news stories for you to read, replacing traditional media. If you are into food you can have an entire newspaper generated about the goings on of food!
I misread the original post. I apologise, you are correct about the second link. I stand by my comments on the first link, but I've been very silly in commenting about the second one. Sorry about that.

Please though, stop making personal attacks.
Sort of a side note but: this is one of the cool things about react. Testing dom structure and things like ids and classes becomes (practically) testing react itself and redundant. If you keep components simple and driven entirely by props and state (perferably as little state as possible), you only need to verify these things are what you'd expect them to be for the given state in the state machine that is your component. Its beautifully simple. You can even get a long way with tools like react-vdom where you don't actually render anything and just test the validity of your props. https://github.com/gcanti/react-vdom (I believe the author did tcomb...definitely also use jest though)
Oh cool, slices don't return index errors:

>>> print sum(sorted([])[-2:])
0
I don't think real engineers can rely on the quality of their building materials. They do calculations to specify what quality of building materials and assembly is sufficient to surpass a safety threshold, then contractors use the specs are used to procure materials and assemble to meet the threshold.

Real problems occur when an engineers specifies a particular quality and lower quality is used. Or the engineer designs for a set of conditions, and that set is exceeded.
You are correct, I misread the original post. I apologise for that - the error is mine.
Standard set of questions:

How else would a machine do it?

What you describe is similar to how a human would do it, no?

When we look at the brain we don't see awareness, similarly how do we know the machine isn't aware?

Some poetry is so obscure it means nothing to me anyway.
Volt: Assets, Components, and Routes
There are literally thousands of programmers out there slaving away in big IT departments who literally can't manage anything more than conditionals, for loops, assignments, etc. Given sufficient time, they can get a pretty complex system to be minimally functional or maintain software written by smarter people. It's overly charitable to think everyone is smart enough to be a goood programmer.
This smells like a job for Apache Kafka [1], I've yet to use it personally but its feature set appears to hit the mark though it lacks SQL. The application described sounds like it uses something similar to event sourcing [2] which people have used Kafka for successfully. If you're not familiar with Kafka there is a very good interview with Jun Rao [3] on se radio.

[1] http://kafka.apache.org/

[2] http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html

[3] http://www.se-radio.net/2015/02/episode-219-apache-kafka-wit...
Seems like this could be really useful for writing larger packagers, installers or `curl | sh` type scripts...
I think in some (maybe many) cases it is a "pissing contest." In other, and probably the majority, of cases I'd hope it is a case of simple inexperience coupled with arrogance resulting from the relative immaturity of the field. And I mean "immaturity" in more than one sense. The industry itself is young, especially compared to "traditional" engineering and sciences, and it is also filled with a high proportion of relatively immature people, at least in comparison to the slice of academia I was in.
I wouldn't say "most", but I once had to fight to get an exemption in a startup's proprietary information agreement. We were asked to sign this after most of us had been there six months, and I had to threaten to walk off the job if they couldn't be flexible.

The way it was explained to me was that they needed to be able to claim ownership of anything I did for the company or using the company's technology. Since that could include things I did outside of work for the company's benefit or my own, they needed to be able to claim ownership over 100% of my "works of authorship" in accordance with "provisions of the Pennsylvania Labor Code" which they refused to elaborate on.

I finally got wording added to my agreement for open source software, provided I didn't use any proprietary startup magic to build it.
Muscular Legs Strong Healthy and Powerful
I'd say the issue at hand is that as a society we have an over saturation of universities and a lack of vocational training. We churn out 3rd tier MBAs and Attorneys by the dozen, but you cannot find a plumber with a clue under 50 to save your life.
When I was in college, there was an A&W machine on campus that dispensed hamburgers, fries, pizza, etc.

I don't know if it's even actually the case but I assume it stored the food frozen then microwaved it when you ordered it.

It wasn't the best food in the world, but it was quite edible (although it kept burning the pizza.)
I was like you. Then I got serious RSI problems because I played competitive foosball while having an unhealthy lifestyle.
I'm now almost fully healed after 2 years. My resolve is a lot stronger now because I've had to do so much self PT,yoga and health research.
I can't recommend getting RSI as a solution though :)
"Seriously, this is linked at the top of the article currently at the top of hn"

Nobody in the original thread has commented on this other article yet, and I thought it was different enough and interesting enough that it could provoke a discussion of its own. Sorry to have offended you, but I post stuff because I think it contributes to HN, not to get points. Also, if an article doesn't get upvoted, it falls off the front page very quickly.
> I can't think of anything good to say about this article.

Yeah, it certainly reads as very smug (at least to me). I think it's an attempt at humour that just comes off as condescending; after all, we've all been beginners at some point. I don't think it's very useful for 'bad' programmers either, because it doesn't go into much depth or explanation, so really what's the point? To make us all feel good that we don't do these things? (some of which are debatable anyway)
A web app always has a state machine somewhere, even in functional languages. The question is whether the app's state is internal (mutable state) or external (write a state transition function and let the environment pass the state back to you on the next iteration).

I think the jury is still out on whether storing all application state in a single state object (as in Elm) scales well beyond toy examples. All the state is exposed which doesn't seem so good from a data-hiding point of view.
> * nor do I feel confident that reporting rape to our existing justice system would save me from further humiliation and other professional/personal consequences while providing safety*

Has there ever been any evidence that charging a person of power of any crime comes with protection from collateral professional/personal consequences ?

In my personal view, getting raped is enough violence that I wouldn't prioritise my professional or personal comfort over getting justice. I am also considering that if some place would refuse me a job because I got someone charged for a criminal offence, perhaps that's not a place I'd like to work for in the first place.

I understand that can feel idealistic, and some situations can be a lot more complex than that, especially when a whole industry is mainly filled with assholes in power positions. But I'd believe that making things clear (have a judge validate a claim for instance) can help to get away from overly abusive environments and alleviate the "he/she's just making stuff up" bullshit thrown around the victims.
The more you know about algorithms and data structures, the better you can do in technical interviews. That much is true. The same for things like recursion and dynamic programming.

In actual fact, nobody uses recursion in real life, and dynamic programming is of limited use outside of some very niche areas (unless you consider the generic concept of caching to be a type of dynamic programming). And, rarely do you need much in the way of data structures beyond lists, arrays, hash tables, and things that can be constructed out of them.

Most notably of the set of "things that can be constructed out of them," you want to know something about trees and graphs.

Anything beyond that is something that's going to apply only in certain very specialized situations. For example, if you're writing a crawler, knowing about Bloom filters comes in really handy.

Things that will actually come in handy are knowing various architectural patterns. This doesn't mean design patterns per se -- this would be things like service oriented architecture, for example. Most of these things you'll naturally gain through experience, but it can't hurt to read a book or two about them.

So, as far as actionable advice, I'd pursue at least the equivalent of a formal data structures class to strengthen your knowledge and give you the vocabulary to talk about things with other engineers. And, as I mentioned, background reading about things like architectural patterns won't hurt, either.

This is just my personal experience as a junior/mid level engineer. Your mileage may very well vary, and I hope some more senior people have other things to say.
William Deming famously said that when focus is on quality, quality rises and costs fall. And that when focus is cost, costs rise and quality falls.

We live in a time where we're encouraged to make mistakes. Refactoring, fail fast and often... I get the impression sometimes that we can go on failing forever and its ok. Everything is awesome. Because its fun writing code right? Just jumping in there and not giving a thought to the step after the next. Managing complexity? JAGNI. My tests passed, didn't they? And we can always refactor.

Getting it right takes discipline, research and experience. I prefer to get it right first time. Doesn't always work out as planned, but to me the need to refactor is a sign to stop and reassess what brought me to that point. And its always a result of having cut a corner somewhere.

Refactoring costs. And upfront design is about as fashionable as leg warmers.
As a programmer, uncertainty is my second greatest obstacle. Second to my ability to fit large problems in my head. Uncertainty comes from not being able to fit the entire problem in my head and being able to compare the different ways problem can be solved.

With experience comes the ability to assign create new kinds of heuristics for various problems, which makes it easier to fit them in my head as I work. Reasoning about them, given reasonable simplifications, require experience. Lots of it.

And while acquiring experience you make mistakes, costly ones. You might put lots of time into it without really being able to solve the right problem. It can make you a bit scared of trying it next time. So you avoid it. I think some programmers become so scared of 'doing it the right' because of the risk associated with it that they avoid it more or less all together.

The good programmers are those who manage to get enough experience to reduce the risk before getting scared off by their mistakes.

That's the theory I just came up with anyway.
> signs you're too good of a programmer -
> you use monads in object-oriented languages (like Python)

Are monads a natural fit to Python, or is this a case of "when all you've got is a hammer"...?
"Why do we need so many provosts, deans, and vice presidents?"

For one thing, compliance with extensive regulatory & reporting mandates.

Universities aren't really about "education" primarily. They're a bundle of a semi-autonomous community, grant-funded research labs, landlords, police departments, public health services, etc., with "running classes" as a small part of their overall portfolio. It's not surprising that when they try to do so much they need a lot of people to administer the effort.
The problem with this quiz, and so many like it, is a bunch of the passages were so badly written. A badly written passage could be a human or a computer, there's no real way to distinguish that. There are 3-4 in here that are well constructed, 1 by a human and a couple by computers. For each, to me, it was obvious which wrote it. The rest I was like "who knows, either a bad writer or a computer but it could be either".
No. Most liberal arts majors either doubled in a "harder" field, or minored in Education/Business/etc. as a back-up option. The Edu and Business major and minor required a CS course. So most of the liberal arts students ended up either minoring in a STEM field or else taking CS1.

If anything I would assume the opposite of a selection effect.
I hope "being able to use an online tool" counts as competence...
We agree more than we disagree. Most importantly: the big problem I see with our industry is our inability to detect aptitude in candidates who don't "show" well in resumes and interviews; in other words, the opposite of the problem of being "too selective". It sounds like we agree on that.

On the other hand: I think the counterintuitive thing about ineffective programmers is that many of them are perfectly capable of reasoning through a CS problem in Java or C++ or Python on a whiteboard. But they're --- for lack of a better term --- useless when it comes to actually getting real-world systems built.

My thoughts about why this happens aren't yet well-formed. I just want to contribute the perspective that the "bad programmer" problem isn't just about people who can't buzz a fizz.
Reading and commenting on HN? b^)
I think the difference is that at medium-large companies there are plenty of technical career paths that don't require a person to actually code - business analyst, QA, documentation, compliance, project manager, etc.

So people at a place like Raytheon who simply can't code (or don't like to code) end up doing something else that they are better suited for.

Early stage tech startups just don't have a bunch of ancillary positions like that. Founders and early hires had either better be great at code or great at biz dev.

Also it's worth mentioning that it's not just a tech/engineering phenomenon. It's very common for people in other professional fields (law, medicine, etc) to get a little ways into their career and realize that the job is not at all what they expected or wanted or are suited for, and there are alternate career paths there as well.
One of the unstated, or subliminal purposes of these kinds of ideas is to act as an emotional "vent." Its social purpose in the programmer community is to present a target for the release of "justified" emotional aggression.

Other fields and other kinds of social groups have them in their own contexts.

One of the things that such sets of ideas produce, in sufficiently large populations and sufficiently complicated contexts, are false positives. That is to say, you will tend to hastily pattern match your object of justified scorn. You will tend to detect more of them than actually exist. (This is how human beings are wired up.) What's more, you will conflate highly salient attributes with actual symptoms of such. Being female, or a member of a certain ethnic group, or being "too old" then becomes a sign of the insidious danger.

The thing to remember, is that extraordinary situations require extraordinary causation. Such individuals do exist, but there must be something or someone very powerful propping them up. They could be very good at manipulating people. They could have been granted a sinecure by someone very powerful. Most often, they are the unwitting beneficiaries of pathological organizational policies.

So how is a diligent rationalist supposed to approach this? Remember that you are wired up to produce false positives. Be self aware of your social animal instincts that will tend to have you use the subject of your suspicions as an object of scorn. Look diligently for "extraordinary" causation.

Most of all, don't judge prematurely.