skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Work is an effort to do something meaningful with time. If our perspective on it is skewed, then that can change—and perhaps it should—but work itself is not evil, nor should we redefine the word to be so construed.

As W. Edwards Deming said, "All anyone asks for is a chance to work with pride." Prideful, real work—work that produces joy for the worker and results in something of value—is virtuous.

The real problem is structural. A requirement of working with pride is to be a part of an organization that treats employees well and enables that pride, and removes all barriers to it. They must seek a quality product and a valuable result as a primary goal.

This is why Deming advocated for Quality as a first principle, and why his system was so functional and correct. It took into account primarily the need for every individual in the organization to take pride in work. Learn more -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

And to sum this up, never a better time for this poem:

To be of use –
by Marge Piercy

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2006/09...

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
What do you think the range on that transmitter would be ?
Is Apple the new Microsoft?
When I moved from Windows to Apple, it was a liberation. All of those annoying issues I was constantly deal with were gone. But over the past 18 months I've become increasingly annoyed at the stability of OSX and iOS. I'm close to where I was in 2011, when I cast off Microsoft altogether. My MacBook freezes and needs a hard reboot at least once a week. My Bluetooth audio has a delay since I upgraded to the last OSX. Load time from the home screen used to happen almost instantaneously, now there are long load times. On iOS AirDrop never seems to work, I've started to get phantom strange touch screen behavior, and every new version seems to be flakier. Apple need to get their house in order because they're on the precipice of not living up the their brand expectations.
If you want me (as an academic) to use ScholarlyMarkdown, then you can't force my collaborators to use ScholarlyMarkdown as a consequence.

There should be a nice ScholarlyMarkdown -> LaTeX cross compiler for starting simple documents in TeX and then sharing with collaborators (pick some obvious defaults or allow a config file to get fancy). But more importantly, if I am joining a project that already has a bunch of LaTeX wizardry going on, I should be able to seamlessly and implicitly edit the text parts in ScholarlyMarkdown without my collaborators knowing.

Can ScholarlyMarkdown do this? If not then I'm not really interested.
That's true, but the local Fox affiliate in my area seems to be way more alarmist than the other stations. They talk about a couple inches of snow as the biggest winter storm this season. While true, it's a bit exaggerated in an area that gets that amount multiple times in a typical year.
Yes, but it's not ideal. Since everything is done through Javascript, we have to first identify all the math, then hide it from the Markdown parser, then parse the Markdown, then restore the math, then call MathJax on the now-HTML. Equation references/numbering exist, but are turned off by default. It's a minor change to your MathJax configuration to enable.
> the pernicious culture of “hard work”

Yes, because productivity and determination are so pernicious.

I don't understand the point of this article; is it suggesting that we intentionally try to decrease humanity's labor output in the name of some poorly-defined notion of "work sucks"?
I hate laptop keyboards. The problem is the touch pad in front of it. Inevitably, my palm will brush against it, and the software will assume I'm clicking on something, and something random will happen.

It's not just me, others will sometimes ask me what the hell happened, I was typing away, and the window disappeared (or some other random thing happened), and I say "you brushed against the touchpad".

It's so bad that when I travel, I throw a full size usb keyboard into my luggage and plug it into my laptop.
My son is 3, and is at almost all times making the case that he is a "big boy"... That's a big factor. Fun is always a factor, because kids love to hang out with the parents.

Besides that, he just wants to help in any way he can. The other day he was piling laundry into a big dump truck, and rigged it to tow another vehicle to transport laundry to the room where my wife was folding.
Looking at my own typing, my left hand tends to float as far right as N, with the Y/H/B and U/J/N columns changing hand depending the word but my right hand almost universally a bit right of "home row" so my pinkie can hover over delete/enter/shift. I've never been able to comfortably use an ergonomic keyboard with the gap in the middle for the same reason.
Welcome to distributed programming. Just because it works for one developer doesn't mean it works for the others, at least not until all the conflicts are resolved. One could have build systems which didn't permit a change to commit in the master branch until everything compiled and all tests passed, but Github isn't set up that way.

The build may also break because of a change in an external dependency.
I do remember being very excited to vacuum and now.
I've had some good results with http://peopleperhour.com/ It's a bit smaller than a Elance, Freelancer, etc. Really though, all these 'standard' freelancing sites are the same.

Some tips I'd probably give: focus on listings in your own country/area, you will have better results. Don't be too formal, try to build a good rapport while staying professional (especially in proposals). Focus on things that you find exciting, or you'll get bogged down.

No idea what your background is, but web dev is the best area to be looking in. PHP et. al. have thousands of available at any time, at a variety of difficulty. Finding clients that will let you work in more 'trendy' (i.e. fun and productive) languages is a little harder, but if you're really pedantic you can find them.

Pay rate is very variable. One thing I've noticed is that a lot of clients just don't know what they should be paying. Most sites require an 'expected budget' on listings, but you can usually budge this up quite a bit if it's too low. Keep in mind if you're in the UK, EU, etc. that you're competing against developers in other countries with lower living costs, and that a lot of clients (especially on simpler projects) don't always have the budget you might be looking for.

The most important part of freelancing isn't your tools or your programming skills or how much time you have available - it's how you communicate with clients, especially non-technical ones (i.e. most of them). Email regularly. If you're in the same city and the project will take more than a couple of weeks, meet up for an hour to introduce yourself and discuss requirements. Always explain what you're going to do, and if you have any doubts at all, ask about it. A misunderstanding is easily made when working remotely.

I'd recommend you go into it (for the first few jobs) without worrying too much about money. Take projects that look interesting and at least cover your costs, and get a feel for how the process works and how you can attract better clients.
The way we do certain things is pure madness.

Commercial buildings are the same way. I had the pleasure of working in a refurbished school converted into offices... Being able to open a window in a room with 15' ceilings was amazing.
This Map Shows What $100 Is Actually Worth In Your State
Authority creates leaders. When you will get rid of labels you will see it.
Only authority on the very bottom of the ladder can avoid creating leaders (public servants, group organizers, speakers, front line support etc.).
>Students who believe to be 1000x SE because they can stick two APIs together and use bootstrap end-up to be very condescending older engineers.

Yeah, I've noticed that younger programmers started talking down to me like my experience is worthless. Then they ask me to debug their code for them.

The frustrating part is that, when I interview, my experience in now-obsolete languages has a value of $0. My skill for understanding business requirements and debugging is mostly transferable, but that doesn't seem to be valued. I understand valuing my experience in older languages at a discount, but I don't understand why it gets a value of zero or negative.

I never saw the point of hackathons, because I'm interested in projects that take more than a couple of days to finish. You can do "Uber for X" in a weekend, but not something substantial or truly original.
This may just be a semantic quibble, but I'd say that someone that produces academic output (usually in the form of original research) is an "academic", and the academy has it's own peculiar rules for deciding which output has merit.

The Mill stuff is just an example of research taking place outside of the academy.
Automate backups from Linux servers to Amazon cloud
My problem with Apple is that it appears that their open source contributions are negligible as compared to their competitors. Although they admittedly piggy back on the great work of FreeBSD, as well as who knows how many other open source projects. Even Microsoft (from what I can tell) seems to have learned from its past mistakes and is trying harder and faster to fix them than Apple.
$20 chinese clones (from the factory next to the microsoft one) available in August.
Here is a pretty decent documentary about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OVAkMrdeKI
This looks very interesting but I have a problem with this. I think MOST of these features could have been build just with clever uses of Pandoc filters. This means that
i) it's fully compatible
ii) it's very easy to extend
Not really the same thing, is it? Gemnasium is a paid service. As far as I know, it relies on monitoring your source code on Github, which requires granting it access to your Github account. The OP's tool is a command line tool that generates a changelog only when you ask for it, and requires only local access to the code.
Yeah, I noticed that a lot of developers keep looking for tutorials on a topic but often don't realize that the official documentation is a gem in itself.
So... just saying here, but with "Siri" in the name, the first thing the title made me think was "oh, is it a clever hack to pipe Siri's processed text into a different program?".
The best talk I've ever seen on this exact problem is this talk http://blog.ted.com/james_howard_ku_1/

And I find myself strongly agreeing with Kunstler on a great many of his points.
There's nothing new about non-Americans creating amazing software. Linus Torvalds is Finish. Guido van Rossum is Dutch. Matz is Japanese. Fabrice Bellard is French. DHH is Danish. Tim Berners-Lee is English.

And that's just off the top of my head!
My guess is that he is building the PDFs through latex/xetex.

I built something similar to that, but instead of forking Pandoc (and investing the time to learn Haskell), I just added filters through Python. It's not at fast, but you can intercept mostly anything.

Thus, the flow ends up as:

paper.md -> Pandoc -> paper.json + metadata -> paper.tex -> paper.pdf
LoopBack: Powerful Node.js Framework for Creating APIs
I have vague memories of the event, and my mother filled me in on the rest when I was about 10. Apparently I gave her an explanation as to why I wanted to do the dishes.
You could drape this one over your thigh, split keyboard style :)
I did not know about that and I will do bit of homework next time. Thanks for fixing the link!
In addition to the counterarguments already mentioned, here is another: a kick to the groin, even well placed, is not always guaranteed to bring a man down. If you are really in a life or death fight it is possible for a man with that much adrenaline in his system to keep going. It is painful but it doesn't actually disable his fighting ability in any way if he can push through the pain.

I think that generally most guys don't hate each other enough to inflict that kind of pain unless it is a life or death situation. And if you are in a life or death situation there are better options to incapacitate the opponent.
You are presuming access to land to subsistence farm upon, skills needed to subsistence farm, and tolerance by the institutions to retreating from the existing economy and engaging in that.
> The problem is the touch pad in front of it. Inevitably, my palm will brush against it, and the software will assume I'm clicking on something, and something random will happen.

Has that ever happened on MacBook? It seems that better hardware and software, Apple has completely eliminated that issue.
Khan Academy: Algorithms
I would tolerate a statement like "unable to respond to an emergency situation" - although, this varies substantially with the substance, quantity, person, and nature of the emergency. And the recognition that there are plenty of non-pharmacological situations that render you equally unfit for dealing with certain kinds of emergencies - good luck dealing with a back injury while skiing off-piste.

However, throwing out a statement like "drugs make you nonfunctional" does not help the discourse.
I love the High Line. These kinds of off-elevation parks are wonderful escapes in a busy city.

Another fantastic park along a similar theme is Cheonggyecheon in Seoul. Except it's a river and below street level.

The more of these the better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheonggyecheon
Also worth a mention is Teamtreehouse and their "no manager" rule: http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/working-in-a-flat-company
The hang-up in these discussions is the concept of "truth."

Newton's physics are useful in engineering; in fact they have been good enough for almost every engineering project mankind has ever undertaken, including complex stuff like landing a robot on a comet. But are they true?

Well, we know they are not complete. There is evidence that Newton can't explain; that's how we ended up with our modern theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity. But are those true?

Because we know we cannot reconcile them with one another. And then there is dark matter and dark energy, which are as yet unexplained, and might comprise about 95% of the known mass/energy of the universe.

More prosaically, think of the last time you saw a bird fly. What's the "truth" there? Your observation, or the theories of quantum mechanics and gravity, which we believe govern the matter and energy of the bird?

In programming we have a concept of "leaky abstractions"--build a layer of abstraction on top an underlying technology, and chances are at some point, someone will have to descend to the underlying technology to fix a bug or find an optimization.

What if our entire history of scientific observation is just a collection of leaky abstractions? We have no way of telling in advance when we've reached the bottom. So the theory we think might be "true" today, might turn out to be a leaky abstraction tomorrow.

Edit to add: Cultural and historical assumptions raise their heads when we find the holes in the abstractions and are trying to explain them. In the absence of reliable theories, or in the face of seemingly incompatible observations, we just try to sort of apply what we already know.

Kuhn's idea is not that scientific knowledge might be wrong. It's that human beings might be wrong when they think they know what the truth, or reality.

Einstein said of quantum mechanics, "God does not play dice," and he spent years trying to prove that the universe is as deterministic as he believed it to be. That's what the voice of historical assumptions sounds like.
However, in most cases you could just RawBlock (or was it BlockQuote?) with specific attributes, and then intercept those in a filter and convert to Latex.
Sample size of 1, but I generally feel more relaxed and creative when I work in a (large-ish) place with high ceilings. If I need extreme focus for moderately short periods of time, I tend to revert to preferring a small, low ceiling place. Confounding factors most likely involved.
Honestly? You're hanging out with a bunch of ambitious, entry level devs, probably all college students. This is what you should expect from a crowd like this. Take what you need and leave the rest. For more depth and maturity, go to your favorite language meetups and attend/participate in talks from/with folks with some industry experience under their belt. Kudos for having perspective enough to ask for feedback about this. You'll be fine.
> my palm will brush against it, and the software will assume I'm clicking on something

There should be palm rejection options available, or options to turn off touch pad clicks in the touchpad driver software. Most OEMs use Synaptics, you can download the latest driver software directly from their site, it may give you more options than you currently have available.
Well played:

<script>
document.getElementById("bonus").innerHTML = 'body { font-family: "Comic Sans MS", "Chalkboard SE", "Comic Neue", cursive, sans-serif; }'
window.onscroll = function() {
document.getElementById("bonus").innerHTML = 'body { font-family: serif; }'
window.onscroll = null
}
</script>
You should be putting your alternate style in a .cls file and not inline. If you are super picky about format, then none of these tools are for you.
lol me 2
Aside from general usefulness, I'm very interested in "Relay".

https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/02/20/introducing...
I left the HH groups for the reasons you mentioned. I personally think it distorts your view on what tech can really do, since the signal/noise ratio has been so low lately. I don't think it's as bad as the group makes it feel, but you're well founded in your opinion.
Hi, a guy who has managed a remote team for 15 years here.

What it sounds like to me is that they don't have someone doing the communication. I get all the bummers that is no face time, no hallway stuff. But we are systems programmers (he said generalists and I think it is sort of the same thing, everyone does everything, there aren't any narrow roles) and we have made it work.

Some ramblings on what works for us.

IRC is big. We're all on it, if there is no chatter I know something is wrong.

Weekly staff meetings. I hate meetings but the team needs to sync. So do those. Maybe even twice a week.

Phones. So much phone, you have no idea.

This is perhaps the biggest thing. Here's how we do design. It's all on the phone and it is all someone talking about a picture. Then the other person talks about the picture. Then the other person. What I mean by picture is we're trying to solve $PROBLEM and we have a proposed $SOLUTION and we talk about the solution. Someone leads because they believe they have a real solution. So they articulate that and the next person either articulates it back or proposes a change. When you go around the circle and everyone says the same thing, you are done. Start coding. Don't code before that, you need to have all the people seeing and saying the same picture.

We've made it work. It has not been easy and someone needs to step up and be the communication dude (that was me). That person has to see everything that is going on and know who needs to know what and make sure they either get the info or talk to the person who can give them that info. It's a lot of work. Many, many hours on the phone. But it can work, we've been doing it for 15 years, we gave you distributed source management as a result, all that work was with a team that didn't live in the same city.

I would not give up on remote teams so quickly, they can work.
The most shocking prediction to me was the prediction that Uber kills Amazon in that Uber could deliver packages from point-A to point-B for $0.90 a mile or more efficiently and less expensively than Amazon's fulfillment solutions can. [Please See 3:40 mark]
Yes it's cool to see how systems fail, but it's even better if you do that and have some sort of solution. "If you show a man a pile of shit, you should also show him a shovel."
For those unfamiliar with the Hackathon Hackers culture, please see some select samples:

https://twitter.com/shit_hh_said
Most keyboards from <1990 that have been treated reasonably well are still be in good working order today (or are at least repairable). It’s only really the last 25 or so years that keyboards have been on a downward cost/quality spiral.
Please. I've struggled with ADHD for most of my life, and while it probably does have an effect on both my work and my code, this is not the effect.

Don't make broad generalizations based on the pop culture definition of mental illnesses.
I want the flow to be

paper.tex -> paper.md + metadata ->(merge) paper.tex -> paper.pdf
Cairo has a population of 18 million, this new city will be designed to house 5 million.
Build and Customize Your Own Hacker News, Reddit, or Product Hunt
The largest issue right now in management imo is the fact that you get either knowledgeable in your field manager, that understands your needs but totally fails in the field of managing, business and negotiating with upper leadership, or you get guy that will work out some great deal for team, will be able to resolve issues and talk to the team, but is failing to understand working process behind what people under him do and that is demanding for team to meet the impossible quotas.

Companies should romance with duopoly - where there are 2 managers, one sport coach style guy, that works for improving quality of employee environment, understands their needs but yet demands results and second tech guy that overlooks work progress, helps with his knowledge and provides an ideas and workflow.
Leaving this article open causes my computer to do a bunch of writes, once per second, and it never seems to stop.

What tool(s) can I use to figure out why this page is hitting my hard drive every second?

(running chrome on windows xp)
According to the datasheet [1] the transceiver outputs -5dBm. (This is 5dB less than 1 mW.)

This specific device is not analyzed enough to reveal whether or not there is an additional amplifier, which "could" be made from a single transistor and some passives.

Assuming that there is no amplifier, and taking into account the short wire antenna and detrimental environmental conditions, I feel safe guessing the upper bound of useful range will not be more than a 250 m distance. Probably it's half that.

I will also guess that the fixed part (you can call it a transponder or base station) will not have power budget to worry about so it will periodically be announcing itself (you don't want the mobile part to do this because it will consume the battery.) The mobile part will answer when it hears this transmission. If this is true, then a TSCM beginner will be able to play "find the beeper" pretty easily.

[1] http://www.datasheetarchive.com/dlmain/Datasheets-40/DSA-798...