skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HN doesn't grey comments out for their authors anymore; it rubs salt on the downvote wounds, and, more often than not, a comment you notice as grey right now will be black again in just a few minutes, so why beg people to write about it?

But HN definitely does still show negative comments from other people as grey.
I don't think there's any relation. Some people may be nervous just because they are interacting with strangers, whereas they would have no problem with people they already know.

Personally I don't have nervousness/stress issues in interviews, but I've found that conversation screws up the analytical mode that I use when I'm programming. It's like how people say they don't like having their managers interrupt them in the middle of the day because they get taken "out of the zone." I can program or I can converse, I can't do both without screwing up both of them.

That's just my particular conundrum. People probably have all sorts of reasons (besides the possibility of them being bad at programming) for why they may have trouble in interviews.
Great question.

This post focuses on what commission structure optimizes for customer happiness.

We need to recognize that, especially in startups, early products aren't a perfect fit for everyone in our target market. That's okay, we just need to align incentives so that our sales team closes customers where the product can provide a Fuck Yes Experience.

In terms of general employee salary correlating to happiness, coincidentally I studied the philosophy and psychology of happiness so I'd be happy to shed more light here.

I think you're referencing the study by Daniel Kahneman.

Roughly $75k is the point at which additional income has severe diminishing returns, but it doesn't necessarily peak (you just see a tiny effect.)

That number is not as specific as it sounds. $75k was about what it takes to not have to worry about money. You can't drink champagne at every meal, but you have enough to live comfortably and sprinkle unnecessary purchases, travel, and vacation without additional stress.

It also doesn't control for cost of living. $75k in San Francisco isn't worth the same, in terms of quality of life, as $75 in Lafayette Louisiana.

Furthermore, within a given company, the absolute dollar amount matters far less than the comparative dollar amount. This[1] study demonstrates that people would rather be paid less money overall as long as they make more than their coworkers at a similar level. To combat this and to avoid horizontal discrimination, everyone at Seneca Systems who does the same job gets paid the same amount.[2]

[1]: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~charness/tenure_papers/happiness.p...

[2]: https://github.com/SenecaSystems/employee_handbook/blob/mast...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9764391
TIL that in former days chimneys were sweeped by Climbing boys
This study doesn't seem to track the long term use of them, such as doing a study comparing those learning how to meditate vs those learning how to meditate while listening to binaural beats.
> Imgur uses the free/extremely cheap CDN Cloudflare.

CloudFlare is not free, nowhere near it, if you're Imgur or 4chan. moot has emphasised this before. It's expensive.
http://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Appea...

"David and his team are initially thrilled when the project is allocated extra servers and programmers. But excitement turns to fear as the team realizes that they are being manipulated by an A.I. who is redirecting corporate funds, reassigning personnel and arming itself in pursuit of its own agenda. "
Sure...

Stackage: curated sets of packages that are known to work together.

LTS Haskell: Stackage + pinning to a GHC version + seperating non-breaking upgrades (minor LTS version increases) from breaking ones (major increases).

SSL downloading.

Stack: also downloading/building of GHC if it does not exists, understands mega-repo's (many packages in one git repo), eases working with shared local pools of packages, eases working with dependencies that are not in Stackage/LTS, and more that I probably forget.

A more detailed explanation of the merits of Stack can be found in this video: http://begriffs.com/posts/2015-06-22-haskell-stack-build-too...
CloudFlare has a free tier, but Imgur and 4chan don't use it (they couldn't, at their scale).
Nice work! Something like this which matches up requests and responses (e.g., with an incrementing integer) is absolutely required for using web workers for repeated tasks. Everybody has to solve this problem. I wish it were built in.

One suggestion: add a priority queue in the main thread to allow high priority requests to be processed before low priority.
Check out http://www.idealist.org/
Array based columnar storage and SIMD comparisons aren't fast enough?
first off, there are strict SEC rules on what constitutes a qualified investor. But second, nobody in the hedge fund world wants to hand-hold a bunch of limited partners -- the fewer the better. And if you've got a track record like Simon (and Steve Cohen and Ray Dalio and Paul Tudor Jones and DE Shaw and a few others) then you're likely way oversubscribed whenever you want to open a new fund and as a result can be very picky about whose money to take. Hence the 44% carry.
You joke now, but we're not too far from this reality when it comes to dealing with Google. Algorithms are very unforgiving and don't know shit about customer service. Google is already there.
Generally speaking I agree with you, but there's another element to discuss, and that's in flexibility.

Imagine you have two jobs to choose from, both in the same field. One is part-time and pays a low wage, but a wage that is just about high enough to live on. One is full-time and pays a much higher wage, enough that you can spend without worrying about overspending.

How many people have the luxury of choosing between these options? What many people end up with is a situation where they're working full-time just to make ends meet. For these people, both time and security are hard to come by, and the competitive nature of the job market means people get trapped working hard in jobs they don't enjoy because they don't want to lose what little they already have.

Whilst I believe that you're right to point to personal choice and responsibility, it's worth acknowledging that some of the problems are systemic. Why can't we change the way we work together, so that doing what you enjoy isn't so much an act of bravery but is just the norm? What might those changes look like?

As for the article, thought it was great. I'm very much in favour of a communal creativity future, though I'm sure we'd find all sorts of ways to keep ourselves amused. I thought this section was particularly insightful...

'Hunnicutt told me that if a cashier’s work were a video game—grab an item, find the bar code, scan it, slide the item onward, and repeat—critics of video games might call it mindless. But when it’s a job, politicians praise its intrinsic dignity.'
Let me teach you something else Mary Poppins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Poppins_%28film%29
I think the "binaural beat" literature is focused on the question of whether such beats can affect people without conscious auditory processing—i.e., whether the particular firing pattern the beats create is an effective side-channel attack on the synaptic substrate.
Was thinking about this as well. In the interview he talks about the act of making a trade moves the market itself. You can't create too much trading volume or you will have distorted the market so much that you can't trade effectively after.
I would imagine he can move and make money at a certain volume (a bank roll of 200 million) and guarantee returns because that level won't distort. But if he had hundreds of billions he couldn't guarantee returns because the moves he would have to make would be so large as to distort the market beyond their measuring.
Much like the observer effect in physics, possibly a trader's effect here.
Ask HN: Getting a job on a different technology
Hi everyone,

I am a developer with 5 years of experience: The first 3 years of my career I worked as web developer using very popular frameworks, however I have spent the last 2 years working on a niche backend technology (not very popular) building enterprise applications.

I'd like to switch jobs and get back to web development since I realized that is what I really feel passion for, however I am afraid I have lost some web skills. I have neither side projects nor many references to provide to future employers but I still think I have experience enough for "senior" (or at least not junior) position.

Do you think I should start working on my web skills (side projects, github...) before applying for web development jobs or should I just start applying right away?

I would really appreciate your opinion on this.
Thanks
Australia. I got my PR (green card equivalent) after working 3 years and applying for citizenship now (5 years since I arrived here). Spent less than AUD 10k total for immigration, including my partner visas. Processing times are reasonable and very transparent.

It's not a perfect system but way better than most countries.
Looks like your link was somehow submitted with a null title: your thread appears broken to me. :)
>Sorry, I just gotta rant a bit... this is a really bad hack, that I wouldn't trust on a production system. Instead of doubling down and working on better IPv6 support with providers and in software configuration, and defining best practices for working with IPv6, they just kinda gloss over with a 'not supported yet'

Yeah, how pragmatic of them. Instead of for pie in the sky, let's all get together to pressure people to improve tons of infrastructure we don't own, action (which can always happen in parallel anyway) they solved their real problem NOW.

>and develop a whole system that will very likely break things in random ways.

Citation needed else it's just FUD. The links explained how it works well enough for that.
The other reason is simply that we grew up, got jobs and have disposable income to spend on entertainment.
Life is long?

Life is indeterminate and at best a blip.

If the thing he is doing is not providing fulfillment, it's probably not the right thing. I'd advise not to wait. Search for what brings growth and contentment. Go for it.

Having a rich life full of new experiences can be done without chasing the dollar.
a handful of self-reported, potentially biased posts is not data. It's barely even anecdata.
Even if RT removed their limits, there are still government imposed ones (supposedly to protect unsophisticated investors from risk):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accredited_investor#United_Sta...

RT's limits are much higher though, and that probably is done with the goal of limiting the number of individual investors. Dealing with investors is a distraction for the fund managers. But the main issue is proprietary information. The more investors you have the higher the risk of information leakage to your competitors.
What is "conscious auditory processing", and what is "an effective side-channel attack on the synaptic substrate"?
Also, many of those government service jobs could require security clearances, making it harder for naturalized immigrants to apply.
I wish experiences like these were put on glassdoor as well, it'd be good to know what their hiring process is like rather than just actually working there.

Maybe enough responses about never getting contact from employers would make them start treating people like human beings
It's very nice to see hiring advice based on data rather than anecdotes. But I wonder if the process described in the article is pre-selecting for people who are out of work and desperate, rather than currently employed and casually looking for something better.

From the article:
> Our process has four steps:

> 1. Online technical screen.

> 2. 15-minute phone call discussing a technical project.

> 3. 45-minute screen share interview where the candidate writes code.

> 4. 2-hour screen share where they do a larger coding project.

Then later:

> ...we can't afford to send people we're unsure about to companies

Does every applicant in this system really have to go through four rounds of screening before even talking to someone who works at the actual company? I can't imagine doing that unless I was desperate.
DEA agent who stole from Silk Road–and extorted DPR–pleads guilty
OBR10
This looks amazing. Hopefully my boss bites because it looks like it will solve a lot of headaches.
Apple has been experimenting with zoomable UI a bit recently: the Apple Watch home screen is essentially a ZUI. On the iPhone, Photos and Calendar zoom as you progress through the levels of hierarchy (though you can't zoom interactively). Safari on the Mac and iPad also lets you zoom out to see your tabs in a ZUI-ish way.
You can't pass a static method as an argument to another static method. You can't write a static method that returns a static method. You can't partially apply a static method. Static methods are not functions.
rescuetime. Check it out.
Where I work, we ask candidates to do a take-home task after they've passed the first in-person interview. The take-home task is trivial, something most developers with a few years experience should be able to knock out in less than an hour. All components of it are easily googleable.

The advantage is that we're building a corpus of solutions to the same problem that we can compare against each other, which is interesting. More importantly, we're building a corpus of solutions that we can then pick from to have the candidate analyze in-person, and talk us through what they see, what they'd do differently, what they like/don't like, etc.

In short, we familiarize them with the problem via their own answer, and then ask them to analyze someone else's (anonymized) answer. Our sample set so far is too small to draw definitive conclusions from, but it feels better than our old ways of doing things.
But if you don't use EC2 but some bizarro provider noone really uses then you can have IPv6...
Top Facebook Marketing Tips and Tricks for 2015
I use them, got a nice little generator for iPhone that I use almost every day for focus, and relaxing before bed.

Could be placebo, could be white noise but either way it works for me.
Interesting. I imagine that latter was never standard, and redirected to the former as a fallback/ convenience (to play devil's advocate).
NHL has a $150/yr subscription where you can watch any of your team's games... as long as they're playing out-of-market! It makes you wonder what the point of it all is.
Don't overestimate people's preferences either. I'm sure tons of people will gladly sit in front of those channels you described all day every day.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9764498
This sort of thing is where I've found emacs most valuable. For proprietary or product-specific configuration and scripting languages, particularly ones where no decent editor is provided at all (or there's some terrible builtin editor, based on SciTE at the very best), being able to quickly put together an emacs major mode is very handy.

Once you've got the basics written, you can start to work. Then add imenu support, and you have file browsing. Then add your language to exuberant ctags - which has a line-based regexp mode that you can pretty much reuse your imenu regexps for - and get it to generate emacs-compatible tags files, and you've got basic cross-file symbol navigation.

(The quality of ctags-based symbol browsing can be hit or miss - for languages like Java or C++, where many mechanisms require symbols to be identically-named, it's not that great. But not-that-great is still a lot more convenient than nothing.)
I've seen https://eventboard.io/ in the past, which is basically the same exact kind of product. Similar pricing too.
Articles like this describe one of my biggest problems with proposed immigration reforms. How many countless people have left the U.S. due to losing their legal status - or been outright denied a visa to begin with? It seems to me that giving status to people that have already broken the law is downright unjust to those that have followed it...
What data am I ignoring, and how do you know?

I made no comment on what kind of interview works best. I merely observed -- what is certainly true -- that sometimes "defusing the bomb" situations actually do come up in real life, where everything is at stake and you have to work under very severe time pressure.

Do you disagree that such situations sometimes arise in real life?

If not -- if your point is that that isn't necessarily a good reason for interviews to involve such situations -- then I think we are in violent agreement. I am not arguing for defusing-the-bomb interviews. I just don't think it's quite right to say that in real life you never have to defuse a bomb.
is this supposed to replace Cabal?
That's exactly what I did. I spent a lot of time and money on immigration lawyers trying to find a way to immigrate to the U.S. only because I don't have a degree.

After years of trying without any success I started looking into other options, only to find that it's significantly easier to immigrate into other countries (like Canada). Two months ago I got an offer from a Dutch company (even with them knowing about my degree issue), and I'm moving to Amsterdam next week.

Last month I spent two weeks in California, and, with this new reality, saw the whole place with new eyes. After the glamour wears off, you realize that the other options might be even better, specially after you see that some countries are much more welcoming to immigrants.
I've never had a cable package in my life and never seen any reason to get one.
It's really amazing, isn't it?

I talked to thumbtack for data science. They wanted a 10+ hour takehome project after just speaking to a recruiter because their data scientists were "too busy" to speak to candidates.

Yeah, I'm going to get right on that.

Bet they're bitching about a data scientist "shortage (^1)" as we speak.

(1) data scientist defined as experienced data scientists who want to waste a day's labor before even understanding what they'd be working on and/or speaking to their potential boss

edit: checked my email archive and fixed company name. Apologies...
I watched the NBA playoffs on Sling TV, which had ESPN and TNT. But I couldn't watch the Finals because it was on NBC.

I wish I could watch local broadcast TV from my computer. But when broadcast TV went digital, it made it harder to get a decent signal. Partial signals on digital are a lot worse than it was with analog.
Asking the author because I'm curious...

Are you tracking longer-term hiring outcomes too? They'll probably take some time to become meaningful, but they're far more important. The data you've compiled is useful since it helps to filter earlier in the process, but it still presumes that your in-person interviewing process makes the correct decision. If the final filter is letting bad candidates through or screening out good candidates, all the correlations you've found could be reflecting only the ability to pass the interview, not the ability to do the job successfully.

Hopefully you're continuing to follow hires 1, 2, 5 years after being hired to tie it back to the data you collect about the interview process. It would be awesome if you could find predictors of candidates that are likely to quit less than a year after being hired or candidates that will receive less-than-stellar ratings from their managers. By doing this, you'd help hiring managers deal with the blindspots in their hiring, not just streamline the existing process.
When do we reach the tipping point?

Seems to be in every industry. Enough people switch to rooftop solar, utilities can't survive. Enough people switch to electric cars, all of the infrastructure around gas vehicles starts to come undone. What's the tipping point for cable tv? At what point is it no longer sustainable for them to operate as they've traditionally done?

Interesting times.
It relies on cabal-the-library. It replaces cabal-the-tool.
Does it count towards making payments on time though?
This article hit so close to home, and it brought a tear to my eye for the author. Just minutes before I saw this show up on my feed, I got an email from USCIS saying that my O1 petition has been approved after having attempted to get a visa for about 4 years (I know, it's kind of magically short in the grand scheme of things) down a variety of paths. It's still kind of surreal and hasn't fully registered, I can't wait to go back to the only place I've ever called home, the Bay Area.

My heart goes out to anyone else who is going through or will have to go through what I had to for the last 2-3 years, trying to work on my startup remotely as a digital nomad. It sounds like a romantic lifestyle, but it's wrought with difficulties leaving one on the edge of depression the whole time.

I'm happy to lend an understanding ear to anyone going through this right now. Having a government whimsically decide what direction your life takes professionally, socially, and culturally with no say of your own really makes you feel powerless.
It's not like a cosmetics company needs a short URL other than to inflate egos in marketing. Corporate videos are pretty low on most people's viewing priority and their target demo isn't going to be manually typing or remembering the address.
You are correct. The main pillar of the European Union is the common market including the free movement of goods, capital and people.

Schengen was originally a treaty outside of the framework of the EU but has since been taken over by it. There are EU countries outside of Schengen (GB, Ireland) and there are non-EU countries part of Schengen (e.g. Norway, Vatican, Switzerland). However all countries that join the EU now eventually have to join the Schengen area.

Besides Visa free travel for residents of these countries Schengen also includes a common Visa for foreigners traveling to these countries (so you only need one Visa to to travel to France and Germany) and allows the police to cross the border when perusing suspects and detain them on the other side.
I'm a cord cutter since 2011... EXCEPT!

Except I am currently a cable TV subscriber. I have to call Comcast every 6-12 months when my "deal" expires. I used to have 150mbit service, but in the dark days of the Comcast vs Netflix battles, I could only stream at 240x120. So I said "screw it" and switched to 25mbit service for far less money -- my Netflix streams got better, too!

Then once that deal was up, they offered to double my speed to 50mbit and drop my price by $5/month.. if I was willing to become a cable TV subscriber again. Turns out the "limited basic" is really just lifeline these days, but they did throw in HBO for the first time in my life.

I returned the cable box to them on day 1; all of my TV programming comes OTA from a Mohu Sky to my HDHomeRun and goes through my WMC7 DVR. I occasionally watch HBO Go on my AppleTV which is the only use I get out of my cable TV subscription.

But according to Comcast's numbers, I am a cable TV subscriber -- or at least will be, for the next 6 months. I'm actually willing to pay a bit extra per month to NOT be listed as a subscriber, but unfortunately very few internet-only deals seem to exist in ComcastLand.

Incidentally, they also bumped me to 100mbit from 50, and recently from 100 to 150. 150mbit for $60/mo is nothing to shake a stick at I suppose. I just wish they couldn't count me as one of their subscribers.

They're gaming their subscriber numbers the same way the NYTimes is when they basically make you throw away the dead tree edition to get a cheaper digital subscription.
If MLB.tv didn't block out Giants games in the Bay Area, I would have already cancelled my cable tv. I think on the tipping point, I can eventually imagine the MLB lifting blackout restrictions.
And, I think, bill C-51 considerably widens the definition of 'terrorist or threat to the country'.