skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How can it be expected that everyone in an environment is a spectacular code ninja that does utterly awesome stuff all the time?

it's not. you just have to find a range of tasks that you are able to perform at a high level at, and then make sure that your job is doing it, with confidence, day in and day out.

if the link in the other comment is true, it seems like their senior salary range is 200-300k/year. in that range, the excuses stop, and the results begin, or you're fired, have a nice life.

in the real world it actually begins at 100k but technology skews this figure much higher since basically anyone with a pulse and a keyboard can make 100k in this industry.
My guess would be that this may drive engineers to the Midwest, with its lower cost of real estate and already-entrenched culture of cooperatives (in agriculture and some industries) and worker-led structures like labor unions. Places like Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, or maybe even college towns like Madison and Ann Arbor (where housing cooperatives are very prevalent and widely-accepted) would be where I would look for this kind of change first. Current "'Silicon $foo' where $foo != 'Valley'" type cities (St. Louis, Austin, etc) may be a good bet too.

Interesting theory. (Let me add Minneapolis to your list.) The Midwest gets a lot of bad press on the Coasts ("flyover country") but what's missed is that if you control for urban-versus-rural or for density, it's probably the most educated and liberal part of the country (perhaps tied with the Pacific Northwest). The East Coast, for example, isn't notably cultured (to any degree that's hard to find in other parts of the country) outside of certain neighborhoods in Boston or New York (which are getting expensive and inaccessible anyway).

The real cultural tension in the U.S. isn't South vs. North or "Red States" versus "Blue States". You might call it "urban versus rural", but there are so few farmers (and most farmers I know are actually quite educated; you have to be smart to compete with agricorps) that it's more of an urban versus suburb dichotomy (with the distinction depending more on lifestyle and outlook than whether the location is technically part of the incorporated city).

So yes, I agree. I don't know that we need more talent coming into the Midwest (although it won't hurt); we just need to stop losing the talent that we have to the Bay Area (where young engineers are still paid better after adjusting for cost-of-living; once you get older, the Midwest starts to win because it's more like 140k vs. 170k than 70k vs. 120k). Obviously, most of those talented people don't stay in the Bay Area (they get older, need space for families) but there isn't a clear "next" destination for them. Do they go to Seattle? Chicago? Portland? Austin? Somewhere else? Perhaps this is a good thing, though, because it's probably better for the country to have talent spread around than to try to replicate an aberration (SV's concentration of economic activity, which congests it and deprives the rest of the country).
It wasn't a problem when H.264 was new. There were devices that had H.264 decoding support well before it was popular with users; I remember iPod videos sporting support for it back when DivX/XviD and flv was the norm. Eventually because devices had support for it, people switched over to H.264 and the older standards died out.
So you are okay with, say, the EFF and ACLU not having any freedom of speech? (Not that these organizations engage in much advertising, but they do some, and stripping freedom of speech would apply to content posted on their own websites etc. as well as to advertising.)

Or, for that matter, newspapers. Sure, you could make exceptions for the press, but then you have to define it; in general this is very dangerous stuff.
Rain shouldn't really affect your smartphone, unless it's poorly built. My Nexus 7 fell into a stream of water, getting completely submerged while turned on, and it didn't even shut off. Opening it up revealed it was completely dry, despite the case being snapped on.

Friends have had similar experiences with their Moto G, a Wiko and a cheap non-branded tablet.
Yes. The main cause of my beeper going off at 3 AM during the time frame he talks about (early to late 00s) was due to brand new EMC storage hardware continually collapsing under a moderate load, even though the hardware's specs claimed it should have more than adequately handled the load. A load that the three year old, cheaper storage hardware that the EMC unit replaced had handled fine. Like they did, we did not really fix the EMC hardware, we just found ways to work around the problem.
>The ad industry is not some diabolical entity that conspires to brainwash citizens of the world.

Yes, this is exactly the point.

Advertising is most certainly a "negative externality." Its cost is not fully borne by the firm, but rather imposed on intermediaries and externals. For example, there is no cost to the advertising firm for promoting blatantly incorrect or dangerous statements that must latter be corrected through costly education.

See for example the statistics about sugary-beverage advertising, and how society must ultimately pay for the health consequences [1].

>You could, instead, possibly make the argument that advertising is a prisoner's dilemma.

Advertising is not an issue of prisoner's dilemma (in which two players who benefit from cooperation are driven instead by rationality towards destructive outcomes).

It is more similar to a problem with asymmetrical information, i.e. the "market for lemmons." All of the posts in this thread about how "advertising is helpful for bringing information to the people who are looking for it" are talking about the very few instances of advertising improving the efficiency of an information marketplace. Instead, the marketplace is full of "lemmons," i.e. instances of advertising that are not aligned with true information flow, but with manipulation. The ad market is like shopping for used cars. Use caution.

[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/sugary-drinks-f...
What you don't get is 100% compatibility with all the Docker containers out there.
Statically typed and simple generally means it's pretty hard to actually write reusable code and it's unlikely to "support multi-paradigm" very well. That said, "simple like Python" is an interesting phrase...
Check out the Sansa Clip. Up to 8GB, should be around $40 now, TINY (1.36 x 2.16 x .6"), good sound, small OLED screen, controls on the front which can be pressed through jeans, small enough to throw into you hood or under your collar or clip to the top of headphones.

Also, mass storage mode so you can drag-and-drop files or set up a script to cp all your newest torrented music to it when you plug it in.
I've been running BugMuncher (http://bugmuncher.com) for about 4 years now, it captures user's browser/os info, path through the site, and allows them to include a highlighted screenshot of the webpage.
The pneumatic tire is an awesome invention. They have the ability to cancel out imperfections in the road surface over a wide range of frequencies and amplitudes. Bicycles have traditionally used no other type of suspension.

To make a non-pneumatic tire you have to invent something equally as awesome. Normally you end up with something that produces a very rough ride.
I was at an entrepreneur meetup group just this week and we got discussing the iPod. Seeing a lot of teenagers with them and couldn't understand why. Guest from Chicago who does a lot of travelling verified that it wasn't just our local area but nationwide. Guess they've become retro hip again.
...Extremely Massive Corporation...

I knew EMC storage was utter shit when, upon attempting to create a new RAID group, I realized that the configuration tool's default was to stripe across drives within a shelf, not to create stripes that span shelves.

Worse, to create the more fault-tolerant, shelf-spanning RAID volumes, one must manually add drives, one by one to the array, in a process that involves about 44 (slight hyperbole) clicks per disk.

And then there was the fact that the configuration tool was Windows-only.

Yeah, screw those guys.
Well I did say that I expect fixed formatting will become more common over time. Having to press the space bar less is one reason. Discussions such as this one are another ;)
Are there command-line apps for these rain and white noise generators? I'd love to use them without internet access and outside a browser.

Edit: I see discardorama asked the same question.
Netflix pays only base salary, no stocks (RSUs). Total compensation at most other comparable companies has a significant stock component. The H1B reports only include base salary. So which they do pay well, no doubt, it is misleading to compare them to other companies based solely on H1B data (i.e., base salary).
Have you looked at Genie? https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Genie
Mad Max Gameplay Walkthrough Part 1 Trailer Review
I'm surprised the Pond Racer [0] isn't in there. With its (relatively) huge engine nacelles way out front dragging the tiny cockpit way in the back, I swear it's got to be the inspiration for the "pod racers" in Star Wars.

I'm also surprised to see the Proteus and X29 in the list.
The Proteus was quite a ground-breaker and doesn't look too strange if you've seen a few gliders.
I remember seeing the X29 on the front cover of (I think) Popular Science back in the day, and thought it was a beautiful design. Highly efficient, highly maneuverable, and I think this was the one with a vertical canard (under the pilot, not visible in most pictures) that allowed it to corner flat (for improved visibility during dogfights).

I think the Edgley Optica looks like something from Lexx, the Bartini Beriev VVA-14 belongs in a video game and the Handley-Page Victor belongs in Agents of Shield!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p7iNuTe3w0
15 Career Trends Every Young Professional Should Understand
Unintended consequences comes to mind...

> "mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.

... to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.

...Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development rolled out earlier this month to racially balance the nation, ZIP code by ZIP code. It will map every US neighborhood by four racial groups — white, Asian, black or African-American, and Hispanic/Latino — and publish “geospatial data” pinpointing racial imbalances.

The agency proposes using nonwhite populations of 50% or higher as the threshold for classifying segregated areas.

...

HUD plans to drill down to an even more granular level, detailing the proximity of black residents to transportation sites, good schools, parks and even supermarkets. If the agency’s social engineers rule the distance between blacks and these suburban “amenities” is too far, municipalities must find ways to close the gap or forfeit federal grant money and face possible lawsuits for housing discrimination.

Civil-rights groups will have access to the agency’s sophisticated mapping software, and will participate in city plans to re-engineer neighborhoods under new community outreach requirements."
Not-quite-so-broken
What exactly do you consider freeway speeds?

Even in the metro ATL area which is notorious for thinking the speed limit is a suggestion, the vast majority of traffic is moving under 85 MPH.
Banksy and peers, in a different medium, have been making many of these arguments for some time, in my opinion eloquently. They got me thinking about many of these issues of who gets to speak to the public and how do we decide, in ways I hadn't before.
Note that the Ultrastable Oscillator they use for their 30 MHz frequency reference has a short term stability of 1 part in 10 trillion! To compare, TCXOs used in commercial circuitry often have a stability of around 1 part per million.
Oh, I see. In that case then, that's a very good question.

To me, the goal is exposure to brutal constraints. There are very few environments as demanding as space, and as such it's a fantastic crucible of learning. Really, the bottom of the ocean is likely the only other environment that is comparable to it. And also a fantastic alternative. Perhaps ironically, I think deep ocean research is actually far harder and riskier than space, and so space may be the easier alternative. But I certainly am no expert on it, and I would love a few billion dollars in research thrown at the ocean that wasn't myopically limited commercial interests. We could find some truly unbelievable things down there, stuff we could never hope to find on the surface of a planet.

So I guess my response is who knows? We should try them both and find out! There's plenty of people, resources, and time enough to try!
The fundamental assumptions in your post disturb me. You are essentially mitigating the severity of the problem the article describes by saying that, really, advertis[ers|ments] are not _totally_ effective in stealing all of our attention. We can probably tune it out, sometimes. Usually we can mostly tune it out. For now.

This is such a pernicious idea. I suppose it can occur because this whole advertising thing has been one giant boiling the frog endeavor -- the fact that in some places you cannot engage in public life without turning over your attention, and all the statistical learning that occurs with it, to some entity over which you have no control. Well, other than the trivial "just stay in your house" control, which I don't feel to be control in any meaningful way.

It's interesting that the solution proposed to this is to assert property rights over something that, like clean air, people will probably have an intrinsic reaction to framing as property. In other words, a tragedy of the commons defense against something that is, in some ways, the opposite of the commons: the right to engage in civic behavior and still be gatekeeper of your own attention. Although maybe you could say it's the attentional commons, as if we all shared the same attentional pasture.

Attention is one of those things where it seems to me the sci-fi future is closer than we imagine -- where you walk along a street, and, based on who some company things you are, helpful product info gets beamed into your brain. It's already that way with audio, which, unlike visual stimuli, you can't even turn away from or tune out.
Ever since I've read this comic from Zen Pencils, I've taken a hardcore stance against any and all advertisements. I block everything with ublock origin, and mute my TV when ads come on.

I've sat down with my kids while they watch TV and it's disgusting just how much they POUND children with ads to buy toys. The advertising industry is insidious. Just absolutely hound them! I've seen taken the TV out of their room and taught them how to use Popcorn Time to watch whatever they want. No more ads in this house.

http://zenpencils.com/comic/155-banksy-taking-the-piss-expli...
AWS has EFS [1] which should allow you to share one FS to multiple serves. It is still in preview but could help address these needs.

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/efs/pricing/
Ec2 has efs at least, no idea if it's any good
True, but there are ways to mitigate that. YouGov tries to create a representative sample out of a batch of volunteers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouGov
That's exactly how sports league handle the issue and there's very little grudge between the players. Everyone know what everyone is paid and how much endorsements they get. Perfect symmetric information.

This is largely attributed to the sports union for the pro leagues such as NFPA, NBPA, etc. Collective bargaining is hated by the owners.
For quite some time I've felt that advertising/marketing, at least the sort we've had for the past century or so, is inherently immoral. The fact that it's a necessary evil in our economic system doesn't stop it from being an evil.

Modern advertising is not merely informing people about products and what they do. It's brain-hacking, where advertisers have figured out over decades of experience, and research into human cognitive biases and failure modes, ways of presenting the same product, the same information, but getting a desired response out of the target.

We accept this as a society because we tell ourselves that, as rational human beings, we have the choice to listen to or reject these messages. But modern understandings of cognitive biases show how advertising works on deeper levels, and even works despite us knowing about the tricks that are being used on us.

The problem is that there's a severe imbalance. Advertisers are getting better and better at attacking -- at figuring out precisely what makes us tick, down to the level of pixels on an A/B-tested website.

Are people getting any better at defending themselves? Are people being trained in dealing with their cognitive biases to make themselves resistant? Overall, I don't think so. There's no law of nature that says that attackers and defenders must be equal in strength; the situation we're in right now with advertising is like medieval warfare with the advent of the crossbow -- a great imbalance in favor of the attacker that disrupted the nature of combat for centuries.
The "Ask" button up there at the top of the page suggests that asking questions is a legit usage of HN.
> For example, there is no cost to the advertising firm for promoting blatantly incorrect or dangerous statements that must latter be corrected through costly education.

I disagree somewhat, as there is certainly a regulatory cost. Now whether FINRA is stringent enough is an entirely different question, and one that would be more fruitful to discuss.

Moreover, you'll see toward the bottom of my original comment that I don't think misleading advertising is a good thing. My comment mostly dealt with the author's discussion of consumer attention as a resource, to which I strongly disagree that there are externalities.

> Advertising is not an issue of prisoner's dilemma (in which two players who benefit from cooperation are driven instead by rationality towards destructive outcomes).

I defined cooperation to be a firm not advertising and defection to be a firm advertising. It certainly seems like the definition of a prisoner's dilemma to me under the way I'd set it up. But we're free to disagree. I agree that this is an asymmetrical information issue, but that quite literally applies to the entire business world.
And sometimes they may not even have a keyboard.
I can easily imagine situations where you get just one data point and correctly infer from it that you're underpaid.

One data point isn't even bad statistics. It's anecdote. Maybe the other person is being vastly overpaid.
>> Plus it always lets you access all your music, regardless of reception, data, record company politics

> Exactly. I can't fathom why people are so in love with relying on so many unreliable parts to listen to music.

A phone will do exactly the same thing...
So, you mean everything Snowden released is also public domain? Because those maps were classified, didn't you read?
My addictions are all "intellectual"... stocks, gambling, HN, Starcraft, Wikipedia.

Since I've never had any addiction to substances I assume the above is what I am susceptible to.

I never had problems controlling alcohol and I couldn't even get high on the times I tried [thing you smoke]. I can handle a lot of drinks but I just don't really have that desire unless there are hot girls around. [thing] just gives me a headache only.
A colleague of mine asked me why India was now spending billions as well on space probes when they have so many starving.

There are many others as well, who are starving in other ways. Once the immediate need of food and water are met, what do people strive for then? Safety, a place to live? We watch thousands drown in boats trying to cross the ocean to richer lands, even though there was food back home.

If food were the only thing a person wanted in life, we'd have focused on and solved it centuries ago, if it had ever become a problem to begin with.

There must be goals, dreams, things to yearn for once those basic needs are met. The thousands of children the nun cared for will not be content to simply be fed for the rest of their lives. Their lives must mean something, there must be things to strive for.

It's not a question of whether or not we should explore space, it will happen regardless. Societies fed, nurtured, and taught their children, and those children will put their gifts to reach every higher. The child eating porridge out of a dusty bowl today may be building bridges tomorrow, or curing disease, or viewing the distant stars.

Space exploration is towards the apex of our technological achievement, and so it must seem far removed to those addressing more earthly concerns. But it's built on the those foundations.

We'll explore space so long as there are mouths to feed and minds to grow.
Popcorn Time is piracy. You can get ad-free TV from legal streaming and PBS. Amazon and Netflix have tons of kids programming.
$50/hour seems really low. It makes me think that the elves are inexperienced or that this is just a thin wrapper around Mechanical Turk or oDesk.

EDIT: This was not meant to be a criticism of whoever built this, but a bit of marketing advice.

As someone who might use a service like this, I would pause before using short-term contract programmers that cost $50 an hour. Consultancies bill out fresh grads at rates considerably higher than that, and if there's any slack time at all between tasks then the elves are being billed out at less than $50/hour. That rate seems more suspiciously cheap than like a good deal.
Most corporations operate essentially like a cult.
You are expected to drink the Kool-Aid and tow the party line.
Pay inequality is just another symptom of a systemic problem we have in the tech industry.
Labor is fundamentally not respected, nor is it justly compensated at the fair market value.
I'm with you. I block every single ad I can. I avoid commercial TV and radio, because I loathe and detest the advertising industry.

If it ever becomes possible to block real-world advertisments with some sort of augment reality sunglasses, that overlay classical art or even a white square over advertisments, I will be their first customer.
How Elon Musk controls Tesla Motors while owning just a quarter of it
You know what other part sucks? The number of brilliant, creative people who create ads instead of useful things.
Yeah, I do a fair amount of small Python gigs in my free time and $50 seems a bit low to me as well. Just talked to a head hunter the other week, and was told their Python devs are commanding much more than $50/hr. Makes me wonder what was going on behind the curtains here as well.
Had a friend who worked at apple, went to netflix, and was back at apple within under a year. It may have been a move to get a raise with apple, but it could have also been a reflection on netflix. Take that for what you will.
I'm in South America, a 3rd world country. So it's either piracy or my kids will be watching Alf on the local TV station.
Well, Comcast has hundreds of thousands of owners and they don't all get an equal or even proportional (in reality not in theory) say in how the corporation spends the money of the corporation to get its message across.

Corporations have 'free speech' in the sense that a corporation can spend its money without legal limit on political campaigns. The number of people who have effective control over that money is quite small in relation to the number of owners. Saying a corporation has free speech is not all like saying a printing press has free speech. Corporations have their own bank accounts, their own money, are subject to laws and have legal privileges that printing presses do not.