Harkins

They also test conscientiousness.

But, yeah, having just gone through a round of interviews I think there's a big range of quality at work in these, and passed on some companies because of how irrelevant their prompts were or unstandardized their processes were.

Does anyone know the rationale for creating Nixlang? Guix's use of Scheme proves there isn't a novel feature unavailable elsewhere, so it seems like a lot of wasted effort to implement a language that will likely only ever be used for one suite of programs. (And tooling; though almost none exists now, making the choice even more expensive.) I've tried to find one, but "nix" is a difficult thing to google for given the couple decades people have used it as a catchall term for unix and unix-like operating systems.

Spam from gmail's smtp servers. There are a number of spam services oriented towards small business. Their users are required to use their own gmail credentials. MailShake and FunnelBake are two services from my inbox this week, though they're deliberately hard to identify - no note in the headers, no footer on the email, customers encouraged to set up domains aliasing "unsubscribe" links, etc.

This is a growing source of spam for me personally and services I've worked on that have public email addresses (eg. support@), especially if near a mailing address. (Other services scrap lists of "local" businesses and sell them to the end users of the spam services.) Blocking gmail smtp is a non-starter due to popularity, graylisting doesn't help, and I haven't been able to find anywhere they take spam reports; search results are overwhelmed by discussion of reporting spam as a user of GMail.

I believe only once has someone who invited a problem user been banned. That inviter contributed a feature to disable invitations and was unbanned. But I think the possibility also has a deterring effect that prompts people to exercise care.

(Context: I'm the lobsters admin.)

You may qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) if your bipolar disorder is preventing you from getting and holding a job: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/getting-social-secur...

That has become a common misconception. See https://lobste.rs/about#michaelbolton

We have something along these lines: https://lobste.rs/hats

I'm not aware of one, but the Lobsters codebase with very similar functionality is available if you'd like to start one: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters

You can get help in #lobsters on Freenode. If you know Rails, deploying to Heroku is an afternoon job; using the provided ansible scripts on a bare VPS is a day or two.

SEEKING WORK | Chicago, IL | Remote OK

10+ years of experience with Rails development, mostly helping startups launch as a consultant. I've spoken at RailsConf and several other conferences, and written a book on Ruby. I also have significant experience with devops automation, React, Python, and mentoring junior developers.

I have availability for part-time work and maintenance retainers. Not available for strict management roles or pager duty.

https://push.cx/consulting or peter@ that domain. I care most about understanding your business's goals and helping you achieve them, so please tell me about what you're working on. Thanks! :)

Patrick has denied this and described it as an attempt to rip him off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17611071

This was probably ~20 hours over two weeks. (I'm the author of the post.)

(author here)

I knew Nix came before NixOS but was interested in both for the possibility of managing servers. I'd have made significantly less progress starting from Nix.

I can see how Guile would be an improvement over the Nix language, but have tapped out my patience on related topics for a while.

The search engine broke, too. Maybe it's it's having a negative term like "javascript -npm" or searching only a single subreddit, but changing "www" to "old" in the url often takes a search from zero results to hundreds.

And that's on top of how much slower it is, how it starts with a sidebar covering the page, janky lightbox scrolling, fixed headers covering the page, autoplay everything, etc. Search and other major features don't work.

The "PC" made me think he was talking about political discussion, but I added some caching in https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/commit/e99c0783aa386740... and I'm thinking https://github.com/rails/actionpack-page_caching would be good for logged-out users.

I'm not sure what you're asking for. If it helps, https://lobste.rs/about has some notes on the community and https://lobste.rs/moderations has the log of moderator actions.

SQL isn't a good match for the recursive structure of comments (and our version of mariadb from LTS Ubuntu doesn't support recursive common table expressions), so the app pulls all comments in ActiveRecord objects and threads/sorts them there. It's expensive and uncached. Codebase is here if you're curious: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters

Traffic counting has to wait until I have spare attention, which is also a shallow resource pool. :)

Lobsters sysop here - we're having trouble keeping up with YC News's level of traffic. We're not going to crash, but the unicorn worker pool is small enough that lots of users are getting 500s. I'm adding some caching.

You can use the https://Lobste.rs codebase from https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters . Before I became the sysop of Lobsters I used it to start https://barnacl.es and the GitHub wiki has few more sister sites. Drop by #lobsters on Freenode if you need help getting it running.

Sysop here, glad to see folks are getting a kick out of it.

This is blogspam ripping off this site and the link should be changed: http://www.wirepoints.com/illinois-state-pensions-overpromis...

The authors of this report are former employees of the Illinois Policy Institute: http://www.wirepoints.com/mark-glennon/ https://www.illinoispolicy.org/author/ilpoliski/

The Illinois Policy Institute is, politely, a conservative think tank: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_Policy_Institute

The full report plays a lot of games to produce these striking, misleading graphs, like comparing yearly numbers with total values of all future pension liabilities at face value instead of any attempt at NPV. If you're curious to spot more, the 1993 edition of How to Lie With Statistics chapter 7 ("The Semi-Attached Figure") and 9 ("How to Statisticulate") are a lighthearted read.

I tried to evaluate it last month. Their login page does some kind of cross-site cookieing or referering that my privacy settings don't permit. Any time I log in, I get a warning that someone's been trying to brute force my account and it's been locked for 24 hours.

Support was useless. I was repeatedly asked if the IP address I gave them was public or private, when they should've had training or tooling to know at a glance. The help system closes tickets aggressively, ignores replies, and the link to keep a ticket open just leads to a knowledge base. Eventually support agreed to take a curl that reliably reproduces their bug, but I got no tracking number or even a vague promise they'd get back to me when it's fixed.

I concluded that if the product was broken and support was broken, there's probably something upstream in the business that's broken and I am not confident I'd be able to restore data.

Because the title is "The iPhone is Dead" instead of something like "Why I Switched to Android".

I also do this, and also start talks asking people not to post photos of me online.

Also, I don't believe he's kept his picture off Facebook. Unless he avoids all photographs, one of his friends has posted a photo, and another of his friends has tagged him. It doesn't matter how many times you ask people not to post/tag, Facebook has very aggressively marketed this as a normal thing to do. The tag step probably isn't even necessary if he's consistently one of the only people untagged in a group photo.

I look forward to GPDR enforcement and hope it can be used to delete even Facebook's shadow profiles.

They still have your face from scanning your friends' photos and contacts. Combine datestamp, location, messages, and posts over years and Facebook knows who was together for a photo whether or not you've uploaded any or been tagged. Facebook knows the face of everyone who is on Facebook or who knows a few people who are.

> And the legal basis for such rules [prohibitions on employees sharing salary information with their peers] is at best murky—indeed, a large number of U.S. states now explicitly ban them.

And besides that, the National Labor Relations Board considers employees discussing pay to be protected concerted activity. I'm not sure if just having the rule is illegal, but enforcing it certainly is.

I'm not sure about exponential growth in public filings (and EDGAR does not track regulation, so it's not relevant). For example, the number of publicly traded companies is down about 70% compared to twenty years ago: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DDOM01USA644NWDB

Could you share a link showing exponential increase in the use of EDGAR?

There's a trick in this clickbait:

> According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American works 8.8 hours every day. Yet a study of nearly 2,000 full-time office workers revealed that most people aren't working for most of the time they're at work.

The plain reading is that this article is based on BLS data. The BLS makes huge amounts of data available (and is friendly about answering questions), and the 8.8 hour figure is really theirs: https://www.bls.gov/tus/charts/chart1.pdf

But the second sentence is about unrelated research not conducted by the BLS, even if you trust that it exists.

This data looks bizarre. 23 minutes of smoke breaks? Only 15% of Americans smoke (https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adul...), so if 85% of people spend 0 minutes a day smoking the other 15% spent 153 minutes per work day smoking. That can't be right, so this list must be the average time spent on an activity of all the people who reported engaging in it, which makes it pretty useless for understanding the overall situation it purports to talk about.

Assuming a study was done, this is probably self-reported data of a self-selected population. Ask 2,000 websurfers to break down their yesterday or last week of work and you're not going to get reliable data.

Without an accounting of methodology (or at least a citation), this article is an infohazard. People might read it an accidentally take it seriously, or remember these numbers but not remember they were completely unsupported.

No, that's about complying with Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering laws so they are committing fewer felonies.

First point: "I found a bug but can't give an example."

Second point: "It adds a feature that's different from a similar language."

These are not persuasive arguments. I'm not trying to be unkind, but the first point is totally unsupported and the second doesn't elaborate on what's bad about classes besides that another language also has classes.

This example doesn’t fit with the React style I’ve seen before, where state is rarely used. This data isn’t flowing (https://lobste.rs/s/ptfoib/yes_react_is_taking_over_front_en...) like I’ve come to expect, but one of my biggest gripes with React is that the docs are no longer very good because they haven’t been comprehensively rewritten for the current design and because the only sentence in the docs to address the crucial distinction between props and state is the distinctly unhelpful:

> If you imagine a component tree as a waterfall of props, each component’s state is like an additional water source that joins it at an arbitrary point but also flows down.

In this post’s example, I would expect to see a component for an individual Person with the props name and location, then a People component storing the ordered list in props. If the app does a lot of this general “maintain a sorted list with random insertions from over the net”, People would be wrapped by a higher-order component (https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/higher-order-component...) managing that. Otherwise there’d probably be a page-level custom component or just random stateful javascript pulling in the data and passing it down to People for rerendering. (I don’t know Redux to address the second half of his example.)

It’s ironic that the author advocates for immediate mode GUIs, because normal React looks and works like an immediate mode GUI with memoization. A component is a function responsible for part of the page. Its props are the input to the function and it returns a render of part of the page (possibly by rendering more memoized components). The cache is busted when props changes. There’s also a hack to be used sparingly called state so that small bits of UI state can be managed at a low-level instead of in their parent component.