Hacker News Reader

confluenceon Iran Air Flight 655 (Wikipedia)

This is in reference to the Boeing 737 that just went down over Tehran:

https://twitter.com/TheBelaaz/status/1214757041123803136

https://twitter.com/Asylumseeker111/status/12147702487436738...

Iranian sources state it was a "technical malfunction", but given current geopolitical events, it may be a anti-air malfunction in their defense system downing a civilian airliner, which looks bad, obviously.

confluenceon Science Fiction Sent Man to the Moon

Existential threats are a hell of a drug.

confluenceon Neuralink Live Stream [video]

Show that it is easily programmable and hackable by end users, like an Arduino.

confluenceon China’s Uighur Camps Swell as Beijing Widens the Dragnet

Want to know a really good way to increase the power of a separatist group? Build internment camps. Congratulations, you played yourself.

confluenceon What was it like to be a software engineer at NeXT?

Psychopaths just pay better.

confluenceon Anthony Levandowski is back with a new self-driving startup, called Kache.ai

Aren't they all?

confluenceon Fifty or Sixty Years of Processor Development for This?

Some improvements are ensuring that when there are too many interactions, we slow down time, and speed it up when there aren't.

confluenceon Problems at Singularity University

I don't have that impression. I do believe we need a coalition that builds towards the ideals promised. The closest we have is the FANG cohort, but even then in only a few verticals (with some "progress" not being particularly helpful long term), with the rest of the economy improving drastically slower than they should. Science is the same - outside of some fields.

What I am saying is that if we do want to achieve impressive results at a massive scale, it's gonna require everyone to up their respective games by an order of magnitude. Globally we need everything to get better, much faster, period.

confluenceon Problems at Singularity University

Difficult to bring about the singularity without historic levels of technical competency and financial investment. Anything less is simply being contemptuous of the true challenge that must be overcome to achieve even 1/10th of what could be possible. A bunch of lectures, or sci-fi-esque stories really aren't going to do anything to achieve it past the first batch that really opened it up, but they do have an effect on what people care about, and what motivates them, so they aren't totally worthless.

Imagine if scientists approached bringing about the Manhattan Project without also demanding 10% of US GDP for five years, multiple state spanning test sites, absolute discretion, and the work output of hundreds of thousands. Same goes for the Apollo project.

Achieving the promises of the Singularity - whatever that happens to be exactly - is bigger than all of those nation spanning projects combined.

And we will only get there through enormous quantities of technical and organizational blood, sweat and tears spanning decades, and more likely, centuries. The work required is bigger than every research org, every country, and every company, so it looks less like "hard take off" and more like faster plodding.

confluenceon Attempt to Reverse a $55 Million Ether Heist

Everyone's a hero until the bullets start flying.

confluenceon Ask HN: Stay or Leave? SoundCloud has deferred salary reviews

Ah yes, with a late June notification.

Maybe communicate earlier hmmm?

That would be better management rather than hold my beer I'll probably close this round while I risk the livelihoods and futures of my rank and file.

confluenceon Ask HN: Stay or Leave? SoundCloud has deferred salary reviews

Funny thing is that salary changes with a raise, so technically they'd be < 100% of their promised benefits after July, and past that, who knows?

confluenceon Ask HN: Stay or Leave? SoundCloud has deferred salary reviews

A great manager doesn't make promises he can't keep.

confluenceon Ask HN: Stay or Leave? SoundCloud has deferred salary reviews

Not holding management responsible makes me think you might have owned a company.

Let me spell out the compact that undergirds capitalism: employees don't take risks and are paid a constant stream of cash, owner's do take risk, and it is up to them to ensure there is enough capital buffer to meet their constant stream obligations. Employees do the work, management/owners ensure they get paid.

confluenceon Ask HN: Stay or Leave? SoundCloud has deferred salary reviews

Key aspect of becoming a manager is making promises you may or may not keep. They cost you nothing, and when they come due it's the employees who suffer.

confluenceon Ask HN: Stay or Leave? SoundCloud has deferred salary reviews

This is the crux of negotiating. The person with more options has more power. There's really only one way to get a raise: pay me X or I walk. If yay, good, if nay, walk.

confluenceon Ask HN: Stay or Leave? SoundCloud has deferred salary reviews

As an employee of a company, I'm paid salary for my time.

I'll take a pay cut for more equity if I want it, not for nothing.

If I take risk, I get rewarded with ownership, but if I'm paid cash, why do I honestly care what happens to a company.

This isn't some fairytale, we're all here to get paid, and employees aren't your buffer for bad cash flow management, that's the responsibility of owners and management.

confluenceon Ask HN: Stay or Leave? SoundCloud has deferred salary reviews

Not the time or place.

confluenceon Ask HN: Stay or Leave? SoundCloud has deferred salary reviews

Strongly concur.

Also make this a yearly habit, so you stay on the ball, know where the market is at, and become comfortable leaving at a moment's notice to avoid this life changing anxiety you might be feeling.

Once you do it regularly, it's no big deal. Companies hire and fire dozens of people a year, it shouldn't be that different for you.

confluenceon Ask HN: We've all been there, what was your big stuff up?

This is brilliant. My day just got so much better.

confluenceon Wall Street's Frantic Push to Hire Coders

Like I said, you just suck at hiring.

confluenceon Wall Street's Frantic Push to Hire Coders

Pretty much. Ever notice that anytime anyone wants to "fix" hiring they end up developing systems that are just cancer.

If you can't figure out if you want to hire someone in < 1 hr talking to them, you suck at hiring.

confluenceon Wall Street's Frantic Push to Hire Coders

So you see a high developer attrition rate, and go, I know, I'll fill it with 3 month code bootcamp graduates?

No wonder their attrition is so high. Apparently they are incapable of observing the fact they are just an awful place to work, and instead of fixing that, they just shovel more developers into their meat grinder.

confluenceon Nightmare Machine – Horror imagery generated by deep learning

The more time goes on, the more confident I become in the notion that I am currently living in an episode of Black Mirror.

confluenceon Nightmare Machine – Horror imagery generated by deep learning

For anyone who doesn't get this, watch Black Mirror.

confluenceon Big Soda sponsored 96 health groups – a big conflict of interest, study says

You mean like the government?

You pay in taxes, government dispenses research funds, you don't know where the money is from.

confluenceon Big Soda sponsored 96 health groups – a big conflict of interest, study says

He was very clever with that wasn't he?

Everyone should be free to consume whatever they want, so long as they know what they want is killing them, and there are no distortions by the purveyors of such products that they are anything other than what they are - namely bad for you.

You want to smoke? Go ahead. You want to get obese and severely shorten both your life and its quality by consuming caloric dense nutrient deficient drinks/foods? Go right on ahead. It's your life to screw up.

But don't you dare stand there and tell me that letting these corporations that profit from the damage people do to themselves be free to run around going "OH NO cigarettes are totally fine! OH NO diet isn't the issue - just exercise more - here have a coke". Kids are literally dying because of this shit, and I frankly won't stand by it.

What I am against is systematic and dirty propaganda operations that directly harm the national interest for trivial sums of profit by lying to the population through their teeth and in turn inflicting untold amounts of misery on millions of our citizens.

confluenceon Big Soda sponsored 96 health groups – a big conflict of interest, study says

They can't win because they are on the wrong side of history and they are fighting dirty by using stealth operations to turn the conversation from diet to exercise. As if the average American can, or will, exercise enough to even burn off 1 additional can of soda on top of their already caloric rich diets.

What they are doing is no different from the various operations Big Tobacco did in the past to misinform, dissuade or deflect the conversation on cigarettes.

confluenceon A TensorFlow Implementation of DeepMind's WaveNet Paper

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463263

Looks like the source deleted their tweet.

confluenceon The refugees who sheltered Edward Snowden in 2013 in Hong Kong

I believe that the point of this story was to shine a light on how one of the wealthiest cities treats their poor and to show us what courage they have to keep fighting.