hectormalot

Not such a strange combination in my view. As i see it, Google's customers are (for a large part) advertisers, and their product is the ability to get ads in front of people (and to get people to click on them). In the economical sense you could even argue that Google users are 'suppliers' (of eyeballs and clicks)

Monopoly abuse can of course impact both suppliers as well as customers, but in this case it's probably more likely to only impact advertisers.

- As individuals we can switch to other search engines and browsers, so it's difficult to abuse a monopoly that way.

- However, as long as we keep using Google, advertisers might have no other option to get a reach this valuable. So Google could possibly exploit its position towards advertisers. (e.g. Favor its own ads over other ad networks).

Still looks like a net win for end users.

If i recall correctly, this was more common but was lobbied against by the CC companies (and might not be allowed anymore in certain states?)

I just wanted to suggest this. Similar to 'chaos monkey' killing my processes once every few days, developers would also look differently at rollback procedures if I guaranteed that one in 10 would be rolled back randomly.

It actually turns out that some non-technical people are more capable of navigating a conversation with a chatbot than the average website. Basically it solves the problem of finding your own information vs the chatbot finding the information for you.

For example: we had a bot that could take care of HR, expense, and IT issues. So instead of having to look in one of the systems or the documents on SharePoint, you could just ask: "how many days of PTO do I have left?" Or "when will my last expense report be paid?" or "can I get email on my corporate phone?", and the bot would be able to handle it. Especially in larger companies with lots of systems finding that can be difficult.

HN is probably not the intended audience for chatbots :)

edit: typos

On that last point: the place I work actually hired copywriters and linguists to create more of a personality for our AI/bot.

You're right that the typical chat is quite bland and feels scripted, but I think companies are picking up on this and are trying to improve on this.

As a department head I've hired almost 100 people over the last 12 months (We are growing very fast at the moment). The majority of these are applications that come in through a normal application, although I'm not sure how many resumes never make it past recruiting.

Next to this, we have grown the team by moving over employees from other departments asking for internal transfers, these have about the same success rate as external applicants.

And then there are referrals from people who already work in the department (can be for people who already work for the company). The success rate on these candidates is indeed higher. I think this is because the person referring them has already thought about whether the person referred is a fit or not. We give them the same interview process, and don't always tell the interviewer that the candidate is a referral.

That said, I see 3 things that might push the reality closer to what you said "most jobs are filled through referrals".:

1. If you're hiring only a few people, the statistics will probably bias towards referrals. It is easy to get a few referrals for a specific position if you need them.

2. Referrals might end up on the desk of the hiring manager earlier (e.g. from employee to hiring manager) compared to an official application (webform to recruiting to manager). Sometimes we can close a position before the first resumes from recruiting even land on my desk.

3. As jobs get more senior, a hiring mistake becomes more expensive, and in that sense hiring a strong referral is on average going to reduce this risk. So, for higher level jobs I think indeed that many are filled through networking or targeted reach-outs rather than open applications.

I had a professor that used a slightly different approach. A correct answer would yield you 1pt, but any of the 3 incorrect answers would subtract 0.5pts. Expected average result for guessing is negative, so he incentivized people to leave questions open if they were unsure.

IPsoft | Cognitive Implementation Engineer | New York, Austin, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London | ONSITE

We're looking for implementation engineers to help implement our cognitive solution - Amelia - at our clients. Amelia is already helping various companies improve their customer and employee contacts at for example SEB bank and the Enfield Council in London. We're rapidly growing our team to keep up with all our new clients.

As a CIE, you will configure Amelia's cognitive modules such as intent recognition, business processes and back end integrations, while working closely with our clients to make sure we exceed their expectations.

Ideal candidates have a good sense of scripting in either groovy, JavaScript, or python. You're interested in cognitive technologies, and are comfortable to work directly with clients.

We offer you an exciting environment with cutting edge technologies, and the ability to grow quickly as our organisation grows as well.

For more information please reach out to Dennis.dereus (@) IPsoft.com. Due to the large amount of undirected applications, applications without a motivation might not receive a response.

IPsoft | Head of Cognitive Operations | NY | ONSITE

IPsoft is looking for a leader of our NYC operations team. You would be growing the team from about 10 engineers now to a team of 25, leading the expansion of automation of our cognitive deployments, setting up new processes, expanding the team for both SRE and service desk roles, and supporting our clients in running our cognitive solution: Amelia.

Great candidates have proven experience in setting up devops processes, introducing automation/CI/CD, growing a team, and implementing changes in processes.

We offer you an exciting environment with cutting edge technologies, and the ability to grow quickly as our organisation grows with you. For more information on Amelia, visit our website at: www.ipsoft.com

For more information please reach out to Dennis.dereus (@) IPsoft.com. Due to the large amount of undirected applications, applications without a motivation might not receive a response.

When working through Michael Nielsen's deep learning tutorial[1], this was exactly the question I had. I used to think deep learning involved 1000s of layers. Turns out that training a network a few layers deep can already be a real pain.

Currently we seem to be training one-off networks that are very good at a single thing (e.g. recognising hand written digits in 28x28 pixels), but we haven't been able to really connect multiple networks together to get to more generalised applications.

I didn't see this model coming, but it show DeepMind is taking an interesting direction here, potentially leading to more generally applicable ML capabilities.

[1]: http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com

I have the same problem. My co-founder (a developer nonetheless) has never taken time to familiarise himself with with ledger, making him uncomfortable to run our taxes.

I'm under the impression that both are true. There is overcapacity in the shipping market, which drives down prices. Because prices are low, shippers are investing in ever larger (more efficient) vessels, in order to turn a profit. This in turn leads to more overcapacity, which leads to a drive for even larger and more efficient ships.

It's a type of 'tragedy of commons' situation, where every shipping company is making the right decisions from their individual perspective, but collectively they're driving themselves into the ground.

For me this explains the rise of slow-steaming. It makes a lot of sense in this market because it lowers the cost of shipping a container (less fuel), while simultaneously reducing the market capacity (# of containers / year).

Finally, very few shipping companies make money on the major lines (e.g. China to Europe), because it's pure price competition. They're much more likely to make money in places where they have a 'monopoly' on something: e.g. being the only ship that leaves in the next 3 days, or being the only shipper going to a specific location. For example inter-Africa shipping falls in this category.

Thanks, insightful to know.

I like ledger. We use it for the accounting of a small side project (few 1000 a year turnover), to track our VAT and general cash in/out. It gives me a sense of safety that our information is in plain text files (in git, backed up on a remote).

This looks nice, might give it a try later today.

That's actually pretty neat! So how come other voices don't match this? Is it the fact that intonation in a single domain (weather) is easier to predict than if the voice needs to handle general (broad) topics of conversation?

IPsoft | cognitive implementation engineer | New York, Austin, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and London | ONSITE

We're looking for implementation engineers to help implement our cognitive solution - Amelia - at our clients. Amelia is already helping various companies improve their customer and employee contacts at for example SEB bank and the Enfield Council in London. We're rapidly growing our team to keep up with all our new clients.

As a CIE, you will configure Amelia's cognitive modules such as intent recognition, business processes and back end integrations, while working closely with our clients to make sure we exceed their expectations.

Ideal candidates have a good sense of scripting in either groovy, JavaScript, or python. You're interested in cognitive technologies, and are comfortable to work directly with clients.

We offer you an exciting environment with cutting edge technologies, and the ability to grow quickly as our organisation grows as well.

For more information please reach out to Dennis.dereus (@) IPsoft.com. Due to the large amount of undirected applications, applications without a motivation might not receive a response.

Based on the wikipedia article, I think the 1.6bn USD is in 1977 USD. That's going to be roughly 4 times as much by 2017 [1], or 6bn USD, giving about $2,000,000/MW capacity at Bath vs $1,900,000/MW for Tesla.

Compensating for the fact that only the upper reservoir provides power, storage cost is around $180,000/MWh for Bath vs $475,000/MWh for Tesla.

Still significant but at least in the same order of magnitude, and this technology is still improving more rapidly than pumps and turbines. And, the batteries I could put close (or in) cities, potentially saving another 5-20% on transmission losses.

I'm now wondering how the operational cost of this will look. Rotating equipment will show wear and I'm assuming Bath has quite some cost on that side. However, that thing has been in operation for over 30 years, and tesla only gives guarantee for 5000 cycles on the powerwall, or about 15 years (assuming 333 cycles a year). If you would actually need to replace the batteries after 15 years then I don't see them beating pumped hydro in the short term, if you can use them for 10'000 cycles with just a loss of capacity, then I think the finances can make a lot of sense.

1: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=100+USD+in+1977+conver...

I've seen Jira tickets about creating Jira tickets :)

In large lines I agree with this comment. Micromanagement of Agile teams is detrimental. Implicitly, the message is that managers should leave their teams to work in peace?

The question I have: assume you are that manager. You have 5 agile teams working on 5 client projects. One team seems to get work done much slower than the other teams. What do you do? (And how does one actually track progress of an agile team to begin with? Story points can vary wildly across teams).

Can't agree more on the one page part. Depending on the background / culture of candidates I've had resumes up to 12 pages long.

A bit of formatting also helps, a professional looking resume will frame your accomplishments better. Something many readers are sensitive for.

And show impact. "Developed key metrics for project hazel" reads different than: "rewrote metrics engine resulting in real time view on all client transactions, leading to $10M in new marketing opportunities".

And finally, if you're really interested in a job. Adapt your CV to show the most relevant information for that job first (and word it in the best possible way, e.g. look for the language the employer uses to describe the job)

IPsoft | cognitive implementation engineers | New York - Austin - Amsterdam - Frankfurt - Madrid | full-time | ONSITE

We are looking for engineers to help bring our cognitive solution 'Amelia' to our clients. The work consists of training and configuring the various modules of the system, which ranges from training intent classifiers to encoding chat processes to integrating with client systems for end to end fulfillment. An importand part of the job is the ability to work with our clients in mixed teams during the implementation.

Typically we look for:

- interest in working with cognitive technologies

- familiarity with JavaScript, Python, or Groovy

- familiarity with basic Linux CLI tools

- enjoys working with clients in mixed agile teams (we're relatively agile, managing our projects in Jira)

Interview is phone screen followed by on-site with technical and personal interviews (can be by VC if needed)

We are currently not sponsoring Visas.

If you want to apply its best to do so via our website. For more information, please feel free to reach out to me at Dennis.dereus (at our domain).

We are also looking for:

- project managers

- technical architects (US)

- US Head of Delivery (to grow our team from 50 to 200 people)

Exactly! My 60th hour might not be as productive as my 20th hour, but it is productive nonetheless.

Currently leading a team I see different behavior from team members working longer hours. For example, we had a conversion to do that was running into a deadline. Together with a team of 4 we worked into the evenings to get it done. 2 of them 'compensated' by being there but browsing more Reddit, the other 2 actually sat down and got the work done.

I see a lot of comments justifying the first kind of behavior, and it doesn't make sense to me. If you are not productive because you are on HN, you're doing that to yourself. At 40-60h we're in the realm of that being a choice, and then you're choosing not to be productive.

FWIW, I'm not trying to justify people working long just to show that they are there/committed. That's a terrible practice too.

There is a big difference between "how much value you create" and the percentage of that that you can capture for yourself.

In the non-labor market airlines a great example of this. They create tremendous value for their customers (fast long distance transportation), but the industry as a whole is not very profitable.

Same for employment. Many (hopefully most) employees generate more value than their salaries, but that does not mean they can negotiate for that value to be added to their salary. If there is someone else with similar capabilities willing to do the job at $x, then negotiating pay above $x will be difficult.

Lack of experimentation might also be because they are afraid to break something. I remember my (completely non digital) parents being unusually good with their car navigation system. Turns out the sales rep had told them: "its impossible to break this system, just try and it will be ok", and so they had trial and errorred their way to understanding how it worked.

I agree, as a Chem Eng master (In the dutch system you do not leave university with a bachelor, it's interpreted as if you weren't good enough to get a master) I've noticed that most of the guys I considered to be the brightest left for corporate jobs, that Ph.D's were a mix of people with deep academic interest (and endurance), some very bright people, and some people that felt they weren't ready for the real world. I think it's too much of a short-cut to say PhD equals high intellectual success.

Having been in academia myself, I remember "learning" how to write articles by reading other articles. With the exception of one briljant prof I had, most other professors would expect you to write in that style, and if not, that would typically be reflected in your grade. I don't even think this is intentional, they probably learned to write articles the same way.

I remember that the best written articles are typically also from tenured professors leading the field they were writing about, and who would not need to worry about bad peer reviews or other ways their articles would be assessed. (Which leads to the question of they became tenured because of their great communication, or if they are finally free to communicate normally now that they've reached a tenured position)

IPsoft | Full Time | Cognitive Implementation engineer | New York or Amsterdam or Bangalore | ONSITE

The implementation engineering team is responsible for aligning our breakthrough cognitive solution (Amelia) with client requirements and expectations. You will implement functionality in Amelia's Cognitive modules as well as integrate and automate backend business processes.

The cognitive division is growing fast and we're looking for someone who loves to rapidly create new functionality for our clients. Skills we are looking for is experience with scripting (JS, Python, or Groovy), working with APIs and the ability to design client facing processes.

IPsoft | Full Time | R&D engineer | NYC | ONSITE

We are looking for developers to help bring us to the next iteration of our cognitive agent, Amelia. As an R&D engineer you will work on a variety of topics related to conversational and cognitive technologies. It’s a unique opportunity to work alongside our senior developers and linguistic scientists as they build the next generation of language understanding automation. Our junior developers are eager to take on assignments and relish the opportunity to learn from senior staff.

You will be a part of an artificial intelligence team working on intelligent virtual agents. You will participate the development of algorithms to allow our virtual agent to learn and execute natural language driven processes and tasks. R&D engineers in BPN are expected to handle full-stack development on Java 8, JEE, Redis, JavaScript/ExtJS, MySQL, JSON, etc. As Java is the primary programming language used in the project, excellent Java, JEE, and object-oriented design are a must. Since our projects include graph search and manipulation algorithms, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML), a good understanding of these is considered a plus.

We have had some great profiles from HN. When replying to this opportunity, please do mention why you are interested in IPsoft and Amelia. For more information, feel free to contact me directly: dennis.dereus (at) ipsoft.com.

The interview process is a CV screen followed by a first round of 2 interviews and then a second round of 2 interviews.

Example of the work we do with Amelia:

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160615006592/en/Publ

Docker-iOS, great :) that'd be super useful running containers on my phone

IPsoft | Full Time | Cognitive Implementation engineer | NYC, Amsterdam, Bangalore | ONSITE

The implementation engineering team is responsible for aligning our breakthrough cognitive solution (Amelia) with client requirements and expectations. You will implement functionality in Amelia's Cognitive modules as well as integrate and automate backend business processes.

The cognitive division is growing fast and we're looking for someone who loves to rapidly create new functionality for our clients. Skills we are looking for is experience with scripting (JS, Python, or Groovy), working with APIs, and the ability to design client facing processes.

The interview process is a phone interview followed by an on-site discussion.

For more information, feel free to contact me directly: dennis.dereus@ipsoft.com.

Example of the work we do with Amelia: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160615006592/en/Publ...

IPsoft | Cognitive Implementation Engineer | NYC or Amsterdam | ONSITE

The implementation engineering team is responsible for aligning our breakthrough cognitive solution (Amelia) with client requirements and expectations. The Implementation Engineer will implement all of the Cognitive modules as well as integrate and automate backend business processes to offer a complete solution for our clients

The cognitive division is growing fast and we're looking for someone who loves to rapidly create new functionality for our clients.

Interview process is a phone interview followed by an on-site discussion.

For your application it is best to reach out through our website. Feel free to mention HN: http://www.ipsoft.com/careers/

For more information, feel free to contact me directly: dennis dot dereus at ipsoft dot com

> the competition for rental property is so fierce now that in many places, monthly rent to the private landlord is higher than a monthly mortgage payment would be to buy a similar property.

This is not a malfunction of the market. Economically renting is always expected to cost more than buying. Renting has advantages over buying:

* No need to have a significant amount of cash to deposit

* Flexibility to move out into a larger or smaller house that better fits your needs

* No exposure to the risk of changing housing prices (which don't always go up, and can be hugely impacted by policy)

* Less headaches over maintenance, etc. This is (typically) your landlords responsibility.

So, just like a flexible airfare is more expensive than a 'no changes allowed' fare, it makes perfect sense that a rental house on average is more expensive than owning a house. Also, if rental prices are lower than the mortgage cost, the owner should probably do something different with that house.

TL;DR: rental prices are expected to be higher than owning, because renters are willing to pay a premium, and because landlords otherwise have no incentive to let out a property in the first place.

Parent's comment still stands, but you have to take the regulation into account: * people can live in a bigger house than they could otherwise afford, e.g. if they can't make the deposit * people can live in a bigger house than they could have the mortgage for. (e.g. Dutch regulation you can mortgage 4.5x your yearly salary. If you make 40.000 Eur that is 180k, which perhaps buys you a small studio in Amsterdam). Renting you could probably live in a 250k valued house, because those restrictions don't apply.