randomdrake

> While coding boot camps had many course listings on JavaScript, Ruby, and web development, they had none that covered product management, wireframing, cloud computing, DevOps, or Agile methodologies. In other words, they don’t teach students the other important entrepreneurial tech skills. This makes sense seeing how their focus is coding. But as I stated in my last article, many recruiters are not just looking for engineers, but DevOps engineers – those who have strong leadership, communication, and team-building skills. Being a coding god is one skill set, but knowing how to work collaboratively on a technical team and manage a product is another skill set in itself.

This type of belief in what "coding" is, is hugely responsible for both the rise and fall of these horribly designed, while possibly well-intended, "bootcamps."

Being a good software developer has absolutely nothing to do with "important entrepreneurial tech skills." Knowing how to tackle problems, envision loops and algorithms, write pseudocode, understand the basics of how requests on the Internet work, or how your computer accesses databases or files; these are skills of a good software developer.

The end goal of being a software developer is not CEO.

"many recruiters are not just looking for engineers, but DevOps engineers"

No, recruiters all over the world are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year because they can't find any competent programmers anymore. There are hundreds of people who were taught how to write a conditional in Ruby on Rails available, but ask them to tackle a problem like: "how would you store 1 million strings, search through them while caching results, and make sure only certain individuals can access certain strings," and you get a deer in the headlights look. So recruiters don't ask questions like that anymore. They ask questions that can be simply memorized and regurgitated.

When there's no difference between cramming for your History 101 mid-term and a technical interview for a software developer, we're not in a good spot.

The sooner we can dispel the myth that programming and software is just "coding," "hustling," and "entrepreneurial skills" the sooner companies won't have to pony up over $150k/yr to find a competent software developer.

Temperature variability is integrated by a spatially embedded decision-making center to break dormancy in Arabidopsis seeds

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1704745114

In short, it shows a seed having binary decision-making areas that communicate with each other to determine the best outcome for survival.

From the paper:

"Both plants and animals make decisions in response to the environment to maximize their fitness. Plants use dormancy in seeds to move through time and space, and timing of the transition to germination is influenced by external cues, including temperature. Here, we report the presence of a decision-making center within the root tip of dormant seeds and demonstrate that it shares a similar configuration as some systems within the human brain. Unlike in humans, where this spatial structure is used to filter out noisy inputs from the environment, seeds use this arrangement to harness fluctuating temperatures and stimulate the termination of dormancy. Variable inputs therefore act as an instructive signal for seeds, enhancing the accuracy with which plants are established in ecosystems."

I remember reading in Scientific American a few years back, about a study that was very striking and against common intuition. In manufacturing, robots had overtaken humans at a particular task by a long shot. They were able to perform the completion of assemblies much quicker and with higher accuracy; humans coming in afterwards and applying finishes that required small hands, light touches, or hard to explain measurements.

Robots > Humans. Humans finished what robots couldn't.

What wasn't foreseen, however, was that there was an additional step to shave off even more time. Given some artificial intelligence, the robots could actually tell the humans when, and how, to do assembly during and as part of the assembly process. The robot figuring out the most efficient assembly, and instructing the human to do what it couldn't, was a third step of assembly efficiency not foreseen.

It turned out:

Robots + Humans > Robots > Humans.

Turns out that the body tag has:

  -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;

Here's a screenshot to show off the difference with the top being the current site, and the bottom being what it looks like without that CSS:

https://i.imgur.com/3UOIOWL.png

He was convinced it was anonymous. I attempted to bring up some points to convince him otherwise but found it to be a rather short conversation.

So, you may be as surprised as I was that it's relatively uncommon knowledge, even for intelligent and diligent technical folks, that Bitcoin != anonymous.

It was simply rehashed and presented as "new", by Robert Half[2], and is now hitting the press again.

The full report appears to be available for free on the web[3].

[1] - https://www.roberthalf.co.uk/its-time-we-all-work-happy/repo...

[2] - https://www.roberthalf.co.uk/press/research-finds-age-discon...

[3] - http://heart4happiness.nl/wp-content/upload_folders/heart4ha...

https://blog.namecheap.com/inciting-violence-vs-freedom-spee...

http://www.timewellspent.io

There's an interesting page where they show the results of 200,000 users of an app called Moment[1] where you can see which apps make people the least happy. Additionally, you can see the time limits at which users start to feel happy about their usage.

http://www.timewellspent.io/app-ratings/

I came upon the movement after incorporating suggestions from Tristan Harris' "How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Magician and Google Design Ethicist[2]" into my every day life.

[1] - https://inthemoment.io

[2] - https://journal.thriveglobal.com/how-technology-hijacks-peop...

For products for the blind, the most comprehensive list I could find was from the American Foundation for the Blind:

http://www.afb.org/ProdBrowseTaskResults.aspx?TaskID=274&Spe...

[1] - http://imerciv.com

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assistive_technology

Bravo and thanks for pushing the envelope forward.

Regardless of whether you agree with the changes, the fact that these discussions are occurring about the code that we write is really great. I love seeing how we can take code to a much different level than the 1s and 0s it is often reduced to in the mind.

I'd love to see some other examples of similar movements in software whereby we are taking great care of the code we write as an author, historian, or any other writer would take care of their own words.

[1] - https://www.drupal.org/node/2275877

[2] - https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-2248

[3] - https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/22667

[4] - https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/3185

I am a big Hearthstone fan so I enjoy watching the competitions sometimes. It's been consistently the highest viewed Blizzard game on Twitch for a long time now so it's important to bring up in this discussion.

PlayHearthstone[1] is the official channel for Hearthstone events so you would think it would be representative of how Blizzard wants to operate in the competitive space. Whether it is due to technology, lack of oversight, or simply not caring, Twitch chat is notoriously atrocious; rampant with trolling, vitriol, spamming, and terrible behavior.

To make things worse, there's absolutely no consistency with how events are moderated, if they are at all.

For one event, members are banned for simply asking questions, or providing constructive criticism to the casting of the event with mods creating trigger phrases or words that lead to users getting banned immediately without knowing why. For other events, the chatters are allowed to use all manner of racial, sexual, demeaning, and outright threatening and horrific text towards the casters, the events, and the participants.

It's disgusting to watch, completely unprofessional, and something that has been brought up multiple times by the community with no concrete resolution.

Either Blizzard finds it acceptable, Twitch finds it acceptable, or they haven't figured out how to do well in moderating live chats with thousands of people.

Given their track record, I'm hesitant to be excited about the exclusivity.

[1] - https://www.twitch.tv/playhearthstone

While Uber may have posted $708 million of losses, it is also up 18% in revenue from last quarter. That's 3.4 billion dollars in the first quarter of 2017.

Uber is making approximately $1,500,000 per hour.

I dislike Uber as much as the next person for ethical reasons, but a company that can achieve millions of dollars in revenue per day, in 7 years, is quite extraordinary.

From the looks of these most recent updates, and reading over this blog post, it seems as though Atlas is positioning itself to be an accelerator in its own right. Offering connections, assistance, setup help, guidance, and even access to investors. It seems like Atlas/Stripe is only missing a funding portion and perhaps access to a highly covered "demo day." Are those in the pipeline as well? If not, can you elaborate on what the end goal is here besides simply altruism? Is it just to get new companies in the Stripe pipeline faster?

Kudos to the team on their findings and for their honest post with some tips for their odd architecture. I hope my comment did not imply that "I would have done better," or that hindsight is not, 20/20. I have enough experience to understand both of those things.

However, as architecture grows organically, it doesn't take too much understanding or experience to know that using a single Redis instance for three different use cases would probably run into issues. That's more than likely not a symptom of "organic growth," but of poor decision making.

Trivago received a $4,000,000,000 valuation. Why does their engineering deserve the benefit of the doubt here?

At some point we (technologists and developers) have got to concede that maybe it's not just a few folks trying to keep up with organic growth, but that some actual bad decisions were made and should be accepted and highlighted more than just covering up for mistakes.

I think the post could have been more useful if it would have conceded the point earlier that they made bad decisions from the get-go, that they had to play catch up with those decisions, and that the advice was for attempting to catch up to these decisions. It would be very interesting to understand why they made the choices they did.

Why are they running memcached and Redis at the same time? Why wasn't a regular database suitable for data persistence or temporary data? Why wasn't the cache for search installed on the application server to remove network latency altogether? Why weren't they running php-fpm from the get-go?

I made the comment because doing some research or having some understanding from the beginning, might have avoided the post altogether. I think it's important for us to be able to own our mistakes and honestly approach how we made those mistakes so they aren't repeated by others. I think that is far more useful than a writeup on how to adjust some settings to deal with some fairly basic mistakes. Especially for a technical blog post from a company with a $4B valuation.

Step 1) Throw everything at Redis because you don't know how to architect. Use it as a cache. Use it as a temporary data store. And use it as a persistent data store at the same time. What could go wrong, right?

Step 2) Watch it break because you're using it wrong.

Step 3) Write a blog post about everything you discovered about how you can sort of get it working while continuing to do it wrong.

Step 4) Only concede at the very end of the blog post that you were just doing it wrong™ from the beginning.

"The root causes of these errors were more a conceptional[sic] issue. The way we used Redis was not ideal for this kind of traffic and growth."

Unless I'm missing something, there's really no reason that all three use cases (caching, temporary data store, persistent data store) should all be sitting on a single Redis server so far away from the metal of the application server.

I do not want my search cache waiting on temporary data to be read and flushed from the cache. I do not want data I'd like to persist competing with search cache results. I don't want any of these things! That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works!

Henry Rollins has a spoken word presence that is not to be missed, in my opinion. He gets up on stage with a microphone, takes a fairly aggressive and active physical stance, and just goes... for hours. When I saw him for his first stop on one of his tours, there was a bottle of water near the base of the mic stand that remained untouched for the entirety of the show.

While it may seem a bit jarring to read him going on, at length, it's sort of what he does these days.

"Knowledge without mileage equals bullshit."

The guy lives a very interesting lifestyle and a great deal of what he practices and preaches is highly applicable to the entrepreneurial spirit and existence. Pretty stoked to see him on Hacker News.

One of the commenters, however, nailed it and got to the heart of the difficulty: getting people to do what they say they will do. Period. Full stop.

You can wrap excuses, or culture, or other corporate vocabulary around the matter, but it boils down to that fundamental thing of people doing what they are asked and delivering what they say they will.

Managing people is difficult and if there's an organization who has had more experience organizing people to execute objectives than most anyone else, it's the military. They are damned good at it and there exists a lot of manuals and writings to this end.

The commentor brought up an essay from 1899 that is still brought up in today's military training. It is clearer and more to the point of the fundamental need of people who can do what you ask and deliver what they say.

It's only three pages and it's wonderful. A Message to Garcia by Elbert Hubbard:

http://www.benning.army.mil/infantry/199th/ocs/content/pdf/m...

There's an extraordinary amount of laziness and entitlement in today's businesses; technology is no exception. It is truly rarer and rarer to find someone who will simply: "carry a message to Garcia."

I should have been more diligent and usually am.

I was projecting other feelings from previous arguments and this isn't the place for it and I deserve those down votes as it clearly wasn't a super helpful addition to the discussion.

Sorry and thanks.

The attitude of "Oh that's absolutely demonstrably awful, here's X to subsidize your life," needs to stop.

How about we create societies where the onus of providing clean drinking water to humans is not arguable?

Yes, we have 7 or 8 different types of categorical pains listed for this reason.

> Is cannabis most effective for any particular type?

To my knowledge, there is not a specific type of pain that cannabis has been shown to be "most effective" for. Cannabis acts on important receptors as an agonist or antagonist throughout our bodies.

> Is it probably the wrong choice for any particular type?

There is no evidence, that I'm aware of, that would indicate cannabis would exacerbate or otherwise extend pain for any type of treatment. On the contrary, we discovered our endocannabinoid system[1], which is a strong regulator of pain and discomfort signals, through research and treatment with cannabis.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocannabinoid_system

https://www.cannabisreports.com/cannabis-studies

This includes a section for studies on cannabis and opioid addictions.

Visiting the links presented in the article, you'll find this is possibly not correct. The article may have misrepresented but it does lead to a study that specifically mentions "facial recognition" capabilities on these devices.

"A Market Survey on Body Worn Camera Technologies" from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and sponsored by the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice in November of 2016 found 9 different devices capable of facial recognition[1]. The software itself comes from a handful of startups and technology companies.

They define facial recognition: "Facial recognition features allow the user to identify or verify a person from a digital image or a video frame."

Relevant to Hacker News, this article is timely probably due to the mentioned Dextro being acquired by AXON[2] (owned by TASER) to utilize their software in their body camera[3].

[1] - https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/250381.pdf

[2] - https://medium.com/@dextro_co/dextro-announcement-d21212463b...

[3] - https://buy.taser.com/axon-body-camera/

Amazing tasting well water pumped directly from old glaciers turned into underground reservoirs is "water in the US."

Water so brown and contaminated you can't even drink it is "water in the US."

Using fluoride, chlorine, chloramine, is "water in the US." Desalinated water along coastlines that tastes as such. Streams and springs that are safe to drink from.

Having lived in the area for years I can say even througout the D.C. Metro area, you have different tasting water as well.

Empathy is quite important in a vast array of creative endeavors. Development is not an exception in my opinion. It's the trait that allows developers to know what a person needs even if it isn't what they're asking for.

Being able to put yourself into the shoes of another busy person working in a domain you may have little familiarity with is difficult. Trying to solve technical problems for that person when they are not technical is harder. Efficiently using that person's time and getting to the root of what the actual problem is, not necessarily what they ask you to do, is harder still.

Getting to the point where you know how to ask the minimal amount of questions to understand the actual problem that needs solving takes practice and experience. It requires good listening and comprehension skills, and comes from caring enough in a person's problems to get to the root of the issue; an exercise in empathy.

By getting to the root of the problem you end up with better, more useful software and solutions, with less iterations. Even having the conversations to achieve these understandings requires knowing your tools well enough to gauge what's possible, an innate curiosity to care enough to dive into whatever it is that needs solving, and enough experience to know when to say "yes," "yes, but," "no," or "I don't know," to ideas. And to not only say it, but mean it, and know it to be true.

Additionally, developers who are good at actually solving problems for people must be creative enough to improve upon that situation without being told how.

All of these traits are excellent separately, but combined produce developers who solve problems and create value, not developers that just write code.

Empathy is a trait of some of the best developers I've ever met or worked with and a lack of empathy has been a strong indicator of mediocre, bad, or hard to work with developers.

There were enough forum posts around with folks having similar issues, that I guess I just assumed you had to be willing to spend time tinkering a lot if you wanted it to work, and thought contacting support would end up being an even larger time sink.

Those are just a couple of examples. Attempting other games would end up with incorrect mappings, incorrect button listings, not working, and more.

Very inconsistent and unreliable.

I don't have a tremendous amount of time for games at the moment. Certainly not enough that I want to be tinkering with, or resetting things, when I'm ready to play.

I received a PS4 for the holidays and it's consistently delivered the experience I was hoping to find so I haven't revisited attempting a controller on the computer.

I was hoping that purchasing a Steam Controller would let me play some of the games that were clearly controller-based like Rocket League, or other action-type games not particularly well-suited for keyboard and mouse.

The controller feels plasticky, poorly balanced, and fragile. Give it a gentle shake and you can actually hear the buttons moving around.

Every single game I wanted to play required configuration of some sort or simply didn't work. I even bought games like Rocket League specifically to make use of the controller.

Instead of just working. I had to unplug the USB dongle a couple of times, setup some manual configuration, only to have it still not work, have to be blown all away and reset back to default. It eventually worked... until the next time I went to play and sure as hell: I had to restart Steam a couple times, re-plug in the USB dongle a few times, and eventually the controller was properly identified and working.

The sheer number of incorrect options available for this thing make it useless. Should it emulate keyboard? Is it a gamepad? Joystick? Mouse and gamepad? Mouse and joystick?

I lamented my purchase and wished I would've bought a more standard controller like an Xbox controller or a PlayStation controller as this was a nightmare.

The article appears to be heading down the right track, with trying to get developers on board with mapping actions instead of buttons, but I simply don't have the time to tinker with something like a controller. When I want to play a video game, I want to sit and play a video game.

I spoked to some of my game development friends about it and every one of them said that controller and device support was among one of the most mind-numbingly frustrating and difficult parts of cross-platform development.

The last time I tried the Steam Controller, I fired it up and none of it worked. I could see the controller was detected, but nothing worked. The mouse pad, buttons, controls, nothing. This had happened so many times before. I installed the beta version of Steam, browsed forums for fixes, and everything.

I tried very hard to like this peripheral but it was a complete failure. I'm very hesitant to try even more configuration options considering how much time I sunk into it last time. I literally gave up on having a controller-based gaming experience with my computer, got a PS4 for the holidays, and haven't looked back.

I still play games on my computer, but I gave up on the dream of having a nice controller-based gaming experience on my computer.

No and no.

Not only is it patentable, the United States Government famously holds one[1] for "Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectant."

Additionally, there are already pharmaceutical companies producing, researching, breeding, and selling medical cannabis in other countries like Israel[2].

And if you're looking to see what's happening in the United States, GW Pharmaceuticals is seeing success in their Phase 3 trials for Dravet Syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome[3].

[1] - https://www.google.com/patents/US6630507

[2] - http://www.tikun-olam.info

[3] - https://www.gwpharm.com/about-us/news/gw-announces-new-epidi...

You might consider mentioning it in this blog post as it does offer interesting background information and technical details.

As a specific example, the actual Python scripts used to generate the data[2] and the data itself[3], give a great deal of insight into the question I had.

[1] - https://18f.gsa.gov/2017/01/04/tracking-the-us-governments-p...

[2] - https://github.com/GSA/https/tree/master/compliance

[3] - https://github.com/GSA/https/tree/master/compliance/data

While the article did a good job explaining how pshtt works and how it generates data for the reporting, it didn't dive too much into the scanning itself. Since this is posted on Hacker News, I'd love to hear more about the nitty gritty of the data collection itself.

Can you talk about what sort of setup you run, and what sort of technical and interdepartmental challenges you run into scanning, storing, and obtaining data for 1,143 government websites?