skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What questions would you ask to an incredibly talented engineer?
Hello HN,

I am an engineer in the valley working for a big tech company. I am a rather recent graduate, and I have a strong interest in infrastructure/data engineering.

Tomorrow, I have an appointment with one of the company's star engineer who accepted to meet with me so I can ask him questions about infra/data stuff.

My objective is to get advices, and insights so I can better myself technically. I have realized that all the questions I could think of were almost certainly biased by my own (and comparatively slim) experience in the field.

More senior engineers of HN, in insight, what questions would you have asked if you were given a similar opportunity? How to get the most out of this meeting?
The software killed it. A minute ago I got curious what item 10M was and saw that and unkilled it.

I think we can declare you both the co-champions of item 10,000,000.
Nava | Washington DC^ | Experienced full-stack developers/devops/product manager/operations | On-site - Full Time

We're a small team of engineers from Silicon Valley that came out to DC last year to help fix Healthcare.gov. It turns out there’s a lot more to fix. And it’s surprising how much can be fixed by a small group of resourceful people with a Silicon Valley mindset, deep technical experience, working closely with dedicated civil servants in government.

Our revamped Healthcare.gov application has been used by millions, converts 35% better, and halves the completion time. The login system we rebuilt is about two orders of magnitude more reliable and two orders of magnitude less expensive; for example, it’s about $70M less per year to operate.

People die because the Veteran's Administration is months behind in processing claims. The Social Security Administration pays benefits to millions of deceased Americans. $80 billion is spent every year on federal IT contracting, and 96% of projects are deemed failures. [0]

That’s not because there’s some conspiracy or because government is inherently incapable of doing it right. These are complicated legacy systems and processes, and there are very few people with modern tech industry experience who are aware of these problems and willing to help fix them. You can help change that.

Our team is 10 people (Stanford, Google, YC alums), and we plan to bring on a few people every month through 2015.

We’re looking for:

* experienced full-stack engineers

* experienced devops engineers

* a product manager with a technical background

* a hyper-resourceful operations person

We have a social mission (we just incorporated as a public benefit corporation), but we pay market compensation (above market, for DC) and equity (above market).

If you'd like to build software and infrastructure that radically improves how our government serves people, we’d love to hear from you at jobs@navahq.com

^Not in DC / able to relocate, but intrigued and in SF? Talk to us!

For more info, google "nava startup" (our SEO, not strong)

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/22/th...
In point of fact I'm using a computer from ~2002ish, and it works more or less fine. The biggest issue is websites that pull in like 1000 external resources and constantly run scripts.
Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Q2b0VpW...
Synthego | BioTech | Redwood City, CA | ONSITE

At Synthego, we are looking for people who want to help build a fully-automated, research facility that moves, mixes, manipulates, and analyzes molecules and cells. We're looking for badassery in the following areas:

1) software engineers - mostly Python

2) mechanical engineers (SolidWorks)

3) roboticists

4) wet lab technicians with experience in chemistry or biochemistry labs

5) Operations folks to help setup our our automated lab

6) Anyone else who kicks ass in significant technically deep ways in an engineering or scientific discipline.

In general, we have—and are continuing to—build a team of extreme technical and scientific ass-kickers, in a joyful, you-own-it kind of environment. We are backed by Founders Fund, and located in Redwood City, CA email us at join@synthego.com for more information.
When in Doubt, Let People Think You’re a Fool
Whether or not it was their idea to do so, it's interesting that there's a cultural norm that they refund all of the pledges. I don't see any claim in the article that they invented this concept on their own for fun.
I'm not from Chicago. Does this have anything to do with the Netflix tax from a month ago?
The results are somewhat disappointing with examples like
"sqrt(x * x + y * y)". Compare that result to http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/06/02/whats-so-hard-about...
I don't agree with any of these solutions. In my opinion the circle should be positioned in an infinite plane, then random vectors should be drawn on the plane and ignored unless they intersect the circle. Then after making some large amount of intersecting vectors you calculate. I'm guessing that this essentially reduces to the random endpoints method.

The other two methods don't make sense at all to me. Random chords is just obviously not a random sampling of possible vectors-- it's essentially the same as sampling a gaussian(x) distribution using an equal sampling in x and ignoring the fact that a gaussian is a PDF and you can't sample that way, you need to invert it into a CDF and take an equal sampling in _y_. Very basic I think...

And random midpoint doesn't strike me as random either as it forces the orientations of the vectors to be non-random and systematically smaller than random because of the pi*r^2 area-dependence of concentric circles...

But, what do I know.
>"Think of how often you Undo every day. Undo makes lots of apps safe for exploration and regular use."

In 2015, when I see and use software that doesn't subtly prompt the user to undo actions for a short period of time after an interaction I just shake my head.

It's such an easy way to reduce customer service complaints it's ridiculous. Empirically, with the companies I have consulted, 'ridiculous' often means 20-40% instant reduction of complaints.
Don’t US Kids Deserve the Right to Be Forgotten?
And California policy has had a not-insignificant impact on that range of options.
The idea of a "Right to be Forgotten" in practice always seems to me like claiming a right to make other people loose their memory (even if electronic). That is at best problematic.

However, as this infographic shows, kids now are affecting their futures in ways they can't possibly understand.

Any thoughts on a solution?
I don't know why it dropped. I don't presume to know the reason. Although I'm sure there are some people who feel pretty certain about what happened.

Why does it matter? If we are already treating each other excellently, as I suggested, and women still won't join computing, then I don't care. If we aren't treating each other in a civil manner, then by all means that what we should do.

I'm in no way advocating special treatment for women. I want to be clear about that.
https://www.google.pt/search?q=emphasise&oq=emphasise&aqs=ch... one is british english the other one is american english
Exactly, most of the real numbers have an infinite number of digits!
I don't believe he thinks about it at all . It has just always been so to him, like the sun comes up in the morning.
That's what I always enjoyed about the concept of flattr. Having to decide "Do I want to donate 10c to this page?" all the time is annoying. Specifying a fixed monthly amount, then dividing it between every site I liked reduces the incremental cost of liking something to 0, which reduces the needed decision energy (for me at least).

Of course, the downside is centralised tracking of what content you like, which is icky.
modhax
Sometimes people forget that browsers are user agents. Sometimes that includes browser developers.
U.S. Paychecks Grow at Record-Slow Pace
What about lines across a square? They must also all hit two points on its perimeter, but randomly choosing p1, p2 in that case will show a clear bias towards the diagonals.

Of course a circle has no corners to complicate things like that, but it can still have biases. Just because we have found a way to uniquely identify cords does not mean it will lead to a uniform distribution.
Voxel8 | Greater Boston Area (Cambridge, Somerville) | ONSITE, FULLTIME, Jr., Sr. Software Devs

At Voxel8 we are currently developing the world's first 3D electronics printer. We launched out of a Harvard University materials science lab a year ago, and just closed a $12M Series-A. We are actively seeking full time junior and senior software developers.

I am hiring developers interested in 3D printing who have experience with web technologies like Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and WebGL. We are also looking for embedded software developers to work on our printer firmware, and anyone interested in computational geometry.

And finally one role that may be a little different than what is out there is someone to manage "DevOps" on our printer. Our device runs linux on an internal single board computer. If you have experience managing linux systems on machines with limited resources then this job is for you. We need to ensure the machine is up and operating with high reliability.

If any of the above sounds interesting shoot me an email at jack@voxel8.co
You can call any constraint imposed by the language a type and that may be true in the abstract sense, but what counts when talking about types in a language is what the language's own type system has to say on the matter

What counts isn't so much what the specification calls a 'type' but rather how the compiler does type reduction - and with all of the compilers I've worked with, argument decorators like 'in' & 'out' are typically handled during type reduction.

depending on how the compiler chooses to pass the values. Note that even 'in out' parameters may be passed by value through a 'pass by copy-in copy-out' mechanism, so whether a parameter is passed by value or reference is largely handled behind the scenes, so the type system doesn't include that information. If it did, Ada would be even more verbose and unwieldy than its reputation suggests, as type enforcement is much more strict in Ada.

Very interesting! I know very little about Ada - other than that it has generally been considered as a safer alternative to C for applications-programming in the aerospace software world.

At the same time, I can say that without the ability to determine the how of how the compiler will pass arguments - by value, by copy, by reverse copy, by reference - I wouldn't consider Ada to be an alternative to C in the systems-programming domain, any more than I would consider Haskell or Javascript to be systems-programming languages. Your original claim, in your words, was that 'const' in C and C++ is broken. C, or any other systems-programming language, simply has more constraints on what const could possibly be. The Ada approach to handling const would simply never work in C with C's implementation guarantees. To pseudo-quote a great man, Dennis Ritchie,

If you want magical argument passing, sometimes resulting in silent and unexpected argument copying, you know where to get it.
If we had some kind of basic income, gas taxes, road use fees, parking fees, and many other prices attached to negative externalities (e.g. general carbon taxes) would be much more palatable at a societal level.
Generating random memorable username
I can't speak for LA or NYC but I would suspect in Cleveland and Pittsburgh this has much more to do with decline of the steel and coal industries than it does with automobile emissions.
The ninja story takes into account the symmetries of the circle, so it basically pre-divides your result.
Think British comedy, not big snake. Monty Python had a sketch about cheese. Thus wheels of cheese.
I am super stoked they now have a Firefox compatible version. The React team have been working very hard and it shows. I've been working with React for about a year now, building an application using React Native and the libraries and tools are absolutely solid, something other libraries and frameworks are definitely missing.
Pretty much. Iteration and conditionals are the bane of a making a DAG elegant. I think the inverse is fairly true too, data flow is much better visualized in a DAG and much more difficult to see in an imperative line by line approach.
It's interesting that you say all that--because none of that rings true to me. Quite literally none of it. Even the idea of understanding types is foreign to me, because I only think of types as collections of messages that objects respond to and use them only as shorthand for exactly that; like, my yardocs are full of [#to_sym] as a "type" instead. Things like `extend` are trivial to me, and I can explain both their semantic behavior and their implementation in three sentences. I find Ruby fairly consistent and its libraries no more difficult than .NET--and seeing as how because of plenty of bad decisions you can't really trust IntelliSense in the first place (like, say, arrays implementing IList<T> but throwing an exception for Add()), I find myself Googling no less for the documentation in .NET. And much, much less than in Scala, though I am very comfortable in that, too.

I'm curious, though. When you say "Ruby", how much of that was outside of Rails? I don't intend that as an ad-hominem, but rather in the exploration of a theory that I've had for a while. I am wondering if the approach one takes to learning the language and the ecosystem influences how much "magic" there is to Ruby. What you describe sounds familiar from friends and colleagues who learned Rails, and Ruby incidental to it. I only vaguely know Rails at all, I don't use Ruby for web applications beyond a Sinatra server as a dumb API.

(And, as I said, RubyMine has a stop-the-world, click-around debugger, much like Visual Studio. I've only used it once or twice, because the REPL is comfortable to me, but it does exist.)
There are at least two major classes of people using Python.

On the one hand, there are people who write, distribute and deploy Unix-y-type software -- system utilities, web applications, service daemons, etc. These users write for users who are like themselves, or who are sysadmins of Unix-y systems. Their concern is with automatable, repeatable, command-line-friendly packaging, distribution and deployment. They benefit from wheels because it saves them a potentially-time-consuming build step during installation, and will generally prefer wheels or tarballs as a distribution format.

On the other hand, there are people who use Python as a scientific computing and number-crunching stack. Many of them do not write and distribute their own applications; they distribute the results of their code. Many of them run on desktop-type machines using Windows. What they primarily want is a single .exe they can download and run which will provide Python plus all the numeric/scientific libraries in one install, plus (increasingly) IPython Notebook as a way to share their work.

There is no single standard which works well for both of these groups.
Fermi paradox
A point can by described by two numbers (the coordinates). If we are selecting a "random point in a square", everybody's intuition agrees that this means selecting the x coordinate and the y coordinate from a flat distribution.

In a similar manner, a chord can by described by a point and a direction.

– The first (1/2) method selects a point from a flat distribution along x-axis, and defines that the direction is always vertical. (Edit: this is how I interpreted the animated gif, but Wikipedia says that actually from a flat distribution along a random radius, and then the direction is perpendicular to the radius.)

– The second (1/3) method selects a point from a flat distribution on the perimeter, and then actually selects another point also from the same distribution, to define the direction by connecting these points.

– The third (1/4) method selects a point from a flat distribution on the circle area, and the defines that the direction is always perpendicular to the radius.

The whole point of the paradox is to demonstrate that there is no single universally agreed upon way to define a flat distribution for the set of all chords. And when we start to try to define one, by breaking the definition of a cord into components, and sampling these components from a flat distribution (or just selecting one direction, because symmetry says they are all equal), we get different results depending on how we broke the concept of cord into components.
That was my first reaction also.

I wouldn't think too much of it. It's reasonable for the likelihood of 'garbage collection' referring to memory management to be higher than collecting trash on HN. Conversely, if you saw it on CNN and thought memory management, then you might have a problem.
As a (now casual) sysadmin, I think things have gotten a bit better. Virtualenv (now part of python3) helps a lot. The trick, if running on Debian, is:

1) use system python -- if you can. Now with python3.4 and 2.7 in stable, that's the easy bit.

2) If you can't do 1), use backports and/or manually backport[1]

3) If you need python-packages that depend on c-libraries, use "apt-get build-dep python-foo".

4) use a virtualenv, or several virtualenvs, eg:

virtualenv -p python2.7 myvenv
./myvenv/bin/pip list -o #list outdated packages,
# typically that'll mean you first need to:
./myvenv/bin/pip install -U pip #possibly also setuptools

Then install the packages you need with pip -- see 3) for tip on stuff like pyqt that needs some (fairly hairy) packages.

This works for most everything -- except perhaps for pygame, which is exceptionally gnarly.

[1] Manually backport, the easy way:

sudo -s
echo "deb-src http://httpredir.debian.org/debian\
sid main contrib non-free" \
>> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sid-src.list
apt-get update
cd /tmp
apt-get build-dep python3
exit # No need to build as root
apt-get source python3 # this assumes sid has a version
# that'll work for you
cd python3*
dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i python...deb

Note, this may or may not work with major packages like python -- but it often goes a long way. If you can't get enough build-deps satisfied, things are more complicated -- and you're probably better off running testing/unstable in a chroot, possible with help of the schroot package -- rather than fighting with conflicting packages.
on OSX: http://superuser.com/questions/8381/can-i-reduce-the-cpu-spe...

on Windows: http://superuser.com/questions/565347/how-does-windows-limit...

On Linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/CPU_frequency_scaling

You can also play with the BIOS, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underclocking
I'm curious how many of your criticisms are reflective of Ruby as of today, rather than the Ruby that upset you when you were starting. I learned Ruby literally eighteen months ago, have never written code against 1.9 to say nothing of 1.8, and everything in this thread is totally foreign to me.
A couple others include QB3 (CA) http://qb3.org/startups/incubators, Indie Bio (SF) http://indie.bio, Harlem Biospace (NYC) http://harlembiospace.com, Science Center Port (Philly)https://www.sciencecenter.org/programs/port-business-incubat..., Jansen Labs (4 sites) http://jlabs.jnjinnovation.com/
ChatID (NYC, Austin, San Francisco) http://chatid.com

ChatID is a quickly growing platform for brands and consumers to directly communicate via chat across any website and on any device. Our chat product is live for partnered brands on Walmart.com, Sears.com and Newegg.com

Our current engineering openings:

* Dev Ops Engineer

* Product Designer

* Senior Integration Engineer

* Automation & QA Engineer

All of our openings and their job descriptions can be found here: http://jobvite.com/m?3dx3vhw4

About the company:

- We're 40+ people based in NYC, Austin and San Francisco

- Our chat services are written in Lua and powered by Prosody [https://prosody.im/] an open source XMPP server maintained by two of our cofounders, one of which is a member of the XMPP council

Technologies we use:

- CoffeeScript, Backbone.js, Angular.js, Flux and React, D3, SASS/LESS

- Python, Flask, PostgreSQL, InfluxDB, RabbitMQ, Apache Spark, Cloudera Impala

- Lua, OpenResty/NGINX, Prosody

Sound interesting? Apply at http://jobvite.com/m?3dx3vhw4 or send us an email at careers@chatid.com
+1 Working for the LF is fantastic.

Not that I'm biased or anything.

//works for the LF and loves it.
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Yeah the idea that taking a taxi is a way to reduce your energy consumption footprint is absurd. Get on a bike or catch public transport you nimrod.
Actually, I was very pleasantly surprised at how well pip+python3.4+visual studio (w/correct paths set up so that pip finds the compiler) worked.

Granted this was recently, under windows 8.1 (tried it mostly for fun, and so that I have a decent calculator (ipython) on hand when I boot up in windows).
Replace "sometimes" with "nearly always" in the scientific world.
> But we all need role models to model ourselves after and sadly, there is a lack of women role models in computing. I'm not saying they don't exist - but it is an predominantly male profession.

We can dispute that.

>Think back to why you got interested in computers, wasn't it because you had someone to look up to? Perhaps some family member or a computing legend?

It was because I saw someone playing videogames in the computer at my mom's job. He was a man, but in no way he was a role model. He could've been an alien and I still would only be fascinated about the computer. I didn't care for the guy at all.

>Women also need women role models and those usually just don't randomly appear - there is a certain critical mass that might have to be created with other methods, perhaps with encouragement from the so called "allies" the article mentions, although that might not be the best way to put it.

I fail to see why should I care.

>Young women have to look at it as a viable career option to work in computing, and for that to happen they need someone to pave the way.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. This is what you say. What you really want is special treatment for women in computing e.g. quotas, grants and internships.

I do not care for any of that. The way I see those things do more harm than good.
But calling it "Scientific integrity" makes it sound like it's a universally accepted standard.

And perhaps it is, but if not, it makes sense to call these specific requirements that Feynman came up with "Feynman Integrity".
Extensions available officially for major browsers are put through a review process first, and installing unofficial extensions requires going out of your way and there are multiple warnings given. The article conveniently doesn't mention this. FUD.
You can't use conda in many (most?) cases.

Specifically, there aren’t conda packages for every Python package. And if there are, they are behind their pip alternatives in many cases. Sometimes you then need to fall back to pip. However, it is impossible to install some packages into conda environments via pip. So basically the whole solution falls apart because the python libs you install via pip can't find C libraries installed via conda.

Edit:
One example is:
https://github.com/ContinuumIO/anaconda-issues/issues/177

Their solution was to include openssl into conda. Clearly, this solution doesn't generalize to other libs. Just things that use openssl.