skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm so glad that this is getting more visibility. I spent 5 long years at Amazon Web Services from 2008 - 2013 as a Software Development Engineer, and was at some point promoted to SDE II ;)

It's a shark eat shark environment. I never cried, but I saw others (specially female colleagues) do. After 2 years of waking up in the middle of the night for bullshit on-call pages (wack-a-mole with production issues) and increasingly heavier deadlines, I developed stress related medical issues. That was a wake up call for me, and as soon as I realized the shit place that I was in, I started showing up at the office detached, practicing interview questions and doing phone screen interviews from work. I eventually got offers from Facebook/Google, and moved on. It was only then that I realize I was actually paid at the 50th percentile for my position's level and experience all along.

Since I left, I've helped multiple other friends/colleagues detach emotionally from the need for approval, practice for interviews and get job offers from Apple/FB/Google for substantial (> %75) raises.

I get Amazon recruiters contacting me all the time, and I'm always nice to them because I know the shit environment they're stuck in. Though in the back of my mind I'm thinking "there's no way in hell I'd ever go back"

Fuck Jeff, fuck Amazon, fuck AWS, and fuck their leadership principles.
I'm not sure myths can be trusted. I'm sure many people, when they think of Microsoft's founding, think of Bill Gates. And of Apple's, Steve Jobs. But neither were single founders.
The point here (pun intended) is that reference is not an OOP specified feature. Polymorphism is.
Really great representation of the enormity of the our solar system (and the universe)
Show HN: Xkcd – Sublime Text 3 plugin for viewing xkcd comics
My main complaint is the search interface. When they first put the Deja News archive online, the search function was very good. It even improved over the first few years.

One great thing is that USENET posts were dated, so you could look for the first occurrence of a word, phrase, rumor, etc. That's hard to do on the web.

Then, a few years ago, the search function started to get worse with every release, with reduced functionality and more and more unreliable results. You might search for a term and see a result from 2005. Then, when you limited results to before 2006, you would get nothing! Around the time they were trying to force Google-plus integration, it became nearly unusable.

There used to be an advanced search page[1], but that's gone. When you search within a group, there's a pull-down for advanced search options, but that's missing from the main cross-group search. It seems that search operators[2] may still work.

The same kind of degradation happened with Google News Archive and, to a lesser extent, Google Books.

[1] https://groups.google.com/advanced_search

[2] https://support.google.com/groups/answer/2371405
Are they? If you can switch the LED fast enough (so the keyboard LEDs are out) and you keep the dark periods brief enough you should be able to hide it quite well. If you modulate it right you might be able to pick the data out of the reflections on walls, whiteboards, etc, perhaps even from outside a window.
7 lessons Soccer taught me
How chimpanzees helped inspire the Windows start menu
No, I'm not. I was giving two conditional scenarios, and dismissing the "salary" one precisely because the people you're telling me I'm ignoring are unlikely to work in those locations.

To reiterate:

IF you are not working in an office park off an interstate near an affluent suburb, most mid-sized American cities have enough transit to get by.

IF you are working in an office park off an interstate near an affluent suburb, then you're probably making enough that you can stitch together a combination of public transit and taxis to get to work from a low-rent area.

And yeah, long commutes suck when you're paying for child care. Which is why a lot of people choose a child care facility close to work.

Basically, my point was that I know a lot of Europeans whose commute involves > 1/2 mile of walking. And also a lot of Americans who live in cities that "don't have any public transit" because they have to walk 1/2 - 1 mile to get to a stop that takes them directly to work.

I'm not saying American public transit doesn't need to improve. Just that if Americans always demand door-to-door service, then public transit will never be good enough. And, more over, will always suck because that's an impossible demand.
- Comic lover (inside me me): "Thrilling story. So sad that it ended in only 6 episodes."

- Techie (inside me): "Oh boy, I can mouse-select the skewed, transformed text in each block, how creator could have done this? Seems pretty tricky. Is there any framework, or from scratch?! Head onto Github..."
I've had the same experience as the commenter your replying to did, as has most everyone on my team. I work at AWS, though, and no one from web services seems to have been interviewed for this article.
I got a reply over email from the author. He says:

"I hope the Wiki will get back up in two weeks when my students return to fix the webserver. Contact me then if it is not up yet."
Remember the "Dear Amazon interns, some advice from an old man who has been at Amazon way too long." post that was made a month ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/3ce0s8/dear_amazon...
It really would be interesting to know if anyone took it beyond the (amazing) demo phase.
http://snakeoil.cr.yp.to/submissions.html
I'm not qualified to answer that question, but I was curious too, did some googling and found another resource. This is still not very satisfying, but there is a little more information on the Reddit thread about this competition:

https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/1us6a1/snake_oil_cr...?
this is very nice.
At least they seem to be upfront about it (inside their own walls, perhaps). There are plenty of companies who preach work/life balance and give lip service to employees being rewarded based on their output, and everyone knows it's complete BS.
I have worked all over Amazon as an SDE and Manager, and still do (11 years and counting.) I have certainly seen parts of the company that resemble parts of this article, especially OLR backstabbing, which I especially despise. As someone in a technical job family, it has always been easy for me to transfer internally to better-run corners of the company.

I stick around because I find that I like the low-fat culture, and working with extremely high achievers. Most of those top-tier people that I know in the tech families that have left end up coming back within a few years because they get bored on the outside. The exceptions overwhelmingly are those who left for Google, they never look back.

I cannot imagine literally crying about criticism in a meeting, and have never seen it myself. Working in a place with high standards and honest criticism is preferable to the alternatives. The real danger is inadequate mechanisms to deal with toxic org politics, and especially jackasses who think 80 hour weeks are not a sign of a problem. This definitely needs to change.
I doubt WebGL will be a serious competitor to any platform 3D engine for at least another decade, probably two.
Ok since we are talking Amazon, let me share my interviewing experience with them. I was talking to an AWS team.

Had a phone interview scheduled. They forgot about me. Ok, it happens in a big company. Had another one, went pretty well. They invited me over.

I show up and my contact person (my future manager) wasn't there that day. They had me wait for 30min, I guess until they scrambled to find a replacement. Except 2 people I talked to that day, everyone else seemed like they didn't expect to be interviewing anyone and were pulled in last minute. Needless to say that made for a pretty bad experience.

Oh and they promised lunch, ok, I wasn't hungry but they actually forgot about me during lunch. I was just sitting there in the conference room by myself.

I thought, ok, this is pretty bad. But no, that's not all, they promised "we'll get back to you with an answer in 2 days". Took almost 3 weeks. At that point I was just curious how long they would take and just waited.

So anyway, I hear people like working there. But judging by me experience, there are some red flags. I think it points to how things are run internally.
Wait, that means all manuals are already digital? So no information actually gets lost, only the old hardcopies?

Edit: Nevermind, searchable database for which manual you want to buy a hardcopy of, not the actual manual...
Good grief, is that example supposed to convince me to use C++, or fun away from it is fast as I can?
When I started using python I wondered why classes were not so prevalent. I was just coming out of several years of C# (I had scaled the MVVM WPF mountain. Interfaces everywhere). Since then I realize that I rarely use classes except to store a basic model. And then, unless there's logic around how to convert a value from one thing to another (full name by combining first name and last name as a simple example) I've started moving things like validation and non basic business logic into their own modules. This makes using it across systems easier and allows me to scale the complexities better. Almost no OOP used basically. This has been pretty liberating as far as development and testing goes.

(Of course in 2 years I'll understand the cons of this approach and will think back on these times and wonder how I could have been so naive. :D )
I'd go with "Prime numbers can't be prime-factored".
In any broadcast medium the broadcaster is expected to conform to community standards so somebody will have to watch the ads and do some editorial selection.

As for production values, look at the ads run by local car dealers, furniture stores and such. Images with text and voi eovers play well. If all else fails use the "Ken burns effect"

A person with a month or so of training and maybe $5k of gear could produce a few ads for a customer in a day and you have to hook up that person to the customer.
Thank you, slavik and titanomachy - this was pretty much the point I was /trying/ to make, it didn't come out right.
No true scotsman eh? There's no doubt that both military industrial complexes engage in propaganda.

Plenty here for you to peruse, enough to satisfy the 'often' condition, while simultaneously not always being 'on message'.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/tag/george-w-bush/
American here. I've never heard of this usage of pressure cookers, and I'm not sure I really understand it. Can anyone explain why whistle counting works?

Does the pressure-temperature relation of the combined gas law hold in the steam regime, considering the weight clamps the cooker to a maximum pressure? It seems like the whistle frequency would be a function of heat input to the system (or rather heat lost) while temperature would mostly be determined by the letoff pressure value. You'd think a longer time or higher temperature would shorten cooking time, not the amount of heat escaping the system. Below the letoff pressure, temperature is a great proxy for pressure (via the combined gas law), and indeed this is how many of the electric pressure cookers "sense" pressure; they have thermistors thermally coupled to the cook pot. Could it be that pressure recovers to the letoff value more quickly at higher temp? That would make whistle counting for temperature roughly similar to the light measurement method of the modulo camera that was discussed a couple days ago[2]. It seems like the diameter of the pot might impact pressure recovery time though.

All that said, it is GREAT to see more cooking tech, OP. Anything that helps people to cook more (or better) can only be a good thing.

Perhaps worth knowing is that there are three types[1] of pressure cookers, and it seems like OP's product could only potentially work for one (?) of them: old-school weight-clamped. Fagor-type pressure cookers release steam constantly, old-school weight-on-top pressure cookers release steam intermittently, and Kuhn Rikon pressure cookers release no steam at all (best for flavor since no volatiles are lost to the kitchen with escaping steam).

1. http://www.cookingissues.com/index.html%3Fp=2561.html

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10053691
A related talk, well worth watching: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/a-whole-new-world
When a friend relocated to London for a well-paying job to "move data around" at Google, I couldn't help to think how similar it seemed to banking. When I read you post about "paying your dues to be in the club" I think the same thing.
I'm a former Amazonian - things are definitely worse for non-tech roles, but I wouldn't say that on the dev side things are "similar to any other large somewhat hip company".

To put in context - Amazon's typical engineering tenure (when I was there) was 18 months - that's engineering roles only. I've worked many jobs since and by a wide margin Amazon still has the highest engineering churn rate I've ever seen.

My personal take on this article is that it seems a bit exaggerated based on my experiences at the company, but otherwise largely accurate. I haven't seen anyone cry, but definitely a lot of shellshocked people wallowing at their desks after being openly reamed out by managers in front of their peers. The general culture is extremely dog eat dog, and in my 2 years there I saw a whole lot of behavior lacking in basic human decency/empathy, justified under the notion that "we're doing hard work with hard technology and have high standards and if you can't keep up you can wash out".

In all my jobs since Amazon I have never once encountered the level of hostility routinely and openly displayed between manager/subordinate and between peers that I saw there. I didn't think much of it at the time - that whole type of behavior was normalized - but it's only once I got out and worked at much friendlier, more collaborative places that I realized how insane and aberrant it is.

There's also sometimes this curious notion that this sort of culture is a requirement for doing meaningful things, and that ditching Amazon for a place with less toxic workplace culture necessarily means you won't be able to achieve great things. This is laughably false of course, and makes me wonder if the people perpetuating it have seen what other companies are doing.
PunkSPIDER – A Global Web Application Vulnerability Search Engine
I don't think Amazon pays well. I turned down an offer from Amazon recently. It was to work in an area that was nearest and closest to my heart. Unfortunately their offer was 50 to 100k behind other offers.
I am curious. If work environment was so toxic, why did you stick around 5 long years? What was your thought process? I have had similar happened to my friends who somehow get stuck at one place for one reason or other and don't realize what they are missing out. Right now, I am trying to help another friend who is stuck in similar situation (not at Amazon).
There are indeed "quantum computers" that work on a few qubits (less than 10), but without what is called "error protection". They are useless for running factorization of practical sizes (i.e. they do break small keys, but you can break those by hand on paper as well).
Dear Huffington Post, WTF Is Going on with You? Day 13 – IGNORED
raises hand

What's a behavioural question?
Complete and total crap hosting clearly illegal material is not covered by net neutrality - That's covered by a totally different set of laws.
People seem to fundamentally misunderstand what a company is. It exists for the benefit of its shareholders, and secondarily, customers. It will take whatever actions necessary towards achieving this. It'll accrue benefits to the employee to the extent it helps towards these goals.

Now what happens in a lot of publicly-traded large companies is, the inmates start running the asylum. The workplace primarily starts to exist for the benefit of the employee. Since internally most companies are structured as an oligarchy or dictatorship, most of these benefits accrue to "management" - another type of employee. Harmonious behavior and not creating too much trouble become the premium value. Everything seems to be going great, until you implode and fire thousands of people, or get acquired and the same things happen. The lucky ones retire before that. All of this, of course, happens to the detriment of shareholders.

Look at Microsoft. Great employee satisfaction. They missed out on the internet, on search, on social, on mobile, all the while bringing in HUNDREDS of BILLIONS in revenue over the last 20 years. Ballmer gets a lot of the blame, but everybody else also kind of just went with it. Asleep at the switch.

A company doesn't exist for the employee to have good work-balance, to get self-worth, nurture your creativity or whatever. It exploits your very human needs and desires to create wealth for its shareholders. Google would like you to think it's just like college, and to give you great social opportunities and make as many friends as possible, so it replaces your original parent-in-standing, The College Campus. The more of your psyche and social world is tied to the corporation, the more meaning you'll ascribe to your work, the more likely you'll stay.
There are higher-productivity, strongly/statically typed languages out there that are probably more reasonable for typical applications programming
>>Since I left, I've helped multiple other friends/colleagues detach emotionally from the need for approval, practice for interviews and get job offers from Apple/FB/Google for substantial (> %75) raises.

Is that 75% number normalized for the area's cost-of-living? Seattle isn't nearly as expensive as the Bay Area (which is where those other companies you mentioned are located), so of course the nominal salaries will be substantially lower.
This doesn't prescribe which branch you do the git push to though. I'm sure you could just as easily set up a branching scheme where you went through testing and internal releases, and launched new code off a stable branchline
Amazon does _not_ pay as well as Google/FB/Apple/Twitter/Netflix/LinkedIn/Salesforce/etc.
If you dont want to open your network ports, you could setup an amazon aws or something (or firebase, disclaimer im a firebase torch/fan) to allow control from outside your house
> "companies need to get it right instead of playing the odds"

Doesn't sound cost-effective.
To expand a bit on this quite correct "no": There are many interpretations of quantum mechanics, like Bohm Mechanics, Multiverse, Copenhagen, but they all are mathematically equivalent and indistinguishable. They are of purely philosophical interest, not scientific (people will argue about this last sentence, but this would be an argument over semantics, not science).

So please do not call it "Multiverse theory", rather "Multiverse interpretation" :)
I would define it as a question about how you handled a particular type of situation or how you would handle a particular situation.

I think it's primarily used in contrast to a coding question.
I interviewed with AWS and had a terrible experience. See my other top level reply.
Show HN: CLake – play Snake from your CLI
It's a push to call the Unreal 4 support decent. Unity at least have it as part of their product feature set. Unreal seem to do it only as a demonstration piece.

The problem with taking a engine like Unity or Unreal and compiling to javascript is that 1) they end up with very large blobs of javascript (Unity is around 5MB of JS for the webplayer alone) 2) It is impossible to optimize, debug or inspect any of that code in the target setting. Neither of these engines have ever demonstrated code running on mobile browsers for good reasons, they can't.

Meanwhile, engines designed specifically for the web, for example, PlayCanvas [https://playcanvas.com] let you create content that works on every device, down to the likes of the iPhone 4S and comes in much smaller download sizes. e.g.

http://tanx.playcanvas.com (~1MB)

http://mmx.playcanvas.com (~3MB)

http://swooop.playcanvas.com (~10MB)

All of which work on mobile browsers. The future of Web 3D is not compilation of desktop game engines. It's engine's designed to be web (and mobile) first.
Just a quick note: NASA is not a unified entity marching in lockstep. This was one org-unit's decision made for their own work. I work with a lab at NASA GRC that uses Unity engine pretty extensively for scientific visualization.
Fzf-fs: file browser and navigator with fuzzy matching
> Create a plugin, extension, or theme.

For WHAT? I assume you mean wordpress, but it would be best to say that.

> Create safe website update procedures

What does that mean? Reads like you ran out of stuff to bullet so you tacked on something which sounded good.

I'd also included database technologies in your "What can you work with?" section.

When I click on "Featured Work," I get a modal dialog and by far the most important thing on that is the "View Live" button, but it is extremely hard to find since it blends in with the other text on the page.

Also that dialog looks unbalanced. You have two things on the left and one thing on the right. It either looks like "Technologies used" is incorrectly positioned OR the title/link are incorrectly positioned. Regardless for such an important dialog it feels really poorly thought out.

Overall I hate the modal dialog. Here's some examples of what others have done:

http://cleayweb.com.au/
http://www.sarahevansdesign.co.uk/

Both have a Featured Work page. It is better on both than yours.

Also why is the Contact Form so tiny? It feels like it was pasted onto the page with no thought to how the rest of the page looks. Like tiny hard to read text boxes are never nice. Go look at Microsoft's Microsoft Account signup page, that's how big textboxes should be.

The image behind the "HI, I'M DOMINIC MONROE WEB DEVELOPER" stuff is so fucking huge that's almost all I can see when I load the page. I can just see the top of your heads in that photograph. What resolution are you developing for? And why is that image so important to your product? Is THIS[0] really the most important thing on your site? Not, you know, content...

[0] https://static.pexels.com/photos/3925/desk-ruler-designer-ch...
I've solved this problem for myself, and I suspect that many other people have it, but nobody has shown any interest in my solution so far:

https://github.com/skorokithakis/gweet

It's a command queue that allows your Raspi/Arduino to listen to commands and your control apps to issue them. I use secret keys for the commands, but you can also use crypto to sign the requests. It's been working very well for me, and with very low latency (the DNS query and TLS setup are the slowest parts, it seems).
This sounds like a big enterprise company taking the next evolutionary step. Soon the tactics will be labelled as "best practices", talks and conferences will be given, the mentality accepted and the rest of the herd will continue to froth at the mouth to be more enterprise-y than the next. As the article states:

> "Amazon may be singular but perhaps not quite as peculiar as it claims. It has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight. Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.

“Organizations are turning up the dial, pushing their teams to do more for less money, either to keep up with the competition or just stay ahead of the executioner’s blade,” said Clay Parker Jones, a consultant who helps old-line businesses become more responsive to change."
Yes, the whistle counting thing is typical in usage of pressure cookers in Indian cooking (I am an Indian).