skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently applied for a position at Etsy, and one of the main points I make in my self summary is that I am most motivated by craftsmanship and an attention to quality (I think a lot of developers feel this way, and more should practice speaking up about it for interviews).

I was told I would have a phone interview with someone from the hiring team. Weeks went by and I got zero response. I figured I had just been rejected with usual company non-response b.s.

But after about three weeks I received an impromptu message from HR saying they were sorry about the delay, and also that unfortunately someone internal had put in a request for the job I would have interviewed for, and they wanted to proceed with their internal candidate.

I was grateful for the message and thanked that HR representative. I think it spoke well of Etsy that they bothered to give me some reply about my status.

But I also thought, as far as engineering goes, that it sounded less than ideal to me that their hiring process could go like that. Why wouldn't internal candidates have been vetted prior to spending time on the application process and phone interviews with others?

They said they thanked me for my understanding and would be in touch about future roles. I have never heard back. So it's puzzling that they seem to want to hire developers with a focus on craftsmanship, but aren't willing to consider me after previously at least feeling that I was good enough for a phone screen.

It's not so much that this is "bad" or "good" for Etsy, but more that it gives an overwhelming feeling of "What on earth is going on inside Etsy? What are they doing?"
Blogging helps you clarify your ideas by forcing you to explain them to someone else.
Yeah because a government that spends hundreds of billions on genocide is exactly the entity we want to spend more.

Good fucking grief, HN is full of naïve idealists.
>This really should be stopped now.

Sure, stopping this instance is possibly worth the trouble, but what about next time? Amateur satellites are already possible, thus the possibility of an ever increasing occurrence of space graffiti.

The first issue is how one can stop space graffiti entirely. Should the UN get involved? Should NATO get involved? In any case, it would either be a statutory matter (pass a law against however-defined graffiti in space) or a military matter (use generally expensive anti-satellite missiles or lasers). The means to stop space graffiti seems to be rather expensive and politically charged/dependent. (for reference, I am not assuming that you want to do anything in particular, but I bring up criminalization of and shooting down space graffiti just to get on with my point.)

The second issue is what harm is cause by space graffiti. Sure, unaware astronomers would be at least annoyed. Do they deserve a natural night sky to make their jobs easier? Space graffiti seems like art to me, but space debris seems the more serious possible problem. Since this specific instance of space graffiti seems to have planned for that, I think that harm is not a problem herewith.

The third issue is whether anyone is obliged to not put astronomically obnoxious objects in orbit around earth; is this the same kind of "don't do" as assault or vandalism? If this specific instance of space graffiti were launched without public awareness, then astronomers might find this space art to be a problem, but I think that astronomers are probably watching news outlets for these sort of launches. Anything on the other side of the space graffiti is not un-see-able, but is that reason enough to either criminalize or shoot down space graffiti. Does anyone deserve the night sky to contain only natural light sources, but also a few super-useful objects (e.g. GPS satellites)?

I bring all this up, because I hope to demonstrate that space graffiti, as stupid as it may be, is a very limited problem. It seems that the stupidity associated with a problem makes the problem seem bigger; ask anyone who has seen prank videos on YouTube whether the government should try to stop pranks. Graffiti on earth is often vandalism and art, yet nobody owns space so space graffiti cannot be vandalism but is still some sort of art.
The Swedish way is to have 480 days of parental leave per child, which can be split between either parent. "For 390 of the days, parents are entitled to nearly 80 per cent of their normal pay up to a maximum monthly income of 37,000 kroner ($4,500)." - http://www.thelocal.se/20151229/one-in-four-swedish-fathers-... .

Also, "From January 1st 2016, the number of use-it-or-lose-it 'pappamånad' or 'daddy months' will increase from two to three, in an bid to push couples to share early years childcare more equally." because currently "One in four Swedish dads take no baby leave".

Mandatory parental leave is tricky. Is that a month in a row? As a self-employed person, am I prohibited from filings taxes, sending out invoices, and support questions? Or can I work one day a week?
>The problem is that logic you gave is suspect to a survivorship bias.

There is no such problem. What you are bringing up is a related, but different issue. The underlying question is still valid for the problem being discussed. If we want to bring in related but different problems... we could start by bringing in the issue of the gender difference in prisons which has really nasty effect on ability get a good wage... or a job at all.
My personal experience is that, after sending out a resume in PDF format, many recruiters (~25%?) will ask me to re-send it in Word format so they can edit it. The barrier of "use a piece of software outside the Microsoft Office Suite" shouldn't be a roadblock to anyone, but it is.

I case anyone wonders, this hasn't caused problems in practice. I push back and explain that I don't have a Word version of my resume (I use LaTeX), and the recruiter will pass long the unmodified PDF after one or two rounds of email.
I don't understand the argument here: the previous poster said women are pushed to take care of kids and elderly parents (for no pay, often prompting a reduction in work hours or a desire to stay at a more flexible but lower-paying job, or for me staying in a particular geographic region with lower pay on average) while men are pushed to be primary breadwinners (so they're pushed to make more money, perhaps doing shitty jobs or trading in time with family and community that they would value). It's pretty clear that the people pushed to do work for no money make less money then the people pushed to do work for money, and in fact pushed to make more money when possible. What's the disagreement?
This a thousand times. For many firms, the roles of "data scientist" "data engineer" "distributed system engineer" and "platform engineer" are all fully synonymous, and all of them really mean "Hadoop* babysitter with a dash of full-stack whenever we arbitrarily feel like asking you to do other stuff too." It's depressing.

* or substitute whatever other enterprise framework you want
So I don't know a whole lot about Rust. Can anyone give a summary of why/when I should use Rust?
This is a great little read, and really resonated with me. Like the author mentioned, there is some value in A/B testing and an incremental approach to product development. But too often organizations can become obsessed with this path forward, and continuing with the same approach becomes like trying to squeeze blood from a stone -- there are just no more significant gains to be had.

Unfortunately the company I'm at right now feels like this. The product team and CEO are obsessed with A/B testing, and don't have a more holistic approach to product development. This means that our competitors are out-innovating us in certain areas, and it's disappointing to watch.
Selling a Property – The Usual Way vs. The Crowdfunded Way
> That's because it's not engineering as a recognized discipline (and seems to be the reason why we can get away with calling ourselves engineers and not be sued).

I'm consistently surprised at how little programmers/developers and software engineers are aware of the progress made here over the past 5 years. Software engineering most definitely is a recognized engineering discipline nationally and in most states:

http://ncees.org/about-ncees/news/ncees-introduces-pe-exam-f...

http://insight.ieeeusa.org/insight/content/careers/97473

We can debate whether or not these developments are good for our profession (good, in my view). However, it's no longer disputable, at least in the US, that software engineering is a recognized engineering discipline. At least unless you don't recognize the authority of the IEEE/NCEES in this matter (in which case you don't recognize the credentials of most US engineers from any engineering discipline).

That said, I strongly agree with your emphasis on formal methods. I'm disappointed that software developers/engineers don't put more emphasis on these tools, even if they fail to convince their managers to actually use them. Yes, we don't need to use formal methods for a few jQuery scripts on a web page, but there are lots of places where they could find good use.

As one example, for general application development, Ada/Spark is an excellent example of an engineering-focused language and environment, and I wish other languages took this approach. For embedded designs, solutions like Ivory (and Ada, too) provide a fairly rigorous approach to software development. TLA+ is another interesting tool (that I know relatively little about). These are the sorts of tools we need to emphasis.

Unfortunately, most clients/companies aren't really interested in these methods, even when they're building applications where security matters. There are obvious exceptions, like some medical and avionics software, but even the automotive software I've looked into seems to have been developed in a sloppy, ad-hoc manner (and surprisingly, often by people trained as traditional engineers).
I'm literally amazed that we have not yet seen a bomb strapped to a quad-copter and flown into [US political building] yet by some FBI extremist group in order to push anti drone legislation yet.
You've got to be kidding.

Displays are becoming smaller, higher resolution, and cheaper. Already, people who couldn't stomach the VR of 2014 are enjoying the VR of 2016.

Graphics cards are about to jump from 28nm to 16nm, later this year, leading to laptops that can run cards that outperform today's desktops at a fraction of the power consumption. One of the biggest issues of the current generation of VR is the necessity of being plugged in via a physical cord to a beast of a machine.

Carmack has stated that his primary focus right now is bringing positional tracking to mobile VR. We haven't even cracked the inside-out tracking barrier yet, so while my GearVR is fun, it doesn't fulfill its potential as a room (or field?) scale VR system.

I'm happy that fellow early adopters are buying the very clunky current generation, but it's ridiculous to suggest that the state of VR is 'it' for the forseeable future. That would be a depressing future of VR indeed.
There's really no such thing as perfectly idempotent operations. But it's an ideal to be emulated as much as possible. Even (or maybe especially) when something appears to be by definition not idempotent.
I live in Canada. We don't need to tell our employers about our families in order to receive health care. We still have a similar gender wage gap though.

Besides, if I did live in the US and the situation came up, I would be more likely to pay for my child's health insurance out of pocket than to take a $40,000 pay cut.
The incredible lives of Khuu (101) and Borghild (101)
> So, you pass file name to your data access library and the file is not there. How are you going to deal with it? Write an error to the log nobody reads and call terminate()? Create a new file and let users guess what happened to the data they expected? Or return an error code?

Perhaps return an error code. Which the caller would check and deal with the error. (Besides, I'd be passing a stream object, not a filename.)

I/O is also network packets, graphics on the screen, motor movements.

> P.S. As to "which functions can throw" - let me suggest a simple rule: every function can, unless you can prove otherwise.

Exactly, that's the problem.
Algolia (YC W14) is hiring engineers, sales, marketers
AKUNA CAPITAL | FULL TIME | ONSITE | Chicago | Champaign, IL | Cambridge, MA | Shanghai |

* C# Developer

* C++ Developer

* C++ Developer-Infrastructure Team

* Gateway Developer C++

* Hardware Developer: Junior or Mid-level FPGA Engineers

* Python: Trading Infrastructure + Compliance Technology

* Python Web Developer * Trading Core Developer (C++)

* Trading Strategies Developer (C++)

* Data Center Engineer

* Trade Support Engineer-Entry Level

* Experienced Trader * Energies Trader

* C++ Developer-Data & Measurement Team-Champaign, IL

* C++ Developer-Shanghai

* C# Developer-Shanghai

| Contact: laura.richler@akunacapital.com | Apply: http://www.akunacapital.com/#Careers
> No salary gap exists between women and men in tech, says job search firm Dice, looking at its annual survey of 16,000 tech professionals, as long as you are comparing people with equal experience, education, and job titles.

> That, of course, is a big if. And previous data from Dice found about a $10,000 pay gap between men and women if not controlled for those factors.

Annoying that the article itself seems to contradict its title. We don't have a breakdown of how much effect those different factors have, but from the summary it's possible that women get equal salaries for the same job titles, but are less likely to be hired for/promoted into better-paying titles--which would be the same thing as a gender-based salary gap.
Obviously you can't take his book as your only source of truth but it provides a lot of insight into how the Nazi system worked. I found especially the parts about Hitler very interesting.
Haha, if we are going to use terrible reward function analogies to measure success, why stop at A/B testing? Introduce your features as mutations to your product! Start them off with one or two customers. Those features that make your users quit in a huff will be eliminated. Those that make them recommend your app to a friend will propagate. Survival of the fittest feature!
It's not just society, it's also biology. Even if "parenting" roles were completely equal, "childbirth" role would fall only on women, so they would still take more time off for children (and hence get lower pay).
Worked fine for me going from NL > UK yesterday. Yosemite.
I was half joking but you're right. That said, for pioneers, explorers and engineers, breadth of experience is very helpful.
> Wage disparity is caused by gender roles, not by discrimination

How was Lilly Ledbetter's wage disparity caused by something other than discrimination on the basis of sex? Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilly_Ledbetter :

"Initially, Ledbetter’s salary was in line with the salaries of men performing substantially similar work. Over time, however, her pay slipped in comparison to the pay of male area managers with equal or less seniority. By the end of 1997, Ledbetter was the only woman working as an area manager and the pay discrepancy between Ledbetter and her 15 male counterparts was stark: Ledbetter was paid $3,727 per month; the lowest paid male area manager received $4,286 per month, the highest paid, $5,236."
I spend a lot of time on Airmail, and I'm currently giving cloudmagic: https://cloudmagic.com/ a try. On iOS I've used it for a long time and they're excellent. On Mac I've only used them for a couple of weeks but so far it's been a good experience far, and they're responsive to feedback, like implementing gmail shortcuts shortly after launching.
LDAP Support in CoreOS Dex: An Open Source Journey
(Edit: my comment on space debris was completely redundant with something you said elsewhere in your post!)
Not familiar with actual Macs, but I did install OS X plenty of times on PCs. Can't you just change time on your machine, install it and then change it back? I'm sure OS X can be installed offline.
John McAfee Sounding… Reasonable?
Show HN: Iterograph – Iterative Art Generator
Ah, okay. I realize they were primarily an installer before. The article seemed to focus on their new efficiency tech, so I was left wondering whether that was a more relevant part of the investment. Presumably they can re-tool as techniques improve and keep their vertical integration...
>that's a very descartesian view

No, it's a summation of the debate behind the phrase "bottle vs breast". From a few links when Googling:

- "Deciding whether to breastfeed or use formula for your newborn?"

- "Breast vs. bottle - breast milk is the perfect food for baby, with numerous advantages over infant formula"

- "Here's help deciding if you should breastfeed your baby or bottle feed with formula."

Pretty much every discussion of "bottle vs breast" is discussing "breastmilk vs formula".

> would you say that you feel the same after eating off the floor (very clean of course) vs. in a nice setting?

Would you say that a newborn baby is capable of comprehending the difference between a 5 star restaurant compared to a 3 star one? I'm not sure applying adult opinions to newborn babies is likely to achieve much.
Why wouldn't you?
I am always amazed by the reach of blog posts
African elephants 'killed faster than they are being born'
Years ago... mid to late 90s... I had everything X-10'ed up in my house. What I didn't know is that my house alarm was also X-10 capable.

One night, I couldn't enter the code in time and you could see what house was alarming for miles around. Inside and outside the house, everything that could blink was blinking - to go along with the blaring sound.

I cancelled the alarm service (and kept the alarm) soon after because 1) it would freak anybody breaking into my house out, and 2) if the cops couldn't figure out that there was something going on at my house without somebody having to call them, they just weren't doing their job.
FYI: I didn't make this, I just found it interesting to use. It was made by reddit user /u/t0rtue
I agree with the sentiment that people should specialize and spend the majority of the time working what they are proficient at.

That said, I personally like working with engineers who at least try to participate in the design/front-end process instead of just passing off to me like they don't give a shit. Their opinions can be informative and it's also a way for me to help teach them a thing or two. Plus sometimes knowing small UI things can help alleviate my workload so that I'm not doing really tiny tasks associated with a project that's primarily driven by a backend engineer.

As a longtime designer/UI guy, I have no illusions of ever being an elite backend programmer. But I actually enjoy learning backend on the side. I feel like it's a way of me having a better understanding how the teams entire codebase works and allows me to have a slightly better understanding of what my team members discuss during meetings. And even for side projects, it's just empowering to be able to implement a product idea from end to end (even though yes, it's likely not stellar code). Overall, just having a growing understanding of how it all connects together is truly rewarding.
Show HN: Pony Foo Weekly
(should I tell him, guys?)
I took a look at your site and don't see how they have the same goals?

Sorry if I have missed something, it's a cool project anyway and it's 100% solving a pain point many people feel when using Twitter.
A lot of oil comes from the middle east. Having a strong ally opens up options for interaction with countries there. I'd say most of the progress in the 20th century came from access to inexpensive energy. Now that we're in the information age we're more concerned with efficiency and effective use of scarce resources.

Cheap energy is a big boost though. Transportation costs are an obvious example. But oil is used in everything. Fertilizer and plastics are big consumers. Keeping those costs down, makes everything cheaper. Theoretically, that's better for everyone. Cheap energy was important enough for the us to go to war at least once, Desert Storm. Good arguments can be made for the second Iraq invasion, and the possibility of oil off the coast of Vietnam.

This of course glosses over all of the secondary effects, like CO2 emissions, health consequences of fast food and all the problems that go along with war. (And i'm sure a million other things!)

But, yeah, the reason is access to cheap energy.
> which can be split between either parent

That's the issue right there. Not surprised "One in four Swedish dads take no baby leave".

I know things are tricky to roll out, there's tons of quirks here and there. User chongli is on like three leaves of the discussion trying to take the idea down based on implementation details. That comes later.

The whole point is that right now it's a "woman's issue". Forcing men to deal with it would make it a "parent issue", and more resources would be devoted to ironing out the details.

It's like that pithy line I heard once- "If men could get pregnant, abortion wouldn't be controversial".

edit: Can't reply, but I got your reply just fine dalke. What I'm saying is that making it use-it-or-lose-it is still not good enough. Rather, if you don't get why I suggest it needs to be mandatory, it is you who is not getting me.

edit2: Fanning threads on HN are just no good for discussing stuff. Sorry!
Someone asked a similar question on /r/rust the other day, here's what I had to say:

Rust is a programming language. It's a general programming language, so it's good for a large variety of things. Different people have different reasons for using Rust. There are three large constituencies, as I see them: systems programmers, functional programmers, and scripting language programmers.

Before I get into details: all generalizations are false ;)

Systems programmers come to Rust because it's able to do the lowest levels of software: operating systems, device drivers, stuff like that. Where it improves on existing systems languages is "safety." The Rust compiler does a lot of compile-time checking to make sure you don't do things wrong. Existing languages force you, as the programmer, to double check your work. We have the compiler double-check your work, and force you to get it right.

Functional programmers see all that static checking, and it feels like home. But a home where they have significant speed gained. Functional languages can be fast, but not always C level fast. Rust is. It's easier to get that level of performance out of Rust.

Scripting language programmers come to Rust for two reasons: the first of which is to write extensions to their language for speed. You can write a Ruby gem in Rust, rather than in C. This is useful because this low-level stuff is not their expertise, and so the extra checks are really nice. Related: we have a lot of the nice tooling that scripting language folks have come to expect from their language. No need to write makefiles, we have Cargo. The second is sort of related, but these checks also mean it's easier to learn low-level stuff, so if they want to expand their universe, Rust is a nice way to do so. We're seeing a lot of people for whom Rust is their first systems language.

I didn't know where to put this one, but Rust focuses on a concept called "zero-cost abstractions." This means that a lot of our features that feel very high level are extremely efficient. You don't write manual for loops, you se iterators. You don't deal with pointers directly, but with references. Structures like Box and Vec do memory management, but you don't need a garbage collector, and you don't need to manually manage it, but you also don't need to explicitly call free().

These are very broad strokes. Lots of other people have other reasons too. But that's some of them.