skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tyrrany doesn't just occur at the highest levels. The argument works at lower levels. When local cops deal with major drug dealers that they know are armed to the hilt they usually treat the suspect with respect and carefully select a time to peacefully confront the person. But some (usually a minority) unarmed kid in a school committing a minor infraction? Gets a beat down.
Setting Up Your Own “Cloud” VPN Server in Under 30 Minutes
The US Marshal Service is basically the judiciary's law enforcement branch. Yes, the DEA is also part of the DoJ, but the DEA is a lot more akin to the FBI than the Marshal Service.

Marshals do prisoner security and transport, run the witness protection program, and are the legal enforcers of the court's orders. For instance, when the Supreme Court ordered the integration of Southern schools, it was US Marshals who actually enforced the order and were deployed to escort students into their schoools.
Doing a design sprint in three days versus five
That's why Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan were a cakewalk - regular people with guns can't possibly resist predator drones and the like.

What you are actually missing is that guns are part of (some American's) tribal culture. The move to ban guns is mainly, at this point in time, a front in the culture wars. (Historically it was also about disarming blacks in order to empower terrorists.) There are many cultural artifacts and other enjoyable practices which kill people; Britain's drinking culture, gay sex (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/statistics.html), etc.

Gun control is mainly about attacking one of the cherished cultural values of our tribal enemies, in much the same way that Bush-era "faith based $X" or opposing various gay things is.
I always read glowing reports from switching to Dvorak, so here's my experience:

I switched to the Dvorak keyboard about 5 years ago. Previously, I typed 110 WPM on QWERTY, and while learning Dvorak my WPM rose quickly from 10 to 70 WPM, but remained there. I now type at about 80 WPM, but even with practice I have not been able to regain my previous speed. I can switch to Qwerty, but my WPM has gone down too -- it's about 80 WPM now.

I realized that I had been achieving 110 WPM because I had unconventional hand positions (I never learned to type "correctly", so it just developed). Learning and staying with the "correct" hand positions brought down my WPM. Previously, my hands flew around the keyboard, but now they're mostly stationary on the home row. The positive outcome of this is that I can now use non-traditional keyboards such as the Kinesis, where I cannot move my hands around while typing.

I don't regret going to Dvorak because of the great comfort it brings to my tired hands, but I do miss the speed from time to time.
> I've never understood the use of AMP, just build your normal site properly in the first place and then you won't need it. It's almost like training-wheels for learning efficiency/optimization.

I've never understood why toddlers need training wheels on their bikes? Why don't they just bike properly in the first place?
This is a very unproductive comment / view-point. I find the anti-learning stance troubling.

This is a link to a very technical article hash table implementation a pretty popular data structure. Right at the top it tells you that's what it's about. Also, if you bother to check the side of the article when it list recent article or go look at the other blog post you'll see it's a follow up on a previous article on lock-free hash tables that use this method. That's more then plenty of context if you just give it more then 5 seconds.

> Although some ideas seem pretty clever, I've too often seen code implementing this in a haphazard way (buggy, no comments). This leaves the next programmer scratching their head and wondering ... why? Unless you have very specific performance and memory constraints, I do not see the need for such structures in most every programmers daily business.

Again, right in the article... the guy tells you that the common implementation of using a linked list for buckets in hash table is performance unfriendly (cache unfriendly) on modern machines.

Just because you don't see a need for it in your daily business, doesn't mean others do not there are plenty of cases where linear probing hash tables make sense. This includes any kind of GPU computing, databases, or anywhere your bottle neck is a particular lookup data structure. And yeah, those are all niche use cases, but they numerous and important enough where somebody might learn something.
Show HN: Devpost Job Bot / Application System
I wonder two things:

1. Price.

2. How it differs from OpenCyc.
Python is just another language VM. C Python should work just fine in WebAssembly, and bridging the APIs to the web (e.g. filesystem, etc) is already possible through Emscripten.

We don't plan to do things for WebAssembly, we plan to make WebAssembly powerful enough that anyone can run their language VM :-)
The UK govt is equally eager to ban/compromise encryption, and I think the challenge for technologists is to find ways around this. How difficult would it be to develop a protocol that concealed encrypted payloads in innocent-looking plaintext traffic? A kind of "clandestine encryption."

I suppose the problem is that individuals might get away with using clandestine encryption, but no convenient service provided by companies like Apple would be able to.
We’re working on a property and casualty insurance product built from first principles on mobile for millennials. Our product takes in a picture of property you want to insure, and connects you with a network of brokerages across the US & Canada to fulfill the requests. Soon we’ll be binding insurance ourselves.

Depending on the geography, 80-90% of all insurance transactions end up getting bound over the phone, it only makes sense that they start there.

Happy to take any questions. Thanks y’all!
That's kind of vague, though, and is laden with the assumption that YOU understand the world "from first principles" and the ones disagreeing with you don't.

Especially your second comment strikes me as quite arrogant. "I know what I'm talking about because I can do lateral thinking, and the brainwashed masses clearly do not".

The way I see it, anyone with a university-or-equivalent education tends to believe that what-they-know is some absolute truth of the world and "the other side" is somehow brainwashed by their respective media or government, whether "capitalist" or "communist".

Can you tell me what these "first principles" are that you use to understand geopolitics? Can you justify to me that this set of first principles is necessary and sufficient for a complete understanding of the topic in question? That there exists no other principle that you've ignored without which your understanding is incomplete?

Or.. are you just using your world-view to make yourself feel good about how clever you are?
Seven ways publishers have reacted to ad blockers
> Did you even make sure the memory was aligned?

Of course, what do you take me for? :)

> I'm sure you know alloc()

Do you mean alloca? It has a lot of problems, and is generally prohibited at Google.

> and malloc() is fast for small sizes.

Not nearly fast enough for my purposes.
I think the ecosystem isn't a zero sum game (not profits, but generally the advancement of software). Apple doing well helps other people do well.

Do you really think that if Apple completely stopped existing right now that it wouldn't have a massive negative impact on consumers and other businesses?
Erlang Memory Models – Private and Shared Heaps
Not really, or well really not.

To have email working you need to own a DNS record which means that your details are on record some where (domain privacy settings don't really work against an adversary like the NSA or anyone with a decent enough legal team).

To pay for the server you need to pay for hosting which leaves another paper trail, you can't host mail servers in your home as your ISP will block SMTP traffic in most cases to combat spam from botnets, if you still want to do it you have to use your ISP's SMTP relay which isn't "NSA proof" and also quite likely puts every email you send on a list easily accessible by law enforcement.

When you run your own server you inherit all the security risks associated with every piece of software which runs on that server, most people aren't really good at dealing, zero-days are also usually patched prior to disclosure by the big players (e.g. Heartbleed) and even when not companies like Google will have a plethora of mitigating controls that reduce the impact of any potential non-disclosed vulnerability.

As far as the aliases go if you run your own server aliases mean nothing even if you buy a separate domain for each alias the MX records will still be the same which means that all email addresses can be traced to you, if you only want aliased for disposable mails/spam control then any current mail provider usually offers unlimited aliases also.

As far as controlling the chain you aren't really, you have little control over how the mails are being relayed, you might be forced to use an email relay (some ISP's actually do transparent mail relays), your target might be behind a mail relay, and even when not you don't know if the guy you are sending it too doesn't use gmail or any other provider to manage their mailboxes using POP3.

And the last part and what people usually dislike being brought up is that actively trying to avoid the NSA puts you on their radar, the NSA has different levels of wide range and targeted surveillance the more "interesting" you seem the more likely you are to be tagged by one of their more targeted programs.

Now this isn't an argument that results in saying "you shouldn't encrypt anything and send stuff in the clear" but it is an argument that if you actually care about operation security then not standing out is a critical part of your opsec. People often point out and say that "security trough obscurity" is a fallacy, but that on it's own is even a bigger fallacy, obscurity is a critical part of real world security (whether it's technical or operational) the important thing to remember is that one must not rely only on obscurity to ensure security but one that ignores it completely just exposes them selves to unnecessary risks.
Was SpoonRocket still having issues with the National Labor Relations Board or were those resolved?
"I never heard from them again and all of my attempts at communication were ignored."

Unfortunately, this seems to be par for the course these days - I have a lot of friends who complain about the same thing. It's just indicative of a total lack of professional courtesy, and you should consider yourself lucky that you didn't end up working with people like that.
Sorry, that was indeed way out. The true number is a few hundred per year, still far lower per population than the US.
Is it really an original sin if ad-financed free content is, as the article indicates, a mere .275% of the online economy?

> The price difference between desktop apps and tablet/mobile apps does not make any sense, but everybody pretends it does.

I dunno, it makes a lot of sense to me: my phone has a screen which is under 11 sq. inches while my monitor is over 300 sq. inches, for a more than 28-fold difference in viewable area and hence game immersivity. I don't have a tablet handy to measure, but it's still small.

Moreover, when I use my desktop I have a full-featured input control surface, in the form of keyboard and mouse; in contrast, on a phone or tablet all I can do is tap & drag. That means that desktop games are more likely to be complex and engaging while still being usable.

Further, my desktop has many times the processing power and memory of my phone or tablet, which again means that games are more likely to be complex and engaging.

From my perspective, $25 is a steal for a desktop game and $1 is a bit of a rip-off for a phone game.
ParkOmator Was Hunted by Eric Willis on Product Hunt
Correct, though we're working on dynamic linking to ease the pain, and improving compilers such as LLVM so that the generated code is smaller.
Why are you asking "fact regurgitation"-type technical questions? I prefer to ask open-ended ones, questions that start a discussion that will quickly determine if the candidate really understands what they are saying. It also reveals correct but rigid thinking, something I would like to generally avoid but that doesn't always come up in a coding exercise.
What are the hardware requirements?
Space invaders game made with RxJS and canvas
As an outsider, I've always wondered about this: Since a lot of people in America are so much hell bent on keeping a gun for a hypothetical future situation of government turning hostile (completely ignoring the 'real, actual' killings that are happening very frequently because some psycho got access to what they obtained for their own safety) - will all these people be personally willing to take responsibility and go to jail for (mass) murder if some psychopath gets access to their gun and shoots people because of their negligence? I mean someone sane should be responsible for the continued acts of psychopaths after all.
The process I've seen working best to this day was at Pivotal Labs: pair for a half hour to one hour with 3 different people in the team you're being hired for. You get to measure everything, from communication skills to cultural fit. Perhaps pair on an internal tool, or even better, an open source project (in which case the candidate gets an extra incentive for not wasting their time).

If you're dealing with too many candidates, issuing a simple 1-hour coding challenge will weed out the uninterested (and won't favor people that have 4-8 hours to devote to a huge coding challenge).
I am in the midst of my job search, fortunately I'm not currently working (due to an international move) so I have more time.

So far, I have completed around 12 1 hour phone coding tests, the same amount of 30 min chats with recruiters, I have 8x 5 hour on-sites scheduled, have spent about 4 long days on one take-home assignment, 6-8 hours on another, and have two more assignments to complete, both of which I estimate will take over 8 hours each.

I haven't had a weekend for the past 2 weeks because I've been working on assignments and I'm pretty stressed and exhausted.

This process has made me consider changing careers because it's so exhausting. When companies give you take-home assignments I don't think they realise how many things you have going on at the same time.

Additionally, I've found that a one hour coding test has allowed companies to move faster in the process with me than those who have given assignments. When I receive an offer from a company I am happy with then I will tell those companies with assignments I haven't finished that I won't be moving forward with them and they will miss out on a great candidate!
> AI is tackling problems that appear exponentially more difficult.

The hardest AI problems are the ones that involve multiple disciplines in deep ways. Here's a top tier artificial intelligence problem: given a plain English description of a computer program, implement it in source code.

There might be some cases where this is possible, and some cases are bound to fail.

Those are the kind of difficult problems in AI, which combine knowledge, understanding, thought, intuition, inspiration, and perspiration - or demand invention. We would be lucky to make linear progress in this area let alone exponential growth.

I think there's certainly an impression of exponential progress in AI in popular culture, but the search space is greater than factorial in size, and I think hackers should know that.
Park your car with parkOmator and never get ticketed again
My experience is pretty similar to yours and copperx's. I'm no faster or slower but my hands have felt a ton better and I haven't had hardly any RSI issues since. Been typing in dvorak for about 15 years now. It was pretty painful for two weeks but I'm glad I switched.
We require a specific language... the language we use for the job. The phone interview asks technical questions, a few design questions, and some personality geared questions. The technical questions are basic and cover some of the basic concepts of the language and basics of OO.

We haven't considered doing a take home test for 2 reasons. 1) We want to see how well the person can get around windows/keyboard. I believe this is important. 2) What we are asking to code is very basic. If we sent something home it would have to be harder.

Are you thinking that the in-person coding would make them nervous? I ask because we are clearly doing something wrong if it's hard to find candidates that can do basic programming. Even if the person is entry level, that would be fine as long as they are an A player at the entry level... if that makes any sense.
"Modeled after Superman, I can move a 2-ton car."
This is especially hilarious^W demoralizing when the same company continues to actively recruit across all available channels. Successive waves of aggressive recruiter spam from some of my past "dead silence" rejections continue to cause hilarity^W^W rub salt on the wound to this day.
The semi-natural language thing does seem good.
Apple doesn't and as far as I can tell cannot sign a version for an individual phone a signed binary by apple that removes the security settings for a phone lock/wipe will be valid for any other apple phone as long as you can trigger an update which you can using iTunes you should be able to deploy it on any device you want.

There are no individual singing keys for phones that would be unmanageable there are probably a handful (or even a single one) singing keys that apple has which are valid on their devices and that's it.
Before, we had asm.js. asm.js isn't very readable. By contrast, Web Assembly has a nice human-readable (though terse and low-level) IR. It even looks like Lisp, if you like that :)

Web Assembly is a small step toward better human inspectability of the compiled blobs your browser is executing, compared to Flash, Java, and asm.js. To be sure, it doesn't mandate that the source be available in the form preferred for editing. But the Web hasn't done that since 1997.
Ugh, the "ratcheting restrictions" tactic is why we can't have ANY compromise on gun laws. The NRA is not stupid.
Just as well they worked that out after burning through only $13.5M in funding, and not after the IPO.
> we would ask you to use just your language’s standard library, no third-party libs or frameworks... With the problem description, we sent to candidates a functional test suite, a binary that when started would try to connect to the candidate’s server implementation, open lots of sockets, sends lots of messages, and verify the results against what the problem description stated. The candidate was instructed only to send their submission once it passed the functional test on their local box.

Incidentally, this is exactly how the "Sun Certified Java Developer" certification was structured. You were only allowed to use java.* and javax.* packages provided as part of the JRE, and even among those things like the SQL packages were off limits. Instead of sending a test suite, they provided an interface you needed to implement and then when you submitted it, they had some sort of test suite that tested your code for conformance to the spec (and if it failed, you failed). If it passed, someone would manually review your program to make sure it made sense with respect to the requirements (which were intentionally somewhat vague, like real requirements) and if you passed that step, you had to write an essay about WHY you made certain design decisions (like sockets+serialization vs. RMI, etc).

This was by far the most challenging and fun task of its type that I've done, and to this day if I see that someone has that certification I know that they have what it takes to get things done. This methodology should really be utilized more, although for many companies the overhead of designing such a challenge would be way over the top. Makes me think that things like https://www.stockfighter.io/ have a future in our industry.
Correct, however we're entering into an entirely different area of argument here. Historically, physical safeguards have been utilized, and any physical safeguard can be overcome give a moderate amount of funding and/or time. I'm not aware of any period where a safeguard would need to be intentionally fundamentally flawed in order to allow the government to proceed with their collection of evidence.

The question becomes whether it is within the power of the government to mandate that flaw, or whether they will need to find some other approach. There is also a question of freedom of speech, as it has historically been held that you can be forced to not express something, however you cannot be forced to express something. In regards to key signing, it could be said that that is an expression of authenticity that you endorse whatever is being signed. Can the government force you to give that endorsement? Does the government's power to collect evidence supercede your right to freedom of speech (or the abdication of speech)?
The fact they have to filter down from a large number of applications to a small number of roles doesn't say anything about how selective they are.

SELECT TOP 1000 FROM resumes ORDER BY received_date

will produce 1000 job offers but speaks nothing to selectivity.
You don't need a gun because nobody is going to shoot you. And secondly because even if you had a gun, I don't trust YOU to not flip out and go postal when someone looks at you the wrong way, or carry your loaded gun in an unsafe manner. From my point of view, and for anyone who doesn't know you, you are no different than a criminal with a gun. By simply owning a gun YOU increase the threat level for other people.
>> The best process was the one where I finally got a job. We talked on the phone for an hour and a half and by the end you could just tell we had that, "developer bond". His approach was the best I'd seen. He just talked through some of the problems he had, I proposed solutions and we talked through pros and cons. He treated me as an equal from the start. After that we had the face-to-face HR questions (how do you resolve conflict, etc.) which they have to ask because it's a big company, and another one with another manager but by then it was pretty much a done deal.

I've had the same experience, and I absolutely agree. Just about all my best interviews were with someone where we just hit it off and talked deep tech for an hour. On most of these we had to consciously cut the conversation off because we went long. I don't think that, when this sort of interaction occurs, you know the person is going to be good at writing production code. But at least you do know they're the "sort" of person you would expect to be good at it, and frankly none of the other methods discussed do a better job at providing that assurance.
WebAssembly has its own semantics, similar to asm.js (statically typed) but much cleaner because it doesn't need to map onto JavaScript.
You don't have a "legal right" to political violence, by definition. You have a moral right under some circumstances and the legal right to own guns helps gives the ability to act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide#Rwandan_Patri...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising
My layout of choice is colemak. I used to have quite a bit of pain in my wrist and between my left ring and middle finger when using QWERTY. I gave up and switched cold-turkey to colemak ~7 years ago and haven't looked back since. Also, it is available almost on every system I use - PKL for windows, `setxkbmap us -variant colemak` on GNU/Linux. It is an excellent layout and if you have a slow month or two (like I did in my final year of college), try an alt layout. It is definitely worth it - speed is the last thing a programmer needs to worry about while typing if one can go > 50wpm.