skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article includes a tweet which demonstrates a very contrived example of a for loop using JSX. If you're ever writing code like this, please reevaluate your career in software development.

As an aside, we recently moved from Nunjucks templates to React / JSX at work and the frontend team couldn't be more pleased. Components reflect improvements made to them across the board and provide a happy medium between designer and JS dev. I have also found a lot of power in refs by implementing superclass functions that provide reusable logic for elements based on the key of the ref when certain functions are implemented on the corresponding component. This can be used for state persistence in forms, analytics or anything else the developer imagines.

Context switching has not been an issue but all of our frontend devs also do work on the backend. This may be an issue to consider for teams that don't embrace cross disciplinary roles.
They have a perfect right to use educational background as a filter. But that's not the issue here.

If that's the filter they want to use -- the time to apply it is before inviting the candidate to take 3 days out of his/her life to fly across the country for an interview. If it's such a huge "ding" for them that a candidate doesn't come from a certain set of preferred schools -- fine, don't invite them for an interview. It's really quite simple.

Of it's a "ding", but they want to give the candidate a "shot" -- that's fine too, but there's no need to blatantly neg the candidate right to their face. It serves no purpose; it's just uncivil and unprofessional. (No purpose, that is, other than to give the interviewer an ego rush, and thereby provide a temporary defense of sorts against their own very deeply rooted insecurities. That, and to basically deep-six the candidate's performance, and nullify whatever enthusiasm they might have had for Airbnb during the rest of the, by that point, manifestly pointless "interview").

And the fact that such allegedly highly educated people would so quickly resort to numbskull behavior like this suggests that maybe's it's not such a good filter, after all.
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.

I some times feel that part of the problem with hiring is that people expect too much of an interview process. Whatever tricks you pull to test out people, there's only so much that you can actually learn about people through a few hours of interaction, in a contrived context. Talking tech with developer candidates is great because a) it puts you in a natural conversation, which affords you to get some idea whether you like the person or not and b) it reveals at least something about their technical skill - it's hard to fake deep knowledge, if you don't have it.
Reminds me of recent Instacart news.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-11/instacart-...

Here's the money quote:
"[Instacart] said 40% of the company's volume is profitable - meaning most orders still lose money. It also said that it will be profitable globally by summer. However, its calculation for profitability doesn't include the cost of office space, the cost of acquiring shopper workers, or the salaries of its executives, engineers, designers or other employees..."

In other words, a $2b company figured out how to "not lose money" 40% of the time when their lowest paid workers deliver things. Ignoring those pesky cost centers that are developers, designers, hiring managers and executives. When every corner deli within 10 miles of me delivers (often for free) and presumably does so profitably (disclaimer: I live in a major metro area).

Technology has a peculiar ability to light gigantic piles of money on fire. These are strange times we live in.
Evasion Jailbreak iOS 9.2.1  – iOS Jailbreak Tools and Jailbreak Guide
I for one have "walked out" of any interview that has asked me to do a take home assignment. Usually, the request for the take-home comes early enough. This shows me that the engineering team is too busy with work to even give time for a 30 minute shared text editor code interview. If we all refuse to do it, this crap will stop.
By "super-intelligent" I meant "surprisingly good at achieving specified goals in real life". A super-optimizer.

An optimizer that modifies its goals is bad at achieving specified goals, so if that's what you had in mind then we're talking about different things.
A long time ago, I ran an amateur experiment that applied an evolutionary algorithm to the problem of keyboard layout, using a simple function of finger motion across a corpus of English language text and source code. The best-performing evolved layouts all had the common vowels on the home row's left side and the common consonants on its right side. So I stuck with Dvorak for my own use, since it's easily available everywhere.
Take these "I'd buy if..." comments with a grain of salt. Some people are simply not interested yet will grasp at any excuse not to buy.

Congratulations on making this fantastic app!
It's certainly fear, uncertainty, and doubt, but usually when people use the term "FUD' they mean to imply that the fear, uncertainty, and doubt are unfounded. But in this case, all three are justified. The article mentions that Nature and Science are open to papers that have been pre-published. But I believe that many biology journals still have a blanket policy of not considering papers that have been pre-published. If that's the case, the working scientist is highly motivated to not pre-publish, since it shuts the door to later (peer-reviewed) publication. Unless, of course, the scientist is 100% sure they can get it published in Science or Nature. And in practice one is almost never sure of this.

I'm always curious to know how physics, as a field, got over this and related humps. Was it just easier to get everyone on board because it's a smaller community? Were the journals not as savvy to the fact that pre-prints are not really in their interest?
I have a hard time being impressed by the win. What's the major difference for writing a go AI versus checkers? Doesn't it really come down to the amount of "if/else" that can be processed in time? To me this is a bigger feat for enclosed, non-networked processing than for AI.

Some things are not as simple as playing out every possible solution and picking the optimal one. Art and humor, for example. It takes intelligence to operate and judge subjectively, not compute power.
Are you sure about 'illegal' there? Is any compiler going to complain?

All the compilers I have used will cheerfully reference unallocated memory; I thought the behavior was undefined.
I'll plug my work as always when talking about the topic:

I wrote a small script for Chrome/Firefox that I found useful for reviewing big PRs on GitHub. It gives you possibility to expand/collapse files, mark files ok/fail in order come back to them later.

It works with mouse and keyboard (though I've noticed there are some issues with tab order after GitHub upgraded their code, and small UI glitches, I'll try to have a look at them soon)

It's a hack on top of GitHub so it needs maintenance every couple of months, but overally it does its job well IMO.

I don't have much time to hack on it anymore, but community contribs are very welcome. I wrote some potential ideas for improvements as GH issues in the repo. AMA if you're interested.

[1] https://github.com/jakub-g/gh-code-review-assistant
chess grandmaster can easily be beat by a smartphone app (komodo), is smartphone using more energy than a human brain?

the problem with Go is that there's little data and the game is more complex - but given the small sizes of the deepmind NNs if they generate billions of meaningful games, they could probably compress their model and require less searching thus less energy
Ha, https://github.com/0xABAB?tab=activity is quite interesting
OpenStack TaskFlow versus Celery
I balked at a take-home. They agreed it was a nuisance, instead hired me for a week to work with their team as a contractor! At my rack rate. That was a great experience, didn't hit me in the pocketbook, and convinced the team we could work productively together.
> JSX is awesome

Article is about trends

> You get all the power of JavaScript and its tooling when writing your markup.

This is just not true
It's #3 that makes all the difference: a task that means something, and makes it worth one's while.

Duolingo wanted a functioning nontrivial (albeit sparse) app, expected to take 10 hours to write. I found it amusing on its own, but interviewed & got multiple offers elsewhere in less time.
I'm not sure I understand,

> but 30 others have temporarily been unemployed and none of the bad ones have been unemployed

Is this 30 new programmers plus 20 of the original candidates who can't code? Should that be "none of the bad ones have been employed"?
Markdown is wildly popular because Markdown is easy to write and read unprocessed. At a basic level, it's little more a few conventions for writing text.

RST, used by Sphinx, isn't quite as easy to write or to read. There are plenty of gotchas. RST adds friction.

Using Sphinx also requires you to setup and configure Sphinx for your project - even more friction early on.

The world is far better for having Markdown, and it's the right choice for most projects.

However, there is indeed a place for more complicated projects to take on the workload of a more complicated documentation system so that they can help user and developers better. Django's amazing documentation is an example of this, and a major reason for the success of the project.
What You Can Expect from Switching to CI/CD
Ask HN: What languages are going to compile to webassembly early
With the recent WebAssembly advancements, I was wondering what languages are already on their way, or have concrete plans to support compiling to WebAssembly.

I know of Rust and C/C++ (obviously).

What about GC'd languages: Ruby, Python, Go ?
Are your company especially desirable? Because if not, why should I invest 10-20 hours across ten companies to get one job? Sure I may get lucky and get hired the first place, but thats not very likely, no matter how good I am.

To me requiring me to waste that much time indicate the company being a diva, something I wouldn't want in my employer.
> it just means that one would destroy 99.9%+ of the human species instead of 100%.

That is the difference between extinction and non-extinction. It changes what would previously have been an extinction level event into a non-extinction level event. That is, it doesn't prevent the event, it prevents it from being extinction level, which is the whole point.

> Shotgunning even a few tens of thousands of people in all directions would not meaningfully change the end result of an ELE on Earth unless you wound up with 100-200 of them on the same hospitable rock.

The point isn't to just send people to other locations, but to eventually create self-sustaining colonies. That doesn't happen without first getting people there. (and hospitable is relative).
Or you could support an independent developer for what looks like a superior solution.
That article is the best advertising for not working for DigitalOcean. The management doesn't understand what makes a good programmer.
> Some things are not as simple as playing out every possible solution and picking the optimal one.

That's the point. The branching factor of go is so high that with the current trend in hardware improvements it is impossible to play out every single solution.
Thomas Jefferson and Apple versus the FBI
Also, (experimental) biologists tend not to use TeX/LaTeX. Typically they use Microsoft Word and a proprietary citation manager like Endnote. Typesetting is seen as something the journal deals with, not the author.
From Web 2.0 to Web 2016: The Need for Public Platforms for Digital Ownership
Retweet? Post their papers to discussion forums, such as HN or others? If you read it and understand it, email them or tweet and give feedback? Simply comment somewhere to let them know you applaud this?
But bottom is "nothing" and how can "everything" be "nothing"? But then again, should "everything" contain (is that even the right word?) all things, each and every thing, including "nothing"?
As far as I know, "some" is just 6.0, which is currently at 2.3% adoption (I have it on my Moto X and like it. About a third of the apps I had before the upgrade fail to work if not given contacts or location, so I just uninstall them.) iOS has the same feature but much greater adoption.

What I would really like is a "some contacts" option. I still have people I haven't called in years in my phone, but if I could give an app a list of 20 family, friends, and coworkers that would make things simpler.
...and thanks to the Internet, people decades from now will still be able to marvel at what a delightful and constructive and totally not insane person that 0xABAB was. Congrats buddy, your douchebaggery will live forever if there's any justice in the world.
BriskBard: 10 apps in one made by a single developer
It's been a long time developing this program and it finally reached version 1.0.

I created it using Delphi 10, openssl, sqlite, hunspell and indy components.

The features list is way too long to include it here but as I said in the website, BriskBard is the new all-in-one Windows program that simplifies many of the most common tasks in Internet integrating in one program a web browser, an email client, a media player, a news aggregator, a file transfer client, a newsgroups reader, a contact manager, instant messaging, and several web developer tools.

I also designed the website and logo (I'm not a designer and it shows)

Please, tell me what you think.
Thanks in advance.

https://www.briskbard.com

PS : Sorry for my english.
Well they did call it Scrooge.
b) Bluespec
Brushed over Microsoft though. They are the ones closest to having that mythical “appliance” for Enterprise IT. Its calles Azure Stack.
Sounds like this could be a big deal for bitbucket.org and gitlab.com? Esp. considering private repositories there.
Does somebody know why we are still using pdfs for papers ?
I know a lot of people that are trying to parse PDF files and it is an awful process.

If somebody is looking for an idea for a new venture, this is a problem, yet to be solved !
I don't think there's much economic irrationality on display here - at least, on the short term. The ROI on those decisions is certainly an individualized calculation. However, I would wonder how healthful your options are when you resort to food delivery services. There's certainly not a lot of wiggle-room here because most humans require the same nutrients to be healthy and need to avoid the same ingredients to avoid being unhealthy.

Delivery food, even the "healthy" kind, is often packed with excessive amounts of sugars, salt, and artificial flavors. You're going to need to make a lot more than $100/hr pre-tax to afford the heart surgery, diabetes treatment, or other major health interventions that result from decades of eating food products prepared by people making about 10% of your base income.
AMA with Evan You, Creator of Vue.js – LIVE Now. Ask Your Questions
I really like the idea, but (to give some feedback) I don't think one can call anything the imdb for x without a best/worst 250. And ratings and explore by category and I want a pony... (Also the site is somewhat unfriendly for NoScript users, apparently one has to allow apple.com to get search working, which is counter intuitive. But of course noscript users should expect some trouble.)
It's really too bad that people feel the need to act this way online. It's one thing when it's reddit or something where the level of discussion is very informal and trolls are downvoted (not saying it's okay, just less disappointing) but on GitHub? Take a deep breath.
Why can't you do 1), but at the end of the PR, after everything is cleared and it is ready to merge, squash/modify the commits structure however you like?
Yes. My laptop is not on the lowest end of the scale, but over the past week my IDE has alternated between vi and emacs on my VPS as I edit Python scripts. I don't need a lot of local power to do that - years ago I was doing that type of thing from VT100 terminals.
Legacy.com Is Seeking a Data Modeler- ETL
That sounds taken out of context, or misquoted. Its reasonable to talk about the marginal profitability of an activity. E.g. Given employee base (shopper workers already hired), current app and backend (no marginal cost for developers/executives) then the sales price minus cost-of-sale was positive. Very important number! Means the company would be profitable after scaling that part of the business enough to cover fixed costs.

Most startups are actually looking for that magic formula. They spend spend spend until they find it, then scale scale scale to become a profitable business as a whole.
I think what they meant is that they could use python without having to also ship the implementation like CPython. I mean, that thing is huge. How is it feasible to serve 10mb for a website?
>Podcasting is a medium that's dying to be upended.

I couldn't agree more, specifically in the realm of comedy podcasts. I don't have the hands on experience you do, but I've followed a lot of podcasts that have grown to the point where they have a rabid fanbase that's dying to pay for more content, but existing means of doing so are clunky or otherwise unappealing (some podcasts that come out of a certain Mexican restaruant/comedy club in LIC come to mind). The closest thing (short of joining a subscription network like KATG's) is probably Patreon, which in my experience has been less than ideal.

Also, many comedians treat podcasts as means to an end (increased album sales, drawing bigger crowds on the road) where as I imagine many comedians could be earning more from their podcasts than any other single thing they do (short of maybe attaining that Louis CK/Kevin Hart/Amy Schumer level of fame). If there was an easy way to set it all up it would take minimal extra effort from the comedians and could turn into a really nice revenue source.

But enough of me blathering about things you're already well aware of, I'm sure. I work for a desktop software provider mainly handling integrations with other companies through our webservice -- mostly backend LAMP stack stuff. No fun side projects as of yet, but the more I think about this podcast stuff the more I think I should try to do something.
Ok, what's wrong with alloca? Other than blowing the stack, that is.
I just had a thought: what happens if Apple complies with the order (say they lose the legal battle or something), but individual employees refuse to build the software? I think the verdict is out on whether or not Apple, a corporation, can be compelled to do this, but what if they can't find anyone to do it?

Just thinking it _should_ be much harder to compel individuals to do something like this than it is to compel a corporation.
20 women in tech: Why we love software engineering
I can't say how early because I don't fully understand it just yet, but I'm planning a backend for SICL.

So hopefully, Common Lisp.
Hrm, that's the not impression I tried to give in my comment. Obviously I was in a dystopia, and it was made very clear that we were being handled - not even the guides tried to pretend we were being shown the North Korea that civilians see. The guy who sat in front of me on the bus was literally arrested on the way out of the airport and is still stuck there! I'm pretty aware of the situation.

The way the North Korea tours work is as following:

1. The government-run North Korean tourist organization partners with foreign tour companies (all based in China, AFAIK). There are several foreign tour companies (Koryo Tours, Young Pioneer Tours, etc), which all cater to different segments of the market and advertise their services differently.

2. Every tour goes to the same locations and in theory gets the same commentary, but the various tour companies can send different foreign guides, and have some power to get different Korean guides. This, combined with the different sections of the market, has a pretty huge effect on your experience on the tour. I went with YPT, which is why it was a party with a bunch of mid-twenties Americans/British Commonwealth guys. If you go with, say, Koryo Tours, you're signing up for what I referred to as the dystopia experience where it's an older, primarily continental European crowd and the guides yell at you for taking pictures. I personally think that this is what the people taking the dystopia tours are looking for - they want to go home and talk about how they braved the tyranny of the government minders and snuck pictures of random rice fields.

On a personal note, I've been to some of the worst places on Earth by most objective and subjective measures, and digging under the skin (and into the dumpsters) of dysfunctional places is a hobby of mine. It's always a little funny to me that if you try to humanize the North Koreans a little (not even trying to make excuses for their government!), the default assumption from people who've never been there is that you're a rube who has been taken in by obvious propaganda.
2: Valuable personal property. I have a bunch of camera gear I used to insure though a USAA VPP policy. It was stupid cheap, like $30 or $50 per year for $1500 of coverage and if it ever gets stolen on vacation or I drop it and break it or whatever then the bank pays. Could see it being useful for laptops/portable electronics, musical instruments, etc. Checkout-lane insurance policies are a scam but I think there would be a market for legit coverage.
This is awesome! I'm sure if you open up the API, many people would want if for their respective players (this would be awesome with Overcast.fm, for example)
I had a meeting with the ICQ founders and senior engineers in 2000.

At the time, they were using 9 T1's, which even then seemed pretty small as far as bandwidth goes.
I love the comment by ezefranca on https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/issues/2520
Do we really need a HN article for "someone is being rude/self-centered/ignorant on a website somewhere"?
"Positive unit economics; couldn't cover engineering salaries, marketing, or G&A" is how I'd read that.

This is notable because some of the on-demand companies are engaged in a bidding war out of perceived land-grab economics, either on the supply or demand side (or both), so they price the customer-side service or the supply-side cut in such a way that the company loses money on most or all orders.

Think like: We'll deliver you a $8.50 sandwich for $10.25 and a $1 delivery fee, with a guaranteed payment to the driver of $5.00 per order.

If that's a little gobsmacking, suffice it to say that there are a lot of people with Uber envy, and that this is part of the playbook in expansion phase for them, too. (They are presently engaged in a bidding war against an Uber-for-China which is transferring billions of dollars from investors of both firms to drivers/riders.)
On top of that.. when you're in `?w=1` view you can't leave line-by-line comments. :facepalm:
Possibly, it's not clear if AlphaGo is playing better or simply approaching the game differently. Game five was close and AlphaGo seemed to mostly win due to time considerations.

PS: Honestly, it might be a year or a decade, but I suspect there is plenty of headroom to drastically surpass human play.
Coverage-guided kernel fuzzing with syzkaller
All-female flight crew lands 787 in country they're not allowed to drive in
>3. 2-week paid trial doing real work.

That could work for those without a job, but if I'm securely in a job, if I'm going to be switching to a 2 week contract, there needs to be a significant bonus attached.