skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I were Trump's campaign team, I'd be begging Anonymous to deliver on their threat. Trump clearly doesn't need an online presence to get out the vote or get media coverage. And nothing will increase the populist sympathy that has fueled his campaign so far than a shady, illegal attack by international cyber-activists.
This is way overblown. Yes, the government should not be able compel Apple to build back doors, but this isn't some kind of new precedent about compulsion. There are plenty of industries where the cost of doing business includes creating something to satisfy a regulatory requirement.
I think it's just that the VC model is predicated on finding that fraction of a percent of investments that gives you astronomical ROI as opposed to more conservative investors seeking lower returns more often (the type of person who would invest in a restaurant just to get a check every month). They are willing to get nothing back a majority of the time while the more conservative investor would probably be bankrupt if even 50% of his investments netted a total loss of investment.
I would do both qualitative and quantitative. 100%. That's hugely critical.
Hi folks!

I graduated from a moderately-ranked undergrad program with a 3.0 in Computer Engineering (the HW-centric flavor of CS), going on 6 years ago.

After graduation, I wanted to get into the embedded field, but was discouraged by the employment options (hardware hadn't yet made the comeback it has been making over the last 3-5 years... 'old' players like Intel still dominated, which wasn't particularly attractive to a bright-eyed 21 year old).

In the interim 6 years, I've been doing iOS development, and believe I've amassed a CV that speaks well to my dedication and work ethic (and is moderately accomplished, at that!).

My question is... how far off am I from being a viable candidate for embedded job opportunities? What kinds of projects/side-work would you like to see to prove that I 'still have it' and/or could sufficiently think on my feet, and get back into embedded development?

FWIW, I have resume experience at Apple, Microsoft, and Google (I actually was hired at Apple out of college to do hardware QA but, once I realized the path from QA to embedded development would be a near impossible feat, I quickly moved on to iOS development).

Thanks! And good luck with your respective products!!
This is making me think twice about applying to AirBnB, or any one of my friends. I will remember this story.
Colonels of Truth
Its my coop's website. I'm not offended, I want feedback! I think we have some interesting long-term goals, but we are still trying to figure out who we have to be to get there.
Maybe we could "solve" both problems at the same time, similar to how the Europeans sent people to settle in North America once upon a time.
It boggles my mind that the phrase "Get your ass to Mars" took this long to appear in this thread.
That's awesome to hear, thanks =D

From a technical perspective, I've been working on streaming live shows via YouTube and having that automatically embed on the homepage and throughout the site. It's displaying 4 cameras in a 2x2 layout similar to this NSFW clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLqRSwyqnU1WEECXxN3uN08G2...

I'm also working on a new app that uses Cordova/Ionic Framework that'll make it easier to listen for regular fans and premium VIP members. In the spirit of staying connected with the fans, I've been posting updates on that progress https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C219o_6tzNk

As far as using the web for interacting with fans, it's been a challenge, so it's great to hear your compliment. Initially, we just had our own forums where fans would participate. Now, our community interaction is fragmented along Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and our forums. Of course, all those platforms allow us to stay in front of more fans but it's a challenge to keep posting across those platforms without just repeating the same exact thing on each site.
Jesus. From the first bug mentioned in your comment in that thread:

Reporter: "libsystemd-journal or systemd-journald loses some systemd's parts of message context when few messages logged in a moment"

Poettering: "This is a race. ... To fix this we need [two new things.] ... These items are listed on the plumbers wishlist, because we need [those things mentioned previously] from the kernel folks."
nope cuz android SUCKS
When I first found out about the web, early 90's, and it was "obvious" that the role of the web was to expand scientific publishing. I expected that everybody would publish latex files (raw source, not PDFs) in computationally accessible formats, with raw data in easily parseable, semantic forms.

That didn't really happen as expected. In my own chosen field (biology) it happened much more slowly than I hoped- physics (with arxiv) was far better. However, just getting PDFs on biorxiv is only a small part of the long game. I did not appreciate the huge importance placed on publishing in high-profile journals has on one's career trajectory and how large a role that would play in slowing the transition to free publication and post-publication review.

The long game is to enable the vast existing resources, and the new resources, to be parsed semantically by artificial intelligence algorithms. We've already passed the point where individuals can understand the full literature in their chosen field and so eventually we will need AI just to make progress.
Your company would be far down my list. I'm not working for free if what I do isn't open source. If I'm working on a proprietary product I expect to be paid for it.

If you told me to do this take home assignment I would've politely smiled and said 'sure let me do it right away'. Then I go home, research more about your product and the market, try out your demo product, figure out how things work and release an open source version and make it free. Surely, that is a much better indicator than 'Build a CRUD using Yii'.

A few years ago, I did this to one company I interviewed at who were super arrogant and condescending. I just checked their website and it returns 404. Looks like people prefered my free open source version instead of paying them for it.

Don't fuck with me.
How to have a better life
Whoa... That sounds just terrible. What makes it especially terrible is that they already had you do some coding work before flying you in.

Something is utterly, terribly wrong with their process if the coding exercise made them think that you were worth flying in for an interview and then they cut short the interview process because they thought it was going so badly.

There are other signs that the tech leadership at airbnb is confused. Witness this almost parody of a video of their devs describing how they worked their way through pretty much every javascript hotness de jour through the years. I honestly thought this was some sort of a parody initially...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMvvb6F8dgk
[SURVEY] What's the best method(s) for a newbie to learn to code? (See Results)
I guess there are different types of "types of types".

:/
2016 Presidential Candidate Tech Scorecard
That's exactly why I tattle on this particular company--Tyler Tech, in Lakewood--at every available opportunity. (In the U.S., truth is sufficient defense against defamation.)

They also had me drive my own car from Madison to Milwaukee, to catch a flight that actually stopped in Madison after the first leg, just so they could save a few bucks on the airfare. And then they refused to pay for the mileage between Madison and Milwaukee, after promising earlier to reimburse all my travel expenses.

I put up with an awful lot of inconvenience from interviewers without comment, but every little slight is ratcheting up the minimum acceptable offer from that company. And if you act like sleazebags at the interview, you had best be prepared to lose any candidates with an ear to the grapevine.
This so much. No response is only really acceptable when you sent a job application, and their only communication back to you was an automated email letting you know they received it. If you were actually in communication with someone at the company, they can at the very least give you a two-line "we've decided to move forward with other candidates" message.

I've had rejection emails from huge companies and tiny startups personally written by the hiring manager. It's not that hard.
Sexual Harassment and attempted rape at RubyConf 2015
> The day WebAssembly is pushed into mainstream I'd use a web browser with no support for it at all.

I'm guessing you're a JS diehard that doesn't want to see other languages hit the web? I'm not aware of any other reasons why you'd fight this otherwise.
I don't usually ask candidates to write code for free. They're professionals and I expect them to _review_ code with me -- some of theirs and some of ours -- but not write it. I find that asking a candidate to write code for no true economic purpose that I will lightly read and then throw away does not inspire somebodies best work and I can gain more insight by an exercise where i have them read an explain code to me.
I'll have to try Munchery, looks like they have a pretty decent selection of healthy and tasty meals. My problem with Sprig beyond price point is much of the food doesn't seem appetizing enough for the price to be worth paying, not that I can't actually pay it. Thistle is more in the category of "healthy food delivery" than on-demand ordering, which is another downside, but I'd still say at least that one category overlaps. HealthyOut actually is probably not in fact relevant to this discussion so my bad on mentioning that.

EDIT: Munchery doesn't delivery for lunch so that's a pretty big limitation there.
So this is a bunch of constructs for creating function-pointers and the like which then would be sent to mpi or other parallel libraries to do the actual interfacing with the parallel mechanism.

Any idea how this would work with (random stuff I'm thinking about) Cuda or Tensorflow?
I wonder if there's a set of API hooks they could expose to allow third party applications to handle more advanced code review techniques? I would totally understand GitHub not wanting to implement a full Phabricator/Gerrit review feature set, but maybe they could make it easier to integrate other services for it.
It depends on what is meant by machine learning. If it's referring to learning games from first principles, then it's certainly true for the time. As far as I know the first AI to be able to learn multiple games from first principles was demonstrated in 2015:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-02/25/google-deepmi...

AlphaGo wouldn't fit in this mould, as it has been taught how to win at Go rather than working it out from the basic rules, so AI hasn't 'beaten' Go fully, but AlphaGo is a great achievement nonetheless.
U.S. Offshore Wind Cost May Drop 55% as Builders Gain Experience
Ask HN: What are your tricks for fighting malware?
For the first time in maybe 10 years I got a bad download yesterday that just about destroyed one of my Windows computers-- registry edits have stopped me accessing the internet from it (proxy settings overridden and greyed out in internet settings) and background scripts I can't find are continually downloading and running adware at such a pace that the computer is too exhausted for me to even open the control panel before the screen fills with other windows.

As a software engineer, this was frustrating. What have you done when things like this happened to you, besides reformat?
> You say "there's not enough data" and "it's not for normal people" at the same time. While these are not entirely mutually exclusive, the more data you want accessible, the more difficult it becomes to categorize, display and visualize this data.

They are different complaints. Adwords is usable after you understand how it works, but the whole process of setting up a campaign or migrating from the Keyword Planner to AdWords is not a piece of cake. They even send AdWords ads by mail to businesses, like anyone can setup an effective AdWords campaign, but it's not that easy to get started with the tool.
On the other hand, I know that it's a different beast, but FB ads are really simple to setup.

Google Webmaster Tools's UI it's not difficult to use per se, but the UX is quite bad on average and I just wonder why Google won't improve it.
There is no need to use the Moon as a "staging post" for Mars.

There are things that make the Moon interesting, but none of them are Mars.
Edit: Meant to reply to a child comment, sorry!
I'd love it if there was a way for me to queue my comments before submitting. I often keep my comments in a separate textedit/nv window and then go back to put them in since I want to keep track of questions that arise as I'm reading, but I don't want to pepper someone with comments that would be resolved 200 lines later in the diff.
Ask HN: Have you known anyone who authored malware or adware?
Why did they do it? Did they actually make money?
Right. If you're going to accept a 50% failure risk, your average return from the companies that don't fail has to be better than 2x. If 70% of them fail, even 3x isn't enough.
Ah. I wish they included that in the article.

I'm all for open source and unleashing Skynet, but I was concerned someone as important and skilled as Lee will be to improving AI was going to go unpaid.
Build things you want for yourself and publish them. Don't worry about cost optimization, production at scale, patents, etc.: just make something with unique functionality. Repeat. You'll be pleasantly surprised how quickly you learn and amass a portfolio of unique toys:)
From the article: "Sprig had looked into acquiring SpoonRocket, but decided against it and is now doing 6X the meal volume SpoonRocket did in SF."
A lot of people here seem to suggest it is unreasonable to ask someone to do some coding in an interview given that you've shown a series of projects and provided references. Unfortunately I've been through a variety of interviews where I feel the conditions which I was asked to code were unreasonable (whiteboard, overly complex problems while under pressure, using a language I was not comfortable with or just academic problems that are rare in the real world), but I really think confirming their ability to write code, beyond things like github repos etc, is an important step of hiring a developer (because i've seen great github repos and references, but ended up with developers that are very, very average)

I've only hired tens of people, and while that is not a massive sample size, I'm still astonished by the simple questions we ask that people get stuck on. The one that continues to shock me:

"In any language of your choice, write a function that takes an array of ints and returns the sum of those ints (If you use a language such as php do not use array_sum)"

I'm just looking for something like:

function sum($ints) {

$sum = 0;

foreach($ints as $i) {

$sum += $i;

}

return $sum;

}

Then we follow up with something like: "lets say your input array contains [4,-7,0], walk me through the code"

And we finally ask "talk to me about some things that could go wrong at runtime that might cause issues with this function". Expecting people to talk about overflows (maxint?) or if its a dynamic language like php, checking for non-integer values.

I estimate that around 50% of people get ruled out during the "coding" exercise mentioned above. It is astonishing that these people even apply for developer jobs.
There's an interesting discussion on Stack Exchange about whether it's useful to sign every commit:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/212192/what-a...
At least they tell you instead of taking the applications anyways and then tossing out resumes that don't match.

I once came across a job application that had TOP SCHOOLS ONLY emblazoned across the top.

Thanks for saving me my time in applying.
Run Servo in Servo
I really don't get it! Could someone please explain this to me:

- Why do humans today work so hard so that some other members of homo sapiens species can inhabit another planet? Those creatures, you, everyone you know and the entire species will be gone. Why bother to do that or anything at all? What is the end game?

- Is the decision to care about humans going to Mars made by careful & rational consideration which resulted in conclusion that members of homo sapiens species should be on Mars and that there is an objective moral duty to do so? Why pick homo sapiens species instead of some other animal species? Is it objectively true that a bio-chemical process known as a homo sapiens has intrinsic value and that everyone should work to sustain it?
Has Skype really learned that in the last year or so?

As it sure was not the case before that (you could even check, if someone briefly was online, while you were absent from your machine, running skype, via seeing the "waiting" icons near messages disappear).
That's awesome and means alongside ObjectiveC, I effectively waited out deep diving on 2 (soon to be) formerly popular programming languages. I get to use my preferred language, Python, for even more.
long term, yes, but in the few years after the gun ban, the graph goes steeply up, so I don't know how you can draw the conclusion that banning guns had the consequence of reducing gun crime. And the graph I linked to seems to use the same data yours does, so aparently your data is just as worthless as mine.

It's not irrelevant as a large number of firearms were unlicensed. There were a ton of old service guns lying in peoples attics completely unregistered. It takes time to enforce a law.

There are probably still service guns lying in people's attics; I don't suppose much crime is being done with them.

As far as handguns that were in active use - i.e. the ones relevant to this conversation - they had to be (and were) handed over to police within the year iirc. It was done quickly and efficiently.

The licensing laws are and were very strict. Anybody who had a handgun was required to have a licence for it, for which good character references and criminal record background checks were (and are) required, and they had to renew it every year. They also had to be an active member of a gun club (the only place you were allowed to use a handgun), and that membership was also reviewed every year.

So it's difficult to imagine how banning handguns would have much of an effect on handgun crime in the first place, unless you want to argue that licenced gun owners were committing crime and getting away with it, which I don't.

But still, I'm willing to be convinced with evidence. A graph that doesn't show gun crime increasing after a ban would be a good place to start.
It's hard to get a programming job without having practical experience. It might be easier to apply to a Testing/QA job and gradually transition to programming when opportunities arrives (test automation -> small tools -> small features -> bigger features...)
The only thing humanity has "leveraged the world economy" to do is to destroy the environment.
What is your opinion on a technical blog? like http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/ (note, this is mine)

Is that more or less useful than a github profile?

Just curious.
I did buy ppk on Javascript, I would never have done so without Quirks mode website. So there's that
That guy again!
> compiling from ECMAScript to WebAssembly would be a great boon in production.

That's not going to work well, I'm afraid.

JavaScript is a highly-dynamic language, and as a result, requires JITs that do runtime type profiling, type inference, and type-specialized code generation, in order to be fast.

WebAssembly is a low-level, statically typed language. It's like a portable C with a small binary footprint.

Even if you annotate and/or detect some of the JavaScript types at compile time, if you don't have them all, that means compiling JavaScript to WebAssembly will result in code that everywhere does "if this type, do that; if that type, do this". That's going to be bigger in code size than JavaScript currently is. It's also going to run much slower.

If you did type every single thing in your JavaScript program, somehow, then that might work well. But that's not really JavaScript anymore (or even TypeScript, etc.).
A quick coding problem doesn't have to take that long either. I agree that asking for a (relatively) huge project is the wrong way to go about it, but it doesn't have to be huge.
> There are parts of the Adwords interface that "suck" because they intentionally try to hide certain things to maximize revenue.

I admit that I have the same feeling
Now that AlphaGo has mastered Go, this article begs the question: where does AI go from here? Are there other high profile games to defeat, or has competition based AI run out of opponents?

This question must have arisen within Google (and Facebook). Certainly IBM will tell you (under duress) that neither chess nor Watson were the game changers they had hoped, at least commercially.

If you're Larry Page, what do you do with DeepMind now?
Can you unpack what is meant by "to be parsed semantically by artificial intelligence algorithms"?

I understand the words, but in this context it has me a bit confused as to what problem you see AI solving.
If you want to target WebAssembly, I suggest starting with Rust or some other language that doesn't require a garbage collector.

WebAssembly doesn't have a garbage collector (yet) which is essential for JavaScript and many other high-level languages. Shipping a garbage collector compiled to WebAssembly is going to make downloads much larger, and it's likely going to perform worse than the native garbage collector.

A compiler for a garbage-collected language is probably better off targeting JavaScript, not WebAssembly. There are already lots of languages that do this: GWT, Dart, Kotlin, ClosureScript, Elm, etc. There was already plenty of work to do for a compiler expert even before WebAssembly came along.
I've been pleasantly surprised at how fast Github has been moving since that critical open letter came out. For a giant company like Github they've been releasing developer tools very quickly.
The World's Top Fighter Pilots Fear This Woman's Voice
Does anybody else feel like GitHub has released more features in the last month than the last 6 months? I'm not sure if it's just a coincidence with all the attention they've gotten on HN, but these improvements are much appreciated!
> This experience has dissuaded many of my friends from applying there.

This should be the lesson for employers: an interview candidate who feels good about their interviewing experience, even if they aren't hired, can refer their qualified friends to your company. The alternative is that they might discourage good candidates from interviewing with your company by warning people on Hacker News about its hiring practices. Also, the candidate might be a good fit for a different position in the future.
arxiv only accepts computational biology papers. Compare the subject areas of biorxiv http://biorxiv.org/ and arxiv http://arxiv.org/archive/q-bio
Idea Expansion Format (IEF)
Food delivery startup SpoonRocket, which raised $13.5M, shuts down
I'm using NEO2, which is pretty solidly researched
These things could lead to an increase in exports from landlocked countries with crummy infrastructure in Africa, as well as inner parts of places like India.
Here's another example, using more modern codecs: https://brionv.com/misc/ogv.js/demo/

It's used in production on Wikipedia: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TimedMediaHandler/o...
Besides, I would say (in my experience) having 'false' like this will tend to occur when debugging, to force a certain execution path.

In this case it is undesirable for the compiler/model to change the static type since that may then let you make other changes which you should'nt be making, or cause compiler errors further down.