skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've had deploys break because gems were removed from RubyGems.org. Using CI as a gate isn't sufficient because a gem can be removed in the window between a completed CI run and the deploy. Making it harder, generally if you have a gem installed locally you won't notice the problem until you need to install it on a fresh system.

It used to be the case that a yanked gem was simply removed from the gem index, but the file was still published, so you'd still be able to install it. Now the gems are deleted, eliminating that option.

So, other systems are definitely susceptible and it does burn people. I just don't think we've seen an issue on this scale yet. The largest I've hit have been when the twitter gem was yanked in advance of Twitter's shutdown, a fog-XYZ gem being yanked as new versions were released, and at least one yanked version of net-ssh.

The only really effective way to avoid this is to mirror all your dependencies yourself (and not honor upstream yanks) or vendor all your gems. I know of exceedingly few people doing this.

I've yet to encounter a legitimate cause for a yanked gem. But I worry more that a bad actor gains credentials to a high profile account and just wreaks havoc on the ecosystem. On that note, I have found and reported users that've committed their RubyGems.org credentials to GitHub in a "dotfiles" repository.
A Subtle Power Struggle for Control of Music Metadata
Who would be stupid enough to allow a known burglar to return and repair the door? I would never put my family and other possessions at risk that way. Plus I would have hired an honest worker to fix the door long before the hypothetical burglar was caught and sentenced. These ideas only seem sensible in the context of an ivory tower philosophical debate.
Probably not legal, but somebody actually made a faithful fan remake of Maniac Mansion called Maniac Mansion Deluxe. http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/site/games/game/401/
This is a no brainer. Time to buy Tesla.
> true of two American speakers

Absolutely. Red and blue states. The east and west coast. Socioeconomic class. Gender, race, age, education. You and I.

But those are the differences. What we have in common also pertains. Almost everyone is American, exposed to the same media climate, and, most importantly, speaks English.

And that is why we communicate. We connect and overcome our differences using what we have in common to get things done.

"Apple" is only the tip of the iceberg. It will mean different things to different people. But what we share between us culturally is the American "apple" and the English "apple". If we compare that with the Japanese "ringo" and the Japanese word "ringo" there will be differences. To say "apple" = "ringo" is only equating symbols and mere entry points, to which not all else automatically follows.

> evocation separately from a stricter 'meaning'

There is evocation, and there is meaning, at all times. There is also context, and the intent of the speaker. There is even body language and tone. Even this is a simplification, but it is far more accurate than what they taught most of us at school, which is something like "language = grammar + vocabulary". This model does not translate mechanically even though theoretically it's suppose to. What we've now found is that what is missing is not technology or algorithms or processing power, but rather, most of the picture. That's why it still takes a good human translator to translate it all. Computers still cannot infer intent, transfer emotions, or cross cultural lines without embarrassing themselves.

(Thank you for a thoughtful and stimulating response.)
True, I know a few (here in SV, where else? ;) who went from a Prius to a Tesla.
I have not really looked at these, no. Mainly because I don't need a new car right now. Though the complexity of a hybrid compared to either a conventional or pure electric is somewhat of a strike against them for me.
Possibly! Certainly if the plane was traveling in a vacuum it would produce no boom, so one would assume that the boom would be reduced as the air became less dense. However my understanding is that most of the advantage from altitude comes from the attenuation (or really spreading out) of sound with the square of distance.
I remember first playing Monkey Island and DotT in German way back when.
There exist a lot of opportunities for startups to use technology to make previously high-friction experiences dealing with the bureaucracy into low-friction experiences to the mutual benefit of bureaucracy and its clients.

An example: substantially every state has a legal requirement that businesses which find themselves in possession of property which isn't theirs must hold it for a while (for the rightful owner) then escheat it. Escheating means "deposit with the state for safekeeping." This doesn't extinguish the original owner's interest in the property; in principle, you have a long or unbounded amount of time to ask for the property back. (You might be thinking "A lost hat" but think more "An abandoned bank account" or "The surrender value of a life insurance policy" or "A paycheck that was never deposited.")

Those processes typically take place on paper and are relatively high-friction. For example, you need to get a document notarized, provide various proofs of ID and previous address, etc etc. Some states have very simple CRUD apps which let you check the status of claims these days. Those CRUD apps could be much, much improved upon by e.g. making it more straightforward for people to find and claim their own property. (This is generally free under the laws of most states, and some less-scrupulous operators charge for essentially running a free search then presenting the results to you, but one could imagine a value-adding business here.)
So there are literally zero consulting companies that will pay a fair wage for 40 hours work? Or is it just that the fancy ones like McKinsey all want to run you ragged?
Badger registrar shutting down
facebook may be a bad example. they named themselves after a generic directory that many colleges have been giving out for decades.
That's cool. It's amazing how much overlap there is with gamedev concepts.
So America has a great prison system and no benefits. Most immigrants work... No real terrorism to speak of outside the lone wolfs. Bad? Good?
only in the most narrow sense. His cause, whatever it is, isn't furthered, but now everyone involved (including him) looks bad, and a lot of innocent people have had their time wasted fixing something that shouldn't have broken. It's a loss for everyone involved. He looks petty and untrustworthy, npm looks amateurish, kik gets bad publicity, and everyone using this junk is stuck with their face in their palms.
15 things do with binder clip [video]
I don't have any hard evidence to back this up (mostly anecdotal), but I think the demand for a Model 3 is much, much larger than people think. Estimating demand based on current luxury car demand is probably not accurate. It's pretty obvious that many people making 125-200k who would never buy an 80K car have chosen to spend more and buy the Model S.

Like I said, purely anecdotal but I know 30-40 people, many of whom aren't in tech, who plan on putting a deposit down on the first day. It's literally 1 out of 6 people I talk to. When I mention "I won't buy another car unless it's a Tesla" I often hear "me too." Many of these people I was shocked even knew what Tesla was, let alone were waiting for this car. I've only driven BMWs and Infinitis and won't buy a gas vehicle again after driving a Model S. A 35K Model 3, assuming it performs similar to a 60KwH Model S has a couple advantages over a 3 series. 1) With tax incentives, it can be had for much cheaper in many states 2) if you factor in gas savings, it brings it closer to 25K. I really think it will appeal to the BMW crowd as well as those who would never touch a BMW because of the image it portrays.
Bootstrapping (or simply being rich) is a thing.
This seems infeasible in the United States.

If I've already agreed to a stacked arbitration process as part of a contract, isn't "the legal system" mostly out of the picture? All you're left is appealing to a company's reputation, to "do the right thing".
The volunteers are going out in the field with mobile apps to record all the data. They have a very large complete data set over years. Here is group of people with no programming experience and they already use this data in unsophisticated ways to predict when a egg will hatch so they can send one of the many volunteers to the site to make sure the turtle makes it to the ocean. They don't have any money and they weren't asking for help. If I had time I'd do this myself to start with machine learning. I was suggesting that this might be a useful dataset for machine learning. Build a model on two years of data and there is still two years of data to test it on top of people with mobile devises collecting environmental and case data every day.

Seriously, isn't this a good example where machine learning might be useful? "I made a million dollars saving sea turtles," said no one ever.
I hope you print out that comment and put it in your future presentations. This is the "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." iPod moment here.

The default reaction to innovation is naysaying; sometimes the critics are right, and sometimes they're wrong. But nobody can predict the future. Keep marching forward.
And by doing that, completely missed the point of the article.
But why three months? They don't explain this part very well. Everything else was spot on.
Could be worse. Could be a lot better.
Well. I'll gladly admit that the C code I have written was way less complex than a web browser. When I still wrote C code for a living, I worked on an application suite that was ~250k lines of code, maybe ~300k, in total, whereas e.g. Firefox is a couple of million lines. I assume other mainstream browsers are similarly big.

Plus, what a browser does is, by nature, a lot more complicated than what I worked on.

EDIT: What I am trying to say is: I do not mean to trivialize use-after-free bugs, but in my personal experience, I did not run into many, while I witnessed (and caused, I am afraid) a bunch of array bounds violations, and they sometimes made me want to cry.
> Is the point that kik should just give up on their company trademark?

You can't possibly think that's the point he's making. Did you even bother to read the article?
I live in a high-end condo (not in the Bay area), and in a building of 400 units there are 5 Teslas on the first 3 floors of parking (8 floors total).

Not to mention, everyone I know with a Tesla is only considering Tesla for their next car.
The pithy version...

How far out you can spot your mistakes, and the multiplier affect you have on the people working around you.
$20k/yr, there goes my plans for quitting my dayjob...
Well, now I'll upvote you for saying something else that seems wise, so it's all good.
Somewhat related, I just coincidentally stumbled upon https://github.com/alexanderGugel/ied . "Upcomming Nix-inspired features", to paraphrase their README, could well prevent this debacle.

(And btw, We Nix users very much do hope to start using IPFS :).)
I like telling my AWS interviewing story. They forgot to call the first time. Then they were "impressed" and invited me for an onsite. All seemed well, except they forgot about me coming that day or just people who were supposed to interview me were gone. Everyone asked pretty much the same "leadership principles" questions, which I refused to parrot back through my "life experiences" -- I guess it went against my own personal "principles".

Oh and they forgot about me during lunch. Not that I was hungry, but it just added to the "oh it can't be as bad as the blogs say, surely..." factor. So sat in the office looking around. After a while started wondering around the hallways, hoping someone would say "Are you allowed to be here? Can I help you?". So that was fun. And that's not all though, also said they'd call within 2 days to let me know the results, which of course ended up being 3 weeks.

It was worth it though -- it made for a great story!
> He made it clear he doesn't want to consider it a knee jerk, which has approximately zero relationship to whether it actually is.

A knee jerk reaction is an immediate unthinking emotional reaction; when you detail out your thought process in a lengthy well articulated blog post to explain your actions, it isn't knee jerk by definition. There was nothing at all unthinking about his actions or his protest. Point in fact, when someone explains to you why something isn't a knee jerk reaction, it automatically isn't. His making it clear has an approximately 100% relationship to the fact that it isn't.
I'm preaching to the choir, but the problem with other manufacturers, and why I would never consider a Bolt, is it's got a 0-60 time over 5.5 and it looks like crap. To me, it's a 3 series with a way better user experience.
Personally, no, but even if it did, what if a bug is found in the future? The community fixes the bug, not necessarily you!
That's an interesting point, I haven't yet thought of that. Could be. Maybe you'd need a whole array of these sensors behind the screen at different positions.
Humans of Silicon Valley
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This is the answer. The reason is because it is specifically "time spent with reality," which has a way of showing you what you don't know.
For now, you may be right. But "cool" is a fickle thing. DeLoreans were cool too.
You probably should've read the article.
I never understood the rate yourself bit. Is it designed to fuck with your head? "So you think you are good? We'll show you. How about this obscure trick question from C++17 spec -- see not as good as you thought"
I'll highlight just one aspect I've been thinking about:

Imagine your company has a programming problems that is a shaped like a vague cloud.

With a junior developer, you need to do the work to dig into the cloud, define its boundaries, segment the work, and write it all up as tickets. Then you give it to the junior dev who focuses on each one independently. They are not responsible for the end result, though they may be asked to verify the parts they coded in production.

With a senior dev you say "solve this problem" and walk away to do other work. You know they can just dig in, figure out the right solution, code it, test it, and maintain it.
I also think that the effect of money on the law is corrosive, and while this kind of technology may level the playing field, that's not a universal good.

Right now in some venues you can buy "the right lawyer" for a lot of money and get a DUI pled down to a slap on the wrist.

That's not justice, but lowering the price to $200, and turning "the right lawyer" into an algorithm that snows the court into letting you off isn't justice either.
It is the Heroku power being used in the Nestor shell example that gives this impression, using Trello or something else should solve this :)
It could be just a title if you work for that kind of company. Or, it could be VERY meaningful- which is what I'm sure the poster was looking for, instead of a flippant answer that suggests you're frustrated and/or don't have a clue.
does this site have an RSS feed?
The sad truth is many startups and wannabe hot tech companies are going to read this article not realizing it's satire, and try these methods out and unintentionally alienate their entire pool of qualified candidates in the process.
What if he had leaked it to the press after NASA declined his valid argument. I bet the launch would not have happened but imagine what the end result would have been for NASA management if they did launch after he made the warning public? Leaking to the press is a good thing.
Why didn't they wait to release everything at once instead of making Mac and Linux look like fourth class citizens?
Keep in mind that `String.prototype.repeat` exists in far fewer contexts than a simple loop. The whole point of using a module is that you don't have to worry about _how_ it works when implementing it in your project.
> Justice-as-a-Service

Justice that has to be bought isn't justice; justice as a service, what an absolutely terrible idea. As if we don't already have big enough problems with justice depending on the depth of your wallet.
When bootstrapping or being rich then you are the investor :)
How precisely does the timing need to be known? Minutes? Hours? Why wouldn't a webcam be sufficient for this purpose?
Am I the only one who dreads going to the gas station and runs the car down to the absolute empty point before getting gas? I really don't ever want to go to a gas station again and would rarely use the supercharger network.
This seems pretty pointless.
These are all great, but I think you're missing something much more basic: commute time. All of the above are great, but if someone's commute time to work (and home again) are intolerable, they will not last.
Or it says a lot about the experience of driving a Tesla compared to a gas car.
Halo effect in action. The Model S has established the quality of experience you'll expect with the Tesla you can actually afford. It's not about whether it's the most rational choice - cars say something about the owner, and Tesla has built the strongest message since the Prius.
It is a knock-out factor for long trips. I agree that if it meets your needs, an EV is compelling. But let's not try to make it out as something it's not.
A junior is much like an apprentice. Often they are being told what to do and told (or hopefully TAUGHT) how to do it. They don't show a lot of autonomy. A lot of mistakes happen from a lack of understanding and foresight.

A mid-level developer is mostly autonomous within the confines of a planned out project. Given a specific scope and criteria, they mostly get the job done with some help from a senior. Their errors and bugs are typically of the architectural and performance type, though a lack of foresight can plague the less savvy mid-level.

A senior should be nearly completely autonomous. You tell them the general thing that needs doing and they are able to do it on their own. They can see the impact a decision would have far enough down the road to accurately weigh pros and cons. On top of that, they are able to help the mid-levels and juniors get better at their craft as well.
This has got to be a joke! Software built in China cannot even come close to Slack in quality or novelty. Period.
Call it satire but I've had 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10 happen to me at one time or another. Regarding 10 (getting called 3 months later), they were smug and cocky about it and resented when I turned them down.
The Apple thing doesn't work though, for a specific reason: it's a very common word/name.

Smith is a very common surname. If one person starts the Smith Automobile Company and another person starts the Smith Farm, obviously there's no issue there. That's because none of us invented "Smith", it's understood to be a common name, etc.

On the other hand, if I start "The Google Paper Company", I'm pretty damn sure I would quickly and easily lose that case, despite the fact that google does not sell paper. And nobody would think that is weird, because Google is very obvious an invention (Yeah, I know, "googol", but the spelling makes it unique).

"Kik" is a lot closer to the "google" situation than the "apple" situation.
Ditto.

Hopefully not in 10 years though, but much sooner.

I would also fund such a thing in a heartbeat.
"These top tech companies each receive over one billion resumes per year (source needed). So it’s safe to say they have a good process for choosing the best job candidates. "

nope -- its not safe to say that.
Your customer may dislike your work, but you have power to change your work,just time and energy. Your boss may dislike you, but you can't have the time and energy to change enough to please him. Difference between engineering something and politicizing something.
How much time do you give candidates to complete their work samples? I'm curious whether work-sample tests filter out, say, parents with young children, in which a company with a 4-6 hour technical interview might be preferred over an unbound take-home assignment (in addition to the possibility of more interviews).
"one of his “friends” was sure to groan and say how boring Ross was, how stupid it is to be smart, and that nobody cares"

The sad fact is that the majority of people will find intelligent discussion extremely boring. Especially if it's about extremely esoteric topics.

From another perspective, Ross didn't seem to understand social cues and continued to talk about topics that his friends clearly didn't understand or enjoy.

It's less about bashing intellectuals and more about pointing out ineptitude that many smart people have when it comes to social intelligence.

I enjoy watching these types of shows because I don't really have to think. It's the same reason I watch stupid reality TV.

"This may seem like a non sequitur, but I’m convinced consumer culture and idiot culture are closely linked"

I disagree. It really depends on what you are consuming.

"And finally: protect the nerds"

Really? Nerds comprise most of the 1% in the US. It is pretty much the best time in history to be a Nerd. Startups in Silicon Valley are cool.

Do they really need that much protecting?
Well for one, I can't afford it, so realistically I am not in the demographic. But if I could afford it, I would want it to be less hassle. Besides that I am really excited for it, well heck, for any tech Elon builds.
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It's not an unrelated technology space! Kik is a messaging platform. It's EASILY conceivable that they might want to publish a nodejs API. It's also easily conceivable someone looking to interact with their platform would type npm install kik. They're entirely in their rights to see this as stepping on their turf.
Yes Rust lets you flatten the results.
> Go build some shit with people you like building shit with and stop trying to figure out how to make hiring objective. You can't.

Yes you can. It's quite easy, make people build something small to get hired, that eliminates 99% of submissions who are just lying about their skills and posing and with code in hand, it's quite easy to decide who's full of shit and who isn't. Resume's are useless, demand code, real programmers program.
Yep, but someone should implement that first. Package repositories have pretty much centralized control still, and will have for foreseeable future.
Wow, very interesting post for me. Earlier today, at work, we ran into an issue where `npm install` was failing because the `shuffle-array` module wasn’t found. Investigation showed that the cause was that it was unpublished today. We found that this was a required dependency of the `match` module and this was in our dependency list in`package.json`.

We investigated and found out that it had been erroneously committed — it’s actually a memory game and has absolutely no place in our webservice project. :) (Mistakes happen… dependency audits can be worthwhile!)

Now, some hours later, I found your post on HackerNews and was really shocked to see, hey, this is exactly why it was unpublished. Quite a chain of events. Never thought I’d figure out why the modules were unpublished, but now I get it! Thanks for the explanation.

[crossposted from the medium article]