skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Apply for jobs you've no intention of taking if offered. Use them as practice.

This runs afoul of the same mental-block when it comes to worrying about your self-identity. It's trading the possibility of "Oh man, what if they think I'm incompetent?" for the self-certainty of "Shit, I'm a horrible person who lied to them and deliberately wasted their time."

Anybody already self-assured enough to "be the jerk" probably isn't that worried about "being rejected".
It's interesting how you can exchange "academia" for "Hacker News" and your comment remains true.
> For people who don't have a degree, have you ever been rejected from not having a degree? The requirement might say it but I doubt it matters practically.

You mostly just don't get phone screens, and this is mostly from larger companies where the HR drives the initial recruitment.
This is one of the dumbest things I've read in a long time. Algorithms are not where the real value is: that's why you can pull them off shelves at the bookstore. Algorithms are public knowledge, commodities to be written and rewritten at will by common, workaday developers.

Data is where the value is, because you're the only who has it. It's your competitive advantage. It's your secret stash that no one else can access. And if you're willing to ship it halfway around the world to a microservice provider based on flashy marketing, well, I've got a bridge to sell you before your VC money runs out.
It's been a couple of years since Microsoft stopped developing their Xenix UNIX system and sold it to SCO so they could concentrate on OS/2 and DOS. It's been some years less since Microsoft started providing Unix command-line tools for their professional Windows series which has lately come to a halt too.

After all, there's not that much ground-breaking "news" in this story.

About the technical part:

1. I wish they wouldn't distribute it in cooperation with Canonical, a company with a reputation that is rapidly decreasing for very good reasons.
2. I, for one, would surely have preferred the `ksh` which came with earlier "Unix for Windows" packages, IIRC it was the "MKS ksh", but I guess they had a reason.
3. I'm afraid of what this means for the PowerShell.
I haven't heard of that happening here, but I've heard that overseas, it's hard to even get interviews without a degree.
ah yes - that is right. I attempted to say something like this when I mentioned western corp's ability to "overpay vs. the local bribery market" and all that, though I admit I didn't flush it very well out. here's a try: this is the natural result of massive western corps having access to economies that rely on bribery wide-scale, and what sucks is that, due to the western companies massive resources relative to the local economy, the bribery gets much further out of hand and continues longer vs. if the local economy had remained isolated.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as GNU/Windows, is in fact, GNU/Windows/NT, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Windows plus NT. GNU/Windows is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another non-free component of a fully functioning Microsoft system made useful by the NT kernel, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the NT system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of NT which is widely used today is often called “GNU/Windows”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the NT system, developed by Microsoft's NT team.

There really is a GNU/Windows, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. GNU/Windows is the userspace: programs that you run as the user. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. GNU/Windows is normally used in combination with the NT kernel: the whole system is basically GNU with Windows added with NT added, or GNU/Windows/NT. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Windows/NT.
You do have to get off the ground first, but at a certain point the countersignaling value of a lack of degree starts to kick in.

It's sad when the most impressive thing about a candidate is that they went to School X.

It's impressive when a candidate has done interesting / difficult things despite a lack of degree.
> I'm in no position to judge the science behind this
And yet, you do.

Why do you imagine the politicians would be concerned with climate change? It's not like they or the rest of the oligarchy are going to be the ones affected.
A Scott Anselman article [1], mentions Clink [2] which appears to be a pretty fully implemented and persistent command line history. Don't know about up / down arrow though.

[1]: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MakingABetterSomewhatPrettierB...

[2]: http://mridgers.github.io/clink/
Despite all the news over 'safe spaces' and SJWs on campus, the academic process itself (including peer review, tenure, and other aspect) tends to be very illiberal. Capitalism tries to make everything fast, efficiently and easy (provided there is a market) but academia can be frustratingly bureaucratic in its effort to be 'above' money.
Show HN: Paralign – A Smart Journal That Finds Patterns Within Your Thoughts
Yeah lets talk about safe spaces and trigger warnings. This stinks of 2015.
What part of the law does this fall under? Do people get arrested for this? (i.e. criminal) What's the worst that can happen?
Tech hiring is a such a cluster____. Why are they screening for degrees anyway? They clearly don't respect what a CS/SE/etc degree represents because at the end of the day, regardless of your experience or your credentials, you're going to be subjected to the programming interview nonsense that won't reflect your day to day anyway

Its like requiring a degree in mechanical engineering to be a racecar driver, and being told to assemble an engine during your interview.
That's not blaming anyone. It's objectively the circumstance under which a precedent would be created. My understanding of your point was that Apple shouldn't comply in this case because it would set precedent. My point is that choosing to comply was actually one of the ways they could've avoided setting precedent.
I've been a dev for 17 years. I've worked at a mid-sized, a startup, and two BigCos, and can't remember anyone ever asking about my education. Hiring conversations are always overwhelmingly about projects I have done.
It says 'basics' right there in the title. Everyone has to start somewhere.
The Classic Metal Behind the Origins of Life
Fascinating article, thanks for sharing!

I'm just wondering: do you think Microsoft will have any objection to you posting this info?
I wouldn't put much stock in the price. Much of the original ETH was distributed in a pre-sale so there are some people out there sitting a load of it they paid pennies for. Those are probably the zealots they have a really strong incentive to pump the price. ETH itself is interesting because it is focused on things like smart contracts and they down play the currency aspect of it.

One smart thing Ethereum did was endow it's dev organization with a large share of ETH so the project will be self financing if it is successful. Bitcoin has the problem right now where some of the Bitcoin companies are trying to kill it so they can make money off their proprietary solutions and they are employing all the devs.
Yes, and this comment is exactly why the ice shelves are going to collapse before people decide it's worth doing something about it.

All in the guise of cheap energy. Hooray. Energy is cheap, until it becomes a lot more expensive.

Thanks for your lack of vision.
Simple bash script for encrypted chat over keybase.io fs (kbfs)
I've seen articles about technical interviews too many times to count, and while I personally don't believe whiteboarding is a good tool for interviewing and don't use it when I perform interviews, I do believe that any good engineer should be able to whiteboard answers with relative ease. The gripe really is dependent on the specific questions, however if you've worked with a technology stack you should be able to recall the function names, parameter order, and basic pseudo code syntax to write answers to questions. If a developer is dependent on their IDE or Google to do absolutely anything, I wouldn't hire that person. Even developers directly out of college have done enough programming to do the basics, and if a developer can't they should be honest about their abilities and rather than stumble through a wrong or incomplete answer. Often the interviewer will still ask you to try your best, but it's important to be honest about your capabilities.

I've interviewed at dozens of technology companies, many that do whiteboarding, and I've always done well. I've gotten offers significantly more times than I've ever been rejected, this isn't because I interview well, but because the things I claim to know and be an expert at, I know better than the back of my hand. If a software developer has been writing code and working with a set of technologies on a daily basis for years, I'd expect the same of any of them.

From what I've seen of the modern software engineers isn't that they interview poorly, or that whiteboarding is the blocking issue. It's that they're actually poor engineers. Lots of people are taking 8 to 10 week crash courses on programming and think they are near the same level as someone who went to college for four years, even tend to expect the same pay. I actually don't think college is generally useful for software engineers either, but it's about the time spent. The best programmers by far are those who started young and even program personal projects as a hobby, who actually love to write software. I love writing software, getting wrapped up and losing track of time, creating amazing software that solves difficult problems and is a delight to use. I hire developers who are the same.
>IMO, Deepmind will mark the transition to the age of Transhumanism.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this, but I'm pretty sure I don't want it to happen.
the trend i've seen lately is that internal recruiters are now as flaky as the typical 3rd-party recruiter. everyone is just spraying and praying. (though, personally, my experience with google recruiters has always been amazingly positive.)
As a dev, I don't use the screwed up bash on any system I work on. It just doesn't work.
You might find this interesting: http://gravitationalballoon.blogspot.com/2013/03/introductio...
If the candidates look like garbage, why are you screening them?

You can't always tell. You begin part of the process, then the company says how great their Agile teams are, or how "collaborative" their open-plan surveillance workspace is, or they invite you to do a HackerRank test, and only now do you know the company is shit and you pass.

It's the same problem you face with the 60-80% unqualified applicants. I get messages from head hunters, direct recruiter emails on Stack Overflow, traditional recruiting firm phone calls, as well as occasional job listings that I locate through a job search.

80% of these jobs are shitty and need to be weeded out, even when they have plausible-seeming job descriptions and acceptable GlassDoor reviews.
Yeah agreed, you are stating a position as it were fact, and using a ton of faulty logic.

So yes, your position is unpopular, and it's wrong.
"...so as to develop total devotion to the system on pain of failure that is not only professional but personal."

You can't publish these results, you can't publish shit, you ARE shit, hit the bricks because you are DONE.
Another way to look at this is that Colleges and Universities are now better-aligned with the industry than they were before.
I'm pretty sure that the answer comes down to one word: Superfish.

Although, in my opinion, I wouldn't trust any laptop hardware company out there enough to use the system that came pre-installed with it, but that's for another discussion.
What capability is unique to Google? Anyone can replace the rom if the bootloader is unlocked, and if it isn't, they need the manufacturer, not Google.
I'm an engineer without a degree and I'm guilty of looking down on those without, but I'd like to justify my actions. Lots of engineers lack the ability to determine not just how to solve the problem (disturbingly common in theoretically competent and seasoned engineers), but the ability to determine which problems need to be solved. Determining how to do the traveling salesman problem in an acceptable time isn't solvable (or if it is to them, they should be doing something better with their time than working with me). Figuring out how to avoid that problem generally is, and I expect candidates to intuit that they shouldn't spend time chasing unsolvable problems.

I didn't learn computer science formally, but I did learn it. I don't expect everyone to know exactly what I know, but I do find a degree a useful proxy for some percentage chance of knowing their shit. Industry experience is useful for some additional, knowing what words to put on their resume is part of it too. If they don't pass some combination of the group they're not worth my time, but I have to verify that by interviewing some amount of applicants anyway to check that those are real determining factors.
> Is the "write once run everywhere" paradigm a realistic goal

A part of me sees react-native adding another option here - "write once, tailor anywhere"

While it's always been possible to have common core logic and then tweak your frontend for each platform as a separate project to get a slightly closer to actual native experience, react-native makes it significantly easier to do so and I think it's that one+ standard deviation away ease that makes all the difference.

I don't think we'll see a lot of successful react-native cross platform that goes for the one-size-fits-all approach but rather, with the same (probably even less) effort, we'll see react-native apps that target the UX of a platform rather than just the UI elements.
What is the impact of Volcanoes or other natural things to the global warming?
I actually found 'toughening up' the wrong mental strategy, but rather "not giving a damn".

You're in a position where you have a job. Anything you interview for you -don't need-. You may want, but you don't need. You also sound very comfortable in a specific role. That's a great place to start from, because if someone rejects you...what are they rejecting? How does it effect you? You know you're good, at least in certain areas. Either they don't need your knowledge in those areas and aren't convinced you'd be an asset in others (which is fair, and a reflection not on your abilities but your experiences), or their process is broken. Neither is a reflection of you.

I've gotten a lot more comfortable in interviews just recognizing that, that I have successes under my belt, I've already proved I can learn and adapt and get difficult things done. So if in an interview I don't get an offer...that speaks more of their process, or the minutiae of what they're looking for, than it does of my capabilities.

And what's funny is that that devil-may-care attitude, has made me both more willing to speak confidently about what I can do, -and- to more readily admit what I can't. I don't fumble and stutter when asked do I know about (a thing I don't know about), and give some half-truth, I just flat out say "I don't. What is it?" And that has led to better interviews, and more offers, than I ever got when I was a scared junior dev looking for work.
Apple uses water damaged boards in Apple refurbished devices
I have a surface 3 and I think it is a really well engineered pc. I'm definitely happy with it. But I think the surface/surface pro line has features most other computers don't have. Such as the pen. And I think MS did do a lot of work designing those around Windows. So I'm just assuming a surface or surface pro would be more functional and better supported running windows. If you really wanted to run linux you probably have better options available to you. But you can technically use linux.
I'm interested in contributing to geth. Are there any materials out there on how to run the tests?

Edit:
I see the makefile target, although I can't get it to run on windows using my gitbash bash shell.
As a Windows and BSD user, I completely switched to the superior ksh.
I was going to say something about feels being paramount at the university in this day and age, but at least for now, at the postgrad level you are somewhat expected to wear your big boy/girl/nonbinary pants and roll with the punches.
What does a startup founders day REALLY look like?
This is a good 'eli5' answer to the question posed.

What is an alternative hypothesis? The energy companies worked against renewable because it was Good For The Country? Because nothing expensive or hard is worth getting? Because economic ruin was definitely going to happen?
It's like i you had two friends your whole life, you needed one and you really liked the other but they lived in different cities and all of a sudden they move in to the same flat.

I am sure there is a firestorm of opinions in the hundreds of comments below this textbox but frankly I just want to say that this was the best fucking news I have had all year.
A bit of a bummer that http://evil.martinfowler.com/ resulted in Server Not Found.
I'm really not convinced Miami will be around in 20 years. The floods are worse every year. Miami Beach doesn't just flood, it shuts down. There will come a time when sea level rise and hurricane season will collide in such a way that it won't be practical to rebuild.

Miami Beach is 4' above sea level on limestone. The slightest acceleration in seal level rise will doom the city. Maybe when the mega mansions on Palm Island become unserviceable people will take things seriously.

People say it could take another 100 years for the sea level to actually consume the land, but that's really not necessary. Just look at New York post Hurricane Sandy. Crippled parts of the city for months. When you get a storm like that, combined with higher tides and more regular flooding it seems like game over because they're just won't be enough time to rebuild before the next flood.
If I ask you whether your sort can be made faster, and you can make a credible case that it's O(n log n), so no, I'm happy.
Show HN: A great alternative to Mint
The Linux kernel is most certainly open source but their criteria to accept contributions is no more open than this or many other projects.

The maintainer(s) get(s) PR approval. Big features that change the direction of the tool are welcome in forks but require maintainers to agree if merged upstream.
"This stinks of <last year>." seems like a somewhat strange statement to me.
Wait, are you saying my Rational Rose UML skillz are no longer in vogue?
How to Rock a Group Discussion
Really? Does Ubuntu come without proprietary drivers now?
Legal.io Powers AI-Assisted Platform for Legal Freelance Network
I experienced this one first hand, which is why I went to the cheapest school in my state and coasted through a bachelor's, knowing that I could easily pay it off once I got a job in the Valley.

Wasn't quite as easily as I hoped as it turns out, but I still managed to pay it off in the same time it took to earn it, so on the overall, it worked out. Honestly can't say my degree is worth much more than the certainty my resume won't get band-rejected by recruiters, but hey.
> Nobody explains this better than the meth guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1WiCGq-PcY

That clip just increased my already substantial respect for Bryan Cranston, though I feel as though calling him the "meth guy" does him a disservice. Yes, Breaking Bad brought him a great deal of exposure, but I think that even his role in Malcolm in the Middle showed how capable he is as an actor. The fact that he performed both roles excellently is also a testament to his skills.

He's also won a Tony, and was nominated for a few director awards. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_awards_and_nominations...)
Is this a cheap ploy by Microsoft to get me to stop fighting that Windows 10 upgrade? If so, it worked!
I've been in the industry since the mid-90s, and employed doing full-time software dev since 2000 (before that was sysadmin and scripting and the like). I have no degree; my undergrad was a BA in philosophy, but I never finished it. I dropped out to join the .com boom and do what I really wanted to do. (I never had the math grades to get into a CS program). There was never a good time for me to go back and get a degree, I was always either employed or broke, or had responsibilities (home, kids, etc.) that prevented me from dropping out of the workforce to do it.

So as to your question; Yes, it happens routinely, in my Canadian job market. At both the junior and senior level. Many positions won't even reply if they don't see the degree on your resume. I make it explicit in interviews just to get it out there because I have had too many unpleasant situations where the degree was at first assumed and then revealed to not be there. Reactions vary.

In the end I've had a successful career, but with some struggle. I work at Google now. But mostly only because I came through acquisition. I would not even be considered for an interview otherwise. I have faced some small internal attitude over not having a degree, tho only a little bit.

There are other things that result; grads from CS programs spend a lot of time in algorithms course studying the kinds of things that get asked as skill testers in job interviews but then almost never used in the real world again. (Not to say I haven't studied these algorithms, but studying them in school I think helps respond in the way an interview expects.) That also affects employability. And more and more because this is the direction more and more interviews are taking.
Language Leakage: An Interview with Sarah Thomason
I've always flip-flopped on grasping the Monty Hall thing (sometimes I'd think I understand, other times not so much)... but this little guessing game really clarified it for me, once and for all. Thanks!
It is even worse in some fields the major workforce is post docs, who basically can't find a job without be cheap labor for a few more years
By the way, for those who are curious: there already have been native (non-msys) Windows versions of Vim, ls etc. for years.
This is totally reminiscent of the Apple integrating the NeXT code base (and inheriting BSD by way of it). If they can integrate Linux as a first-class citizen in Windows, I will totally be sold on Windows as an OS platform.

Can you imagine the day you'd be able to link a library built in Linux with a Windows native app?
Warning, this link either goes to CrashSafari or http://no-hipsters-allowed.t28.net/ .
I'm curious is it using MSBuild as the build system on a Linux machine, or does it integrate with existing makefile, CMake, autotools, etc. style projects? It seems like a total nonstarter to expect Linux developers to switch to MSBuild.
From the very start, I've called Asana the Lisp of task management tools. The problem is all of the founders and early employees of Asana are insanely smart so they prioritized power over learnability at every design step. There's a huge amount of conceptual complexity to absorb and very little support in the way to help you do so.

Like Lisp, once you're over the hump, you become a rabid devotee but it's culturally not friendly to newbies and probably never will be.

My conversations with current and ex Asana employees have all reported essentially that my take is accurate.
Here is a good primer that includes some example companies that self-report the impact of NSLs, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Verizon...

https://epic.org/privacy/nsl/
A college kid spends $60 to straighten his own teeth