skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's really a question of what kind of experience you've got. Many programmers with "10 yrs of experience" really just have 10x1year of experience; they've just done the same thing over and over again for a decade without pushing out of their comfort zone.
Yes, but only after initially denying it all
I think a solution would be to move to a system of professional jurors.

As it stands, the current jury system seems to be a horrible mess of people who can't get out of going to jury duty, relying not on understanding of the law or legal procedure, but rather the judge's instructions and the arguments of lawyers, and all the crime/courtroom drama shows and movies they've watched. They can't question lawyers during the trial or anything like that; they just watch a show for a while and then make a decision.

Given that a jury decision is, in the most abstract sense, an alternative to a judge's decision, then it would make sense to have jurors who at least as competent as a judge is for the job.

There would still be the issue of them becoming too close to prosecutors, lawyers, or judges, as we have now with judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement. But there are ways to address that. Nonetheless I believe it would be an improvement on the current system
You can land a job in cranking out CRUD websites without any kind of side-projects. Hell, with just a little bit of luck you can land such a job without any kind of experience or education.
Remove vowels and add R to the end.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11579757.
I was a juror in a trial 10 yrs ago where the police fielded their so-called blood splatter expert who testified he could recreate the entire crime just from casual observations about bloodstains at the scene complete with props using red dyed water to further the fraud. As soon as he was done the judge instructed us that the entire testimony be thrown out since it was blatant pseudoscience but later when I looked the police agents name up he had given the same false testimony in other trials and it was admitted as evidence without question.
Out of curiosity, what does marking a subthread off topic entail?
I dunno, it seems pretty harsh given that drug doping cases on the men's side only receive 2 to 4 years for a first offense [1] and given it's not something she could have gone out and done on her own - coach and mechanics must have been highly complicit and were probably driving the use of the cheat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_doping_cases_in_cyclin...
This article points out the major issue in blood testing: it's not a panacea. So often, particularly outside the life-sciences press, the idea that we'll be able to test for everything and that it will be useful gets shouted from the rafters.

The problem is, it's not that simple. Biological variation and lab procedure variation and just plain dumb bad luck makes it so that any lab test should only be considered a single datapoint. To be taken seriously, but not to be taken as "the answer" in and of itself.

Technology can solve the lab procedure variation issue, but can't solve biological variation. Maybe it can alleviate the biological variation problem by making it feasible to test more frequently. However as you multiply the things you're measuring and multiply the frequency of testing you might end up testing too many hypotheses too frequently for your statistics to be reliable.

I'd love to have more tests more frequently. I work in medical informatics after all. But We need to be cautious about what will come out of it and not over-promise.

Much as we'd like it to be true, big squishy bags of water with bits of hardened calcium in them are not computers. Anything biological is hugely more noisy and far less deeply understood than anything we deal with in information technology.
Object Oriented Wrapper of AWS DynamoDB SDK, 0.21.1 Released
Success has many fathers; failure is an orphan.
What "unbridled '00 capitalism"? More like statist, crony-capitalism intertwined with kleptocracy.
There's a deleted scene that explains that all of our computer technology has been covertly based on the results of the Area 51 research into the crashed ship. It makes that bit a little less silly.
How long until this technology is used to get a discount on your insurance? How long after that until it's mandatory for insurance?
+1 for -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks

But actually, what I'd rather like is -fno-optimise-based-on-undefined-behaviour.
If anything happens that prevents them from finishing "How To Train Your Dragon 3", I am going to be very annoyed.
Improving Large Rails Apps with Service Objects
I'll agree that the sale of Echo caught both Apple and Google with their pants down, but I don't think it's going to last long. Apple could, quite easily, make a Siri standalone (and so could Google). Tying it to the phone was a great idea, but the implementations of both weren't the greatest. Plus, with Apple keeping Siri as a closed environment for so long probably hurt it as well.

But all that said, Echo is a neat device but not unique. It can be easily outpaced by either company if they choose. Amazon's "Skill Store" for Alexa is piss-poor and the ability to add skills is horrendous. Getting a skill approved is a nightmare, and they basically have to be "free" skills to have any potential.

If Amazon can figure out how to monetize skills, they may be able to pull ahead. But as it stands, right now, Echo is a novelty device that appeals (mostly) to kids.
Glad. Thought you abandoned it too. Only place I know offhand which groups many of those particular not-very-common books together.
Do you have any idea how easy it is to tell when someone's doing that? Or going even further, how exhausting this is for someone who's not good at it? Why not just be genuine?
This reflects my use case. I was just writing Scala code that compiles to both the JVM and JS. The requirements for the code in terms of performance for the JVM side are very intense which ruled out using Typescript there. I am using the browser for visualizations / UI where I have used Typescript in the past, between using Vanilla Javascript and then Coffeescript and before Scala.js was available.

I continue to watch Typescript because I think it has its place and certainly is worth knowing / using in certain projects. I really appreciate the .d.ts/DefinitelyTyped (files which provide Typescript static types for javascript libraries) that are available, I am able to mostly convert them to ScalaJS facades programatically which gives me nice code complete in ScalaJS.

One area I think Typescript outshines ScalaJS is if you have a large existing Javascript codebase, or are a Javascript programmer looking to incrementally improve your codebase / language knowledge Typescript is the best step in that direction.

However if you are going `full stack`, with high performance requirements on one side, and a browser on the other, right now I think Scala is the best option. That opinion might change in the future with web-assembly (then perhaps back again e.g. scala.native ).
Soviet Historians Called Chernobyl a “Battle.” Is It Over Yet?
From what I understand, she developed the initial prototypes as an undergrad at Stanford and one of her professors helped hook her up with a bunch of VCs with powerful friends. Could just be part of the mythos as well; it can be hard to tell with startups like this.
>But one thing i never see interviewees do is outright ask, "Wait, what does this question actually tell you about me?"

That seems like a pretty quick way to end an interview. Although if they are asking dumb questions, they probably won't be a huge loss.
You are correct that the comment is based on a couple of anecdotes that don't say much about the school, so it has little value.
Yep, the interview process is pretty broken. It took me 5 Google phone screens before I got invited to an on-site (although one of those phone screens had the technical phone interview waived due to the team's familiarity with my skills, but I still got rejected amusingly) - the only reason I made it was because I failed & learned from each of the previous phone screens enough to pass.

This is an absolutely awful way to interview. However, the author should learn some patience & attack the problem. You deal with the cards you're given - it took me 2 1/2 years of applying to jobs before I lucked into get a job in the tech industry after grad school, and lots of wtfs in many interviews after I entered tech. Learning how to take it on the chin and keep going is an important skill for success - he could learn something from sales in that respect.
Did they not agree to expense your trip? Back when I was job searching and looking to move cities I would never have agreed to pay for a flight to an interview out of my own pocket, and never had a company request for me to do such a thing.
Ever wondered if it's exactly because of people discussing like this?
Only team to have more European Cups than national top league titles!
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Brony
"mid-level IR"
If you like the big theoretical approach, you might want to go into an architect or principal engineer roles. These typically involve higher-level considerations of systems design, data flow, etc. without delving into the tedious boilerplate (that's for lowly devs! /s)

Of course if you want to get out of programming altogether, you could try writing a book about your experiences or whatnot and market it as a career advice.

Or you could live my dream and go back to school for chemistry and become the High Priest of LSD
Anything installed in an aircraft is subject to a regulatory avalanche of paperwork, testing, and approvals.
Yes, it's extremely patronizing. A better email might be:

"Hey, sorry if that code review seemed a little nitpicky. You did a great job, but we try to be as strict and consistent as possible in our reviews, for everyone's benefit. Here's a link to our style guide, and please let me know if you have any questions. I'll stop by your desk in a little bit to introduce myself and see how you're doing."

You don't need any exclamation points, and you don't need to talk about how unique and amazing your company is. Treat your colleagues like colleagues, not insecure undergrads.
> I've never seen a production compiler use anything except decimal points.

There's a distinction between literals used in programming languages and how various input/output routines emit different numerals. Most programming languages follow the convention: a '.' for a radix symbol and no thousands separator. Many programming languages also include: explicit '.' implies a floating-point numeral, scientific notation support. Most modern programming languages (and even some older ones) have standard library or extremely popular library support for localization. That localization will customize things like the radix and thousands separator.

Some languages support custom literals, so you probably could adapt it to match your locale if the grammar doesn't somehow become ambiguous.

Other interesting stuff literals sometimes include: different numeral bases, signedness, precision.

It doesn't seem confusing to me, but I'll admit that there have probably been many times that I could take advantage of the programming languages' support for parsing literal numerals whose format happens to match my locale's (en_US.*).
Cyber Competition at Bletchley Park
Europe’s leap into the quantum computing arms race
Apparently they were trialling/planning to trial electric boris bikes in some parts of London in 2013. I've been googling and can't find any follow up to it though
You are presuming they were maliciously making up evidence. The story isn't super clear but it seems like the examiners were overstanting certainty and that they were using dubious statistics.

People do that sort of thing all the time, not out of maillice , but out of ignorance or bias.

The article doesn't even talk about what the actual problems were. Was the forensics based on wrong assumptions or research later proven inaccurate.

There is a difference between being wrong in good faith, being wrong because of bias, and straight up lying.

Even the statistics in this article reek of bias. 95% of reports overstated the matches. By how much? Are we talking about 99.9% matches being called 100%. Or are we talking about 30% chance being called 100%. How many times was it substantially overstated?

The biggest problem is that there isn't really an academic field for most of forensics. Which is pretty odd.
Well, if you notice, the team was also fined for some odd millions of dollars. If the athlete were to admit culpability, they could probably also be successfully sued by the team to cover their costs.
The answer to your question would be to track and analyze the results of VC investments there were made purely because of nepotism or social connections, and compare them to the results of those companies that actually ran the SV VC gauntlet.

Although I can't possibly know the answer to this, I would be willing to bet that the success rates of the former are abysmal in comparison to those of the latter.
I'm not trying to be annoying - I'm simply curious. I never had to deal with that (internally that is, I do localize for end users - but that data is one way), and I was wondering how people handled it, that's all.

Sounds like it's a bit annoying, but you just deal with it because you have to. I guess it's a slight extra use of time, but nothing major?
It's SIL, not HIL: http://llvm.org/devmtg/2015-10/slides/GroffLattner-SILHighLe...
My StarTac did actually detach at the flip sometime in 2001. Still usable for months after, though. If I recall, there was just some sort of bus cable between the two pieces. I would have to hold them next to each other to make calls.
If lawyers want to rise to anywhere near the top they need to meet such stringent billable hours requirements that they will have essentially no free time in which they could sue people.
Donald Trump, well aside from the content of his speeches, has been noted for his rhetorical style. As i stated, this bears some resemblance.
1000 of same model flying 12 hours a day (utilisation is nearer 11[1], Some airliners where made in numbers a lot more than 1000, 737's where over 8000[2]) for 20 years is 10000 flight years (very crudely).

438000/10000 is 43.8, so 2.3% chance over 20 years.

It's a longshot but it's not never.

[1] http://web.mit.edu/airlinedata/www/2014%2012%20Month%20Docum...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-produced_aircraft

So yes the odds of any one plane experiencing that problem are absolutely tiny but across the fleet not so much.
Yeah - if you allow any kind of motors as a standard part of the ruleset, you've basically got 'lightweight motorcycle racing'.

You can get something like this already with trial riding or motocross races, where having a lightweight motorcycle is essential for handling in rough terrain and to take falls and jumps without breaking the suspension.
I spent a lot of time researching cell phone providers here in Ontario as I was just getting a cell for the first time. All the plans are pretty universally terrible. I ended up with Wind Mobile for $40/month for BYOD. Unfortunately, they're 3G only but it's 5GB data vs. 100MB for similarly priced plans on other carriers.
Okay I think you get what I'm saying. The Golden Rule would have gotten you killed in the desert if those nomads find flint to be some kind of sacred metal only their priests can carry or something equally absurd.

I just don't think "treat people with kindness" is what the Golden Rule says. That might be the intent of the people who reference it, but the Golden Rule literally says, "Treat others how you wish to be treated", which makes the assumption that "how you wish to be treated" is universal. I agree, realistically one should treat people how they wish to be treated, but that's not what the Golden Rule says.

My point re: calling girls dudes is that you simply cannot know if a girl does or doesn't want to be called a dude unless they express a preference, which may or may not happen. Some girls like to be called dudes (A), and we should do to others what they like us to do to them (B), therefore we should call those girls dudes (C). (B) is not the Golden Rule as such, because how I'd like to be treated doesn't apply to someone else (see nomad flint worshipers above).

I just want to be clear that what you're saying is not what I have issue with -- yes, we should definitely treat others in the manner in which they'd prefer to be treated. My issue is entirely with the characterization of this as the "Golden Rule". I don't believe that's what the text of the Golden Rule reads as.
It's pretty big in ad tech, or anywhere that really does lots and lots of centralised logging (Datadog/Loggly both use Kafka).

Lots of places also use it just as a message queue, some places for example write time series metrics to Kafka for monitoring.
Thank you for the insightful comment. How do you perform your own testing? What I mean is, how do you replicate space (or extreme-condition) failure scenarios on Earth? I imagine that either you need a lab in which you blast your hardware with radiation hoping to get some failures, or do you maybe have a reproducible way of simulating these types of failures?

If you're working out of a lab, once the testing is complete, what happens to the hardware? Is it irradiated and does it need to be disposed of safely?
I wonder if the new hire raises eyebrows constantly talking about "core memory", "dumping core", etc.
For newbies, it would be helpful to explain how to retrieve the encrypted password, aka ./passgo www.example.com. Didn't see it listed on the help and github page.
the interviewers (software engineers) just make sure that relevant people don't get hired. It's just a job security gimmick I guess.
Classpass users are freaking out over new price hikes
> So, to clarify, you're advocating that programmers be hired based on resume, references, and a conversation about prior projects?

I think he is, considering this is the way every other engineering discipline does it. Please don;t fall back on the licensure issue, either. The vast majority of engineers in industry are not and do not need to be licensed. They still get interviewed this way.
There is one break that I know of. `>>` is now parsed as two tokens, and will preferentially mean "close two templates" instead of "right bit shift" in cases of ambiguity.
Wondering if the "cover your ass" is a factor in these hiring decisions. If you're the guy/gal who hire a new engineer, who turns out not to know their stuff, your ass is probably on the line. Making engineering candidates jump through hoops might provide them with a level of protection against future reprisals.

While I don't interview for engineering jobs, we do bid on municipal contracts which are dominated by this concept (cover your ass, hire the big guy). A different animal indeed, but in a employment hierarchy where employees are held accountable for performance of new hires, it seems similar incentive would exist.
Why does he need to be persistent?

He proved that he's a decent programmer by releasing a bunch of semi-successful open source projects. He worked at Yahoo. He has 900+ days GitHub streak. That makes him passionate about building things more than a huge chunk of programmers.

Not being able to implement a random algorithm on a whiteboard while applying for a front-end position has absolutely nothing to do with the lack of passion. Of course he gave up, and so would I if I was in his shoes.
Hiring is broken? The hiring process seems to have worked successfully in this case by preventing a bunch of companies from getting into a bad match.
Instead of the wistful subjunctive ("if they had revived Interix I would have ...") something in the imperative mood.

Please revive the Subsystem for Unix Applications, Microsoft!

You own the technology. And it addresses quite a number of the issues that you are currently listing on GitHub against the Linux Subsystem. Including:

* Interix has pseudo-terminals. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11415843 https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/266908-command-prompt-con... https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/169 https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/85 https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/80)

* Interix has production code for terminal-style control sequence processing in Consoles. (https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/111 https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/243 https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/27)

* Interix has the mechanism for sending signals to Win32 processes. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11415872)

* Interix had an init and could spawn daemons. It could also run POSIX programs under the SCM. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416376 https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/229 https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/206)

* The Interix build of the Z Shell runs just fine. (https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/91)
> this post is basically a Donald Trump speech about Typescript.
I think it's important when interviewing candidates that he/she can demonstrate fundamental CS knowledge. In any software project, you may be working out very complicated features, and CS knowledge is often the common language for conveying complex and subtle ideas.

That said, it's perverse that there's a cottage industry around software engineering interview training on both sides of the table for the crazy questions that are being asked. No one wants this, but sadly, once you're in the door at these places that do these sorts of interviews, the motivation to affect change approaches zero.

There are some companies that have tried to make this a fairer assessment though, e.g. Foursquare http://engineering.foursquare.com/2016/04/04/improving-our-e.... Putting this sort of effort into an interview process is time-consuming, but if the software industry is going to make its interview practices assess candidates more fairly, it's going to take effort.
No, it isn't. You're not getting the advantage you used to have. That's different.
The interesting thing is that in software engineering the cost of additional sub components is zero. Copying bytes is effectively free, so we gain no useful information on how much it costs to build a widget.
That could make a fun fanfic.

Starfleet Tech Support.
Your comment is duplicated now because we merged the threads.
I mean, I'm not holding Brendan Eich personally responsible for the toolchain or anything, but it's not pleasant to work in a language whose ecosystem sucks.
It's interesting to compare and contrast this against bytecode from other platforms like CIL or JVM bytecode. They're both essentially a kind of compiler IR and they allow for incremental compilation, can be interpreted, dynamically manipulated, structed as basic blocks, etc. But MIR is represented using a textual form that still has scoping and which still uses Rust syntax. I can see the appeal. But I wonder how much it complicates working with MIR. You'd need a more complex parser, I guess.
Reading it again, I can see that. However, I personally am a fan of rigorous - not ruthless - code review, the purpose and level of which has previously been explained to a new employee.

Obviously being an asshole is out of line, and if someone is being a dick in code review, that's a problem with the reviewer. But I think that being rigorous about maintaining consistency and quality is important.
What of all the people screaming about the exact opposite?