skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> Go work for a couple months at one of those terrible office jobs that require a college degree but you couldn't really find a compelling reason why.

I worked at one of those jobs as part of work-study while I was still in school. It's funny there was another kid I used to work with there who was studying CS like me. Our supervisor had given him tasks in secret for him to complete and he had all these fancy scripts doing the work for him. I was floored.

There were all kinds of useless tasks we were assigned that would have taken seconds to complete if any of the office drones had the competency and foresight to write a script. Me and the other CS kid always used to muse and laugh about this.
Ask HN: What should I create for my Coding Bootcamp Final Project?
?

I'm currently approaching the end of a 12-Week bootcamp, and lack the creativity to come up with an original product/idea.

I have 3-4 weeks to build a data-heavy/web app product using the following tools:

Python
-Data Science Libraries
-Machine Learning Libraries

Django

HTML/CSS/Javascript
I edited my post. Yes, this makes sense, if the interviewer describes what they're actually after.

I have experienced (on both sides of the table) situations in which it just hasn't happened. 'Can you do X?' 'What is X?' 'Never mind, let's move on'.
Doctors are harder to train, as such they are a rarer resource, and more expensive. We can freely pay cleaners less, and purchase more doctors. Isn't that how it works?
about defining infrastructure and application code side by side.
Completely agree with all of your points. I think I'd do horrible in most on the spot interviews, but give me an ide with intellisense and a book of advanced algorithms and I'll complete what ever you want. I understand the most common algorithms but I don't use them hardly ever in all the work I have done over the past 10 years. Am I implementing a big data search engine, no. So why would I know all the specifics to that, but given an hour or two of reading I'd be up to speed and be on top of things.
I am a longtime Heroku customer on an Enterprise service plan at the moment. I brought this up to my sales rep last time he checked in.

I explained how we moved a bunch of smaller sites to S3, reluctantly because I really like having a unified platform for all our sites. But even though (or perhaps precisely because) we are spending thousands of dollars a month with Heroku, I find the $20/month SSL charge insulting. SSL is not an option anymore.

The good news is, the sales rep said this has come up a lot, they hear us, and to "stay tuned".
Discussion on the source article from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11575550
Please don't post these comments here. It's not relevant to tech discussion.
Most specialized fields have jargon. It is the common language between the practitioners of that field. At what point should a person be expected to know some basic ideas and the words associated with them for the field they work in?
Compiler bugs caused by optimizations aren't at all unheard of. We got bit by one recently: https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38653

That said, I agree with treehau5.
> "You are saying then that the animations are 'minimal' in the Arkham games, which they are not."

I'm saying for playtesting they are the minimum you need to do the playtesting. If playtesting is a priority then you work on the elements important for playtesting first. "Minimal" is not a reflection on the amount of work that goes into getting up to the playtesting baseline.
I thought this too but your post is the only one mentioning it, I think.

It's only been a month since what should be one of the biggest doping scandals in history (world's biggest sport and affecting top teams) and the sport and especially the media, are not mentioning it.

This is the article: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-doctor-claims-he-d...

Is it the case that football clubs are "too big to fail" and this all gets quicly covered up, or have I got it all wrong?
What happened to 6.0.
Even off the free tier, S3 + Cloudfront is now my static host of choice. Incredibly cheap for my low traffic side projects and free (and instant) SSL certificate setup.
Our Strategy and the Future of Intel
Some type of chaining adaptor makes more sense.
LSD for the masses? :-)
Ask HN: How to find gigs as an independent contractor
After 14 years of service working for 'da man' as a Linux Admin (a.k.a. DevOps Engineer, as the youngins now call it) in the corporate world, I've decided to form an LLC and work corp to corp hourly only, with a specialization in automation (scripting, config management, fixing up operations procedures, policies and monitoring, infrastructure advice and setup, etc.)

Already in my first contract now, and the joys from billing hourly and watching full-time colleagues work more hours, and on-call/weekend ("unpaid overtime"), while I get paid for everything I do, make it joyful compared to my FTE days. I also feel a lot more productive since my work is project-based and focused.

What's less joyful is looking for my next gig after this one ends.

When I use Dice, I get contacted by recruiters every so often who do have gigs, but want to take 50% of my money. For a 140/hr gig, they want to pay 80. This is a running theme, and what they do is contact a bunch of people like me, soliciting the lowest bid, regardless of skillset. They all do it.

How do I avoid this race to the bottom, and get access to employers / small businesses / etc. looking for automation engineers like myself? Is there a site that's for people like myself? Sites like simplyhired cater more towards full-blown devs, and I'm a 'sys admin who can code'. Also have some cloud experience.

Anyone do something like this? I'm in NYC, by the way. If so, how do you keep steady contracts coming your way?
It's still not realistic. People don't code on whiteboards. You code (today) with all the resources of the internet at your fingertips, and if you need to invert a binary tree you will use a well-tested implementation from a standard library.
That shouldn't be true. Please file bugs!
If you're sure you don't want the job, turn the tables and say something like "I have no clue. Can you show me?" Most likely, they don't have a clue either.
The proposal includes stereo analog output.
It is not hard at all, but typically external pressures force people to agree to things that don't make sense. I have a client that has an event every year at the same time (let's say it's mid-July. They want projects to be completed before this event every year. But for some reason, they don't start planning these projects until let's say end of April. So every year it's the same crazy pressure and quality issues.

If only the planning for these projects started in say, October? But no, in October the team is still dealing with the fallout of the poorly planned projects of the current year.
Well, if the knowledge of a particular thing is useful for that job, then yes, that's reasonable.

But we know that most of the time this isn't true. <1% of software developers write sorting algorithms on the job, and even fewer of those actually need to know which one is Bubble and which Quick and which Heap without reference.

If I'm a multinational company, I want my accountant to know what transfer pricing is. If I'm a self employed joiner, I don't.

Problem solving tests are good. Memorization tests are terrible. We have search engines for that.
TLDR: Doesn't know computer science fundamentals, doesn't get hired in a role that requires computer science fundamentals.

Is this Hacker News or Script-Kiddie News?
Automakers entrenched in fuel cell hydrogen are succumbing and going electric
I saw something similar when I used a German government agency's website last week to fill out some forms. Their password policy was:

- minimum 8 chars
- contains at least 3 of 4 of the following types of chars:
- small letters
- capital letters
- numbers
- symbols

I usually use random-generated passwords that are dumped as hex, i.e. [0-9a-f]{64}, so I just added "A+" at the end. Turns out that didn't work.

What did work was to prepend "A+" instead of appending it. So apparently they silently truncate long passwords somewhere before the 64th character.
The sky and ocean are not always blue.

For most cultures on Earth, the last color they named was blue --- this is thought to be due to its rarity in nature.

Up through the Renaissance, the pigment for blue paint was made from Lapis Lazuli which made blue a very expensive paint and rare in most art. This is another sign of the rarity of blue in nature as pigments for other colors were much easier to come by.

I haven't listened to this episode of Radiolab in a while, but I think it provides more info/source on both of these points: http://www.radiolab.org/story/211119-colors/

There is also an interesting anecdote where one of the interviewees tells the story about teaching his daughter colors. He and his wife made the decision not to tell her what color the sky was; he would go on walks with his daughter and ask her to identify the colors of various plants and objects, when asked about the sky for a while she didn't have an answer and when she finally did she said its as "white" not "blue" --- which does seem like a better way to describe the sky since even on a clear day the brightest parts can look almost white; but someone told me once it was blue.
All good, except most of your mitigating code/tricks cannot be tested reliable to know they actually work.
One of the most aesthetically "future proof" movies is probably 2001: A Space Odyssey. Compare Star Wars, released almost a decade later, and how the Stormtrooper armor looks dated (at least to me): http://i.imgur.com/sLhv0LJ.png

This is a great related essay: "HAL, Mother, and Father: Watching the sixties and seventies through 2001 and Alien." http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/01/09/hal-mother-and...
Good point.

"which is about a 12% decline in year-over-year quarterly revenue. It’s officially Apple’s first quarterly decline since 2003."
"The risk of choosing the wrong person is so great, that it's often better to not choose anyone"

This risk can be great, but the team and company can be organized such that the risk is extremely reduced. A pairing schedule, for example, can be very effective.
I could maybe understand it if it was a USB hub, and the phones all had a defect that meant rogue USB signals could infect them. So if 2 people plugged into the same hub at the same time, it could spread.

But if the claim is that the virus lie 'dormant' in the uninfectable plane OS, then I can't understand that.
I am not saying we should ignore people's job descriptions; in fact, I was responding to one comment in the thread that was trying to put equal blame on the EPA too.

But I want to bring out an important aspect here: if the USA (mainly its people) fail to punish VW and its criminal leaders (along with the shareholders who backed, rewarded those leaders) in an exemplary manner, then some people will keep on blaming its capitalist economy based democracy for being too soft on "big and rich" while punishing severely only "poor people" even for smaller scale crimes.

The VW leaders should be put behind bars for something like 30 years and its big shareholders (the ones holding more 0.1% of its total shares, say) be punished monetarily by legally declaring their shares to be void. If US cannot do this because Germany wouldn't allow it to do so, then USA should ban the VW and all the companies associated with VW or its parent companies to do any business in US.

What has currently happened with VW in the name of punishment is pure farce. Its shares are still trading at non-zero positive value. And its leaders enjoying multi-million dollars in rewards for the criminal behavior. The justice has become farce in this case.

>>Or we might as well say all humanity has failed, or God has failed,

Yes, you can say so. But at least now we don't have a world-wide single state. As a god or gods (whether he, she, it or they (multiple gods)) are concerned, we don't know for sure whether the things called gods exist or not, so saying god failed doesn't get us much far.
What an incredible way of thinking. If getting rid of you means losing a lot of jobs, you can break the law for decades with a sneer and hold us all hostage?

No.
It was fixed but isn't fixed. https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/19776
Given time alone in a quiet room with a computer, these are not huge demands. Trying to do this in front of people, on a whiteboard, with limited time, and having to explain yourself to idiots is indeed, the very definition of "stupid interview questions". This would, however, work great in other professions. For example, why don't we test surgeons' skills by giving them a chainsaw to cut up the patient with, in a room full of germs, while they have to explain to a 3 year old what they're doing? Oh, and always ask the surgeon to operate on a body part he doesn't specialize in, hasn't worked on in 20 years, and will likely never work on in his lifetime. This would hire us great surgeons because it hires us great programmers! I mean, just look at all the amazingly good code out there!
In jobs or sales or relationships (which is ultimately what this is: interpersonal relationship dynamics), the best outcomes are effortless. If there's too much friction, it's probably not going to work out. The best job/deal/friend/partner will simply fall into your lap, and you'll wonder how it can be so simple.

The challenge is finding these. Careful filtering can help, but it seems to be largely a numbers game.

This becomes increasingly difficult, as more companies are infected with these faddish processes every day.

And there's a cost, of time and money and contentment. To help reduce this, consider spending increasingly less time on opportunities you deem unlikely to work out, based on past experience.

I often prequalify jobs--sometimes companies respond, sometimes not, but that also provides me with useful information.
A small USB type c hub, powered from the thing it's connected to.

May be as small as a cable inter-connect 3 type c sockets, 1 for the phone, and one each for whatever you want to connect to. You could daisy chain these or have hubs that offer 1 in and 6 out, etc.
Additionally, a good programmer (or worker in general) should be good at much more than programming; like being able to collaborate & socialize with other team members & management without immediately resorting to "Fuck you, I quit".

The author seems to have a chip on his shoulder...
10 Best Math Apps for Adults
When I started my career I worked for a University and then a private scientific engineering/manufacturing company. The latter was purchased by a public company. They cut 20% of the staff and expected the same output. This has been going on for 20 years.
It was the development version.

See "Version Numbering Scheme for GCC 5 and Up" here https://gcc.gnu.org/develop.html .
Considering that it's our fellow programmers doing the interviewing, I'd say we're failing ourselves here. I'd wager that in almost all cases, those doing interviews have had zero training on effectively recruiting anyone (let alone other developers). An effective interview requires preparation - and I bet the majority of developers do this right between saying "fuck, have they arrived already?" and starting the interview. Is it any wonder it falls back to the standard approach of "Google does it, it must be good" or a dick swinging contest trying to prove how amazing your team is, because "fuck yeah, we all write search algos every fucking day - it's why our product is amazing."
I see these same algorithms/concepts show up repeatedly in interview rants posted here. At this point, if I'm going to interview, I'm just going to cold memorize them over a week or so and then adapt to the specific interview questions. It's just a ritual that needs to be done at this point.
If he stays with Leicester he can almost guarantee a first side place, not so much if he goes elsewhere.
> Desktop is reasonably stable

Have you ever written desktop GUI programs? ;) Particularly on Linux, but I remember that when I was still writing .NET programs on Windows, it was a running gag that every major .NET release brought a completely new UI framework.
I had a disastrous phone interview this week throughout which I remained calm and focused but immediately after putting the phone down I emailed the recruiter to say I wasn't interested.

The "Technical" part was just trivia. Never-mind that I was sat in front of a computer and could have googled everything asked, I chose not to do that.

So yes, I stumbled when asked "what does the using keyword do". I explained how it relates to IDisposable, disposeing the object at the end of the block scope and avoids needing try/finally blocks.

But clearly that wasn't the script, because they kept asking "Are you sure it doesn't do anything else? Are you sure isn't used anywhere else?".

Eventually I realised they were talking about "using System.Linq" etc, and all they wanted to hear was the word "namespaces".

Talk about interviewing by numbers, had I wanted to I could have googled every question and given them perfect descriptions.

What could they possibly have learned from that interaction? I learned I didn't want to work there, so it helped me I guess.

But I find implementation things more helpful (in person, not by phone!), because it's not about whipping out the right answer, it's about watching how the candidate thinks and approaches problems. It's about how they work not the end result.

I like the "write a function to multiply" because it can be extended to any level. If someone aces the positive numbers case you point out negative numbers, if they ace that you can talk about efficiency, or bounds checks, exception handling, efficiency or whatever else you think they'd like to talk about.
I don't think many software engineers deal with "computer science problems" in their everyday jobs.

GitHub stars are worth much more IMO. It shows that other developers value your work. That says a lot.

In the end, we have to realize that most developers are just average. Why go through the ridiculous process of finding average developers who by luck (or some homework) happen to solve the problems you throw at them perfectly?
I use a tiny disposable Tracfone and a new iPod Touch.

Sure I could combine them in an iPhone, but I don't think they need to be tied together.
Needs to learn the definition of bureaucracy as in hiring bureaucrats aka jobs. Don't get me wrong I see his point about inventory, but arguing I didn't hire more people because the government hired them with my tax money is kind of minimal argument. If your kind of neutral about who hires people.
Nope. Wavelength is not a useful proxy for color, because the way we detect color is based on intensity differences between different light detector responses, rather than wavelength per se. Trying to compute a specific “wavelength” value for a particular blue or green color is misguided. As Newton wrote in 1730, “For the Rays to speak properly are not coloured.” That is, color is a perceptual effect, created in the eye and brain, not an inherent property of objects or light.

In the human retina, the responses from the 3 types of cone cells (daylight light detectors) are immediately combined into a lightness signal (M + L), and two color signals, “red–green” (L – M) and “yellow–blue” (L + M – S), where {L, M, S} are the long-wavelength-, medium-wavelength-, and short-wavelength-sensitive cone cells, respectively. The basic L/M/S signals never make it past this first level of processing in the eye; all the brain sees are the combined signals.

The perceptual geometry of human color vision therefore has a built-in notion of red, yellow, green, and blue as “unique hues”. There’s a fair amount of variance from person to person, but anyone with trichromatic vision will be able to pick out some particular hue of “blue with no green or red in it”, “green with no blue or yellow in it”, etc.

You’re right that some languages apparently didn’t have any particular need to distinguish blue from green. I could believe that the introduction of blue dyes made this distinction useful. There’s been a lot of study of the topic of color naming, but I’m not sure there’s a definitive answer on that point.
Yes, but for applications ; instead of doing a remote call to your other system to create an order or send an email, you just stick the data in a queue, and the other system does it when it feels like it
I think I agree with your assessment more than the "Scam" idea. Granted, the difference between the two in terms of results could choke a mouse, but it is still very different. I think Theranos probably started off as something real, and evolved into something... scammy.
That's not what happened to the OP. He was asked to code up a solution to maze searching problem. The statement of this problem is understandable by a 5-year old kid.
Apologies for not seeing that.

I was actually submitting http://hackaday.com/2016/04/22/hackaday-dictionary-usb-type-... and realised that what had led me to look for that I hadn't seen on HN, and I trusted that HN dupe checker would just upvote The Verge one if it existed.
>> ...nowhere tells you that.

Eeh, I beg to differ. What you need is a good beginner book that starts with the real basics. You will need to be patient and disciplined because there's a lot you will need to learn (try to have fun with it).

I also don't buy your justification for why you can't program at the moment. All programmers need to know why "main()" is there and what "\n" does. It's not like the mark of a true programmer is the ability to blank out axioms.
Multi-Layered Parallax Illustration with CSS and JavaScript
It's rather basic though - you can only select/unselect folders within your fixed, root Dropbox folder.
And this is why people "don't know what capitalism is" and "don't know what communism is". Different people take the words to mean something different.

For a lot of people, "communism" is little more than a synonym for "authoritarian kleptocracy".

---

As the phrases are actually used in Leninist theory, the goal was stateless communism. Socialism was an intermediary stage between capitalism and communism accurately described by Lenin, who invented the concept, as "state capitalism".

A "dictatorship of the proletariat" would take over capitalism's economic and political infrastructure and support the citizenry until a transition to true communism was possible. To the surprise of nobody who owned a history book, it turned out the dictatorship came to be corrupted by a ruler with no real interest in communism, but plenty of interest in being a dictator.

It's worth noting that Marx didn't advocate any particular method of transitioning from capitalism to communism, because Marx wasn't, precisely, a revolutionary. He regarded the transition as simply an inevitable consequence of capitalism's failings.
Or the D standard, or the Java standard, or the Fortran standard, or the Golang standard...

It is the GNU compiler collection, after all. I'm actually particularly excited about a new release of gdc myself. I've been reading Alexandrescu's excellent The D Programming Language, and I think it may be just the better C++ that I always wanted, ahead of Golang and Rust.