skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Misrepresented My Programming Ability in an Interview, Now What?
Just had an interview for a position I'm very interested in. I knew the position would involve some Python, which I use with some frequency. To give you an idea of my skill level, I was practicing context managers and decorators beforehand.

During the interview I was asked to take a couple of command line arguments and print them out in reverse order. I got all flummoxed and messed up some really basic things (like typing bash commands into the python shell, and using list.append multiple times in a row instead of just declaring a literal).

I'm pretty embarrassed about it, and afraid that I didn't represent my true ability. Is there anything I can/should do? I thought of emailing the interviewer with a link to some of my github projects, or something. Maybe I should just let it go?

Any advice here helps. Thanks everyone.
This is not new or particularly interesting. Dick Cheney had one of these for a long time. I knew someone who had one too. I'm not sure why this is being written about as if it's new.
> but it's not possible to go the other way

Why not? We do exactly that. We prototype in mongo and then migrate to postgres when we're comfortable with where the app is headed.
Kcore Data Science Influencers: Top 10
Inside Boole and Babbage's Trek “Vision”
Ask HN: How do you configure personal server?
Hello! Long-time HN lurker joining for the first time. I'm wondering what suggestions people have for configuring a personal server; I run a couple WordPress sites on a small VPS and am looking to add a Mailman install and probably a Rails app or two soon.

The whole Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Docker world is a little new to me, so I'm trying to figure that out and don't know if that should be part of my solution. Ideally, I'd like to be able to recreate this entire server if anything ever happens to it, restore my database and file backups, and be done. I want the software configuration (nginx, MySQL, Postgres, etc.) to be "nice."

Any advice is much appreciated.
Reinventing Fast Inverse Roots Using 8th Grade Math
Wow. Is Google so homogeneous that you both can be so sure about your respective affirmations?
There are a couple of things at play of course. Apartment ownership pays parcel taxes just like single family home owners. However 1/3 of the budget is tax revenue. Of the taxes, the two big heavy hitters are property tax (16%) and sales tax (9%) of the total revenue[1]. More people, more business transacted, more revenue.

As revenue increases, city services can be expanded. Schools on the other hands are basically crooks as far as I can tell. The reason being that I have yet to get the Fremont Union Highschool District to offer up actual budget numbers and actual spend. They will argue all sorts of things about "confidentiality of teacher salaries" or "we're not a government so we don't have to give you that information." but generally I have not been impressed with the way they operate. [2]

Traffic and parking is a legitimate concern. Traffic has gotten worse again (after getting better after the dot com crash). But many programs are targeted at making the city more bike accessible for easier access.

[1] Page 12 -- http://sunnyvale.ca.gov/Portals/0/Sunnyvale/FIN/FY%2015-16%2...

[2] I had an administrator at the district tell me that it was "illegal" to be home schooling my children.
I'd like to see this fleshed out more with examples, because I don't really know what some of these mean.
You seem to be repeating the same falsehoods commonly quoted around Tesla stories.

> Every Tesla on the road today is effectively a coal powered car

Assuming that your energy is entirely produced by brown coal power plants, then even powering your electric car is still more efficient (and thus cleaner) than running a petrol car.

Power generation sources varies wildly depending on region - Nuclear, Gas and Hydro are big contributors in many areas. Wind and Solar in others.

> losing 1k on every car sold

you're conflating the profit on selling cars vs company profit. They make a profit on the sale of each Model S/X, they're investing a lot of money into expanding production.
Insert the typical disclaimer here about how they only did that demo to get some California ZEV credits and how they're not moving forward with actually implementing it for end users
Training a CNN using pictures of faces just got patented
It really doesn't matter why you (or I) think. It matters what the auditors will accept.
SpaceX to re-launch recovered Falcon 9 in September/October
Get back here ye wee raj tae ah kin hiv a wurd wi you oot the back :)
I agree. For me, planting seeds is easy and watering is straightforward (driplines on a timer). It's the weeding (despite mulching) and pest control that is ongoing, time consuming and difficult to automate.

If I don't dust tomatoes or cover broccoli/etc I will lose almost everything.

Something that skimmed/raked the surface lightly at regular intervals between rows to frustrate slugs and disrupt weeds would probably help me, but not sure how it could reliably account for varying plant types, sagging leaves, wayward tomato vines, etc.
Interesting results - it's a pity there is no theoretical justification whatsoever, like with most of the deep-nets papers.
"complete control of the entire supply of goods or of a service in a certain area or market"
- Webster's Dictionary
How debuggers work (2015) [video]
A similar one when dealing with compiled languages with good type systems (Haskell, OCaml, Rust, Mercury) is to periodically build even when your code is broken and try to guess what error the compiler will give. This helped me a lot with those languages.
>If you moved to the area in 2012, odds are you got a very good deal. If you moved in 2015, odds are you paid several hundred thousand dollars more for your home than your neighbor in a comparable home.

I don't see what that has to do with new infrastructure. If you moved in 2007, people moving to the area in 2011 were paying half what you paid.

>Do you think there is such a radical difference in infrastructure needs during that period to warrant shifting a disproportionate percentage of that burden to the person who bought only a couple years later?

When you move into a Mello-Roos district you're paying for the infrastructure that was built for you. That's not a shifting tax burden. That's paying your own freight. If it's too much, don't move there. There are plenty of old houses that were either never in a Mello-Roos district or for which the bonds are paid off.

>Further, long-time owners in the area have been paying massively less than newer residents despite taking advantage of any new infrastructure funded by newer taxes thanks to Prop 13. Oftentimes to a comical degree.

That's true, but it's also true for new residents who move into an older area.
Just to play devil's advocate if I may. Of course the longer you wait the more you get for your money. The difference is you didn't get to enjoy a 980Ti for a long time and someone who bought one did. Money can't buy that, it's priceless. The type of people running a 980Ti probably already have a 1080 anyway. :) While everyone else is snickering about how these wealthy folks somehow lost.

People who have a Geforce 1060 budget, probably won't have a HTC Vive either to worry about beating 980Ti VR performance..

I think the PSU thing is anecdotal. Not enough information to explain that either way. I generally go for a decent wattage PSU but worry a lot more about the 12v rail. I've had my existing Corsair HX650 for many years now and among many reasons chose it for 52A single 12v rail. Rock solid PSU.

I do agree that just recently has buying less-than-top end has started to make sense. But I disagree that historically that move has been as sensible as it is now. I agree with the OP. I always bought top tier hardware until recently because we actually needed the performance. I always paid the price when stepping down, that 20-30% was needed for a very long time. I've been using 256bit memory bandwidth GPUs since at least 2002. There was a huge gap between them and the lesser tier 128bit stuff. Again, some things are priceless. Every cent I spent on my original 3dfx Voodoo card in 1996 was worth it. Even if I could've saved a few bucks going with a Rendition Verite.

Today, not as much as the market has matured if you discount VR. I'm probably done buying high end for desktop machines but I think for decades now, it's been well worth it. Example, I was dismayed at the slow FPS my Geforce 8800GT offered me. When I upgraded to the 8800GTX it was very much worth it.

Even so, my PC spending is actually going up though from historic numbers. I'm buying gaming laptops from here on out, something I've never done before. Waiting for a Razer Blade with Geforce 1080M so I can use it with a Vive in a wirefree backpack configuration. Similar story to the above, it's expensive: but can you put a price on completely wireless roomspace VR? Not in my opinion. While I'll likely use this in VR then also have a docking station for it, for my 2nd PC, I'm moving to the Skull Canyon NUC and successors.
Scary. Not only have I personally met the organizers of the festival that was muzzled last year, but I have also filmed in Indonesia which could have resulted in a nominal 'visa violation'. Of course, the latter example was clearly politically motivated: it's widely held that the Indonesian military authorities profit handsomely from and even help to organize piracy. On the other hand, in my experience Indonesia is pretty decentralized, somewhat like the 1990s internet. People in many areas hold much more affinity for their island or regional identity than that of the nation, and significant animosity is held against the politically dominant Javanese. In fact, people on some islands even said "we like you guys, you can stay here as long as you like, fear not central government visa issues". Back on the political side, I once attended a Wikimedia event at the National University of Jakarta, where it seemed that the main bureaucratic function was the decision on whether or not to approve additional 'minority' language Wikipedias. A young man from the Minangkabau region of Sumatra had endured a ridiculous amount of bureaucracy to reach this point, and I argued heavily in favor of adding the language since in my view it cost so little to maintain and Wikipedia has no business politicizing language availability and should equally support all linguistic communities who adhere to the general format, regardless of size. Unfortunately, the Minangkabau Wikipedia seems to have entirely stagnated in growth over the last three years, which while sad does not devalue its >220,000 articles: https://min.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laman_Utamo
Realize also that exceptional uptime is not easy to achieve. If you want to sell this service, you also need to have incredibly reliable infrastructure.

Example: I worked at a VoIP company. A mishandled call by another carrier in the chain led to the death of a child (it took several minutes to actually reach emergency services in the right country).

You don't want to advertise that your app is available when everything else has failed unless it always is.
http://www.dsl.ac.uk/about-scots/the-scots-language/
Data Visualization and D3.js Newsletter Issue 186
AFAIK it actually dates to Win8.1 too.
This is a great summary. One could change the title to "Mastering Problem Solving" and it would be just as true.
In my experience programming speed goes like this:

- 1x benchmark - C / static C++

- 2x slower - pure virtual C++ / objective-c

- 3x slower - statically typed GC languages (java,go)

- +6x slower - dynamically typed GC languages (js, python, etc)

After a well optimized implementation, speed comes down to manual vs GC memory management, static vs virtual function dispatch, dynamic vs static typing and heap vs stack allocation.

Compile speed is usually slowed down by any sort of type inference or templating/generics, which is probably one reason why go resists implementing generics or subclassing
Win10 does allow limited control on the time Windows updates are installed, BTW.
You shouldn't merge until you've tested and are fairly certain there isn't a bug. Bugs in staging shouldn't be common and fixes should be fairly quick and easy. That's what staging is for, after all.
The Gaza strip is an enemy state of Israel so, if you are Israeli, you immediately lose your citizenship by entering the Gaza strip (or any of the other enemy states).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_nationality_law#Cancel...
I would love to see $100 kWh batteries. Worst case, my house uses 30kWh a day in electricity so 90kWh would be a 3 day+ UPS for the house. Update the solar on my roof and be off grid for an addition $9K in batteries? That would be totally doable for me.

I think it would be hilarious if houses went back to just having a gas hookup like it was prior to the spread of electricity.
Yeah, sorry, that's how the world works. Why am I going to give you more responsibility if I'm not sure that you can handle it? Do the job, get the job.

You come off as extremely entitled. Honestly, I'd be happy that you left.
Mods - is this kind of downvoting really warranted for these series of comments? I don't really understand. Much more off-topic posts that've been removed from the main thread in the past. Why is this any different?
It's not that complicated.

The second paragraph.

> 'Bold aims to provide the best experience for reading and writing long-form content at work so that your best ideas can be heard.'

Seems like an unique and interesting product. My work doesn't involve writing 'long-form content', so I'm not in the target market but I didn't find it hard to work out what it does.
Spam filters and anti-virus vendors seem to cope OK with having their algorithms understood though. It's always going to be an arms race but I see your point that using obscurity slows down the need to refine earlier. It'll be interesting to see what the final stages of the algorithm is as it converges on a proper definition of what relevant content means.
It is even more interesting, today, when you see the statement that prompted Göring to respond as such.

> "There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars." [0]

It is funny how quickly Congress delegated that power to the executive.

[0]: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/goering.asp
Sadly just an outline but I didn't mind that. Good read.

I'd add a few things I've noticed over the years. Great developers like to pair program on tricky stuff, because they always learn something. They will try 2 different implementations if they're not sure which is best, and then the right one will then be obvious. They back their arguments with real world proofs. They try most fringe/new technology, even if it's not right for the current project. They hold large amount of domain knowledge in their heads. They admit when something is twisting their brains, draw it on paper, talk about it and then bang it out. They fantasize about what-ifs, in a perfect world, scenarios. And they love to share knowledge.
That is a really fucking stupid test of your ability. If they lose out on a good employee because of it, they probably aren't a great culture to be a part of.
Mesos is c++ and marathon and other schedulers are based on jvm :)
That's my problem. I hardly have time to put effort into writing in the real world. I usually need to get something down.

I've been spoiled by my keyboard.
> You come off as extremely entitled. Honestly, I'd be happy that you left.

Easy to say, hard when its a sellers market. Maybe when the tech labor market softens? Otherwise, you see a 10-20% bump by moving immediately, rather than wasting a year of your life making less than you could.
With the advent of Vulkan I would like to see if there are intentions to support it in future releases.
Power plants are a lot more efficient at extracting energy out of fossil fuels than your internal combustion engine. Even factoring in the efficiency of power generation, power distribution and your EV's electric motor... you're still polluting the environment less with an EV than pouring petrol directly into your traditional car.
So somehow, using unbecoming means (anti competitive and illegal) these taxi cos are disallowing other entrants as well as these coffee shops thus controlling their respective industries? Creating a monopoly (i.e with purpose) is not the same as enjoying a virtual monopoly. At least I see daylight.
Well, that sucks.
Codify Brand Builder
This is also works well for launching a feature as it's a simple on/off switch - simply git ignore the features.php file to have a different one in each environment.
“The Making of Atomic Bomb” and “Dark Sun” by Richard Rhodes
And not-so-legitimate devices.

I've got a cheap Chinese 2.4GHz analog video transmitter in a box somewhere which is _way_ overpowered (600mW from memory, instead of the legal max of 25mW) it completely knocks out all my 2.4GHz wifi when I switch it on (and I strongly suspect all my neighbour's wifi as well). I've got much a less overpowered 5GHz which my 5GHz wifi doesn't seem to care about.
It's not even opening for me on mobile.
How Porn Leads People to Upgrade Their Tech
One of the early criticisms of air bags in passenger cars was that they were said to protect only people who aren't belted in, with nothing but potentially-injurious effects for anyone who is.

Does anyone know if that is still (or was ever) true?
Anent and regairdin whit ma mither uised tae say, it wis fair plotin in the hoose the day.
Perhaps I should have been more direct with my point: I think it is disrespectful to Palestinians to expect that their "normal conversation" doesn't include any sort of reference to their political realities, as political realities are part of everyone's normal, in any society that acts even under the pretense of democracy (and Hamas was elected).

It would have been odd if people living in a territory that had electricity for six hours daily and mostly closed/highly regulated borders didn't have normal conversation about topics that are, inherently, political.
Golang Echo v2 released
When Haskell is Faster than C (2013)
Not to mention that many MongoDB drivers are worse than MongoDB itself, adding insult to an already unprovoked vicious injury.

The official Java driver is the easiest way to waste otherwise useful CPU time due to its blocking nature and wasteful threading model.
Simply startup. Non corporate, but with same if not higher level of service due to resiliency and resourcefulness.
My apologies, you are correct; the jamming will affect aircraft above 50 feet.

I was reading an article on Gizmodo[1] that originally said 50ft, then they "corrected" it to 5000ft[2], and then corrected it again to 50ft. Serves me right for relying on Gizmodo rather than reading the official FAA site.

[1] http://gizmodo.com/faa-warns-of-gps-outages-this-month-durin...

[2] http://www.govtslaves.info/faa-warns-of-gps-outages-this-mon... [this is someone's capture of the incorrect Gizmodo article where they said 5,000 ft]
The comment opened with a "huge disclaimer" and closed with a long paragraph that show that s/he is aware of this.
"Three current Tor employees—two of which agreed to be named on the record—have confirmed that they personally know the authors of the alleged victim statements on the site, JacobAppelbaum.net. Although they continue to maintain anonymity for the authors of the stories, these Tor employees are now publicly vouching for the site’s authenticity, which Appelbaum has called into question."
Wearing a seat belt is always better. In the US they do adjust airbags to work for people not wearing them. Making the experience worse for people wearing a seat belt. https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-airbags-in-a-car-dont-...
Julian Assange: Google Working Closely with Hillary Clinton’s Campaign
I had a similar experience in 2011 with Mango where we were running map reduce jobs which Mongo advertised to support. The whole system got blocked from running the map reduce and the Tengen consultant sighed when we told him we were running map reduce jobs.
and the disclaimer about how the only semi-viable battery swap company went bankrupt and shut down:

http://cleantechnica.com/2013/05/27/no-better-place-battery-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventricular_assist_device

The above seems to be what Cheney was outfitted with.

The syncardia system mentioned in the article appears to be a full heart replacement unit.
Deep Learning Trends  ICLR 2016
> [Shigeshisa Takada] didn’t mention that Takata had tried to fix the problem by changing the propellant formula in 2008.

My Acura TL is affected by this airbag recall, and it's a fairly recent 2012 model too. Whatever changed circa 2008 apparently didn't work.

> NHTSA says those companies are making 70 percent of the replacement inflators.

When I took it to the dealership for servicing about a week ago, I also inquiried about the airbag issue. According to service rep, it's a quick 30 minute fix assuming parts on hand...problem is the 30-45 day lead time for parts, which blew my mind away considering the nature of the issue in a state well known for its warm weather and humidity. Considering the logistic predicament, I wonder how quality will be affected given the number of 3rd-party players manufacturing a complex replacement component for a proprietary airbag system.
Now, if only Apple or Microsoft added the opportunity to compile and run Cocoa or WPF Apps on competitor platforms, that would be great.

Apple could do this very well, it makes sense from a business perspective, and from a technical perspective, it shouldn't be hard.
Right, let's take the human denomination away from people that use cURL...
How does the return compare to the market overall? Instead of putting a down payment on a house, what if that was invested in the market along with the other savings from not owning a house?

Going from $250K to $1.4M over 20 years sounds good, but it's only a ~10% annual return.
How much do you want to be there's some other search-system (current or planned) where Microsoft does not honor that setting and makes you hunt for more? :p
SSGs Part 1: Static vs. Dynamic Websites
It's somewhat different. Cheney still had his heart inside his body. This device is a total replacement.

http://www.syncardia.com/medical-professionals/tah-for-medic...
I think I can comment on what people might be thinking when you show them your prototype: "will I have to maintain this?"

The only advice I can give is keep yourself available and keep looking for a job even if you want to work where you are at. It can't hurt to shop around.
You mean like RPC? If so take a look at Thrift, Protocol buffers, Avro, or whatever.

If the idea is to just expose reusable functions, you can take a look at https://algorithmia.com/
Surely believing that you, of all other people (many billions of them!) only you have "thought about it" enough? That strikes me as a delusional belief to hold.
I agree. I actually think it's the single most important skill for beginner to intermediate programmers. Not structuring the code or managing complex abstraction, just having a reliable mental model of the program and the environment.

I've often seen beginners struggle because they get so used to the compiler or the (often manual) tests catching errors that they just try things "to see if they work" without understanding what they're trying. But they don't consider two important questions: "what do you want to happen?" and "what do you expect to happen?".

If you can answer both of those, you can figure out whether your code will work before you write it. In many cases when programmers struggle it's because they don't know the answer to one or both. They're left just trying stuff until something works, but there's a lot more things that don't work than things that do, and a lot more bad solutions than good ones.
Oracle Suffers Cloud Capacity Shortage