skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can't read the paper - is this an implementation of or just related to CRDTs?
Show HN: LockedAway – A unique text experience
Many of us don't live in the browser.

Personally for me the web is HTML + CSS, for everything else there is a native application, even though I have done my share of web application projects.

I also don't put my private data in the hands of strangers.

Also do know lots of people that think like I do.
Cisco is a very hierarchical company. Every time there is a shake up, most people affected are not generally bad performers but those who fall under spineless Directors/VPs. Also, Cisco generally starts hiring right away.. So, in effect nothing changes drastically. You still have long hierarchies and the drab environment. The same set of names at the top level get reassigned or regrouped and nothing major changes. I feel that it's a company going down, though it will be a very slow process (perhaps a decade more) before it becomes insignificant in the tech field. (mainly because of the money they have in the banks/overseas). It's very difficult to expect the company to transform itself unless it lets other people grow and not feed suck-ups.
I heard from a colleague that John Chambers walked into one of the Cisco buildings and found that it was mostly empty due to people taking advantage of Cisco's lax policy on working from home. The buildings are now planning to get sold because they no longer need them. Either these employees that were assigned to work in those buildings are gonna get laid off with this 14K figure, or they're gonna be working from home.

I have also found that people get a lot less work done if they're working from home.
It would be great if you can put Top Comments as well
It also had some issues to recognize 1.
I wish there was a modern correspondence medium similar to letters
Be prepared to put substantial effort into the interview process. You are looking at approximately 40 hours of your time.

Once you are in, you sign one contract and create a very detailed personal profile (another time sink) and that's all the admin done for any role. This seems to be one of the benefits - you don't need to interview and agree contracts, etc. for each new role.

They match candidates to roles based on skill overlap - typical recruiter style. If you don't have substantial experience in a particular technology that is deemed important for a client then you won't get that role - which seems fair, but if you have lots of experience, but none in funky web technologies, which is where many of their roles are, then it could be an issue.

You can choose your rate and commitment level (e.g. 10 hours a week), but that potentially limits the roles available to you. I've been told that average rates are around $80,000 for the UK region. It makes little sense to me that there are regional rate differences as it's all remote working, but I think it relates to keeping the working day in sync with clients.

All the people I've spoken to in Toptal seem friendly and competent and the interview process is relatively polished.
Kurtas for Men :﻿ the Modern Man's Must-Have
I'm sorry. I'm not PC, I'm not Millennial, I'm Gen-X.

I was brought up to think about the concept: the best person for the job. The BEST. If I were to hire someone now, I couldn't care less where they were born, what language they spoke, what colour they were, what gender they were, what hobbies they like or gasp political leanings.

Does anything of what I mentioned contribute to how they could perform? NO!

What does? How effectively they are able to actually perform in the job.

I will NOT be pressured by society or anyone else to fill quotas.

I think someone said it best in Twitter. Diversity does not mean lowering the bar.

If you want more of a certain group of people to be in a certain profession. Then make it attractive to them to be interested in it ALSO make them work hard to have the skills so that an employer would hire them on the SPOT!

Let me tell you something. I have worked with some amazing female developers. In my book? I'd hire them over a guy any day, especially when it's coupled with analytical skills.

Seriously. I wish this forced diversity thing would just die. No one company should work hard, it's the other way around. Want to get into a company, work hard and get into it yourself!
"The JSON datatype described in this paper
is a kind of CRDT"
Thanks. Can't edit any more though.
Cisco is losing the ground to Huawei, ZTE
I work in finance as a quant/dev. I took the toptal interviews as a backup in the case I didn't find my own finance gigs. The interview process is very serious and fairly hard, and I barely made it through. I do think people who make it are good. The interviewer I had clearly knew a lot of stuff.

I've had a cursory look at what contracts they had on offer, and unfortunately it looked like there was not much for data people, and even less for finance. Most of it seemed to be web and apps.

That said, besides the job, there are other benefits from joining: you get access to a network of people who can help. And I think they give you free access to some teaching material if you write for the toptal blog. And also, you get to show publicly that you went through the screening process. So that can help to get other jobs.

You set your own rates / availability, so if you don't want to be cheap, you can.

All in all, the screening process is a bit long, but not crazy long, so it doesn't cost you much to give it a shot.
Nigeria: Today's Business, Economic and Financial Headlines
Yep we are in 100% agreement. To rectify my own lack of clarity, the sort of parts I am talking about are largely prismatic with a handful of holes and pockets, or for the more complex geometry, not more than around 300x300x300 in total envelope, so definitely not large.

For reference, bainite has completely replaced 8630 in all ranges of quenching and tempering as a material for us, and I'm currently in the process of phasing out most of our Hardox parts in lieu of bainite as well. Haven't used Bisalloy plate for years due to its even-worse-than-expected machinability.
> It's entirely possible that Snowden is an ongoing CIA op to discredit their rival NSA as part of a turf war.

It's a shame that snowden's CIA background isn't talked about very often.
The layoff is probably coming from the hardware business unit. If you're in CTG or CSG, there probably won't be many changes as Cisco is shifting gears to become a software driven company.
Worked on my machine with 10.11.6.
Best Practices for Building a Microservice Architecture
I'm on pentadactyl and loving it, but haven't heard of qutebrowser - what made qutebrowser stand out for you, if you don't mind me asking?
You can have your cake and eat it too -- there's no throwing away of performance gains. Libraries can use threads, but not directly or "silently". They should take threads as parameters. Then the application knows when they're being used and the application programmer can reason about it.
That would be so because with R you get access to a myriad of statistical packages or because the functionality of numpy etc. is already included? IMHO the only real shortcoming is the lack of 64 bit integers, which is of course ridiculous.
>...less prisons by not incarcerating so many non-violent minor "criminals".

"Minor Criminals" as that term might commonly be understood typically don't go to prison, they go to jail. The very nature of prison entails a felony charge, now I know you can make an argument there are a few drug possession crimes that are felonies that shouldn't be, but that is not really applicable to the prison from this article, as this is a Federal prison.
> Is there a source you can find that shows neonicotinoids as used in the wild being calamitous for bees

The Swedish Board of Agriculture recently released a systematic review of scientific literature [0].

Bumblebees are more sensitive to subletal effects of neonicotinoids than honey bees [1][2]. There's a great variation in sociality, seasonality and living for various species of bees, which means the effects of neonicotinoids will vary between species [3][4][5].

A big issue is also that most studies only look for residue of neonicotinoids in plants or in the bee to figure out how calamitous they are. Even though many of the most used neonicotinoids have a high LD50 in bees [6], there are very few studies that look at the effects of the bees of the exposure. Instead of just looking at the individual level, more studies are needed that look at effects on sub-individual, hive and population level.

In rapeseed, there has been negative effects on the growth and reproduction of the bumblebee Bombus Terrestris linked to neonicotinoids [7][8]. And in [8] they also showed that Osmia Bicornis failed to create hives by rapeseed fields where clothianidin were used, but in average created 2.88 hives by non-treated fields.

---
[0] http://www.jordbruksverket.se/download/18.1a3130fb152332440f...

[1] Cresswell JE, Page CJ, Uygun MB, Holmbergh M, Li Y et al. (2012b) Differential sensitivity of honey bees and bumble bees to a dietary insecticide (imidacloprid). Zoology 115: 365-371.

[2] Cutler GC, Scott-Dupree CD (2014) A field study examining the effects of exposure to neonicotinoid seed-treated corn on commercial bumble bee colonies. Ecotoxicology 23: 1755-1763.

[3] Thompson HM, Hunt LV (1999) Extrapolating from honeybees to bumblebees in pesticide risk assessment. Ecotoxicology 8: 147-166.

[4] Williams NM, Crone EE, Minckley RL, Packer L, Potts SG (2010) Ecological and life-history traits predict bee species responses to environmental disturbances. Biological Conservation 143: 2280-2291.

[5] Brittain C, Potts SG (2011) The potential impacts of insecticides on the life-history traits of bees and the consequences for pollination. Basic and Applied Ecology 12: 321-331.

[6] LD50 for imidacloprid, thiamethoxam and clothianidin for the honey bee Apis Mellifera is 0.02-0.08 μg per bee. For acetamiprid and thiacloprid it's 8.1-39 μg per bee. EFSA 2012.

[7] Goulson D (2015) Neonicotinoids impact bumblebee colony fitness in the field; a reanalysis of the UK’s Food & Environment Research Agency 2012 experiment. PeerJ 3: e854.

[8] Rundlöf M, Andersson GK, Bommarco R, Fries I, Hederström V et al. (2015) Seed coating with a neonicotinoid insecticide negatively affects wild bees. Nature 521: 77-80.
You can generally buy the majority of items you want directly and it's often actually cheaper than buying 200 crates to get some item with a 0.5% chance.
That's what lobbying, PR, and soliciting influence through large grants can buy you.
It mostly just confirms my belief that fully half of all white-collar workers in the developed world are adding zero value. They hustle for their first few years, then coast as old products sell themselves to old customers they already established relationships with in their younger years...

I can't fault them for not giving their all every day... I know for a fact I would instantly put in the minimal amount of work required after achieving tenure / seniority / whatever at a large organization.
According to this 2009 document[1], they're 30% engineering, 27% sales, 43% business support functions.

[1] http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/ac227/csr2009/pdfs/CS...
( population * gdp ) / number of medals

Would be more interesting. Medals cost money. The UK has invested something like £5m per medal won.
Your software, right?
USB-IF announces certification program for USB Type-C chargers
Not really. Depends on how many years they have stayed with Cisco and how old they are. If majority of the layoffs are senior people, they might find it is not that easy to find a good position out there. Those big firms are like walled garden, they made their own wheels, and outside world has moved on since way too long ago.
I don't understand the "express-like" in the title. What's similar to express in your router?
They retrieve weekly contracts from the Night Mother diligently.
Do you have any book recommendations on listening and/or conversational skills? I read one on a whim, and felt it was pretty insightful, but could probably stand to read another one or two.
"Dark time" strongly implies a subjective experience. Maybe Mark meant that was an event he personally experienced as intensely dark.

That's more or less the same situation that the TV show Silicon Valley used to stress out their founder. He's got something with potential and an offer to buy it for more money than he's ever thought about before. What do you do? Maybe go throw up in the bushes? How would it feel when you make your decision and then most of your team leaves? What if they're right and you ruined everything?

That scenario is dramatic enough when you get to watch it happen to someone else. Living through it could easily be "dark."
"No self-respecting developer would ever include the items enumerated in this list as part of their "tech stack.""

There is a dis-joint here between the reality what ^is^ and what ^should be^. Here's your chance. Write a better list and submit it. Show us how it is done. Or find a newer, better article and submit it.
"I was anticipating a bit more in depth analysis beyond a few third party services everyone uses."

Valid point, write something up. Submit it.
I agree. I have been a loyal user of Curse for years but when they released their app I didn't see the value and didn't want to install an attack vector on my pc. I still go to Curse, sometimes several times a week but definitely it has become a worse experience over the years.

As for Discord... my guild leader switched our raid team from Teamspeak and there was some acrimony because a guild member refused to install Discord as he felt strongly that it was a security threat and malware.

I did try to substantiate these claims but couldn't find proof one way or the other.

As a precaution I've resized my hard drive and installed a separate Windows for gaming and encrypted each partion separately to isolate Discord from my personal files.

Several weeks into using Discord I think it is better than Teamspeak for overall features but in a raid situation with 20 on simultaneously the quality isn't as good as paying for a private Teamspeak server. Having said that though Discord is free and allows for a much richer experience so if they can sort out voice reliability and quality it will be a compelling proposition.

I still have concerns as to the security of Discord as their website pretty much brushes over the topic but they do offer two factor for what it's worth... but I can't raid with my guild without it so I'm stuck using it.
I'm curious where these layoffs will take place: if it's evenly spread worldwide, or focused on a particular location/country.

Although a third of their workforce work out of San Jose, so it'd be surprising if that wasn't hit.
> If it was purely based on luck, without any talent involved, you'd expect billion dollar companies to be more evenly distributed, and not cluster among certain individuals.

I agree with you that talent is a thing. That said, the Matthew effect is also a thing. Winning tends to compound – partially because talented people are repeatedly successful, but even lucky untalented people can be repeatedly successful because of all the attention they get.

The example that's coming to my mind now is a little silly but – there are lots of funny people on Twitter who barely get any retweets, and there are moderately funny things said by popular people on Twitter who get tonnes of retweets and responses suggesting that they're the funniest people ever.

It takes a lot of work and/or luck (probably usually both) to get to the point where people just lap up everything you say, but once you're there, there IS a certain Halo effect of sorts.

Sorry if not water-tight, just rambling here
Data Analytics in Insurance
Are open offices actually more effective?
Get the ultimate workflow at your multiple project environment
What has curse done to cause this amount of distrust?

(I assume you don't do this for every application you install)
TerpreT: A Probabilistic Programming Language for Program Induction by MSR
Cisco Systems to lay off about 14,000 employees: CRN
the annoying and stupid modularity of it ...
Excellent remark. I'm wondering how they'd do that though. A quick search tells us a standard Intel CPU is in the 200-300mm² range. A server one might go to the 400-600mm² range.

A high-end (higher margin) ARM SoC like the A9x is in the 150-200mm² range. I'm guessing it's the same for qcomm/samsung/lg's offering. How would it be more profitable to go from a $30-$50 SoC to an $300-$900 one ? Even when accounting for processor node differences (negligible between Samsung and Intel at 14nm or TSMC at 16nm), I can't see an ARM chip bringing high-enough margin.

Unless they envision some magical tiny IoT chip that would be expensive ? Or that smartphone SoCs price will continue to go higher? What am I missing ? Are they preparing for the end of the x86 PC/Server market (hence the need to fill the fabs) ?
Gradle is the amazing middle ground between maven and ant.

Highly customizable like ant, but with a ton of predefined behaviors like maven. Unlike maven though, changing or customizing predefined behaviors is a lot easier.
Sounds like PlayCanvas would suit your needs very well. https://playcanvas.com
I repeat what people say all the time, especially if I am asked a complex question to make sure I understand. A lot of people get annoyed at me.
When I handwrite a 7, it has a dash through the middle. Everyone I know does this. Your app doesn't like these; it sees a 3.
> He isn't responsible for generating many of the important features or business decisions, though he certainly has to approve of them.

Alternative way of framing this: Any CEO who is personally responsible for generating most of the important features or business decisions in his company is incompetent at hiring and delegating
It seems like yesterday when Twitch was on the verge of closing down. Is it profitable yet ?
Exactly - getting laid off means that the job you did no longer exists - it is unrelated to your personal skills, performance, productivity, etc etc.
Curse hosts nearly every important WoW addon.

If you are a raider or customize your UI the site is essential.
Well you certainly have the money to live around paris. I really don't.
WebVR 1.0 available in Firefox Nightly
Also as a curiosity I've successfully heat treated bainite stock that was mistakenly supplied raw with a butane torch, an infrared thermometer and a water bath. The end result was slightly softer and slightly tougher than the parts heat treated at the foundry at time of casting.

Basically it is a fantastic material and I want to marry it.
I don't see a hot code replacement feature. The editing of scripts is in another window. It looks complex, but that's normal ; the thing is it seems like it abstract way too many things. Using playcanvas you don't learn js/webgl, you learn playcanvas ; see the difference ?
I've tried a bunch of these "vim-like" plugins and I always come back to Vimium (on Chrome). On Firefox I'm stuck with Vimperator, which means I don't use Firefox very often.
I'm surprised that they have 14,000 working at Cisco. I know it's a big company, but still.
Quick Guide to Quantum Physics: 24 Phenomenons Explained
true...

...this applies not just to threading, but other things that are not in the domain of the library such as memory allocation strategy or communication mechanism.

Libraries should be small, focused and decoupled. This is the way to proper re-usability.
Infographic Small Business Website Design and Digital Marketing Statistics
Pentadactyl is great, but you'll have to find the signed xpi.
Tried the free version, good iptables management.
How to Recover a Deleted Git Stash
> Discord also has a better documented API and libraries in a lot of languages. Overall, Discord (despite using an electron app...) is simply a better chatting product.

Better documented APIs and libraries than IRC? That’s not just quite a stretch, it’s literally a lie.

There’s IRC libs in every language you can imagine, usually dozens per language, with many perfectly documented ones, for every possible purpose.

And about all of them work for Twitch chat.
Uh, then you and I have very different definitions of "express-like". When I think of express I think of middleware.
Pentadactyl is EOL. Vimperator is still being actively developed..
WW3 US V CHINA,BUT SEE FINAL PART OF BLOG
"Salsa".
What people understand from that article:

- Apple makes money in the US and because of various tax loopholes, does not pay corporate taxes for those revenues

What happens in reality:

- Apple makes money in many different countries and pays corporate taxes in each of them (including the US), but if AFTER paying taxes (for example in an European country) they want to bring back some of that already taxed money to the US, they have to pay an additional ~40% in taxes.

Think of it this way, you as an employee go to work for one year in a European country. There you pay all your taxes and after that year you want to return to the US, but now the US decides you need to also pay income taxes in the US for your salary in Belgium.
Tech support scammers mess with hackers mother, so he retaliated with ransomware
> I'm not the biggest fan of the algorithm-theory centric hiring regime, but "implement a red black tree" is a straw man.

I think it comes from the "Get that job at Google" blog post[1] by Steve Yegge. It is not clear what Steve means here, but he wrote:

You should be familiar with at least one flavor of balanced
binary tree, whether it's a red/black tree, a splay tree or
an AVL tree. You should actually know how it's implemented.

I understand the gist of a R-B tree, I can probably write the immutable one on a whiteboard, but I don't think I will ever be able to implement the mutable insert/delete methods on a whiteboard. I have never been asked it in an interview yet, though.

[1]: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...
Truth be told, describing something as an alternative implies that the thing already works and can be used instead of the main option.
> Our principle of not losing input due to concurrent modifications appears reasonable, but as illustrated in Figure 4, it leads to merged document states that may be surprising to application programmers who are more familiar with sequential programs.

That decision is a bit odd to me. Not only do they show that their merge system can produce data that the application considers invalid, it can even convert a string to a list without having any operation creating a list explicitly.

> Moreover, garbage collection (tombstone removal) is required in order to prevent unbounded growth of the datastructure

That is always the painful part of a CRDT system. Until that part is done, it cannot really be used in production. That said, previous work on CRDTs give me confidence that it can be implemented with minimal overhead.

> In fact, we wrote the LATEX source text of this paper using an experimental collaborative text editor that is based on our implementation of this CRDT. We are making the character-by-character editing trace of this document available as supplemental data of this paper

String editing is brushed over in the paper. I'd love to see their implementation. Does anyone know where it all is?
I don't like browser based desktop apps. They have all the disadvantages of native apps but lose most advantages of HTML5 apps by being platform specific (apparently these is no discord desktop for linux) and require you to download an entire browser engine along with your app. You have to install them as opposed to just visiting an URL. They are not as lightweight as conventional desktop applications and don't perform as well. I'd rather see the browser getting more powerful. The cat is out of the bag already. If they're going to use a browser anyway, why can't they just run in my browser of choice along with all the other websites?
New Startup Aims to Commercialize a Brain Prosthetic to Improve Memory