skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Job interview with no specific project details revealed
Hey all.

I just had this strange thing happen. I went to a job interview for a Senior iOS developer, eager to learn about the projects this company might have me work on. I got there and showed them a few things I had done in the past, discussed general background questions, and then tried as hard as I could to get some details about the project itself. Their lips were sealed the whole time. I got nothing out of them other than the technologies and platforms I would be working with.

Is this sort of thing common in the software industry? I know that projects sometimes need to be kept secret for whatever reason, but from my perspective as a job candidate, I need to know about the content of the work before accepting a job -- Does the CEO have a vision with this product? Is this project going to succeed? Who is their designer? What sorts of prototypes have they built? etc.

I say this because I know from my past experiences that my enthusiasm for the job is directly correlated with the degree to which I perceive their projects will be both meaningful & successful.

So now I am in a weird spot because I might really want to take the job, but if I were offered it tomorrow, I wouldn't be able to take it until I get more information about the specifics of the project I would be working on. I want to make sure they have an enthusiastic employee who is eager to do the project because the vision is truly impressive. If I sign an employment contract, and the project is a lemon, I don't want to put them through the trouble of my early exit.

If anyone has run into this problem and solved it, what did you do? My only thought is to be up front about this and tell them I can't accept the job without any specifics about the project itself. It seems like the only ethical thing to do here.

Thanks for any thoughts & experiences you might have
That's a legit thing to say about a prototype on its second test flight. You expect some setbacks, and this is an encouragingly minor one.
> that means you only get 1g of container/cargo/engine for every 22.4L of gas enclosed.

For reference, the Hindenburg carried about 200 million liters of gas. A nitrogen craft would need approximately 1.52 million liters to carry a single 150#/68kg human being, not counting the additional gas needed for the craft itself.

So if you want to build a Hindenburg-size craft to carry about half a dozen people it might actually be plausible!
Going Back in VC Time – charting VC back to before Metallica was born
No. AutoCAD is written in C++. It has a crude Lisp as an extension language, but that has been deprecated years ago in favor of VBA and loadable C++ DLLs.
Australia's national dictionary updated for first time in 28 years
Just a quick note to inform you that Racket now uses a new model for macro expansion. It is based on sets of scopes rather than the mark model used in syntax-case.

http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/scope-sets/

The new model has also been used by Tim Disney and others to make macro expander for JavaScript (see the sweet.js project).
Not technical and the "creating new products or services that have changed the world" is hugely debatable, but how about Amancio Ortega[0]?

A spaniard, son of a railroad worker. Started working as a shop hand at age 14 and it's now, at least according to Forbes[1], the richest man in Europe and the wealthiest retailer in the world. You can't be more self-made than that.

On the other hand, some of the people you mention were already well-off to begin with, even if not really rich.

Once said that, I agree with you at some level: The mindset in Europe is (or was, maybe it's changing?) different from the US and, generally speaking, more risk-averse. Also, the feeling among most of the european entrepreneurs I've met is that the US is the place to go if you really want to succeed: Funding, market fit, know-how... all that is perceived to be better/easier to get in the US.

Anyway, just my 2 cents and my very personal, very subjective, anecdote-based perception of it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amancio_Ortega
[1] http://www.forbes.com/profile/amancio-ortega
I've never seen an advertised limit on FPGAs. You'd probably grow old and die before you ran out of reflashes since that process takes a fair amount of time. 100,000 flashes at even five minutes each is over a year of relentless flashing.
The Olympics didn’t stumble because of Millennials, but because of NBC
Mezzano?
https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano
i am really disappointed by apple. I respect Apples wish to develop products in secrecy and i understand that you can't just open source your secret sauce. I also really like their products.

But not publishing your advancements harms the community greatly. Its like building your product entirely with open-source software (the published work of other researchers) and not contributing back.
Yet, if we do not have clearly defined definitions, then we may as well not be speaking at all.

A clear description of Docker encapsulates it as a container.

A clear description of Lambda explains its relationships with functions and statelessness.

Using a term abstractly, in such a way that it can collide with a word that for all intents and purposes appears to be its opposite [0], shouts to a degradation of language use. Metalanguage is in use within various fields, to make it easier to communicate concepts. Here, using a nonstandard word without clear meaning is pointless.

That this is being discussed is proof enough for me that the word is ill-suited to its task.

[0] "I deployed a serverless stack that serves up information from our database."
Faxes are still used by all sorts of businesses in Japan.
That's what they did with osx.
most Fpgas can be passively loaded from a processor, one word at a time. That processor can get the FPGA image from anywhere. It takes longer to load an FPGA this way but it gives you a lot more flexibility and avoids the issue you're concerned about.
Selling My Papers
"Some FPGAs can only be programmed once."

That's not an FPGA then. That's a PLA. Even then most of those can be reset using ultra-violet light, a simple process.
The original article on Bloomberg is about Europe as a whole not 'continental Europe'.

Also Scandinavia is in continental Europe. Just the UK and the islands in the Med are excluded.
I like your proposal of first-order, dependent types. Shocked I havent heard of it before now given advantages. I hope someone helps you build it.

On related note, what do you think about the Shen LISP approach where Sequent Calculus can be used for advanced typing? Does it have the expressibility and decidability benefits you described? Hadn't seen many specialists talk about it so still an unknown to me. If it does, I figure some default type systems could be created for a specific style of Shen and/or specific libraries. Or something similar done in a ML.

http://www.shenlanguage.org/learn-shen/types/types_sequent_c...
This. It important to note that there are SO many factors that we don't know that can prevent habitability (for Earth definitions of habitability). We will need detailed study of its atmosphere to really understand habitability, and even then there are many mechanisms (e.g. volcanism) that can produce false positive biosignatures. For all we know, this planet could still have a hydrogen atmosphere (i.e. more akin to a Hot Neptune). Still, this is a really exciting discovery and will prompt a lot of follow-up studies in the future to really understand the system.
To see this error page without disconnecting from the internet, visit chrome://network-error/-106.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/11/orca-fai...

I helped with some of the UI for the boiler room in 2008. This article only touches on the GOTV and targeting aspects although the most exciting component would have been the ability to allocate human resources to contest improbable results in real time.
Bitcoin is dead and the blockchain has been coopted.
Here is why vim uses the hjkl keys as arrow keys (2002)
Reports that say that something isn't defined are always interesting to me, because as we define, there are defined undefines; there are things we define we define. We also define there are defined undefines; that is to say we define that there are some things we do not define. But there are also undefined undefines – the ones we don't define we don't define. And if one looks throughout the history of our language and other free languages, it is the latter category that tend to be the non-conformant ones.
Massimo Pigliucci on Stoicism
I focus on software and computers because those are the products that have most changed the world in recent history: "Software is eating the world."
I witnessed Tower Records asplode in 2007 in graphic detail when a very large and very well-stocked Tower shop jn Portland, OR was forced to sell off every scrap of inventory (allowing me to stock up on Danger Mouse (the cartoon, not the DJ) DVDs, among other things).

Imagine my surprise when I landed in Osaka in 2011 and saw Tower Records still very much a thing there.
Traffic would be even worse because you can only "go around" so far before either cooking or freezing.
The Laravel Certification Program
It's no wonder Intel made a big FPGA acquisition lately. This sort of acceleration has enormous upside potential, especially if this sort of thing comes part and parcel with your CPU.
You think "There is an amazing amount wrong with this ESPN piece on DraftKings/FanDuel. Awful." is a strong, emotional objection?
> It'd be great to have those auto-group under the parent front page tab and hide out of view until later.

Tabs Outliner for Chrome does this:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
Huh. Yeah, no, they're still there. Okay. I have no idea what I meant. Could have sworn somebody axed ptrace, though.

My main point was that if you have a superior utility that doesn't break compatability, like less, than why ship the original? Less is better than more, and it doesn't break compatability in any way I know. That's why setting it as $PAGER works.

The fact is, a lot of superior tooling is backwards compatible. PCRE (although superior is up for debate) is fairly compatible with extended regex, GNU tar is compatible with posix tar, both syntactically, and semantically with the aid of -H. Heck, it's compatible with the v7 archive format.
I'm no expert on processor architecture, but when I had to learn about it, I always wondered why is this 3000page manual necessary (x86), why is this thing constructed to be so complex when it's doing a lot of some very simple things.
You've essentially rattled off the US Government SCIF specifications (which are public and a fascinating read).

Also non-conductive ductwork and plumbing at the edges of the SCIF and careful selection/programming of the phone system to make sure an attacker can't remotely set a phone off hook and use it as a microphone.
"Next time, it might help if you put the argument your own words"

I was just linking to what I thought was an interesting and related document that argues that terrorists are not kill maximizing agents.

We probably both agree that because of certain policy changes like a cockpit door there are a few less deaths. We probably also agree had we done nothing, terrorism deaths would not be anywhere near the magnitude of other things that kill us like bodies of water, cars, cancer, and heart disease.

I'm not arguing that all countermeasures have no effect. My intuition says how terrorists decide to go about terrorism has a larger effect on number of people killed than post 9/11 policy changes, but who knows.

Also I don't know who said we should change nothing in response to 9/11 but it definitely wasn't me.
Where? I'm ctrl-f-ing here and seeing nothing older than my comment.
One approach that's probably quite easy to implement is to generate test suite code coverage by file, and only do the substitutions in files with sufficient coverage (where your definition of "sufficient" might vary, of course).
Keeping data away from the cloud is presumably the point.
pushd/popd have been on it since Windows 2000
I used to find interesting spots by browsing the pictures at a certain location on the old Google Maps; I've used Flickr for this as well.

However: for real stories, I'm still visiting WordPress.com and read the entries there.
MySQL is dominant in China Internet companies.
you are just trolling right?
No, because there is no known material (even exotic stuff like nanotubes) that can hold a vacuum AND be lighter than the contained volume equivilant of air.
Uber launches flat fares in San Francisco through subscription
"It would be interesting to break it down further in “normal” instructions, SIMD instructions, other optimizations, and special purpose instructions… if anyone can be bothered categorizing 600+ instructions."

sandpile.org

Also, nop == xchg acc,acc
React.js Chat Apps: 4 Great Resources
Sergey Brin is from continental Europe :). Still I don't understand why you would exclude Scandinavia. It's like excluding Florida when talking about the USA.

Also Dieter Schwarz of Lidl, Michel Ferrero etc. - what exactly do you mean with 'new'?

However it is definitely not a coincidence, American companies usually win because the American market is big and unified, the European market much less so, and there are many other differences.
Honestly, I'm thinking long term freemium-style addiction can hope to recover those costs.

I was surprised that they didn't monetize some of the analytics (or whatever utility player scripts were providing) that the big winners were using after banning them from using their own scripts.

But then again, a lot of the decisions described in the article were surprising.
Thank you for your overgeneralization of America. I am sure that it holds 100% up against any further discussion. I am glad that our Western European betters can teach us so much!
Haven't used this, but hopefully it is better than the nightmare that is Akka (more reasons than I want to list here...maybe a blog post).
Is it feasible to send deep space probes to such planet? Let's say the probe is accelerated to high sub light speeds with ion thrusters. Can it reach it in some sensible time then?
Why Americans love drones
Because it's convenient for him and his argument.
Abcd phohics song
What makes Clojure "not LISP"?
I used to use Opera but a lot of sites don't think that Opera is a real browser and show incompatibility messages. I used to use Firefox but it felt a little clunkier than Safari and Chrome and was not as performant. It's been a while since I used the tree tab extension but if I remember correctly it wasn't too attractive.
I think UtilityScore has a promising business model in offering free residential energy guidance that is supported by the promotion of energy efficient products. I've been hoping to see something like this for a while.

I'd like to share that the Department of Energy supports a suite of open source software tools that are useful in making these kinds of whole building energy predictions. Some of this may be applicable to the UtilityScore team in making more detailed and accurate predictions.

At the core is a simulation engine called EnergyPlus https://energyplus.net, and around that DOE also supports a middleware called OpenStudio https://www.openstudio.net that aids in assembling detailed and complex energy models more easily.

For commercial buildings there is an Asset Score tool very similar to UtilityScore built on top of OpenStudio. The asset score tool even has a web API. This tool stops short of making specific product recommendations as that is outside the domain of a publicly funded project like this.

EnergyPlus accessed through the conveniences of OpenStudio is becoming a shared platform for many different use cases beyond asset scoring. The large HVAC manufactures are using these tools as the foundation for their next generation equipment sizing tools, energy audit tools are leveraging OpenStudio for simulation http://www.simuwatt.com, utilities are beginning to coalesce around the platform for quantifying utility incentives http://aceee.org/files/proceedings/2014/data/papers/5-603.pd..., and the state of California embedded this framework into the commercial energy code known as Title 24 http://bees.archenergy.com/software.html.

Full disclosure I am a National Renewable Energy Lab employee and principle developer of OpenStudio with a vested interest in the platform. That said I think there could be some synergy in leveraging OpenStudio models in the UtilityScore process. Our charter is to support commercial tools exactly like this while not directly competing.
Agreed. I wasn't looking for a buy button. However, an authoritative info page by IBM itself providing technical specs and details of the platform would earn them good credits at least amongst the tech audience.
According to [1], on recent Intel CPUs, each instruction is translated by hardware decoder to up to four micro-ops: either trivial micro-ops like addition, subtraction, bitwise and/or/xor, or a special "microcode assist" micro-op which is essentially a function call into the CPU microcode table. According to the same source, CPU microcode table is believed to consist roughly of 20,000 micro-ops which handle edge cases like rare instructions, rare prefixes, FPU denormals, traps/exceptions, all that stuff. Also, CPU microcode table is believed to contain full-blown implementations of RSA and SHA-256 in order to support microcode updates.

So, yes, there's a performance gap between instructions with hardware fast path and ones which require a microcode assist.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/086.pdf
It's funny that British television for a long time (up until the HD era in fact) did this on historic, technical accident: indoor/in-studio cameras they used filmed at a much higher fps than outdoor/on-location cameras for cost and technical reasons. I remember noticing it the most in shows like Keeping Up Appearances and Fawlty Towers. Fawlty Towers especially tended to use outdoor shots for more of its slapstick, playing into the lower framerate for comedic effect.
Answering my own question via the reddit AMA:

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/4zdkra/askscien...

Says we'd need about 30 milliarcseconds, while, as noted elsewhere, Webb provides 100. Damn!
Agreed. If you want to spend more time working on features, don't accrue technical debt - or pay it off early.
This is known as the incessant obsolescence postulate: http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.1066
And how's that working out for you over there, with double digit unemployment rates in Spain, Italy, France?

As someone who's not American nor European (but lived for a while in both) this self-satisfied approach always amazes me. Are you guys realizing where you're heading?
BCD was the one I thought of; never seen one in compiler output. I believe x86_64 completely eliminated them.
> Basic laptops

Hey now, I went through two years of college on an Acer C720 that I ripped ChromeOS off of and ran Arch on. It was a great fucking laptop; even after putting a 250 gig SSD int it, the little thing flew far higher and faster than anything else in its price bracket (all told, around 300 bucks). And the battery life was honestly obscene, I managed to get 10 hours of a bus ride into a combination of reading papers for school, playing nethack, and doing homework before it finally crapped out on me.
That's cool, and that is what the article is trying to get across - using Instagram (and other sources) to assess the (near current) state of a location. A dedicated webcam or drone could be useful here too (or even errant Pokemon Go players with GoPros? :))
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_instruction_set_computer
> It only looks like a bad idea because of the close proximity in my example. What I've seen normally is that it's grown into something mimicking this structure, but actually far more complex. The point where the file read happens isn't so near the top so that refactor is less obvious, and it's so deep that the person who puts it into that outer loop in main may not realize what's happening internally (fully, at least).

I don't see how Big O calculus helps here. If you have enough understanding to run that analysis you have enough understanding to see it is trivially a dumb idea.

> I'm trying to recall the structure of another case where this happened that with a more complex internal algorithm. The solution was far less obvious, but required similar refactorings. In that case it was both reading the file multiple times, and a several deep loop where one (which was by far the longest running) could be refactored to only happen once. Instead of 100 or so times, we flipped some of the loops around (moved it to be the outer loop, similar to the idea of moving the loop over all lines to be the outer loop in my other example). Big-O wasn't essential (for me), because I'd internalized that sort of thinking. But that explanation was essential for my colleagues (EEs, couple years out of school) who hadn't been exposed to that construct before (at least not enough to stick).

What's funny is that I am an EE, and the way I internalized complexity analysis and optimization was to look at the number of operations being performed, along with the cost of those operations, and design the code such that it used the fewest resources. Only later did I learn this "Big O" thing and it seemed stupid because it seemed overly complex and was telling me to throw out significant factors that I spent my career worrying about. I still don't really see the value of it over more detailed methods that seem trivially easy to me, like simply deriving an approximation of the complete polynomial describing the runtime, memory usage, or what have you. I am a systems engineer and have a bias towards modeling things, though.
Now we can factor in "always sunny" or "always dark" to our simulations of what aliens might look like (maybe even two races/species from the same planet?).
I thought the issues were:

- navigation at any non-trivial fraction of *c* (not running into something that would obliterate the vessel)
- slowing down and actually arriving where you wanted to and not overshooting it or stopping .5 LY away
+1 for Tree Style Tabs; combined with "suspended" tabs, it provides exactly what I need: a lightweight, integrated system for short term bookmarks.
Nice! Thanks for posting this.
OSX is much more than the kernel. Darwin is open source, even. What are you talking about?
I was under the impression that US social mobility is actually lower than Europe's.
> We just know so wery little about habitability of M-dwarfs

s/M-dwarfs/planets around any star/
The Noise framework documentation. I know there's "a" number for GCM, but I always forget what it is, so I keep going back to Noise.