skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> how do you think lack of that knowledge affects knowledge of optimization and scalability?

I once wrote a log analysis python script. It took 2.5 hours to execute to completion. I then used Cython to compile it to C. It then took about 2 hours to run to completion.

I then stepped back and thought about the data structures I was using. I replaced some lists that were being searched with dictionaries that could were keyed by what I was searching my lists for. Replaced a few other simple data structures.

Now the script took, IIRC, 20 seconds to run to completion.

Now, I don't think you necessarily need to know all of the internal details of how a data structure is implemented to know its performance characteristics or when to use (or not use) them. However, the point is that by understanding their performance characteristics, code can be optimized or made more scalable.

Also, while something like a hash table might not be faster in actual real life terms (ie worse O() complexity can still be better wall clock; eg searching an array linearly can be faster than accessing a hash table since the array can be in cache and prefetched) when run on a single machine, big-O complexity can start mattering much more when you have a distributed workload or TB worth of data. (Although if you have a distributed workload, you have distributed systems problems to deal with too).

Having said all of this, without going into specific implementation details, hash tables and linked lists are incredibly simple and I see no reason why anyone calling themselves a programmer would have trouble with these. I mean, I wouldn't expect you to be able to write a good hash function or anything, but explaining the basic concept shouldn't be too hard for most programmers. If someone is self-taught, then ok maybe they haven't ever needed to learn this. Its definitely possible, but I would at least hope they would know basic performance characteristics or at least some rules of thumb as to when to use what data structure. Hopefully based on logic and not just hearsay ;-)
I second OP. Broadly I think the EU project are pushing back on the economy over politics paradigm given the general and endemic failure of credit cycle economics and the Brexit and migration meddley.

To your second point OP, over banking is a problem. If means more expensive banking operations which effects the whole of industry . Banking monopolies are the best of a set of bad options.
Vulkan C++ Bindings reloaded
There's considering it potentially lethal generally, and considering it an actual mortal risk if I sneak a couple of extra t-shirts into the wash. Understanding that something I own contains a potentially lethal mechanism doesn't void my reasonable expectation that safeguards have been built in that handle the intended and common use cases--like every other washing machine sold since WWII.
Extending the UX with "the current tasks and spans multiple regions at once" is definitely NOT the right way.

I believe the current sub-categorizing of services:

API Gateway, AppStream, AWS IoT, Certificate Manager, CloudFormation, CloudFront, CloudSearch, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline, Cognito, Config, Data Pipeline, Device Farm, Direct Connect, Directory Service, DMS, DynamoDB, EC2, EC2 Container Service, Elastic Beanstalk, Elastic File System, Elastic Transcoder, ElastiCache, Elasticsearch Service, EMR, GameLift, Glacier, IAM, Inspector, Kinesis, Lambda, Machine Learning, Mobile Analytics, Mobile Hub, OpsWorks, RDS, Redshift, Route 53, S3, Service Catalog, SES, Snowball, SNS, SQS, Storage Gateway, SWF, Trusted Advisor, VPC, WAF, WorkDocs, WorkMail, WorkSpaces.

is not helpful and confusing for new users. This is because all the mentioned services are a mix of dependent (e.g. ECS depends on EC2), independent(e.g. IAM & EC2), security, services acting like plugins.

The documents for all of these services can be a sequel novel. If you have been with AWS since 2012 you may have gradually been updated by each service that was getting blindly added but for a new user or a startup aiming to setup something or test the scalability of their application ASAP it is a nightmare.

The other day I found out (in a hard way) that you cannot launch an EC2 instance with an AWS container agent from the default launch page but you need to go to the launch page via the document link which puts extra parameters in the url...

Having said all that I believe the improvement needs to be more fundamental than couple of bullet points.
I've been the victim of a couple forms of fraud (fraudulent charges in TX, Macy's CC opened in my wife's name) and the CC companies bent over backwards to accommodate us. No hesitation that the charges would be reversed, holds placed on the account, and new cards sent.

That and fraud detection is getting better. I went home to visit my parents (2 hours away), got gas, then exchanged USD for €300. That triggered their algorithms (as well it should have), and I got a text about 10s after I swiped my card.
How to do before(:all)/after(:all) in minitest
> "Once the opportunity cost and risks are factored in, the schemes have represented a transfer from taxpayers to the financial sector."

Why not also factor in lloyds dividend which resumed in 2015 and makes the UK government £200m a year?
>how do you think lack of that knowledge affects knowledge of optimization and scalability?

In any program that has to handle just tenthousands of items ocasionally, knowing the difference between arrays, liked lists and pointer lists, or between various forms of hash tables, various forms of trees and sorted lists makes a big difference. This kind of knowledge affects how any program scales with input size and should be one of the first things checked when optimizing.

And I'd argue that just memorizing big-O properties only gets you half the way: heapsort is theoretically superiour to quicksort (better worst case, more space efficient, same average case), yet quicksort is used far more often because it makes better use of cpu caches and has a worst case that barely ever happens.

> Also because I used to write large-scale real-time signal processing code that didn't use hash tables at all, so lack of knowledge there wouldn't have this effect on our code.

Is the fact that it doesn't use hash tables a coincidence or is it because the people designing and writing the system know their data structures and realized that hash tables don't fit the problem?
Introducing Dedicated SSL Certificates
Good call about the batteries - of course they will become totally useless after discharging and freezing.
It's not "limited scope". This information was obtained as part of a very broadly scoped illegal action. Also, this cut of data does not "target[] any specific crime" -- it will contain information on Danish citizen who are not in any way breaching danish law (either because they are using these shell companies for legitimate purposes, or because they aren't resident and thus not liable for tax, in Denmark). That initial action doesn't become "limited" just because the criminals filtered it down. This is exactly the same as NSA dragneting and then only passing on information when they thing they find something bad.

But even with that, "limited scope" and "targeting specific crimes" aren't magic get-out-of-jail-free cards. If I design (from a secure location that won't prosecute or extradite me for doing so) a worm to infect peoples computers, and once there, quietly scan these computers for evidence of pirated movies (very targeted, very limited scope) and only when it finds evidence of such does it phone home (and only with the evidence, nothing more is ever collected or shared). I then sell this information to an aggressive anti-piracy-litigator. Is this now OK, because it's "limited scope information about people breaking some specific laws - the information is verified to be useful by sampling"?

(Also, on laws: If the law can be changed willy-nilly to suit whatever the government wants to do, you don't have the rule of law. This is bad. It is doubly bad when you go and change the law, not because you have a principled belief that it's bad, but because it prevents you from doing a specific thing. In practise, this is the same as the law not applying to the government. The Danish constitution is tragically toothless, as most of the relevant articles contain the phrase "except where an special exemption is created in law" - for an example for the inviolability of the home, more than 200 such exemptions exists.)
Useful info, thanks. So it's more of slo-mo crash landing then - that makes much more sense now. And the bit about the directional antenna also makes total sense.
... a planned freeway just to the south was canceled back
in the 1980's, and all the houses that had been taken by
eminent domain were auctioned off. The new tenants
didn't take care of their neighborhoods like the owners
used to.

This blows my mind. So the local government forced people out of their homes, then said, "Nevermind!"?
Leveris Banking as a Platform Solution
>In the minds of many of those who didn’t know me that night I became “The guy who wanted to invest $1000 in the stock market when he was 18”, which is an easier label to remember than “The guy who wants to democratize the financial system”

I think your self-diagnoses is not quite right. The wrong conclusion is to think "$1000 at 18" is more memorable because it's a biographical detail. The bigger issue is that "democratize the financial system" was too abstract and vague.[1] A clear and concise description of your product is still better than a founder's biography. You just happen to pick a nebulous product description and that distorted the weighting towards your personal story.

To me, the landing page of http://hardbacon.ca was more effective than your live pitch to describe the product. (The youtube video didn't show your slides so maybe the live audience received your messaging better.)

From that page, I would substitute "democratize financial system" with something like:

- "We're like LendingTree for small investors. Instead of presenting a list of banks offering loans, we present a list of brokers including human brokers and automatic robot brokers."

- "We're like Expedia/Orbitz/Hipmunk for choosing an investment broker. We let non-professional investors compare brokers and advisers."

[1] "democratize the financial system" is so generalized that it could apply to PayPal, Ameritrade, Charles Schwab, Square, Stripe, Kickstarter, Bitcoin, etc.
>>> This is especially important now when countries like Poland have the Euro hanging over their heads.

Not sure what outlets you are using for getting your information, but there is no way Poland will implement Euro within next decade unless something catastrophic will happen to their own currency. The referendum won't go through and if the government will try to pass it without public approval you will see hundreds of thousands of people taking this to the streets. The western media do not understand the situation in central Europe. While Poland still being one of the biggest EU supporters, is actually supporting a conservative model of it, without any deeper integration when possible. Status Quo from 2010-2012 is what Poland wants to maintain its relationships with EU and only change they are looking for is a bigger influence in central Europe and EU offices.
> What is your definition of "roughly" and how do you think lack of that knowledge affects knowledge of optimization and scalability?

Just that you hash a value you want to store and transform that hash into an array index for fast lookup. If someone didn't know that I find it hard to believe they'd have much knowledge or interest about how to pick appropriate data structures for large collections as it's such a fundamental concept used in lots of places (e.g. indices, caching). I'm not even expecting knowledge of what happens when two keys hash to the same bucket.

> Also because I used to write large-scale real-time signal processing code that didn't use hash tables at all, so lack of knowledge there wouldn't have this effect on our code.

Is there a similar data structure question you would ask a candidate who wants to work in this domain? You don't use hashes at all?
About nicks: I have been at it for at least six years, use a new blade with each shave, and still cut myself once in a while. Unless you have an extremely steady hand, it is just something that is going to happen.
Thanks to this very informative blog post I also discovered https://embedd.io that allows to embed HN and Reddit comments to any website. Thanks again!

EDIT: I don't know why I am getting downvoted. I am NOT from embedd.io (why else would you downvote otherwise?) and just genuinely discovered the service. HN is truly toxic lately.
CACKey ;-)

Trying out Falcon, keeping the exclusion list updated has been slighty more work than originally estimated.

Proxy Switcher, to access some sites though an SSH proxy automatically
What you might have missed in JavaScript world (A weekly roundup)
>>Closure(sic) compiler from GWT

false.

Closure does not compile java to js and closjurescript does not use any tech from gwt.

Clojurescript compiles to JS itself and then uses the Closure compiler (which is an incredible piece of tech) to compile js to js (not transpile, but actual compile).
Is the point of fingerprint scanners really to defeat advanced, targeted hacking efforts where someone has multiple high-resolution photos of you? Or is it (IMO more plausibly) just to keep somebody who picks your pocket or whatever from also getting access to your bank accounts and so on? For the latter scenario the fingerprint works fine.
How AI Helped Me (Almost) Give Up Brownies
I don't agree with you, but I'm tired of this fight. I'm replying to your point about downvoting in case it helps:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

Speaking of tired fights, and only slightly related, I've always thought removing the vote count display was a mistake
I wasn't sarcastic
Oooo please add Degree level courses with particular mention of ones that can be done from home.

Will bookmark, thanks for this
You'd switch, lose the ability to convert between unicode and those random 8-bit encoding, and end up having support for the encodings you can't solve to converting to unicode any more.
Agreed: the law does not trump physics [0]. Consumer safety regulations don't require safeguards to be perfect, just to properly address normal use and various failure modes, and that's what Samsung failed to do here, in contrast to basically every other washing machine manufacturer.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_waves
Although that's true it's still a legitimate question because this appears to be raising far more than a traditional CD sale.

It's too bad the OpenBSD guys didn't discover this long ago. I buy a CD set almost every release just to support the project and would have gone for a small premium for a signed edition.
Why your iPhone app (and web site) must have an error monitoring system
Restify requests validator
I'm all for learning for hash tables work, but is avoiding them really widespread? Especially in dynamic languages I feel like dynamic arrays and hash tables are like 90% of the data structures used.
What exactly don't you like about ClojureScript? The tooling may be kind of weird (and I believe you're out of date) but once you're set up with figwheel and something like om/reagent/re-frame you start approaching the bottom-up, truly dynamic, interactive approach to building things. Every time I hear stories of "we couldn't scale our JS until we switched to TS" it's always the case of they were developing their JS in IDEs and structured similarly to a Java application, but without having to declare types and having slightly nicer data literals...
Got a girlie name? Man up if you want to get work in the tech world
Yes, because two wrongs make a right. You just need to spread the proceeds from crimes wide enough, then everyone's happy. What could possibly go wrong?
> In any program that has to handle just tenthousands of items ocasionally, knowing the difference between arrays, liked lists and pointer lists, or between various forms of hash tables, various forms of trees and sorted lists makes a big difference. This kind of knowledge affects how any program scales with input size and should be one of the first things checked when optimizing.

Exactly. If a developer is picking data structures without any consideration of their growth complexity they're going to cause serious issues.
Agreed, an anycast IP should be provided just like that of their resolvers.
Direct link to demo: https://the-solar-system-10kapart2016.azurewebsites.net/

Repository: https://github.com/mfluderx/TheSolarSystem
Get out of Apple stock before it slides 20% this year, analyst says
Yes, a bank is a business not a charity. Customer service is important but saving their own skin appears to matter more.
And of course, they can't turn it off after they've touched down because they will likely no longer have a comm link!
To be fair, LinkedList is of very limited use. I can't think of a scenario I'd use it in beyond an LRU cache.
Shuvalov prior to his political career was a businessman. Do you have any facts that he stole anything? Stop talking non-sense, only facts, please.
NES/Famicom game programming discoveries
Self-destructing, single-use file sharing
On the other hand, there's plenty people who are still using a HP calculator from the same era. There's nothing inherent to computers that forces a rapid turnover. It gets really problematic when you have capital equipment with a lifetime of decades controlled by a computer that for some reason needs replacement every five years.

Organ builders have solved the problem: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgellandschaft_Ostfriesland
I took a look at Facebook's Flow type checker for Javascript seems like it would really help with a lot of the authors complaints but would still get to right mostly plain JS.
Timber Sycamore
It's available as a poster from the store:

https://www.openbsdstore.com/cgi-bin/live/ecommerce.pl?site=...
> Having said all of this, without going into specific implementation details, hash tables and linked lists are incredibly simple and I see no reason why anyone calling themselves a programmer would have trouble with these. I mean, I wouldn't expect you to be able to write a good hash function or anything, but explaining the basic concept shouldn't be too hard for most programmers. If someone is self-taught, then ok maybe they haven't ever needed to learn this.

Even if you're self-taught, if you've been programming for a while you should be able to read up on what linked lists and hash tables are in 15 minutes and virtually all interview preparation guides mention data structures. If you've not had the curiosity to do that then that's a bad sign.
Crypto Classics: Wiener's RSA Attack
BIOS is not part of an evil maid attack.
Regarding the second point, can you give an explanation of why you think that is the case? Normally more competition leads to lower prices. Why should banking be special?
That's because that implementation is more obvious but has worse real-world performance than linear probing.
I think the idea of having some examples of relevant, high quality, punchy data journalism is great. Such examples are few and far between. Unfortunately, what I clicked on looked, to me, pretty disappointing (journalism, not software). Example: looking at their top link

http://projects.aljazeera.com/2013/syrias-refugees/

It took me a while to figure out what exactly are they showing: the plots/colors look good, the software works cool, but it took me a couple of minutes to figure out what this is a plot of (area, at population density at your chosen location, needed to house X million people).

Maybe all they need are better titles / verbal descriptions, but as is it does not cut it for me as best practices of data journalism (interesting, correct, clear, grabs me by the balls). My 2c.
AFAIK most real-world dictionary classes use linear probing.
EAN means "European Article Numbering".
French guy calmly destroys everything in Apple Store with steel ball
The last time Logitech released a webcam, Obama was running for re-election
Well, to be fair, non-exclusive means Amazon gets to use the developed tech in any way. The authors of the IP retain the right to use the tech in any way they see fit too, including making a competing product or applying the tech to novel domains or licensing it to a competitor. Of course if Amazon wanted to apply the IP to a novel domain they could too.

This is a better than most employee deals where the employee has no rights to the developed tech. Even most contract work gives the company exclusive rights as a "work for hire".

It's more like an MIT license between the developer and Amazon rather than a proprietary license just for Amazon.
I know. IAN and EAN are interchangeably used.
Meet the First-Gen Engineer Who Forged His Path in Tech Despite All Odds
> To be fair, LinkedList is of very limited use. I can't think of a scenario I'd use it in beyond an LRU cache.

It's more the point that not knowing they exist is a very strong indicator you haven't read even introductory text on algorithms and data structures. I barely use them either but when I'm thinking of solutions to problems they're a useful concept to know.
Well, the fact that it's a VM that is installed on practically everything is really cool but beyond that I can't see why you'd prefer to use it.
"like every other washing machine sold since WWII"

Youtube seems to disagree with Whirpool, GE, LG and many more machines "exploding" e.g.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z4fjiCz6tU (LG)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNpRqxdsQAY (Whirlpool)
Ah, my bad then, I wasn't much into details, the titles on most media was literary "Bank X went bankrupt".
> Identity should never be used as a password.

Like in the USA, the social security numbers, our driver license numbers, etc. are all used as authentication, when originally were meant as identification for tracking purposes.

So far, the safest form seems to be what we keep in our heads.
The obvious way to wipe out both shareholders and keep the bank functioning is to supply capital to the bank, but take ownership in return. As the bank is worth less than 0 before the bailout (or one wouldn't be necessary) it would be a total wipeout of shareholders.
I see threads on here all the time about how interviews are broken and you shouldn't be expected to be quizzed on data structures if you're an experienced programmer

Anyone who thinks that an experienced programmer shouldn't know data structures just isn't programmer material: someone who truly appreciates this profession will have had formal education in algorithms and data structures, and if they do not, they will make sure they learn it on their own. Otherwise - this is how we get bloated crapware.

I just cannot up-vote your comment enough, if I could, I would up-vote it with my both hands and feet!

I always think back to The Art of UNIX programming:

Rule of Representation: Fold knowledge into data, so program logic can be stupid and robust.

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html#id2878...
No one's suggesting regulation can overturn the laws of physics, it's about assigning responsibility for their consequences in such a way that incentivises safe design.

And if the incentives are structured right, it can be entirely reasonable for consumers to assume that potentially risky things are in fact entirely safe.

>you can't change the fact that lithium-ion batteries are potentially lethal.

And yet you feel comfortable carrying it around in your pocket. Which is exactly the point.

Why should washing machines be any different?
Or getting them to use a sensible way to state dates.
Not Productive? 7 Ways to Get Unstuck
awesome! thanks for this!
Show HN: Wave function collapse algorithm
Yeah, agreed. They are extremely simple.