skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use slack every day and have no problems with it. This letter has so much wrong

> First, and most importantly, it’s not the features that matter.

Yes, yes it very much is. Do you think people would use Slack if it was bare bones?

> The revolution that has led to millions of people flocking to Slack has been, and continues to be, driven by something much deeper.

I have no idea what this "revolution" is. What exactly is the deeper meaning?

> Second, an open platform is essential

Says the team making a closed source app with an api. Nothing Microsoft can't do.

> We’re glad you’re going to be helping us define this new product category

Group chat isn't new.
How often, in your day job, is it a necessary job-related task for you to be pop-quizzed on the Big-O characteristics of half a dozen data structures and then have to draw out manipulations of a binary tree on a whiteboard?

Somehow we decided to never test for the things we actually do at work, and instead to invent an entirely new discipline (whiteboard interviewing) and test for competence at that, in hopes it would translate to doing well on the job.

Thus far the empirical evidence is not particularly great that testing for the skill of whiteboard interviewing translates to success on the job, and there's a growing body of evidence that it excludes the most desirable people (since experienced high-quality candidates are likely to have been out of school, or whatever they used to learn "fundamentals", for long enough that the things tested in a whiteboard interview are not close enough to the top of their minds to consistently pass).
I'd just like to say on behalf of npm that Microsoft's handling of this incident was A+. As soon as we alerted them to the issue they were all hands on deck and did a rollback.

We've been really pleased that Microsoft chose to put their @types packages into the npm registry rather than a separate, closed system, and in general happy with Microsoft's support of node and npm. We're confident we can make the new features of VSCode work, we just need to work with Microsoft to tweak the implementation a little.

This was an honest mistake on their part, and we caught it in time that there was very little impact visible to any npm users.

Fun fact: at its peak, VSCode users around the world were sending roughly as many requests to the registry as the entire nation of India.
To be fair, there are still people people in decision-making positions who were alive in the "4 out of 5 doctors smoke Marlboroughs" days.

And, it's hardly more hysterical than other american public safety fears re: terrorism, children, drugs etc.
I'm not a user of Slack (solo dev) so I guess I'm not the target audience for this. But I am I wrong in feeling that this comes off as completely lame?

To me it reads as weirdly premature desperation conveyed in a condescending tone.
FBI's Clinton Foundation investigation now 'a very high priority,' sources say
How the politics of debt explains everything
haughty
Thank you! My knowledge of how these things work is somewhat general and out-of-date. I think I remember reading about FeatureBoost back in the day, and will try to refresh my memory of how it compares to max-margin methods.
Pew Research: Donald Trump voters are more tolerant than Hillary Clinton voters
No - Linux runs great, it's macOS I'm having issues with!
Can you elaborate on what the issue is and how you want it to be fixed? Is it just something like rate-limiting requests or something more fundamental?

Edit: Answered at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12861118
There's a reason why coding bootcamps now tend to have a section at the end, entirely separate from teaching coding, on how to pass technical interviews, because technical interviews are increasingly completely divorced from the skill of knowing how to code (despite the claim that failing a technical interview is unimpeachable proof that a candidate was an impostor who was "lying" and "couldn't really code").
Yey! I can now go to Linkedin for the mean average of some pseudo-random numbers, cough sorry I meant salary information.
This just demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding at every level of how the political system in the US works.

Our voting system is messed up, but that's a symptom of many deeper problems (FPTP voting, closed vote counting, the mixing of parties with government and others). These problems aren't going to be solved by any one effort. And most definitely not by any SV backed one.

Also, anybody who thinks a text messaging campaign will result in meaningful voter turnout improvement is so distant from understanding why turnout is so low as to be dismissed out of hand.
Hasn't the notion of voter fraud been more or less debunked? [0][1]

[0] https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/voter-fraud
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/20/opinion/the-success-of-the...
The confusion comes from Slack acting like Teams won't also have an open api for integrations.
i think it's funny their final point was "slack is here to stay".. as if their explosive growth over the last year - which involved many companies switching out their existing chat service for slack - could not be repeated next year to another destination.
He did say "in the field". Further, I remain skeptical toward sociology departments until they bump their reproducibility up a bit above 50% or bring their ideological homogeneity down below 90%. And I don't trust gender studies departments at all ("glaciers are sexist" and whatnot).
Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers...

Does this article add anything new?
I thought that sentence sounded very trump-ish.

The feature was so great that npmjs couldn't keep up with it, it was yuuuuuge!
I recognize it's the principle of the thing, but I have to admit I'm not sure I could get worked up about being excluded from seeing advertisements
iCracked (YC W12) Is Hiring Lead Engineers and Product Managers
iirc when you sign up, they sua sponte take all your contacts from [fb, Google, your phone, etc] and message all of them saying you have invited them to join LinkedIn. This is the scummy behavior I assume the poster is talking about.
Narc Rage, anyone?
he worked the hours and he deserves the pay. Good for him.
Your statement to "hire the absolute most productive" implies that no woman or black or hispanic person can be "the absolute most productive", because there is no reading of your comment which makes sense without the assumption that you believe this.

Congratulations, you've exposed yourself as possessing irrational biases and allowing them to influence how you'd hire, while showing no desire to eliminate, overcome or compensate for those biases. As a result you are unqualified to ever make a hiring decision.
CDNs don't usually cache 404s. VSCode was looking for @types packages for any and every npm package its users were using. Packages that had a type description caused no issue, but most packages don't, so we had a > 1000% spike in 404s. Our workaround before MS did the rollback was to cache 404s for @types packages specifically, and it was effective enough that the registry never really went down.
In the future, we will all be rental serfs
Great list though 13 and 24 seem almost contradictory, can you expand on 24?
I mean, I think the whiteboard thing is pretty lame, and would prefer to give and get coding tests on my own machine and environment.

But yeah, I expect someone to be able to tell me what the complexity of various algorithms when shown them is and how to manipulate common data structures. At the very least one ought to be able to walk a tree don't you think? My front end engineer has to walk a tree of JSON on a project right now. I'm glad she can do it.
Yes, you're right. But base salary is the only reliable number to use for comparisons. If we get into things like startup stock options, value is effectively zero on a probability scale. Monetary bonuses are paid out based on all kinds of factors that may or may not come to pass, and have their own taxes associated with them. The only reliable extra comp I can think of would be RSUs and similar at large tech companies, but those are already fairly well known.
Got any data to support that? (If you do, it makes my point even stronger...)
Good point, opportunity cost describes it perfectly.
4-5 years ago when I was building AIR mobile apps; you could build iOS apps on Windows.

You can do everything you could do on a Mac except upload the final build to the iOS app store.

To my knowledge there is no way to use native Apple tools to build iOS apps on Windows; but I haven't kept up with the tech.
It's on the person running the ad to not break laws or operate in discriminatory ways, not Facebook.

There are tons of metrics that correlate heavily with race, combinations of which that can be used in place of this metric. Facebook shouldn't be at fault when an advertiser abuses them.

If a landlord took online rental applications, the company providing the technology for the applications wouldn't be at fault if the landlord denied all applications from a certain ethnicity.
I don't get many of them. I've since moved on to FounderDating though.
Your first point suggests these questions have some value for you in identifying people's skills. Fair enough.

Your second argument admits that this is basically a hazing ritual. Of course you will have to learn some things you don't intrinsically care about in the course of your work. The difference is, that isn't part of a process that we intentionally designed to be that way. Admitting that your hiring process requires useless knowledge that people just have to learn to get through the process means you admit your process doesn't measure what matters and is just a hazing ritual. You're putting up hoops just to see who will jump through them.
CDN caching globally, please!
Are you assuming that there is some genetic or evolutionary reason for men to like cars? That somehow it is hard-coded into the Y chromosome to like cars?

Or have you considered the possibility that social conditioning can make a large difference in what hobbies and preferences someone ends up having?
Both of your comments here have been composed of relatively strong opinions with nothing to back them up. Care to contribute anything to the discussion other than your potential bias?
I'm not entirely sure what the point of the release is, it also feels sort of passive aggressive to me
An overwhelming amount of sexual offences are committed by men so it makes sense to have this in the bathroom for potential victims. Sadly it's true that some women will use this to get rid of bad dates.
I haven't seen any ads on xhamster.com which I think is the same company?
i've been trying to think of a list of types of pros that use Macbooks
("pro" being anyone who can use their work to justify spending at least twice as much on their computer, or who works for someone who will spend it for them)

as mentioned, there are photographers, video editors, software developers/computer engineers

also, audio engineers, illustrators and graphic designers

my anecdotal evidence says architects and engineers don't use Macs professionally, and neither do accountants. Lawyers who use Macs don't—or at least don't need to—use high end ones. Same with professors, doctors, accountants.

So was in mind during design?
Totally agree. I'm the opposite -- been doing this for 25+ years, have done quite a few things in those years, but my current title is just "Developer." It doesn't mean much.
I suppose one could sidestep it by requesting permission to record for "review with the rest of the hiring team." Probably not a good idea, though.

Confronting them on the phone is probably a worse idea, though.

Realistically, though, if you're job hunting, filing lawsuits might not be the best use of time.
> Your statement to "hire the absolute most productive" implies that no woman or black or hispanic person can be "the absolute most productive"

How on earth did it imply that?
we have unlimited vacation, and a formal month long sabbatical every X years.

So far, its been great. Vacation approval is up to your manager. Ive never had or heard of a request getting denied. People are responsible; it works.

I do wish there was a 2 week minimum policy just on principle, but it wouldn't really change anything.
Their secret sauce seems to be in how they can convince so many people to use it despite similar products existing for decades. I really wish I knew the answer to this question, I admire it a lot.
So one day they switched their entire user base to rely on a 3rd party free service without any load testing or heads up? What could possibly go wrong?
Location: Los Angeles, CA (Part-time in Asia)
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Ruby, JS, CSS, Bootstrap, React-Native, Python, OpencCV, some ML with Computer Vision
Résumé/CV: https://boopis.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/david_chun_resume.pdf
Email: [redacted]
Github: https://github.com/dchun, https://github.com/boopis

For the past few years I have been running a plugin business while also consulting and freelancing. I am originally from Los Angeles, and I have been working remotely in Asia. I had the good fortune of working on a few computer vision projects recently and I'd like to continue down that path since it's so different from the typical process of building crud apps. I'm not an expert in the field but I invest a lot of personal time into expanding my skills in the field. If you would like to see a sample of my work, send me an email, and I will share a feasibility study I prepared for a client.
To be clear, there is no moral imperative to maximize diversity, only equality. We have no business pressuring 'diverse' people into careers they don't want to be in.
And anonymity would be nice too, or at least opacity. I don't need my payment provider knowing exactly which content I'm reading.

Patreon has a lot going for it in the sense that if you support stuff you like, you will see more of it.
For tons of academic references on this sort of thing, check out the Journal of Polynesian Studies based out of Auckland University, New Zealand @ http://www.jps.auckland.ac.nz/

Except the very latest issues it's all online for free, and some fascinating reading. I used a lot of it writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wa_(watercraft)

For example http://www.jps.auckland.ac.nz/document?wid=4414&page=0 discusses modern trimarans versus traditional craft complete with rigging, photographs and vessel schematics, and http://www.jps.auckland.ac.nz/document?wid=5567&page=0 provides wind tunnel measurements of the efficacy of traditional rigging.
I think the article makes it the correlation between education attainment (a proxy for income) and net loss. So, it isn't that millenials are aging. It's whether they get credentials as they age.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing this information.
Sure, and if my opportunity costs exceed your offer then I won't work for you. BATNA is what drives compensation, and the risk of you ceasing operations definitely factors into that.
And yet... this attitude is how we get stuff like the Homebrew guy tweeting that Google is happy to be internally dependent on his software while also saying he's not qualified to write software for Google, because their tech interview excludes him.

(Google's interview process, in my experience, can be gamed heavily by just memorizing a dynamic-programming solution to the longest-common-subsequence problem; they love popping that one out in interviews, even for job descriptions which have no reasonable need to ever be able to regurgitate it onto a whiteboard on command)
I'm surprised the recent news about how Trump's campaign is using facebook to depress black voting wasn't mentioned.

>The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts” — nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

Highly targeted negative political advertising is the norm, but when the digital director for a campaign is openly using the ethnicity option in facebook to "affect her ability to turn these people out", it feels wrong.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the...
GameMaker Studio 2
This. I pretty much ignore anything with "URGENT" in the subject line at this point. When everything is urgent, nothing is.
It's largely the reason why I left. As I learned more about the industry it was less palatable. They do take steps to shield themselves and reduce their liability. Let's face it, if you're a top dog at a large porn company, you live a charmed life. These guys don't want to go to jail or have the government poking around in their business.

The whole industry is legitimized by one object: a camera. If you pay someone to have sex, it's prostitution. If you pay someone to have sex and you record it, it's business. This very fine line is one they constantly walk; they're always a step away from criminal behavior.
My first thought was that it's incredible that these startups exist, when the majority of the US population isn't even willing to eat more vegetables. Then I was curious about how many vegetables Americans eat, and I discovered that there isn't much useful data on the subject. This CDC report says that US adults eat (on average) vegetables 1.6 times per day: http://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/downloads/state-indicator-repor.... Not a very useful metric.
We've asked you twice before not to do this, so we have to ban this account. We're happy to unban accounts if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll not do this in the future.
Official blog announcement: http://www.yoyogames.com/blog/397
Not sure about the last crash reports (the os froze until i force restarted it), but other weirdness are things like the keyboard going apeshit. Spazzing out like a variety of buttons are being held down. That's happened 3 times since updating, never before. Another one is all input not working, etc. Both keyboard/pad related though, i assume there's a wonky driver in Sierra but i haven't researched it (and frankly don't want to atm).

I'm not complaining/etc, just saying i'm not getting a crash report on the last two items - and i'm unsure about if i received one the times the OS actually crashed.
Two years of perseverance, and still going
Pandering too much?
I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but it is extremely common for cofounders to be added later on (after development has begun). Heck, I would say that all cofounders being involved from the very beginning is the exception, not the rule.
> we have a moral imperative to eliminate unfair and discriminatory barriers to entry because its the right thing to do.

First you have to demonstrate that those barriers exist.
Well, at the time something in the list of "C++ (Boost, STL), Python, SQL (PostgreSQL, SQLite), git" caught his eye.

Since it was RethinkDB I suspect the combination of C++ (which RethinkDB is written in), Python (one of the 4 languages for which there are/were "official" libraries), experience with 2 different DBMSs and an interest in "a challenge as a backend enginer to further hone my C++ skills" were probably all factors.
In the context of "diversity", which is taken to imply increasing the population of currently-underrepresented groups in the industry, responding with "just hire the best" only makes sense if one believes those groups do not by definition contain "the best", since otherwise everyone who already claims to "hire the best" would have hired from those groups.
First Facebook Event Integration App
Let us know if you want to try out our Facebook event integration for your next company or holiday event for free.
Contact us at info@gjests.com

Love to hear everyone's feedback
I had no idea Microsoft released a chat client until I read this article.

Microsoft should send Slack some flowers and a thank you card for the free marketing.
So what, we just let everyone who says they can code in? That's how fizzbuzz was born.
...and they made npm Inc. pay for it!
Make your development team happy with better communication
None of those requires a lot of physical strength anymore, machines do most of the heavy lifting. Not that any of them required a level of strength unattainable by women anyway.
I'll admit that i don't use slack...but it would have come across as more respectable if they hadn't injected a tad bit too much passive aggressiveness. I mean if this was written in the late 90's/early 2000s, perhaps I might have agreed with them. But have they seen what microsoft is up to? I mean, microsoft is working with linux...working. with. freakin. linux! Microsoft. with. linux! ;-)
Stating for the 1e100th time in discussions of this topic: whiteboard interviews do not test coding ability and do not usefully distinguish people who are able to code from people who are not. So any argument proceeding from the assumption that doing away with them equates to no longer testing for ability to code is invalid and contains a known-false assumption.
> and some being just quick hackathon projects that needed authentication, a bug ...

The solution here is not to 'fix' LDAP, it's to have proper processes for testing, change management, and deployment. It's to have non-production environments you can use, etc.

I know it's not particularly popular or trendy in startups, but these processes don't have to be onerous. Just some control over what you put into production. I'm not suggesting you wan avoid bugs, but there are in-depth mitigation you can take to help prevent this.
I agree on the surface of your argument though it's not as bleak as we fear.

While I don't think it's intentionally malicious, the current "cult" dev culture disempowers developers. I think there's two competing movements; the attempt to make programming more like engineering, and the belief that programming is an art.

For the software engineer camp, programming is quantified and implicitly egalitarian. The mantra is "the work speaks for itself" for these folks.

For the creative camp, programming isn't so easily measured and turned on or off.

I think the answer is somewhere in the middle. The first step to solving a problem is being able to talk about it. Many people of all genders and races are interested in being developers. They just don't want to give up their lives to do so.

Imagine being in an interview and being asked about golf balls and school busses. On the other side of the table is a suitcase with $100k. Is it really reasonable to ask them to shake things up when their livelihood is on the line?

The good news is that for all the warts software has, there are no barriers other than personal determination. Anyone can be a developer so long as they're interested.
Just an amusing thing to notice: 大零 ''da ling'' means "great zero" in Mandarin Chinese.
Clickbait title ignores the text -- it was the albatross that inspired the design, not the Ho 229.