skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Using a GUI for editing E-mail or joining a WI-FI network is silly, just like it is for most things people do with computers.

Englebart? Sutherland? Kay? Idiots! Fifty years of academic and industrial research into Human Computer Interaction? Arrant nonsense. Let's blow it all off and do your thing. What could possibly go wrong? [0]

[0] http://gandre.ws/blog/blog/2015/04/07/why-the-command-line-i...
What does your company do?
I don't think I could have used it to write code, though I never tried very hard coz it was so frustrating. Practice would have helped.

But I could and did use it to write and edit long-form prose.

It's way better than a touch-screen for shelling in and fixing server issues when you're stuck at a party away from keyboard.

Actual code writing tends to mean using lots of symbols though, and while the N900 keyboard was better than a touch screen, both make you want to rip open your skull and put the wires in directly in frustration.

I miss that keyboard.

When I had that keyboard, the best email-interface was still Mutt over a terminal. You could use Vim! Type without looking! It was ace.

That phone had the best microphone out of any I've ever owned by a clear mile too. Certainly the only one that could stand up to being used in the band practice-room without just distorting to hell coz of the volume.

I still use it for that, for video-recording band-practise, cos nothing else ever came close. The USB port broke and now can only transfer files with WI-FI and have to use an external battery charger, and all my batteries are swelling slightly and really ought to be retired.

But I don't have anything else that will actually work for it.
I feel you... I use some unholy abomination of Emacs, Vim, and Spacemacs. Sometimes based on convenience, but mostly based on what I learned first.
I see so many comments which boil down to "either buy a subscription or be willing to have ads shown". But here's the reality. Even if you pay for a subscription, you still see ads. And worse, you still have code from 3rd parties, whom you didn't invite, running on your computer.

I bet if you took a survey of the HN community, the majority would say they have no problem with 1st-party ads (how about simple inline images) of a quality commensurate with the quality of the publication.
This, exactly. I thought of that same episode, it's been weighing on me since I saw it.

As a person who uses no social media, this post exemplifies what my fear is: penalizing people who choose not to use social media, and a "non opt-in" approach to digital rating. A Yelp for people, regardless of their own will. In the future, will they deny coverage to those who don't have a Facebook, or just jack up their rates?

EDIT: looks like they have stopped the program. Privacy wins
This is because the technical interview has completely degenerated into an arms race. It started with good intentions. It used to be just, here's a problem, try to solve it and let's discuss. And at first it was fine. But then knowing Big-O, algorithm, data structure, etc. became a way to "show off" and impress the interviewer. So everyone started to focus on those to impress the interviewer. Then the interviewers noticed and started to state they would only be impressed by more and more obscure algorithms and data structures.

And then the real downward spiral began with the publication of Cracking the Coding Interview. More books were published, a whole industry to support this. Then came the sites like leetcode and HackerRank. Now there's a lot of money supporting and pushing for continuing this stupid process. And the arms race just keeps getting worse and worse. The interviewers expect more and more obscure algorithms and data structures and justify it with "must avoid false positives". This just increases the study time for candidates and they're willing to spend time and money to do it. And the tech interview industry (all the books and sites) are happy to push this arms race since it's more money for them. Now they have enough money to go openly defend the tech interview as the "best practice".

It's not even enough to get the right answer now. You have to do it fast enough or you fail. And now they care about syntax on a whiteboard. None of this used to be true. It all started as a way to see how you approach a problem and discussing it. No expectations that you would correctly get Algorithm ABC and Data Structure XYZ. No expectation that the syntax is correct, pseudo code was ok. No expectation even on a complete working solution, the point was just to see if you can reason about the problem.

All that is gone, replaced by the tech interview arms race. Now it's just a massive speed pattern matching contest to see if you've studied enough to hopefully cover the obscure problem the interviewer will pick and if you can correctly pattern match in time based on the hundreds of questions you did on leetcode. Completely useless and against the original intent of tech interviews.
> technical interviews skills are gained

Oh yes, and that applies to both sides of the table. Interviewing skills are learned as well - and they can be taught. (A friend is proud of the fact that he's had actual interviewing training.)

Interviewing is not that hard, but it sure as hell is a difficult thing to master. I'm reasonably good, but still nowhere near as good as I'd want to be. Nonetheless, it's still a skill that can be learned and improved.

The irony is that it'll be easier to improve one's interviewer skills than those of being interviewed. The reason is that if you're conducting technical interviews, you'll be doing it as part of your job, and any reasonably good interviewer will have his or her calendar full of learning opportunities.

Candidates will have less opportunities and due to the nature of the experience, are likely to be demoralising to boot.

I recently wrote a post about things I've picked up and learned when doing technical interviews: https://smarketshq.com/notes-on-interviewing-engineers-a4fa4... ; when judging the experience from HN posts, I cannot help the feeling that most engineers are subjected to pretty horrible, even recurring interviewing experiences.
That's a very good point. That tool, however, should at the very least be internally consistent and pleasant to use.

I don't think that's what the person was saying that I responded to or he wouldn't have made the condescending remark about people using a pro machine to use Outlook and Facebook.
Maybe you have to get your enterprise admin to enable it?
...And this is why I might buy a BlackBerry. Because while BB phones are Android now, they still have real keyboards.
I'm waiting with great anticipation for the politically correct outcry to solve the problem of not enough women being represented in the mining, construction, sanitation, logging, or deep sea fishing industries, or for there be a popular movement to get more men into teaching or nursing where they're also dramatically underrepresented there.

Let's see if there's any intellectual honesty here, or maybe there's something else behind this politically correct movement?

Gee, I wonder why certain people are trying to pu$h this so hard? You can ea$ily gue$$ what thi$ expan$ion of the labor $upply i$ really about if you think long and hard about it.
Throwaway from my main account.

I am a recent grad and I was looking for a job since May to Sept. I applied to a lot of places from the HN Who's hiring threads.

I thought I'd post my stats below:

Remote:
I applied to around 25 of these posts - I got only ~3 replies.

* Coinbase: Had a hacker rank challenge that didn't work seem to work (and was disqualified)

* Hola Networks: Extremely slow & async (took almost a month)

- Google Docs code test (2 questions - was not allowed to use an external editor or compile my code) and the contact refused to talk to me before I had complete this challenge.

Now for in-person local interviews (in and around Toronto):

I must have applied to over 50 companies posted in that timeframe. A few rejected at first reply (needed more experience although the posting itself didn't mention how much experience was needed), a few didn't bother replying and finally of those who did reply (~10):

* 1st interview stage: went to about 5 companies (rejected for culture fit, not enough experience, didn't do well at the white board [0]). Others made me use hacker rank or other similar tools.

* 2nd Stage: white boards (most went well apart from [0]). One hired an internal referral (and rejected me).

* 3rd Stage: Rejected because they had better candidates. One offered me a Job Offer (but not in my field at all - it was a call center support role - they why even interview my coding skills? :/)

Notes:

Overall, while I didn't have a lot of success at HN Who's hiring, the quality of interviews was much much better than from other places I had applied. If I were looking for a job again, I'd definitely use it as a source of Jobs.

[0] - It was at an American car manufacturer:
First stage: phone call with coding questions over the phone (and verified against answers his paper) and
2nd stage: in person, they kept asking me THE EXACT DEFINITIONS of various stuff in Java (I explained what they were, and what they did but they were not the exact definition as in Wikipedia - WHICH THEY WERE VIEWING AS THEY WERE INTERVIEWING ME)
> Many apps need to index or store or transform arbitrary key/value pairs, but without knowing anything about those keys or values mean.

Then those apps shouldn't be interpreting those values. E.g. if you don't know and don't care whether a given JSON number is an integer or a decimal, don't represent it as a number in your app. Just copy the serialized number verbatim (or a canonicalized version thereof).
Ruka, a Truly Modular Drone
How a graphics card is built – includes assembly line GIFs
Which vim plugin did you use? There's 4 different ones.
I've seen a number of tech interviews where the interviewer has played down candidates that were better than them (consciously or not). I've also been a interviewee many times and sensed a one-upmanship from the interviewer(s), and subsequently avoid those companies. I could easily see this also being another factor if someone isn't in tune with the norms of the industry to call BS and walk.
I really miss leaders though.
I'm one of the people who ask those algorithm/white board questions. I've read a lot criticism on this topic, here're my reasons to stil keep asking these questions:

1) Working on algorithm problem requires very little in common between interviewer and interviewee. I'm C++/C#, I won't be able to give Ruby dev a real world task and evaluate it properly. Algo/data structure problems are universal and looks similar in any language.
In my practice I completely failed to make any conclusions by talking about previous experience. It was not clear to me what person actually did vs what was already on the project, may as well just fixed couple UI bugs on the complex project. This part might be might personal failure as interviewer, but it was it is, and I've seen enough developers with years of experience who barely code. So unfortunately having great resume doesn't prove anything.

2) Everyone knows that big tech companies ask these questions. Knowing that you didn't take to prepare, says one of two things to me: you don't find it interesting topic/usefull or you don't have enough grit to go thru that.
When I prepared for the interview I went thru two algo books, it took some time but it was easy for me, I did enjoy the learning part, yes it's not something I use every day. But learning things is a trait of good developer, knowing fundamentals if part of that. Some folks found it useless, but since it's known fact that's being asked on interiewes, motivated developer would spend time and learn it. Over the years at work, we have to learn things that are not interesting and that I'd rather choose not to know at all, same as algorithms to some people. If you can't make yourself learn algorithms to pass interview, likely you wont learn things for the work too.
Yep.

I miss that keyboard.
If you sell the book the usual way, you are paid a percentage of sales; the publisher pays for web design, printing, etc out of the percentage they don't pay you, so in a very real sense, when you write a book, from your perspective, you are paying the web developer a percentage.
>Stealth means you show up on radar like a 15ft skiff (in the case of a ship) or a seagull (in the case of aircraft)

a seagull flying at Mach 1+ :) ... I know, i know, it is about distance you can detect the "seagull" from, not about classification.
Best advice I ever had early on in my career.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12612246
IFTTT announces open partner platform
You're taking a huge risk not working for Cisco, Oracle, Google

No, this is not risk. This is opportunity cost.

When referring to finance or economics, risk describes
the possibility that an investment's actual and projected
returns are different and that some or all of the
principle is lost as a result. Opportunity cost concerns
the possibility that the returns of a chosen investment
are lower than the returns of a necessarily forgone
investment.

http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/041015/what-differen...

A VC can lose their cash money investment in StartUpCo. That's risk. An engineer choosing between StartUpCo and Cisco faces a choice between two opportunities. The cost of choosing one opportunity is the other. That's an opportunity cost.
Truly, in academia people will study and right about absolutely anything. I got halfway through that interview before I realized that there was no "there" there.
Regarding Thatcher effect, one of the Hinton lectures from https://www.coursera.org/learn/neural-networks talks about difficulties in recognition of reflected/upside down objects. I can't easily look it up, so here is my paraphrasing:

Humans exhibit a comparable delay when recognizing and reasoning normal and reflected objects. He then gives a few examples such as answering "is this a left or a right foot shoe" and suggests that brains do rotational transformations as part of the object recognition. The machine solution is probably similar to a human solution - do a bunch of transformations and pick highest confidence one.

The interesting part that is humans can answer "this is a shoe" question immediately, but take longer to reason about reflected images.
Yes, but Postgres has high standards ;) There are plenty of crappy JSON libraries out there. (I took to writing my own in C for just this reason.)
Yes, thanks for the response.
No idea why this is being downvoted. This matches what I heard about Plasma's mobile endeavors.

In 2012, at the Akademy (KDE conference) in Tallinn, I spoke with Plasma developers who were, at the time, working on a tablet called "Vivaldi", which was supposed to ship with Plasma Active (the KDE 4 version of Plasma Mobile) based on Mer (the community fork of Meego). And they really struggled with the hardware part: They carefully assembled a BOM of parts for which open-source drivers were available, ordered test devices, built the whole software stack. And when they were ready to start mass production, the manufacturer was like: "What, that chip? That's soooo last month. We have this new chip here, which is completely undocumented, but we have an Android driver for you." Last I heard, they never got an actual device shipped because of that mess.

I don't know if it's gotten any better since then, but I can easily imagine how that situation led them to base the new Plasma Mobile on the Android HAL.
We are talking about the hiring process here, being selected at all, how your financial prowess doesn't jive with the culture fit doctrine.
I agree - I have a project that has similar problems (cataloging standalone lectures - https://findlectures.com). The biggest advantage of it being a side project is there's no pressure to get the data cleaning done, but in a work environment with time pressure this type of project is a huge pain.
*> it does use android drivers*

...Wait a minute, that sounds like something I can do, too!

I'm a LFS[0] kind of guy. I'm also just as opposed to proprietary driver blobs as the next guy...

But, for the purpose of getting more use out of my existing phone... I guess I can just root the thing and copy some kernel modules off, eh? Nice.

0: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
If certain activities have a huge effect on how the world operates, which is kind of the premise of Y Combinator (software is eating the world, etc.) then it's important that the people who call the shots are representative of the people who are affected. This has to happen from the bottom up, since for obvious reasons you can't parachute in "untrained diversity" at a management/strategy level.
$1499 (minimum surface-book pricing)
Surface - "6th generation core i5"(no mention of clock speed), 128GB SSD, 8GB ram(no mention of speed), Touch Screen, Whatever the fuck they call their shitty excuse to build a facial recognition database
MacBook Pro - 2GHz i5, 256GB SSD, 8GB 1866MHz RAM, Intel Iris 540 graphics (at least twice as many GFLOPS as the HD graphics), trackpad w/force touch and good drivers, unlock w/ Apple Watch.

1999(highest price before MacBooks go 15 inch, for a bit less you can sacrifice 256GB storage and get a dGPU on the Surface)

Surface - "6th generation core i5"(no mention of clock speed), 256GB SSD, 8GB ram(no mention of speed), Touch Screen, Whatever the fuck they call their shitty excuse to build a facial recognition database
Seriously, literally the only thing to change for this model appears to be the SSD.

MacBook Pro - 2.9GHz i5, 512GB SSD, 8GB 2133MHz RAM, Intel Iris 550 graphics (at least twice as many GFLOPS as the HD graphics), trackpad w/force touch and good drivers, unlock w/ Apple Watch, touch bar and Touch ID(w/their secure enclave so the NSA can't log your fingerprint)

After that it just becomes unfair because the MacBooks become 15 inch and their dGPU has 2GB memory instead of the Surface's 1GB(which is the only actual spec I can find on the surfaces graphics)
Here's one I wrote a long time ago in Z80 assembly for the TI-86 graphing calculator: https://gist.github.com/electrum/76ac88de2e1d6c9254deaba003a...
very nice animations
In Hamburg, a New Musical Landmark for a City with Plans
Maybe it is worth pushing 'pause' on my list of project ideas and just spend a month or so memorizing all the different sort algorithms etc.
Owwww, the E70! I loved that phone. Still have mine.
The PLO's goals were originally the dissolution of the state of Israel, right of return for Palestinian refugees and restoration of Arab control to Palestine (including Israel). They never got very close to those goals.
"even"? more like "especially"
Yeah, and then the government will still tax the owner for the full self-assessed amount. Even if the full sale doesn't pay for the tax, and then prosecute you for the unpaid tax.

This already happens in many places with property inheritance tax in the EU. All across Southern EU the governments are valuing assets as in the peak of the bubble because it suits them.
I think it sounds like something a "Cockney" market trader (played by someone who's not actually from London) would say in a 1970s Carry On film.

"Orl right darlin' how's about some of these luverly toms? Luverly bag of toms for one pan ten"
Boy do I miss the N900... Mine is sitting on my desk like a museum piece gathering dust, and it makes me sad that no modern phone has come remotely close to it.

I used it as my main phone when travelling for years and it worked everywhere I needed it to when other phones wouldn't. I'd use it for getting unwacoughted access to WiFi when I was in a tough spot. I'd manage my servers with it. I'd use it to emit music through the radio on car trips and such (why is this no longer a thing?). I could even push my own programs on it without having to make a sacrifice to the phone gods. I'd also kill for a keyboard like that again.

But no, instead you have to get a hobbyist device or get one of the many shiny slabs running (poorly) one of three (and I mean, really, two) ecosystems.
Welcome to HN!

Like you, I lurked for a long time (a couple of years) before a comment got me emotionally charged up enough to finally create an account. I'm certainly glad I did, though.

Yeah, every once in a while somebody "pees in the pool" but (as I'm sure you already know) normally the conversation and dialogue here is better than what you'll get at most other venues on the Internet.

Now that you've got an account, just stay logged in, continue contributing, and help even out the signal-to-noise ratio a little bit more.
I don't think so. Your best bet may well be to set up an X server and run a Linux terminal program.
> T-Mobile works nowhere, and is the only carrier which is actively countering net neutrality.

It works way better than a few years ago, and for the reference, almost all mobile providers, including Verizon[1] and AT&T[2] (not sure about Sprint) are violating Net Neutrality by giving preferential treatment to their own services.

[1]. https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Verizon-Begins-Zero-Rati...

[2]. https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Not-Worried-About-Re...
I postulate that false negatives are far more expensive, in a constricted talent pool. We keep seeing the adage that false positives are expensive but honestly if one cannot spot a false positive within 30 days of engagement with that person, then the hiring person should really contemplate their expertise in the field.

I saw a really good write up (I think on here) where they basically did a initial "are you an idiot?" round of interviews and then contracted every person that they thought might be a viable (not good just viable) candidate with a small piece of software for 2 weeks. This amounted to 3 candidates IIRC the TL;DR was that the person they thought was least likely to perform knocked their socks off. The one that crushed the interview asked for more time and then just fell of the radar. The technical code test and trick question interview is a tired fingerprint of the industry. Honestly if one cannot spot technical talent by having a 30 minute conversation with a person, they may want to reassess where they think they are in their own technical and managerial skills, because they may want to reflect the possibility that they are engaging in a weiner waving contest as opposed to an interview, to stroke their own ego.
Exactly this, if you don't have that level of representation it leads to social problems down the line. The bloodshed in Iran and Iraq are shining examples of the extremes of what can happen. Democracy only works as much as it can provide an outlet for friction from different groups by allowing them an equal share of the system.
You probably will be disappointed but it sounds worth doing for a year. You'll work with some smart people, but the culture is very different from SV startups. But for 450k it seems worth doing for a year.
Parse Server Review – Migration down to the penny and performance comparison
New York Times reports 95.7 percent fall in quarterly profit
it does, it doesn't have to

the network expends vast amounts of electrical energy because people are competing to earn bitcoin from that network. they will even do it at a loss because bitcoin is 9 billion dollars, and can be between 30 and 70 trillion dollars.

if they turned off their machines it would spend less energy on aggregate, and the system would be just as credible, because I would turn my machines on.
Basically, Ubuntu Touch with Plasma instead of Unity.
See

* https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris

* https://sailfishos.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/SailfishOS...

Lot's of that is rather generic. Plasma Mobile is using the same libhybris to interface glibc system with blobs built for bionic (Android) libc.