skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just a few days ago I did a fun and completely ridiculous exercise and compared Amazon to a country, and then wanted to see how it would look like. I ended up with Stalinism.

(I'll just paste it here and add some more to it):

* Personality cult: Bezos = Stalin

* You sing praises to the great leader: the 14 leadership principles.

* Officially they have a zero-tolerance policy for harshness. But I bet if anyone complains to HR they get sent to Siberia (i.e. put on performance improvement plan) or shot (terminated). https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/fired-for...

* The top management is the Central Committee. They wield massive power. Officially it is a meritocracy but it is all about gaining favors with the ruling party.

* In the warehouses I hear they do these group exercises: Stalin loved public performances

* They like to monitor your microphone, eye, head, and mouth movements : NKVD (the secret police is watching you)

Who wants to add more?
Keep in mind that Swift's emphasis on value types means that idiomatic code can have very little refcounting. Obviously that's not the case when you're doing iOS/macOS applications, since you're using the ObjC runtime.

Refcounting can also be dropped to non-atomic by the optimizer when it can prove that an object hasn't escaped.
I guess that's kind of my point about Ben's argument. Are pre-trained models going to be the "sustainable advantage" against AWS. I don't think so.
You don't want to work at Amazon anyway
Snapchat. Facebook launched a number of equivalent features. None of them got traction.
So? It's still an environmental risk to their community at the present time. Oil's days being numbered must be cold comfort to them.
It will cost a lot more than a single DB, and a bit more than a pair of DBs.
I'd argue the opposite. It's this dismissive attitude about a vulnerability affecting 1M+ accounts that is the problem in some sectors of the security industry.

You're drawing arbitrary lines around what Google is responsible for and what the user is responsible for, and ultimately blaming the user for having an "older device". But guess what? This problem doesn't affect iOS products anywhere nearly as much, even though there are hundreds of millions of older devices in use. That's because Apple took an approach that allowed them to ensure devices stay up to date. Google didn't. And that's as important to security as is UX design and all the other often-dismissed factors that go into achieving successful security outcomes.
Why does it take legislation by the Senate to block or delay rule changes, giving the FBI authority to remotely access computers in any jurisdiction, seems it should have required legislation to enact the changes in the first place. Unfortunately this will go unnoticed by the public until it is too late
Too many HN links point to items behind paywalls... That said, its all what you're used to. I've lived for nearly 30 years in odd corners of East and South East Asia and most of that time I had no access to cable or satellite, or the content that was available was so dreadful that it wasn't worth having. Over the last four years in Phnom Penh the only channel worth watching was BBC news and after that vanished the only reason to get cable would be so my wife can watch Thai Soaps with crappy Khmer voiceovers. If I had an American bank account, I could get netflix or other net services like spotify, but I don't, so I'm cut off from those services.

Before bit torrent and ok bandwidth, expats shared VHS tapes of TV shows from whatever country you came from. The English and Korean's seemed especially well organized. For movies, local night markets sold pirate VHS, then VCD (which was never a thing in the West from what I heard) and now DVDs. For a while you could buy legal first run VCDs in Bangkok and Hong Kong that cost less than going to the cinema

If you lived near a big city you could also go to the cinema. The cinema is very cheap in most of Asia even fo first run western movies. Even better is that many times western movies are shown in two ways, one theatre has "original soundtrack" with subtitles and the other would have painfully bad dubs into Thai or Khmer. Most people go to the dubbed version, so many times the theater with the original soundtrack is half empty!

If you have access to bittorrent and an internet connection that can handle YouTube there is certainly no reason to have cable. And even for my wife, she can still get the Thai Soaps on DVD at the market that aren't on YouTube.

I've been told that if you are into sports, cable is the only real option most of the time. But then, that's what sports bars are for, and there is no shortage of them in Phnom Penh. And if you're into football (not to be confused with American football), pretty much every local cheap restaurant has multiple big flat screen TVs that only seem to be able to show channels with little figures running around on huge green fields kicking balls to each other. Though from time to time, when the boys aren't looking, the girls will briefy switch to music videos before the boys realize the screen is no longer green color and demand that it be switched back to the game :) People are pretty much the same everywhere...
"turning away any candidates with a shred of self-respect and/or some notion of their true worth"

Given that this thread seems to be fairly split on this issue (at least at the time I'm writing this) this seems like a bit unfair to say. Personally, I wouldn't give a shit, and I like to think that I have at least some self-respect.
The ethics are one thing, but also it just sounds like a shitty place to work generally. I hope people at least get paid well for the bullshit.
Keep in mind that if you have extensions installed, many of those extensions will make callbacks to other services. This will track the use of those, too.
Sorry, but I don't buy your contention that the restrictions adopted by market leaders are about blocking the "free of exchange of ideas", per se.

And apart of that, your "extension" would be a faulty generalization based on that contention.
I do not disagree with your assessment, but it was a great motivator for me to learn z80 assembly. I just wish I knew how to use the stack. Modern me shudders at how horrible that code was - it worked, but god damn was it ugly. I still have the Z80 assembly reference manual on my bookshelf. It just hasn't been opened in close to 20 years. I've never had a physical x86(_64) reference manual, but I usually keep PDFs handy - just in case while debugging. I think I still have Atmel AVR & Motorola 68k docs physically somewhere...
Both of these points are conjecture
We let our employees choose any health plan they want through the marketplace, or whereever, and reimburse them for it.
Heroic compiler?
Vim is pretty much an IDE. I type :make (not :!make) to build. Vim gathers the errors into a quick-fix list, and navigates through them. I have Vim's :grep bound to doing lid lookups on a mkid-generated database: lightning fast to find all occurrences of an identifier. And of course tags for chasing identifier definitions, thanks to a ctags-generated database. Vim has very good syntax highlighting and indentation; many times I spot as syntax error because it is flagged by Vim. I also have a Vim add-on that performs code completion. I type foo. and the list of members of structure foo come up, etc.

I don't step-debug inside Vim; but it looks like there are ways:

http://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/2046/how-can-i-integra...
>I'm curious why he didn't just disable/disconnect/cover the microphone & webcam

It's required that you take the test with these enabled.
It's like that old CS professor joke, "I know everything, just not all at once. It's a virtual memory problem."
I can believe a company has their reasons for doing this. I also think they can kiss my ass if they expect me to agree to this.
And so? They didn't name RedShift (great name!) after the company they acquired.
Interestingly, the one place I know that loved putting people on PIPs as away of avoiding looking into questions of basic managerial competence... also had tons and tons of H1-Bs.
It's worth noting that these are Proctorio's (https://proctorio.com/) restrictions; they're just a third-party company that Amazon is using to administer the test. I've used a couple of similar systems (e.g. ProctorU - https://www.proctoru.com/, where a human will actually watch you via webcam(!), or ProctorTrack - http://www.proctortrack.com/), and "monitoring" of this sort is pretty much par for the course (no pun intended).

These companies are typically used in settings where some level of rigor is expected (e.g. administering an exam for an accredited university). In that context, I think these restrictions make sense in order to ensure some degree of validity in the test results (especially since you're only expected to run the software for the duration of the test).
Get out of here with the reasonable analysis.
A RocksDB storage engine with MySQL
It is actually (unfortunately) incredibly common.
Yeah, and Cider was getting surprisingly good at the point I left Google (I was initially a skeptic). But so much of what made it good came from its tight integration with other internal tooling. I'd be surprised if it's ever externalized in a form that captures most of that value.
All of this information is available to an interviewer in person.
George Hotz’s Startup Gives Away Semiautonomous-Driving Software
I work on Cloud Foundry on behalf of Pivotal. Cloud Foundry was partly inspired by and is somewhat in competition with Heroku.

"Do one thing and do it well" is underselling Heroku.

PaaSes have to do a lot of things and do them well.
Ok so lets say i get this job at Big Brother Amazon. They give me my first assignment. I find a way to 'cheat' such that i finish the project in record time and it is perfect. You don't want that?

What the hell does cheating mean in software development.
Ah. I forgot about that.

See, this is what happens when you know Scheme better than CL.
The same idea applies. The company wants to ensure people aren't cheating and also wants to get some insight into how people respond to their interview process. This only improves the process for future interviewees.
I have the same concern. I don't think when the Russian government is your biggest (or sole) investor that you can say "no" to backdoors similar to those recently found in quite a lot of Chinese Android devices. In theory you can but in practice they can twist your arm enough for you to agree.

Even though I am more likely to trust the Russian gov't compared to the USA gov't, I still can't safely assume they are the best-hearted people in the world and they'll just open-source all the Sailfish OS code and keep the process fully transparent.

I want to believe it but IMO this is the modern arms race and the superpowers are simply trying to make their weapon better than the others. :(
I agree, I don't think the doctor is intentionally fear-mongering. I think this doctor is probably just biased from his own second hand experience with a very, very small and unrepresentative portion of MDMA users. Misguided.

My issue with the doctor's statements is concerning only the potential for abuse/addiction (which is not even worth talking about when compared to opioids). The potential for harm is definitely worth being cautious over.
Internet of Stranger Things: Wire Up Christmas Lights with Raspberry Pi and Node.js
About 8 years ago, I interviewed w/ Amazon & I chose to do my interview in C++. Although there was no actual compilation, I did get called out for small pedantic syntax errors. Maybe it depends on the individuals that are interviewing you.
I think this is still a little off. Maybe you used bufp[i + j] where you meant buffer[i + j]? I may have something wrong too, but I probably would go with:

for (size_t i = 0; i < 12; i++) {
int64_t sum = 0;
int32_t *bufp = buffer + i;
for (size_t j = 0; j < 12; j++)
sum += coefficients[j] * bufp[j];
*bufp += (int32_t)(sum >> qlp_shift);
}

I think this will put it in a form where the compiler should vectorize it[1], probably making the loop about twice as fast as the version shown: 3 vector loads, 3 vector multiplications, 3 vector additions and a horizontal sum versus 16 scalar loads[2], 12 scalar multiplications and 12 scalar additions.

[1] I presume the "various reasons the above snippet is not as obvious to vectorise as it might seem at first sight" is because the coefficients[] are 64-bit and buffer[] is 32-bit. But a smart compiler should be able to use PMOVSXDQ (packed move sign extend double-word to quad-word) here. Unless there is some other issue, I think the author may be underestimating the benefit of vectorizing here.

[2] While the author is right that most of coefficients stay in registers, there isn't actually room for all 12, so 4 of them are loaded from the stack every iteration. Since only 3 128-bit vector registers are required, they should remain there. I'm not sure if the excess loads are actually a bottleneck, though.
OT and not sure if you're the author.. but what a beautifully designed website!
Let It Be – How to Declare JavaScript Variables: Madhatted.com
It's not a typo.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-1-phenomenon
That makes sense. But I do think we use the word 'anonymous' too often when we talk about the Internet, and it leads people to believe, falsely, that if they don't log in to a website then no one ever knows they've visited.

Quite the contrary. Imagine, as someone mentioned elsewhere in this thread I think, if the adtrackers got hacked. What might it reveal about you?

If someone threatened to email your boss your entire browsing history, how much would you pay to prevent that?

What if it was being sent to you wife? Your mother?

What if it were being broadcast to the world at large?

These hacks are a dime-a-dozen. Everyone sees Ashley Madison hacks or xHamster hacks and thinks, 'well that's not me. I don't go to those sites.' But it very well could be you. Or worse, someone could falsely claim it was you...
And lots of contradicting privacy claims:

"Secure Exam Proctor Exam Environment: You can generally utilize the Secure Exam Proctor for taking a proctored examination without revealing any Personally Identifiable Information about yourself. The types of information collected depend on the exam settings and can include video, audio, desktop recording, and websites visited. The aforementioned data is encrypted and will not be used by Proctorio in anyway. This information may be used by "Authorized School Officials" to review the actions of Students during exam administration. Proctorio may collect additional information set forth below in the "Aggregate Information" and anonymous information. Aggregate and anonymous information will be used to improve the quality of the Secure Exam Service.
Note: Proctorio utilizes zero-knowledge encryption to keep your information safe."
It's the principle of it. Needlessly invasive. It's my hardware, and my network traffic—not theirs.

Using such a system in the first place also signals their ineptitude at hiring, or at least an ignorance of quality hiring practices.

>What are you going to do, take a break and load up some porn?

Well, yes:

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/669103856106668033/UF3c... [NSFW]
See my additional reply to DINKDINK's comment, further below for source/citation.
> It's a tradeoff, but it's nothing compared to the tradeoff we make by using Facebook or Google services.

I don't disagree, and I recently stopped using all Google products in part because of how much information they have collected and still want to collect from me. After the account suspension drama from several days back, I was spooked and came to realize just how dependent I was on the company, and what I stood to lose should I come into the crosshairs over a simple ToS violation or even just a random bug in their service.

But that only strengthens my point of view about this hiring process and how wrong it is. When a company wants to exert that much control over someone who doesn't even work there yet, it speaks volumes about their overall culture and attitude towards people in general.
Assuming that what you say is true, I believe the distinction here is that a single entity here must package, release and deploy the driving software.

But like RedHat and Ubuntu, building a distribution of well proven and flexible open source software is likely the best route to success.
“If [auto makers] don’t accept software companies writing the code for their cars, they’re going to end up like the phone companies that didn't accept Android,” Mr. Hotz said.

An interesting comparison, but I'm not buying it.
Why Stalin? Might as well just go straight to Godwin's law if you want to attack Amazon...
"Both" as in yours and mine, agreed.
Yes, sure is one hell of an "improvement"!
Look at css-module-values [0]. It's not perfect, but it lets you share values between JS and CSS. All values in the file are visible on the imported module.

[0] https://github.com/css-modules/postcss-modules-values
What if you don't have a webcam? Also, you could use one of the many webcam emulators that let you use prerecorded video, such as ManyCam.
> This is dangerously naive, "communism" had almost nothing to do with the genocide(s) that Stalin purposefully perpetrated for political and economic reasons.

Who said anything about Russia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

"The Three Years of Difficulty or Great Leap Forward Famine, was a period in the People's Republic of China between the years 1959 and 1961 characterized by widespread famine. Drought, poor weather, and the policies of the Communist Party of China contributed to the famine, although the relative weights of the contributions are disputed due to the Great Leap Forward."

If you want to talk about Russian communists and famine perhaps a good starting point would be the Holodomor/Soviet Famine of 1932 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1932%E2%80%93...)?

"The reasons for the famine are a subject of scholarly and political debate. Some scholars suggest that the man-made famine was a consequence of the economic problems associated with changes implemented during the period of Soviet industrialisation. Collectivisation also contributed to famine in 1932. "
The answer is "x, such that x is an element of the set containing Everything."

But personally, if asked this question suddenly, I would've gone for the simplest: 61, because 27 - 24 = 64 - 61.
Hubbert's Peak

"World oil production will start to fall sometime during this decade, never to rise again. In 1956, M. King Hubbert predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970's. Although Hubbert was widely criticized by some oil experts and economists, in 1971 Hubbert's prediction came true. The 100 year period when most of the world's oil is being discovered became known as "Hubbert's Peak". The peak stands in contrast to the hundreds of millions of years the oil deposits took to form. Hubbert's methods predict a peak in world oil production less than five years away."

http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/the-peak.html
Polypacker: Universal js build and distribution tool built on top of webpack
I wonder how such a company would respond if you have neither a webcam or microphone. I certainly don't, at least not on my desktop. Well, that's a lie, I have a microphone, but it has a physical kill switch that is usually off, unless I'm playing a game where I want to communicate verbally.
Maybe that's the real test!
saying "if you don't like it get an interview elsewhere" is pretty unhelpful, because that's pretty much what he did; refused to continue with the current process. it also doesn't really work in the real world, because nothing would ever get fixed. if there were awful terms in a license agreement and someone found out, it's all well and good to say "go somewhere else", but what if it's in something like, say, windows that many people are forced to use for various reasons. sure, you might be able to go somewhere else but the practice still needs to be criticised and shown to others
> there’s a lot of back-of-the-envelope math in this post and I wonder what the real math looks like.

There's already quite a bit of academic research and published papers doing the real math. At places like MIT and Oxford. Of course it's not hard to poke holes in models and analyses about future scenarios that far off. But people are working on it seriously and it can be interesting to read about.

Maybe a coincidence, just 2 weeks ago MIT's Future of People Conference was about "Renaissance 2.0" and how "science and technology impact the human body, mind, and society in the 21st century". http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/press-releases/inaugural-mi...

If one looks into the research and the math some major issues stand out. The math isn't very difficult, but stuff like modeling intertemporal choices become really problematic. If there will be paradigm shifts in society, which way might they go and how big a shift is likely. These questions have lead into some unexpected directions like neuroscientists studying brain responses to various values and rewards, trying to understand how society's future decisions/views might evolve.

> Are we selling with a handful of robot-inventing billionaires surrounded by masses of poor? Sometimes it sounds like it.

Another example: Price and demand expectations adjustments under UBI. Is there a real difference between a UBI of $11k vs $55k if prices adjust? And is there a real difference between scenario 1: UBI of $11K + a group of deca-billionaires or scenario 2: UBI of $55k + a group of deca-billionaires? Arguably both are "billionaires surrounded by masses of poor".

Really important to this discussion is the real math is when you start to discount democratized technology. Briefly: there's no law against the next kid making her/his own robot in their college dorm room. So trying to advocate one's ideas for UBI against a future of "robot-inventing billionaires" having some monopolized stake to future technology and the wealth that comes with is myth-making and a bit of intellectual dishonesty.

I'm glad UBI is finally being talking about. I know YC and Sam have also been thinking about UBI as well.

Hopefully we get these robots in our lifetimes, that part sounds cool.

Links to Oxford maybe of interest:

http://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/

https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/
Bug 1321066 – (CVE-2016-9079) Reported Firefox SVG 0-day (SMIL)
Interesting, what are you using as a receiver ?
You should have done the test in a virtual machine and disabled some features (cam, microphone) and record the screen (outside the virtual machine obiviously).
Thanks for the update. Been chasing that link all morning :-)
What are you planning to do with the firebee?
The fun thing is how simple the test case is. All you need to do is to call pauseAnimations at the right time. I was able to do a more real world test case pretty quickly.
Exactly. If they want to impose all of those conditions, they can send me a laptop or tablet configured however they want.
Afaik the data is delayed and the damage might already be done by the time the alarm fires
Can you please give me some sources that explain how it is unethical? (I am aware of the NYTimes article which explains how badly they treat their employees, but that doesn't necessarily translate to unethical development.) I ask because I am about to join them, so forewarned is forearmed.
> Installed their proprietary software on my Mac

1) No

2) What if you don't have a web cam, say a desktop, not a MacBook?
Amazon continues to amaze me in their ability to challenge the status quo.

100 PB. Simply. Awe. Some.
On desktop the video is right at the top of the page.
Any personal account I have, at a minimum, I give access to my SO.
Yeah, I somehow felt that people were going to read that last sentence and forget everything before it. Bad call keeping it in I guess.