skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I interviewed with them a decade or so back. First interview was a phone screen. Ok makes sense. Second interview was another phone screen. Never mind the fact I lived about ten miles away.
On there other hand two years ago I interviewed with a company on the other side of the country. After a half dozen phone interviews they decided to fly me out... For more interviews
Most online exams require these permissions to make sure you're not cheating. No big deal. It's not as sensational as author made it to be.
When I saw the example in the paper of building a list by copying the entire list for every new entry and trashing the old one I knew performance would be a problem. A smart compiler can optimize that if it knows what you are doing, but they were writing a research compiler.

There is a tradeoff with this kind of immutable oriented programming that you trade off relatively easy parallelism for heinous memory thrashing--and cache misses are already a huge bottleneck on modern architectures. Rust seems to have struck a good balance here, I'm keeping a close eye on it as it continues to mature.
Yeah, that's a tough question that we as a society will have to wrestle with. Knowing that humans are imperfect drivers as well doesn't make it any easier. Even cars today have crippling safety flaws -- remember that one Lexus model that had a sticky gas pedal? Or worse yet, the Ford Pinto. I'm genuinely interested to see how the governments of the world weigh in on this, if at all.

Intuitively, though, I think that buying/using the software is tantamount to accepting its imperfections, so long as they are adequately (factually) presented to you beforehand. You're signing off your ability to make your own decisions, but are still responsible for them.
When I see all these catastrophic events related to the the changes we cause to the climate, I sometimes question the point of living the way most of us do. The values and things we chase, our day-to-day endeavors. None of it matters if we don't drive towards sustenance, because nothing would last, all the pursuits would be forgotten, the light of mankind would fade if sustainability isn't the top priority. There would be no way for humans to become an interplanetary species, for generations to continue through all the ages of the universe. Nothing would matter if we live a life now that destroys the potential life of our successors.
> To what extent should personal ethics play in deciding where a (software) engineer should work?

A significant one, surely.

> What if the engineer has no other choices for a job, and needs to (make rent/pay the bills/eat food)?

Look, sometimes you can compromise for practicality. But even then there's pretty much always more than one option. Almost anyone can get a low wage job at department store/grocery store/restaurant/whatever so they can eat, guilt-free, and there are still degrees. You don't have to immediately go for the extreme of selling your soul to the devil, you have other options. (To bring it back to the concrete, especially as a tech intern; there are tons of companies that aren't Amazon.)
No what would appease practically everyone would be if r/all - the "frontpage of the internet" - had clearly defined rules as to what that means. Is it a collection of top up-voted content from a collection of subreddits? Apparently not due to this and other "algorithm changes."

Take twitter shadow banning people as its an easier example.

The rules of twitter are simple - someone tweets and it gets put at the top of a follower's feed. This is accepted as "the truth of twitter." When this truth is altered and all of a sudden some individual's tweets are NOT showing up in follower's feed people should be rightly pissed. No matter who the target is - because the accepted rules of the platform have been twisted to push an agenda. It is no different than propaganda and an insult to free expression.

> If you turn your head one way it's fair

Anyone can certainly justify anything if they are willing to turn their head with the breeze. I would point out the blatant mod and brigading bias in r/politics as an example of something you as a presumed liberal should be equally mad about. The content there is laughable and part of the reason why people even subscribe to the TD to get what little news is there.

Reddit has a problem - and its been written about before. Mods are dictators of their own communities and have complete control to push their own agendas within places that should be neutral. I don't see much of a future for the platform if this is not solved.
The weird part about sequestering is that if it's really going to work, people will need incentive to simply put all that energy in to the ground with no immediate benefit for them. You either need heavy government regulation or for everyone involved to be thinking about the larger picture.

I wonder if anti aging technology would push people to start seeing climate problems in its larger context.
It's easy to buy memory, but hard to buy L2/L3 cache. The whole point of the exercise is to scale more easily on multicore architectures, but it's no good if you blow out the cache thousands of times per second and bottleneck the system on memory accesses.
The solution is quite simple: you write using the abstractions and then profile; inspect the assembly for the hot parts of the code and tweak if needed.
AMAZON Suicide Survivor Is ASKing FOR HELP
No, normally they will not ask for it unless they are actually doing software or system engineering work on the products. If they are the non-engineering type then they normally have an executive dashboard interface that they use to find the information they are looking for vs a DevOps dashboard.

For those that are not actually doing work on the product that request access or any managerial/executive types they are normally forbidden direct access to any production or testing systems unless they are actually doing engineering work. This access is denied via physical access controls ( no PMs, managers or executives in the datacenters, network closets or anywhere there are servers or networking gear ). Logical access controls, there systems cannot access the development network or databases, they go through the frontend or internally through a web application interface just like finance, accounting, marketing, etc. go through.

The only people that can directly access the servers or networking equipment are a small amount of top level networking, security and system engineers. As for most companies, especially those with industry certifications or that work with the government (RMF for example) want you to insure that least privilege access and access based on job role be used.

This means the PMs and executive level people do not get direct access to anything and have to go through the proper channels if they need engineering channels if they need more information than what is not available through the standard interface.
Okay, fair enough. In that case, it may have been the case that your manager disagreed with HR's assessment and was willing to give you a second chance. In all of the cases I've heard of, however, HR has been brought in at the manager's request, when other, more informal mechanisms have failed.
AT&T just declared war on an open internet
The Queueing Knee, Part 1
No, but there seems to be more to this than a simple question about access.

Usually when a question about access comes up the root concern is more the accountability. Access used appropriately is rarely a problem, but access misused can be very damaging.

In small organizations is not uncommon for everyone to have access to everything. The required knowledge domain is small enough that everyone knows what's going on and everyone needs to be able to address issues without undue delays from process. The larger the organization grows this begins to break down and access needs to be segregated to groups that understand their areas. This prevents a person from making changes to things for which they do not understand the impact.

If your organization is at this point and you feel like you need to push on denying access to something, be it founders or others, you should consider the why of this. Do these people insist on access to the DB due to lack of trust of those responsible for the DB? Are you as committed to the organization as a founder or CEO? Are they causing disruptions/outages by having this access?

Ultimately founders, owners & c levels are usually the chief decision makers and therefore should have the ability to access nearly anything, and they'll view it as such. Their house, they should have keys to it kind of thing. So perhaps the argument to be made is, just because it's your house you shouldn't leave a mess because we all have to live here too.
You could; I'm not talking about the existence of such things but the prevalence. There probably wasn't much blatant botting, but a lot of mild botting which is much more difficult to detect and lives in a grey area.
I will search about Tilera :)
Your answer open my mind cause I hadn't thought about hardware. It got me thinking.. Are GPU architecture more friendly to be immutable or It have the same "problem" of shared memory too?
And.. by the way thanks to sharing your knowledge :)
Interviews with Micah Lee of GPG Sync
You severely and drastically underestimate the size of the "shady economy" on the Internet.

I used to laugh a little 10 years ago even when people said spamming couldn't be profitable. Spammer could e-mail the same million people every single day, and still get 8-12 $30 commissions every single time for months.

Expand that to even a low rate of 50M e-mails/day and you can see how profitable it can be.

And the "web spam" made the e-mail spam market look pretty much trivial in comparison - before you even get into the outright illegal stuff like hacking boxes and doing drive-by installs.
What is your favorite HN thread?
I just read through this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12477190
for a third time, I love the discussion and viewpoints brought up about a programming domain I spend a lot of my time in.
I had one of those, and eventually replaced it with one of these lamp controllers:

https://www.amazon.com/Lighten-39-95-Uses-Your-Lamp/dp/B00AX...

The time settings were much better than the Philips, which had sort of an awful UX. Also, you can have a longer ramp up, which better approximates a real sunrise.

For the lamp, I used a 3 bulb floor lamp, with Satco halogen lightbulbs (the kind that, for ~70 watts, replace a 100 watt incandescent). It's a higher watt draw, but I'm only running it for an hour or so each morning.
Glad to see the promised investment from PM but its sad that it appears the only reason is because its likely impacting tourism and therefore jobs/income which is likely real reason. I vacationed in Cairns (and elsewhere) in 2001 and was best 3 week vacation ever and GBR was definitely a highlight. If it was dead then I'm not sure we would have gone there.

I almost feel that its wasted effort at this point as its like putting your finger in a dam and it will only hold for a short time. We really need to make a serious redesign in behavior and its hard to get any country to do anything and with recent political changes seems less likely and Kyoto will probably fall in short order.
A discussion on GPL compliance
first example: ok, yes, if they offer the DB as a service, that would be bad.

If you run it on a VM it's IMHO your responsibility to make sure your time sensitive database nodes have shared time.

Same for the second example, interesting point for SaaS scenario, although it seems like that could break through normal deviations already.

EDIT: ok, the blog post actually mentions "local clocks in sync with VM instances running on Google Compute Engine", my bad. Not sure what to think about that. In comparison, Amazon recommends running NTP on your VMs and their Linux AMIs come with pool.ntp.org configured as default. </edit>

Third: It's going to figure out some solution (if Google is only one source it's probably going to drop it as faulty), but you probably should not have added a time source that's officially documented to not strictly follow standards. It's not like Google offered a NTP service for years and now suddenly switched how it works.

I guess I underestimate the amount of trust people put into random time sources: practice is probably messier than theory.
unfortunately I didn't get video (as silly as that sounds) and the person who did never sent to me

I even put my son's furry dog halloween costume on it :)
Absolute bullshit. All these tech companies are totally crazy about their interview processes as if they are really working on ground breaking stuff.
Linux kernel maintenance, Brillo style
Very cool, thanks for doing this.

A bit off topic, but here is my Emacs configuration advice: keep a Dropbox folder 'emacs' where your confit file and installed packages live. On numerous laptops my .emacs file is a one line load, and for Linux servers where I don't want to install Dropbox support, I just drop a copy of Dropbox/Emacs into my home directory. I thought of using a git repo, but for now this works fine.
The bumpy road to reference-count protection in the Linux kernel
Scheduling for Android devices
No Such LAbs Unveils FUCKGOATS – Hardware RNG for Sale
Topics in live kernel patching
It's far better than what POSIX clocks do. They'll just drop back a second and you'll get the same time twice.
Fedora on Macs, or the lack thereof
I completely agree with this. But, what I found more impressive about Google Cloud is that it requires a far fewer number of people to get things done compared to AWS. AWS believes in providing fundamental building blocks rather than frameworks. It takes a lot of time, money, skills, expertise and people to make it work. Google Cloud provides frameworks which are easy to use, secure by default, does not require tuning or turning knobs, high performance, scale automatically (or automagically) and are ready to use. It is an impressive feat that Snapchat, a 25 Billion dollar company, runs on Google Cloud with 2 part-time DevOps engineers and recently Pokemon Go was able to scale to facebook level user engagement in a mere month time period with 4 backend engineers (and of course with lot of help from Google). Things like these are impossible to achieve with AWS. Bottom line, if you want to get something done, Google Cloud will get you there in a fraction of time compared to AWS and can scale way better than what AWS can, at half of the AWS's price.
Python context managers
just find an f(x) where f(x) is in [a,b,c,d] and f(x) isn't so arcane that its unrealistic that the examiner would've had it in mind.
Did you see recently that Pauline Hanson took some of her mob to a still-vibrant part of the reef to prove 'it's all lies, what they say about the dying reef'? What can you do to convince the wilfully ignorant, I wonder?
Newbie question: What do verilog and VHDL compile down to, i.e. what is the assembly/machine language for FPGAs?
Reddit already has a history of killing subs it doesn't like via 'quarantine' or outright bans.

"Restrictions on a quarantined community include:

Requiring an account with a verified email address
Requiring an explicit opt-in
No custom images
Will generate no revenue, including ads or Reddit Gold"

This effectively kills subs unless it's lifted.

Subs targeted for this range from offensive to innocuous (E.g. freckles, female ejaculation, a racist anti-black community) https://www.reddit.com/r/GoldTesting/comments/3fxs3q/list_of...

Reddit is a business, not a bastion of free speech. They have killed communities for less than what The_Donald was doing. I'll let you speculate on the motives (:
Got it, thanks for clarifying. Hopefully if anybody from AWS sees this they can perhaps do extra nudging on their end about making SLAs more transparent to end users.
I did a diving trip nearby there just last summer (winter in Australia), and it was not what I imagined it would be. A couple on our boat said they had been there 15 years ago and it was nothing like what they remembered.

It was still beautiful, and if you just happen to be there I wouldn't recommend skipping it, but seriously don't go out of your way to take a trip there.
Swift's long term goals are to handle the exact same space as Rust, and that means the exact same performance/control goals. We're just starting higher up, and working our way down.

Rust is a lot more mature! RIP libgreen.
Fitbit is reportedly buying Pebble for around $40M
Value types only avoid refcounts if they contain only primitive fields, which is not all that often in interesting code.

For example, count the number of atomic refcounts on each iteration of the following loop:

// given
struct S {
var x: [Int]
var y: [String]
var z: NSView
}

var array: [S]

for element in array {
// maybe do something with the NSView
}

That's three atomic increments and three decrements per loop iteration, as the array entry is copied into element because it can't prove the NSView operation wouldn't cause the array to zero somehow.

Given atomic memory operations are some of the most expensive things on a modern CPU, this is brutal, and a place where Rust-style memory ownership would be a big improvement.

I haven't seen the optimizer convert atomic refcounts to non-atomic refcounts - do you have an example situation where that happens?

(By the way, I think Swift is a delightful language, but the pervasive reference counting threw some cold water on my passion as it means today we're not really close to replacing C/C++/Rust for machine-level performance.)
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/55/
To note:

> Out of the bunch, Rust has impressed me the most. They have delivered on much of what we set out to deliver with Midori, but actually shipped it (whereas we did not). My hat goes off to that team, seriously, because I know first hand what hard, hard, hard work this level of type system hacking is.
gonna be a ton of bummed out dads and uncles if espn goes belly up.
This is one of those rare ideas that is so stupidly simple, that it comes back around to being brilliant. Setting this up myself tomorrow.
Erlang systems have been immutable, parallel, and concurrent for > 20 years.
> No one running a real business on AWS wants a hard ceiling instead of billing alerts and service by service throttling. Which Amazon has.

I know startups that I could bankrupt with a few lines of code and a ~$60 server somewhere long before they'd be able to react to a billing alert if it wasn't for AWS being reasonably good about forgiving unexpected costs.

I'm not so sure no one running a "real business" would like a harder ceiling to avoid being at the mercy of how charitable AWS feels in those kinds of situations, or when a developer messes up a loop condition, or similar.

Perhaps not a 100% "stop everything costing money" option that'd involve deleting everything, but yes, some risks are existential enough that you want someone to figuratively pull the power plug out of your server on a seconds notice if you have the option.
Interesting part here is:
"...the acquisition is a “small amount” but there’s no word on exactly how much, or indeed how little. Further, The Information said that the deal will see Pebble and its products closed down over time..."
>> "...horror stories of abusive alimony decrees..."

[0] is IMHO a fairly evenhanded (and comprehensive) treatment of divorce outcomes by state, partially written by an MIT CompSci professor.

It was an eye opener, and I wouldn't call it a men's rights website.

[0] http://www.realworlddivorce.com/
"I am aware of the NYTimes article which explains how badly they treat their employees, but that doesn't necessarily translate to unethical development."

Yes it does.
Eh - let them have their metaphorical fifteen minutes of fame. HN treats Apple keynote days, Microsoft Build conference days, etc, with exactly the same... er, enthusiasm :)
'However these are infeasible for most non-technical people'

Most non-technical people wouldn't be applying for a software internship at Amazon!
To be fair, Amazon has developed a Silk browser for their Kindle Fire tablets.
I took their online assessment. They also require you to use your webcam to show them your desk and your entire room. Also, they required that I download software so they could remotely control my laptop (via a remote desktop application) and modify system settings and turn off background services.
Unless there's a bug in curl, jq or sed that leads to an RCE, which is what my point was.
Ditto on the competition space. In my mind, letting Amazon and Google fight out the epic war of machine learning / intelligence will only yield better APIs for those of us wanting to leverage such technologies.
I don't argue that humans impact climate change... But I do want to mention that around 3000BC the world was roughly 2°C warmer, which is what most climatologist claim we will be at after we continue to burn fossil fuels (until we probably run out)

Overall, this isn't "random chance", but it's also probably happened before within the span of human existence. The world changes and I am sure the world will adapt, and while that happens mass extinctions and horrible growing pains will likely occur
Yep. And it's very hard to change without everyone else changing as well.
And it's very hard for everyone else to change unless that change is mandated at a government level.
And it's very hard for change to happen at a government level unless every country is doing it.
And that's VERY hard.

No-one wants to give everything up while everyone else gets to keep living how they want and ruining the environment for you anyway. I wish we could get more worldwide consensus on real change.
You're going to have a bad time if you assume "the rest of the world" isn't doing their own, different adjustment

https://developers.google.com/time/smear#othersmears

> preferred to see a resolution made by an independent body

Independent bodies have spent the last decade debating if leap seconds should even exist. Agreeing on how to treat them if we keep them is way down the priority list.
Thanks for answering. Flatpak is unavailable for Ubuntu official repositories (it has an unofficial ppa) while Snap is only installable on Fedora using a copr.

A new packaging format would have been great time for Linux to converge around the biggest usability+discoverability+ availability problem that the platform has. While developers need to release one binary for osx or Windows...they need to release atleast 4 for different Linux flavors.

Is there any chance that there could be convergence around the new static packaging that everyone is reinventing?
I really wish you were taken more seriously. I worked at AFWA (Offutt AFB) from 2002 to 2004. I worked at the Global Wx and Event desk where we tracked hurricanes, volcanic activity, haboob's and more! I am no Phd scientist, but thoroughly enjoyed the conversations|discussions|arguments on "climate change."

I would stare at a large monitor and pick out a volcanic plume easily while the city of Quito was not even recognizable. I would really have to hunt for LA or San Francisco in comparison to a giant haboob in the ME. Your standard cold front is more recognizable than any major city from the satellites we used (30m, 15m, 10m mostly).

Pondering how often these volcanoes erupt and send horrific gases aloft, it is hard to say; "Humans are doing it ALL!" Not to mention the thousands (tens, or hundreds of thousands?) of underwater volcanoes that emit all sorts of horribleness.

Then you contemplate that the Earth has been here for 4 billion years + or - a few million... How much hubris do we have to measure for a couple hundred years and say unequivocally; "Humans DID this!!!" It seems a bit...
Erlang CSP is also commercially deployed and safe.
Sadly, very few politicians in Australia give a damn about it. It's all about "jobs and growth" over here.
If it looks like you're typing, and you're not entering any text into the test, they can infer what's going on.
What Is Snapchat and How Does It Work?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmbkfTiLQ58

notice 02:29