skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The deal, according to a report from Bloomberg, values the smartwatch startup at less than $40m. If true, that is a massive drop from earlier reported acquisition attempts. Techcruch says Pebble was first offered $740m by watchmaker Citizen in 2015, and then $70m by Intel in early 2016. Pebble’s chief executive, Eric Migicovsky, reportedly refused both offers.

... OUCH
U.S. life expectancy declines for the first time since 1993
Tackling building Tooltips in Angular2
Please do not discuss whether we should improve and extend perception management capabilities. There are other places to have such conversations this week. Please focus on how to most effectively improve perception management capabilities.

What? No, fuck that. Flagged, since there is no meaningful discussion to be had about this, IMO. Asking a bunch of hackers to use their skills to promote propaganda is Not Cool.
I was like "can't be true" but it seems you're right:

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12527/do-i-have-to-w...

The license [1] says that you are free to:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit...

ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

[1] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?
So then why don't you just write the tests BEFORE you are about to refactor something or change some interface? Why write them at "launch time" of the feature?
Fear can be one of the reasons blocks occur.
This criticism applies equally to every piece of software you haven't written yourself. You have to trust someone at some point. OWS has demonstrated that they are more trustworthy than their competitors.
Wow, this is great - nuclear-energy powered beacons would be a hit. Hope they will commercialize it soon : )
I think it was legit. There are a few of us on the team that are very committed to OSS and giving back. They talked to legal, and legal shut it down. Can't go into too much detail, as I don't want to rock the boat, and this is my livelihood. You know... stuff like that. :)
Its almost 2017. Nobody cares.
> I haven't heard _any_ criticism about Python 3 outside of the Hacker News community.

That only means you don't participate in any other online community that discusses Python 3 besides Hacker News.

For instance, the Python2 Vs Python3 migration issues are widely known even for those who never written a single LoC in Python.
I've used expect to automate distro upgrades at some point, as we needed to upgrade a couple hundred machines.

During testing I kept finding edge cases. Then I eventually accounted for most of the edge cases, and gave a default answer for "unknown" edge cases. It sort of works, but I would like to have more confidence in the process.

Then again, I never felt that the problem was expect, expect does its job, and does its job reliably. The problem usually boils down to unexpected prompts (pun unintended).

I've also used pexect in Python for testing, no complains there. In fact at some point somebody tried to refactor this particular python program to use Paramiko, but decided to keep pexpect after running into some problems.
A political science prof once laid out the scope of politics as anything regarding the exchange of power or money. That seemed like an overbroad statement at the time, but now it seems like I was under-perceiving the political aspect of pretty much everything at the time.
Amazon: Where we are all terrible and we kill puppies (probably, I don't know, I think I read it in an article somewhere)

^ I've summarized the comments
Are you going to suggest a better term?
Beside generational GC, I also forgot to mention escape analysis, which sounds like what you are leading up to.
Your seem to be confusing politics with partisan competition, which is an aspect of politics, but very far from the whole of it.
Explore your next travel destination or discover new ones
The FAA's written exam for pilots is similar, they have certified testing centers which can administer it. That's what made me think of this approach. Looking around a bit, it looks like dedicated testing centers are fairly common.
Internet of $%: Google API change triggers Epson printer revolt
He still uses vim bindings. Emacs is an editor construction kit. It can become vim, or another editor.

What we really need is a 21st century editor construction kit with Minority Report gestures, eye tracking, and voice input, as well as the keyboard.
I always wondered why people live in seismically active areas so much. Then a hypothesis hit me: people need fresh water -> fresh water has usually comes from mountains -> mountains are created by seismic activity. Not sure if it's true though; does anyone know?
Isn't it ironic they're both facing the same privacy concerns they helped to create?
oh I thought you meant to an external app. yeah if you want to stream data to a Module, just call nb.dataset(_fileId_)[0] and it will save it in an object. no token needed.

[0] https://docs.datazar.com/notebook/core/#dataset
Some orgs make it mandatory. Some don't. There's no global policy
Lets at least pretend to apply Occam's Razor to things first before jumping on a company.

It's much more likely those responsible for choosing the ProctorU solution didn't realise everything around what the approach entailed, or necessarily the ramifications. That's especially true if it came out of HR/Recruiting who aren't necessarily the most technical people.

They have a very real problem, with thousands of people in the recruitment pipeline (especially during intern interview season), and they saw a way to significantly filter them out, without having to turn half the business over to more of a recruiting pipeline than it already is.
Use "lure" ... no, that implies that employees are like rodents. Next time try "propositioned"... no that's for whores.

This is tough stuff.
Even while you're hunting for that date you're improving their metrics :(

Having a date on the article is not an advantage here.

Unfortunately I don't see this going away anytime soon. Something like a browser plugin that notified you of article date could be helpful, but would face challenges in mass adoption.

Have you noticed the general reduction in usefulness/efficiency of web pages? I sure have. Pages turn a 100 word answer into a 10,000 word essay with 5 videos.
This article seems to have an agenda. It feels like it's intentionally portraying things in a mischievous frame. Maybe that's just because it's getting its information from a lawsuit written by hostile lawyers, but it still doesn't seem unbiased. As an example, the line "While on the committee, Andreessen slipped Zuckerberg information about their progress and concerns, helping Zuckerberg negotiate against them." could easily have been written as "While on the committee, Andreessen kept Zuckerberg up to date about their progress and concerns, helping Zuckerberg know how to best proceed with the discussions."
There's quite an interesting discussion here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/57n8ee/inst...

As I see it, there's some sort of trade off for all solutions for private instant messaging right now. Wire comes close to a good solution. The biggest problem for me is that the official Android client is quite buggy, UI wise...
I'm curious to know what messaging platform did they used? Also, were they aware that any communication via the platform would be monitored?
Yeah, I had read that.

It could just leak out of subterrane entrapments, as they mention later in the article:

> They must have been of Martian origin—perhaps a burp from a relatively small and localized subsurface source to the north of the landing site. The Martian winds would blow that methane away over several months, explaining why the signal went away when it did.
I've got mixed feelings about LinkedIn. On one hand, they're the poster child for dark patterns and persistently trying to sneakily vacuum up and monetize your personal info. On the other hand, and apparently unlike most of HN, I appreciate recruiters reaching out to me and try to answer as many of them as I can even if it's just a polite "no thank you". It's nice to know what's out there even if it's mostly "bottom of the barrel" type jobs. It's also nice to have an easily updatable "online resume". Even if the value LinkedIn provides is $0.01 it's better than a resume in document form sitting on my hard drive which provides me zero value.

I figure as long as I am careful and use reasonable op-sec, using LinkedIn can't hurt, even if it doesn't really help much.
Evolution has to work, or else there would be no bacteria left in the world.
Just avoid amazon.

It's really not that difficult.
"Hold on a second (while I spin up this virtual machine to install this software on...)."
It's but a click away (and yes it has :-))
http://facebook.github.io/jest/docs/getting-started.html
Docker Kernel Requirements Examples Java Code Geeks – 2016
How about just "hire"
What Should Mixed Reality UI Look Like?
I have seen codebases where the developers diligently insured that every getter and setter method had a test case. They had great test coverage, but not particularly reliable outputs.

OTOH, projects with excellent end-to-end tests tend to have lower coverage but better regression management.

I think this is the point of the article?
Much of the US, if not the world is fucked if the Yellowstone Supervolcano erupts.[1] That is one of the ultimate "big ones".

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_supervolcano
Range is 10/40/60cm with accuracy 1/2/3mm (apparently there is some kind of scaling factor). I wonder where such short range measurements with such a low accuracy are useful.
Product Launch Post-Mortem: Primitive for MacOS
Maybe device management or policy?
Can't wait for the big one in SF!
Sure, but the ease of someone abusing this is far greater than what we've been using before.

Can you honestly say that you trust signal over locally or even airgapped pgp'd text?
And god-mode does exist:

http://chrisdone.com/posts/god-mode
>...device drivers...

I hope you're joking but I suspect you're not. Device drivers have the highest level of privileged access in many operating systems and code quality for drivers is so uniformly lousy (certain large vendors whose names begin with "N", "A", and particularly "Q", I'm looking at you) that attempting to break the drivers would be among the first things I'd consider if I were trying to root a device.
They would still require access/camera probably
Is Inheritance Dead?
There's a little bit of marketing dissonance between the request that people help build Gitscout by using Github and the absence of a Github repository for Gitscout itself because the implication of using Github issues for bug reports and feature requests is that the rest of the project is also accessible to users.

I get that there's a business model behind the decision and that business model is ok by me. Using Github for issues also seems like a reasonable business decision. What is likely to create backlash is the appearance that Gitscout is trying to exploit the goodwill developers feel toward opensource while keeping the code closed. There's no 'giving back' to go with the 'contributing'.

My advice is to demphasize that aspect of your marketing. It's a distraction anyway because it's not a feature for users. Solicit feedback but not in a way that might be interpreted as 'bait and switch'. The ill will it is likely to generate will probably do more harm than good.

Good luck.
The main thing we learned is that a change like that won't solve HN's civility problem, which was the big question we had. But we learned other interesting things too, like that a week is too long for trying out an idea like this. Also, if we say we're trying out an idea briefly, some people think we mean permanently. Communication on the internet is hard.

We're definitely going to consider tweaks to the guidelines, but substantive stories on e.g. diversity are already not off topic. Some do get flagged, but we've often turned off the flags or reduced them (which is standard practice on HN for a whole range of stories) and many have appeared on the front page.
you're describing two different types of tests.

one kind is the acceptance test, where you write a test that specifies correct behavior under normal circumstances (including expected error scenarios).

the other kind is a regression test, where you reproduce a discovered bug in a test environment, then fix it, and make sure that the test covers the fixed code to confirm that the bug is no longer occurring.

both types of tests are important and for different reasons. they aren't mutually exclusive and they aren't addressing the same problem.
That makes more sense. This sounded like a certification exam.

The process you describe sounds normal and fairly reasonable, although I must say if I were the maintainer/developer of some Linux lib/app and applied at Red Hat, I would expect to skip most of that to be honest. But even Google wanted to make Ken Thompson go through their process, which he didn't and thus couldn't work on their main code base. Maybe he did by now or they granted him a license to commit, but it was hard to believe at the time.
I interview people remotely all the time. We allow people to go through Coderpad or something like that, but in practice, I always suggest screensharing.

The reason I suggest this is not that I am interested in the rest of their computer: I don't want keyboard or mouse control, and our rubrics have absolutely nothing to do with what else is running your box. What I am interested in is letting the candidate work with their favorite tools. It's your computer, with your favorite editor, with whichever bindings you have, and whichever libraries added to your project as you like to use. In our interviews you can also check language docs and stack overflow if you like: In fact, it's pretty common for people that pass the interview to do so.

Interviewing is stressful, and other than letting people work on a longer interview project on their own time, the best thing I can do for my candidates is to make them be at ease in every other way possible. In case people worry about privacy, I am happy if they just share a window, especially if it's for an IDE that lets them both see the code and show me test results at the same time.

So In my employer's case, a preference for screensharing is not really about treating people like cattle. We discuss all those pros and cons with candidates prior to screening, and accommodate them in almost every case. While I'd agree 100% that the ProctorU plan wound not be something I'd find acceptable, there's a great case for wanting access to your screen that is for the candidate's benefit.
expect scripts in general are brittle IMO. The general design is: "look for this and then that and then this. If at some point you stall along this path for more than X seconds, something must have gone wrong, abort."

Well, I maintain that the characters in the stream aren't as good success criterion as the stack of exit codes among the tasks. So if I "ssh remotefoo /tests/the_test.sh" it is the_test.sh's job to return 0 if it succeeded and nonzero otherwise. ssh will return 0 if the remote script returns zero, so I can count on that. But if the host is busy sometimes and the_test.sh takes 91 seconds on a heavily-loaded day but 37-45 seconds normally, I might encode the wrong timeout in my expect script. Things like /etc/issue or /etc/motd or PS1 should have no bearing on my test results. But if someone writes the text "Password:" or "Username:" or some other similar content in there, my expect script might choke on it.
Do you think it is possible to find accurate metrics for the performance of creative thought workers like software developers or programmers?

I have a very strong feeling that there are important qualities that are required for both of those jobs that are almost impossible to quantitatively measure. And therefore introducing purely quantitative metrics would actually hurt performance, make employees miserable and make the best of them leave the company.
I recently had this a version of this with test taking - As part of immigration, I had to complete civics and language learning courses. Both had tests to take to complete the training.

The tests were held at the schools, all online. Purses, bags, jackets, electronics and so forth were left at the front of the room. Paper and pencils were provided in the computer labs, which were recorded and inspected for signs of cheating. Humans were at the site, but video wouldn't have been out of the question either.

It wouldn't seem too much to be able to rent a local school's computer lab for these sorts of purposes, for a small fee. And the internet and security on these is already tax-payer funded. This should put test taking environments well within reach of most people.
Components in Figma
All well and good for us, but we're probably not the target here anyway.

And be honest, did you really bother to do all that?
This is a good example of a downside of regulation: regulations embed assumptions that favor certain outcomes. Those assumptions might have made sense when the regulations were written, but are very slow to adapt to changes in the industry.

The FDA drug approval process was basically designed for things like antibiotics: Single molecular compound, high purity, standardized dosage and application, and run trials with many many patients.

Treatments that don't fall under that umbrella (like phages) are very difficult to develop and bring to market, even if they work very well, just because of the impedance mismatch.

Phages are basically individually tailored to the patient, require a lot of work in administering, and difficult to test under the FDA's guidelines. Many people have unnecessarily died because treatments that could be are lifesaving aren't brought to market due to too much rigidity in the system.

To be fair, the FDA has been active in coming up with ways for things like phages to be brought to market safely, but it's a very slow, uphill battle.
It is. But technically they are correct.

If you just handed out phage freely, as you do abx, bacteria will "eventually" evolve resistance to phage....at a 2-3 orders slower rate, but it will eventually happen.

Of course, the solution is easy, you don't develop a phage therapy like you would an antibiotic, but rather like a constantly updating flu vaccine.
The only people who I've met in real life who say that Amazon is a good place to work are people trying to hire me (with one exception). Everyone else tells me that either that they hated it and quit, or that they hate it and will quit soon. I work for a competitor so there's absolutely some bias in the people I'm exposed to, but the complete lack of positive experiences related to me by humans in real life is surprising and compelling.

The one exception is a friend who started working at Amazon a few months ago. She loves it. But she's also been handed a pile of money and told to basically do what she wants. They hired her to create a new product line (not tech related) and the execs apparently don't know enough to get involved so she's basically got signoff to just do what she thinks is appropriate. So she loves it. Her husband also works for Amazon and hates it.

I'm sure there are other people at Amazon who like their jobs. I just haven't met any and I'm not sure they constitute a majority.
The ARM emulator only runs 32-bit x86 binaries.
I recently came across a beautiful application of it to solve one of Ramanujan's integrals [1].

[1] http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/808452/proof-of-a-ra...
> Oh and in this case it wasn't a question of frugality, but scaling. Too many interns to interview, not enough time.

I've interviewed for Google and Apple internships and the process has been extremely pleasant, with the interviewers happy to give their time. With Apple, I got to meet the entire team and spend time with them. I've heard similar stories about the Microsoft interview process (I mean, they even fly you out to Redmond).

What makes Amazon incapable of interviewing their interns adequately?
no no no. It is all about the flying spaghetti monster. If you look at the sentinels they all look like flying spaghetti monsters. That was the real intent. The flying spaghetti monster is trying to control us, don't listen to it.
Long ago, I had to write a utility to backup the configurations settings from all the network devices in a given network. At the time, the network consisted of many, many different types of routers, switches, and the like.

For many of the devices, there was a way to fetch the config but it required logging into the device (generally telnet) and navigating a menu to "send" the config somewhere. Using expect to do that was a fantastic way to handle it.

There's also a number of cases where you want output from a command line program "as if run by a user at a terminal". For some programs, they change the output (ie, removing color codes, etc) if the output is not going to a terminal. Expect does a fantastic job of pretending to be a terminal.

Also, it's Tcl, and I love Tcl. It's (possibly tied) at the top of my list for languages. So much fun and more flexible than anything that doesn't support lisp level macros.
There are other possibilities as well. For example, if your partitioning strategy is such that it improves the selectivity of an index, it could improve query plans for queries that were on an index that was less selective. As an example, I once had a table with over a billion rows distributed among ~100 tenants on which queries were typically run by tenant and date range. Partitioning that table by tenant dramatically improved the performance of those queries because those queries no longer had to scan through rows of which only ~1% were for the tenant of interest.
I get that you're being facetious, but just to take you seriously for a moment: if the help that you're asking your coworkers for is something like "tell me again how pointers work in a linked list", there's a problem.
While I am big on OSS, and giving back to the community... let's be realistic. Some of it really is bad.

There are definitely issues on some OSS projects, like inability to reach consensus, and some upstream devs doing things that break stuff for a large group of people, and not caring much about the consequences of some of the technical decisions made.

OSS is awesome, and can also be problematic, all at once. I'm not ready to dismiss it as a whole, though. Some orgs have that approach, and just throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I think it's important to go in with your eyes open, and be aware of the potential risks.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13129374 and marked it off-topic.
Sorry to be a broken record, but can you give some specific examples?

I ask because elsewhere on this thread you have people bitching that they were asked some low level CS questions about inverting binary trees and the like, and how insulting they found that.

While I sympathize, it's not going to change the fact that the company does want to hire engineers that are equally competent at contributing to some sexy new high-scale AWS services as some boring business reporting features. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft all do exactly the same thing.

On the other hand, if you had people that were actively rude, did not give you hints when you got stuck, and made you feel unwelcome, that would definitely warrant feedback. Though, as you said, it's too late since it's 2013.

I advise anyone in the future who runs into this kind of situation to contact your recruiter with feedback, and be very clear if you had a bad experience. Amazon takes customer feedback super seriously, and when we interview, the candidates are customers.