skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article was vapid and nonsense, and Apple's inclusion makes no sense at all (I mean, if there was ever a company to disprove their points...).

I mean, they pit Barnes & Nobles (which hasn't failed yet) vs Amazon? Ignoring Borders? Likewise, Taxi's haven't failed, and aren't really looking like they will, either.

It's pretty rare that I wish for a downvote button on posts on HN.
Semi-related tangent: I had a not-terribly-unpleasant experience when taking an online exam for a linux certification. The certification exam was effectively an interview round similar to this one because it was the first step the employer suggested after I submitted my resume for the job. The test proctor was unseen but could use my webcam to see me. It made me uncomfortable, for some reason I thought I'd be able to see and hear them if I needed anything. I suppose they might multiplex the proctors across multiple test takers. I knew in advance that they wanted a tidy area, so I used a guest bedroom with a small dresser that I set my laptop on.

I was logged into a VM through my browser and tasked with several simple sysadmin jobs. Unlike this person's Amazon interview, the technical difficulties that I encountered were all my own doing. On my server, I tried to be very disciplined and used 'sudo' sparingly (sudo for each command that I issued that required escalation. No "sudo -i", that doesn't leave quite as nice of an audit trail. Well, I fat-fingered something while in visudo (grant privileges to a user was one of the tasks). I forgot the user's name so just exited but I must've 'ZZ'd instead of :q!'d. visudo puts up big scary banners about the syntax error and I quickly dismissed them because I planned to go right back in fix it in a jif. Well, sure enough, those syntax errors effectively neuter sudo. Of course, that's the right behavior for sudo and I just hadn't thought it through. I couldn't complete the remainder of the exam's tasks without sudo. I thought for sure there's a way for the proctor to reset the system to neutral -- I'll just start the exam over and go through it quickly. No such luck. I can reboot the VM but there's no way to halt the VM during the bootloader. :(

I did whatever I could without privileges and wrote detailed text files about what I would have done for the ones that required privileges. The autograder gave me a failing grade and the human that told me to take the exam didn't seem to care about the problem I encountered (or believe me).

Lesson learned: leave a terminal open in the background with "sudo -i" for later. You never know when you might need it. [this advice is for exams and not real sysadmin]. And while you're at it, go slowly and heed that warning from visudo. ;)
Sorry, but you don't get to make that call; it's the CEO's job, and the CEO said it needed to be done immediately, not in "a day or two".
Amazon SDE here. The SDES internally are PISSED about all of this, and I assure you many people are escalating with HR to have this new ProctorU-based interviewing process changed ASAP.

edit: I don't know if there'll be an official announcement, but as of right now we're pulling usage of ProctorU for intern loops.

For those asking how this happened, you simply do not understand the THOUSANDS of interns Amazon needs to interview every year over a couple of week period. It's a nightmare to scale. So, someone in HR thought they'd show some bias for action. Oops.
All these show what kind of candidates Amazon is looking for. A bunch of desperate people who'd do anything for [money|Amazon brand value|Whatever else Amazon has]. I wouldn't want to work at a place that resembles an irrational hell with such people as coworkers anyway.
If someone is really that desperate for a job && believe they are smart to work on things Amazon scale, why wouldn't they find other jobs or heck start a company themselves solving a genuine problem?
I do know starting a company is not for everyone to be able to do, but other jobs?
If this was an article about a startup I'd write it up as the (quite reasonable) fear of the cost of a bad hire. When you've only got 6 months cash in the bank having someone who isn't up to their job on board could end your business. Amazon need to understand they can afford to make mistakes now so long as their review processes are good.
How is being honest about what you earn 'socialist'?

Is this a joke?
Tests are great for dyslexic colleagues as well. A good clear concise unit test is often easier to grasp than the best of API documentation (e.g., JavaDoc in Java).
I'm here in SF and didn't feel a thing. I see some people on reddit felt it a little bit, and that it lasted quite a while.

I'm not seismologist, so I have no idea if this is possible, but I hope it doesn't jolt anything closer to the city loose.

Good time to remind everyone to have an earthquake bag available and a plan with your family, and be prepared for -=The Big One=-
Stratospheric radiation
If you haven't seen Eskil's very old video "Developing the Technology Behind 'Love'" you definitely should. In it, he describes the tech design choices he made that made it feasible for him to develop an MMO as a solo project.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f90R2taD1WQ
I'm going to take this opportunity to plug this series of videos on imaginary numbers, which covers the discovery/invention of zero to a small extent: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiaHhY2iBX9g6KIvZ_703...

I think it's just under an hour's worth of videos, in five minute chunks, covering both mathematics and history.
> one of the concessions Zuckerberg wanted -- to allow the billionaire to serve two years in government without losing control of Facebook -- would look particularly irresponsible

So he wants to run for office while maintaining control of the platform where people get their news from?
I think expect is often used to have it enter username and password "interactively". But it's easier and more robust to just use the public-key auth facility that is built-in to ssh.
Linux: nasty digital scurf out of dismal Helsinki student bedroom (1997)
Ah, I see. I think in the U.S. those are pretty firmly established as legal under 'fair use'.
Ironic, since so much of Amazon's infrastructure runs on Linux.
You should come to Holland, you get to work tax free (for 5 years) and there are lots of interesting companies in Amsterdam.

We're the #1 place for English speakers in Europe because the local population are smart and bilingual.

Oh, and I've never seen douchy things like this (I rejected the Amazon recruiter, not worth taking a pay cut to work for them).
I can't help but suspect this will be the end of LinkedIn. Why would any firm want Microsoft to have control of so much potential competitive intelligence? As well as the ability to potentially interrupt / snoop on critical communications?

Yeah, LI messages aren't as important to most people as plain email, but LI messages are used for a lot of recruiting and B2B sales stuff. Think about it like this: if I compete with Microsoft, why would I want to continue using LI to contact potential customers (or potential employees for that matter) thereby giving MS access to so much important info?

I wonder if all it's going to take to trigger a mass exodus away from LinkedIn is the emergence of a truly viable competitor?
Scala Inventor Martin Odersky: “From DOT to Dotty”
Using signal myself I think it has the best trade offs for security and user friendlyness since I have been able to convince my friends to use it .
It's weird that so many American schools and so many American companies seem to think the best model for them to follow is the one of a prison, with inflexible, arbitrary rules that dehumanize and disenfranchise.

Maybe the fact that America imprisons so many of its citizens is to blame for this.
Power is three times as expensive over here. It's a very poor trade.
Trivial code does not grow, it gets replaced. If the replacement is non-trivial, test it. If it's trivial, don't. Anyway, you've saved some useless tests that would need to be rewrite on the first change.

Trivial tests may be trivial, but they are numerous: their need grows exponentially with code size. And they generate almost all the false positives you will get.
This also made me sad. I approved a specific state. If it has changed then my approval should not be assumed.

Still it is a start, and will hopefully improve.
Using a Time-Of-Flight LIDAR Sensor
Well, screen sharing is okay (even though I'd prefere some 3rd party service with real-life code editing) and most OS has this kind of feature by default. Or via something like Skype (some other IM softwar has similar features too).

My main 'concern' was about "The proctor then proceeded to shut down all my running applications for me" - the fuck is this? Pardon my language.
> The main gate to functional languages participating in, say, the Linux kernel is NOT that they are "too slow" or that "laziness makes them too confusing". It's that the Linux kernel is written entirely around the unique weirdness and expectations of C, and only languages based on or descendant to C do well there.

Sure, but the usual functional style has intrinsic issues that prevent it from being feasible for writing kernels in general. A kernel (especially a microkernel) spends most of its time managing state. You can use a functional language as a metalanguage for an imperative DSL (as the Atom DSL for constant-space programming uses Haskell), but you won't be writing code that looks remotely functional.
This is not true. Google is using tons of throw-away commodity disks because it's cheaper in the long run than to buy a more reliable enterprise storages.
It would be a legit question in some circumstances.
Today I used "man" to check some parameters of a command. I felt such a rush knowing that I cheated the system.
What's your value proposition, besides the installation mechanism itself? The components are all readily available.
I completely agree, and I think this is the natural evolution of Amazon (and, to an extent, corporate America). Amazon gets to treat their min wage warehouse employees as fungible, and their process around hiring and firing shows that. Have they gotten to the point where a certain amount of their engineering resources are the same? It's looking like they are trying to get there.

It's a demonstration of our privilege on HN that we rally against these interviewing practices, yet they are a mainstay for a huge percentage of the USA.

I'm not sure I'm getting my point across well, but I think there's going to be a point where this becomes more and more normal across more and more companies. They'll hire people to abstract the very difficult parts of computers away, and bring people in en-masse to fill in the blanks.
I think it's management that thinks an attaboy can pay a mortgage.
Surprise – a simple recommender system library for Python
Btw: The next iteration of that project live here: https://github.com/harc/ohm
I think it's pretty sad that these quite big companies don't manage to stay independent. All this power concentrated in very few ecosystems. If fear that the future holds nothing but walled gardens nobody can escape because some big companies bought half the internet and now everybody is depending on them. I think there should be some kind of monopoly-legislature for tech companies regarding walled gardens and a too tight integration of their services without giving 3rd parties a chance. It's seriously hurting the whole country and hampers innovation.
I'm glad you guys are pissed, it's insane! I just hope you have enough influence to actually change something about it; as it stands this process is horrifying.
The Year Silicon Valley Went Morally Bankrupt
I had no idea what this was so I found it, and its great:

http://i.imgur.com/dgGvgKF.png
I agree, tread safety and race conditions I got hit a lot, other than that test coverage provided a lot I guess
If you re-read my comment, you'll note that I only said that 2.4GHZ was in the 1-20 GHz band that is easily absorbed by water.

Engineers juggle multiple constraints, cost, size, power, and efficacy, and 2.4 GHZ choice was the result of the size of the magnetron that would be cost effective and physically fit into the oven. But it did, of course, have to be within the range of frequencies best absorbed by water, which 2.4GHz is, and which is why it's difficult to get bluetooth through your body.
> The weirdest thing about Mitt Romney is that crazy religion. Mormons believe Joseph Smith received gold plates from an angel on a hill, when everybody knows Moses got stone tablets from a burning bush on a mountain.

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/cw4el2/the-colbert-report-yahw...
I didn't know org-mode, looks interesting even though it looks more technical.
I believe that markdown has gained popularity thanks to a nearly perfect balance between simplicity and flexibility.
Because not everyone [lives in the US | has a North American passport | can afford to not care about money].
Perfect timing, I've just ordered the three big Technics sets from 2016.

Technics is brilliant, even if my enjoyment with it is currently limited to following the instructions. I hope that it'll teach my kids a lot about engineering. The gear boxes in the big sets for example are genius.
POD's?
But if I publish my token in my Javascript code everybody will be able to modify my data!
No looking at my elephant
Actually the title goes beyond "uninformative" to misleading. A company isn't worth $740mm because it says so. The deal failed so it was never worth that. This article said the offer was "rejected" and sourced Techcrunch which did not say the offer was rejected but that the deal failed (likely in due diligence).
Sounds like a good read! Downloading to Kindle now!

https://www.amazon.com/Revenge-Analog-Real-Things-Matter-ebo...

I think this is only the beginning of the Renaissance of Real. The music industry has been in this for a long time; for fiscal and emotional reasons, but plenty of people are realizing the benefits to unplugging with something that doesn't require batteries.
To be honest, my exact reaction to something like this would be to tell the recruiter the only way it was happening was in a virtual machine, with no camera or mic access. I'll happily do a video interview, but I'm not going to be given a test like that under such invasive, low trust circumstances. Either you trust me not to cheat, or you don't trust me enough to give me the position.

I'm also a bit against tests of this sort, beyond just the privacy issue - in the real world, if you're not looking up things you're unsure of, you're making a mistake. Denying someone even written resources seems like setting them up for failure. But the privacy issue is a big one, and would likely cause me to quit before even allowing access to my machine.
Why isn't anyone talking about Wire? https://wire.com/

The little I've used it, I found it pleasant and effective. But it almost seems like there is a campaign to ignore Wire; nearly every article written about Signal and alternatives fails to even mention Wire.
The best outcome is when sarcasm is not detected, yet the comment still gets upvoted.
How are brakes cooled on heavy aircraft?
Similar question can be, which kind of tests failing most frequently, this is a good insight on what kind of tests you should focus on your team
A Look at the Cisco UCS Manager HTML5 Interface
Not always possible. The problem is that ssh lives in the mythical land of perfect security, where people never need to do unsafe things in order to get their jobs done.

Hence keys silently not working without "correct" permissions, passwords not passable on the CLI, inconsistent type-yes-to-override behavior, and other user-hostile design choices.

I love openssh, but it's a real pain in the ass sometimes.
I'd suggest getting organised as a preventative measure against this kind of thing, but that's likely to go down like a lead balloon here. As long as there's a shortage of developers, we're somewhat safe, but that position is very precarious.
This is something similar, except they run test centers rather than just renting out office space for that use:

https://home.pearsonvue.com/
ProctorU does that for people without webcams/compatible systems.
Why would fusion power result in "enourmous abundance" of usable energy? A fusion power plant would not run on magic, it is an extremely complex, very expensive high-tech system which requires human oversight, maintainance, and fuel.
They should launch a political targeting advertisement app and call it Rosebud.
NYPD spied on protestors during Eric Garner protests but won’t release any info
> The 360 system is great for highlighting projects and contributions a top-down review might miss, and also gives the coworkers a chance to call out areas for improvement. Employees can game the system by exchanging positive reviews, but that is easy to spot. An honest review with proper critical feedback is valuable to an employee's progression

The 360 review as i understand can be quite a complex flow ie. reviewer nomination, anonymity, ensure everybody answers the review, releasing the questions. Are you using a software for this or straight up google forms or paper?

With these 3 different flows, do you tend to get push backs from teams?
How did you overcome that?
I doubt that this can be used for VM escape because it requires access to the physical LAPIC and afaik hypervisors wouldn't allow VMs to touch this.

It also doesn't work from userspace so pretty much all you can do with it is hacking SMM from a kernel running on the bare metal. Maybe useful for rootkits, but truth be told 3LAs seem to have no problem making non-SMM malware undetectable by commercial AVs. See stuxnet :)

> conveniently "discovered" by a 3 letter agency favorite principle contractor

Not sure what you are alluding to. 3LAs wouldn't want this to be known if it was their job, methinks.
Isn't this just an example of the risk you take by investing in a company with majority stake held by one person?
Interesting. Do you think the legal/liability issue was the underlying reason, or that it was a smokescreen? I could easily see, in some corporate cultures, someone using that as an excuse because they didn't understand the value of giving back to OSS.
Proctor sounds so much dystopian.
There's a comparison table here: https://hypercontainer.io/why-hyper.html
BigData and ML Library and Framework Weekly Roundup – Dec. 8, 2016
It's not really up to other firms though, it's up to the employees who see value in the social network.
Coming soon: Amazon automated testing centers featuring Amazon Go Store tracking AI
Use Signal and give them access to all your contacts who may or may not be using Signal. Use their proprietary client and trust them on their pinky promise that they "can't" look at your messages. The deceptive pretense of privacy is worse than no privacy at all.

[Edit] - "Use their proprietary client and trust them on their pinky promise" was factually wrong.

But, they still expect me to trust the signed binary they send through the App store right? How is that anyway non-proprietary just because there is a Git repo somewhere that may or may not be the same code running on your phone?
Can I run a client from the Git repo and still use all of their infrastructure?
MimeType application/pdf no longer works in Firefox
It's great to know I don't have to know all the dirty details behind enterprises to develop a useful and profitable product!
So the $40 million would go to the debt in this case.

They would still owe some money to debt (say -$10m in your example).

I agree that the inventory can't be worth much. I mean if it was worth that much it would be the main story, not the sale. In your example the inventory is worth over 2x the IP!

Let's see, between Feb 2015 and July 2016 they sold about 800,000 units. (http://www.wareable.com/wearable-tech/how-many-apple-watches...)

So that means if they sold 800k units in 18 months, that is about 44,444 units/month. If they keep around one quarter of inventory, that would be about 130,000 units. (not accounting for deceleration).

On Amazon they go for about $60/pop (and discounts will deepen). So they have about $8 million in inventory on the high end. This doesn't take into account the cost of goods sold.

The question is: how much debt did they have?
People wanting money is fine. It was the assertion that they "see coding as an easy way to get it" that's too harsh. In my experience people who have been through coding bootcamps are very aware that they're learning something hard and that they'll need to put in a lot of effort, and that they're starting a new career where they'll be a junior in their first role unless they're very lucky.
Well it's good that someone tolerated it; now I have another couple names for my job black list. Thanks! :)

(Although I wouldn't work for Amazon anyway, but now I don't have to do any research if a company brings up "ProctorU").
This is as glamorous as it gets I think. Throw in repeated yelling at the screen and many WTF moments and we have hacking to a tee
Windows RT supported C/C++ "native" compiles for ARM, so long as you published it to the Store and used the WinRT runtime/lifecycle. It just didn't support Win32 binaries compiled to ARM outside of the exceptions for Microsoft's own applications.

I don't think we have details if the new plans include allow developers to cross-compile Win32 apps to ARM, in addition to the x86 emulation.
Not if you use the preselected Ubuntu. ;)
I used pexpect (a Python expect like library) in my master thesis. Was far from perfect but much better for what I wanted than all the other libraries I've tried.
The ethics question you asked there is a tough one. I don't know what I would do if I would be forced to make such a choice.
I don't know if it exists for interviews, but there are definitely firms which offer facilities and services for test taking. I think it's quite common for certification and distance education
I've got a server in my basement running VMware Workstation. That's how id approach it.
It's about choice.

Currently I lean back, cross my arms and hold a wireless mouse when I read long articles.
Is there a phrase used in programming communities that is similar to writer's block?
And then they will also use that information to help other companies poach your employees, at best. At worst, the data will be purchased for some sales team to identify and target your company to sign some wildly overpriced long term sales contract. They will know employee behavior and who the key prospects are in your organization.

It has happened before.

Even I was shocked how tens of thousands of companies handed over mind blowingly valuable customer data to Facebook. They aggressively promoted their Facebook Page to their customer base: please like us on Facebook!

What did Facebook do? They took that data and sold it to competitors as ad inventory. I never saw a single company owner complain. Companies spent millions of dollars and years of effort building up a customer base, and just handed it right over to Facebook.

To put it in more blunt terms, Facebook stole companies assets through social engineering. I saw friends turn around and build profitable, multi-million dollar businesses through this single data usurpation channel.

Will companies get more savvy about locking down their data? I'm not counting on it.