skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get contacted by Amazon recruiters every couple months or so. They can be a bit aggressive and will sometimes try to get me to attend one of their hiring events in my city. I would possibly consider a SDE opportunity but they want me to relocate to Seattle. I just feel that if you are going to spend all this time and resources trying to poach devs from other cities, you'd at least open a local office or let them work remotely.
That's why I only work for myself and rather fail at my company until I die, than to work for someone else and be treated like this!

This is the main reason I quit university to start my own company and the main reason I will never look for investors.

If I had no choice I would work part-time at a non-tech company for as long as it took for my company to take off.
Those are different situations. They're fairly fixed tests which are multiple choice and are given to you as an example. My understanding of this is that it's for an interview and requires a little bit of free form thinking.
I'd be very interested in reading how you determine whether or not something is a flamewar algorithmically.
Ask HN: I have 150 USD in savings. How to to get a “proper” visa to the US?
I thought about E-2 Investor Visa and opening a company in the US. Does anyone has experience with this?
I expect ARM to be a threat more as a scorched earth commoditization manner. It's not that ARM chip manufacturers will take over Intel's billions, but instead they will deflate the CPU balloon by allowing cheap and ubiquitous devices that have 'enough' CPU.
BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) is supported these days by all modern phones and we haven't seen mesh implementations on top of BLE that would be low-power. There are other non-low-power BLE implementations for example for lightbulbs, but it's not useful for beacons since they need to be wireless due to operational costs of deployments at scale.
You would expect the number of deaths to rise due to demographics, but just the distribution alone should not affect the rate. Now because a group is demographically together, that group of peers may have collectively had a significantly different integrated set of life experiences than previous groups - different food and food habits, different environmental exposures, work environments, etc. (all of which could add up to more obesity). So the dip could be the first sign that those integrated differences add up to a shift.

Though, re: obesity, aren't there a number of papers that seem to say that some extra weight in your latter years may be an indicator of better survivability for some medical events?
The metadata is considered super important in modern surveillance. Your receipt can be correlated with a sender for example, over the course of many messages. Now they can start on a network analysis, start correlating with other people or events etc...
The data sheet is frustrating. It's not clear whether this device is a carrier-modulated device or a pulse timing device. I think it's carrier-modulated, like most low-end LIDAR devices. Multiple carrier-modulated devices in the same space can interfere. Pulse timing devices, not so much, especially if you randomize the pulse schedule a bit.

[1] http://www.st.com/content/ccc/resource/technical/document/da...
True, true, too.

But I just appreciated that could have so easily been a 'thanks for your time', handshake and leave, with no-one satisfied.
Tax free? Are you talking about the 30% ruling? Not exactly "tax free", but a good deal nonetheless.
People are constantly learning how to program, and they pick up ideas in different orders from different sources at different times in the history of a discipline. Every idea anyone has ever known was something they didn't know until they were introduced to it.

The fact that you knew it first doesn't give you a reason to be snide.
I see that too, among the relatively wealthy, well-educated people that make up most of my friend groups and family. However, as a primary care doctor, I can tell you that obesity and type II diabetes seem to be affecting people at a younger and younger age amongst the poor. I'll look for actual data later this afternoon, but that's been my experience and those docs who have been practicing decades longer than me tend to agree.
wt bloody f?!

There is no way I'd go through the first steps of this stupidity, let alone as far as the OP did
> a fitness center

You'd be amazed how much exercise helps with concentration and reduces stress.
Yes, this. Provide options to management, with risk analysis, so they can make a decision. Management's priorities are not always the same as development's priorities.

The important thing here is to provide the risk-assessed alternative in writing. This covers the asses of both sides! If something blows up and management was not warned about the possibility, they're well within their rights to rake the engineers over the coals for it. But if engineers warn management of the potential consequences and management chooses to take the risk, if it blows up, you have your CYA right there - they were warned in writing.
Indeed, the ecommerce system at my company used to use email+password as the account identifier (because reasons) and when we tried to deduplicate we found a lot of duplicates were things like SmithFamily@isp.example.com where one account always shipped to "Laura Smith" and the other one always shipped to "Harry Smith".
Does it? I rather think that your criticism shows a complete lack of awareness of how the the public opinion operates.

Let's say for the sake of the argument that Google's datacenters consume 1% of the electricity in the US.

If Google were operating its datacenters with clean/renewable electricity produced on site, it means the technical problems are, for all practical purposes, already solved; and now everybody can just license their technology an imitate them. There still remains the economic and political problem of having the other 9x% of the country to jump on board, and invest the required resources to convert to renewables, but that's simply a matter of how much money is devoted to that. It could take us 100, or 50, or 20 years, but we'd know for certain that we will eventually get there.

Instead, we have Google claim to be operating their datacenters with clean energy, but instead they operate with whatever mix of clean&dirty energy is available from the local provider, and then go elsewhere and finance the production (let's say, same amount of kilowatts/hr) of renewable energy. That is still a good thing, since those investments would never had been done without the incentive, but there are 2 problems with that.

1. You call electricity "fungible", but it is not. You cannot generate the same amount of solar kWh per dollar in Alaska than in Arizona, the same way you cannot generate the same amount of hidro kWh/$ in Arizona than in Mississipi. By following economic rules, it is rational to assume that Google is picking the low hanging fruit first. Therefore, when the other companies try to emulate, they will find that the second 1% will be more expensive than the first, the third than the second, and so on...

2. The other big whale in the room is that renewable electricity, unlike coal-based, cannot be produced on demand. Until the problem with storage is solved, - and for what I have heard from people that has been doing this for many years it is far from solved, - you will need some form of fosil fuel to close the gaps when production is low. It is very easy to add 1% renewables to the general "fungible" pool of electricity in the grid, but 5% would be less so and I don't think it would be possible at all to do 50% with current technology, even if the production capacity was already in place.

So, what do you think? are my concerns really nonsense, or ridiculous?
It's not very clear, but I think the article discusses that. It says the death rate above 65 is unaffected, so this is not coming from the aging boomers dying off. It's middle-aged people.
How Much Equity Do Founders Have When Their Company IPOs?
Beacons use only BLE to talk to each other; there no Zigbee or other connectivity technology. That way both phones or other beacons/BLE devices can inject data to mesh.
Thank you for teaching me something new today.
You're right, I was using it as a catch-all term which I really shouldn't do.

What I was trying to get at was the trend of rising costs of living with stagnant wages which a lot of people have been seeing for the past couple decades. Need to come up with a good portmanteau for that :)
I can't help but wonder, what was the test like that you could prepare cheat sheets for? most dev interviews are problem solving that you can't simply lookup in 5 seconds

just curious why they are so paranoid about that.
i do phone screens where i can hear people type to google for answers but it's usually pretty easy to tell that they don't know something and then they come back with textbook answer. but most questions are not the kind you can just ask google.
Care to give some examples? As someone who has been building gaming rigs for some time, this flies in the face of ally experience. NVIDIA always has the best performing GPU each generation, has better drivers, and better support for most AAA games. Where is AMD winning?
That's when you should just start taking off your clothes just to make sure you're in even more compliance. (Might be writing on clothes)
No, it's not a free market. They also don't try to poach other teams' employees with higher salary offers, push bad press about the other team, try to be ramen-profitable, etc.

But you can get some of the benefits of a free market by having teams work on multiple solutions to one problem. You can also squander them by making the wrong high-level decisions.
...and the first thing that happens when it ever happens to be connected to the internet is that it gets broken and has to be rewritten. That's why it's good to care about the quality in the first place...
Design patents are drawings of ornamental aspects of an item. No one specifies technical details. A jury is responsible for determining if the drawings match based on their layman's judgement.

It's not an engineering process nor is it intended to be one. In particular, the results are not predictable or reliable.
Save the link, you'll use it again and again.

I bit at an Amazon posting 5 years ago, but declined to do the Seattle interview when a local (and more attractive) position opened up.

Despite repeatedly telling Amazon's headhunters that I'm not interested, I hear from them about every 6 months.
Ask HN: Favorite Programming Books for kids?
After reading https://drtechniko.com/2012/04/09/how-to-train-your-robot/, I started looking for "programming" books for kids... It was hard to find any that stood out as worth buying, so I thought I'd ask you - what are you favorite programming books for kids?
Yes, but the natural thing would to be not to have anything HTTP on its path

(Unless of course some IT department has transparent proxies that try to be too smart)

And that's why some sanity checks are important (magic numbers on the protocol, size limits, etc)
If you think Florida is bad, try Appalachia. I moved from Orlando to Seattle and earlier this year took a trip to Gatlinburg. The obesity there was just insane.
Universities are moving towards using software like proctor u and other computer lockdown programs for online education. It's absolutely absurd and every single work around get patched up real quick.
Plato and Object Oriented Programming
The article mentioned it's used for testing gcc and LLVM. If you want an example you can actually look at, it's also used for testing the fish-shell (fish-shell has other tests too, but expect is specifically used to actually test user-visible behavior, which makes expect the perfect tool for the task). You can find those tests in https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/tree/master/tests. The files of the form "foo.expect" are the tests (the "foo.expect.err" and "foo.expect.out" files are how it interacts with the rest of the testing infrastructure), and the file interactive.expect.rc provides a bunch of helper functions for the expect scripts, and in particular a standard way of looking for prompts (because the shell will redraw the prompt at various times, this function, coupled with the fish code in interactive.config, lets the expect scripts tell when it's the old prompt redrawn versus the new prompt after a command has been executed).
Yep, Friends is an example of the success of research, product development, and commitment over status quo. LEGO's research showed them that many girls wanted characters with names (Sophia, Emily, Sherrie, etc.) not mini-figures with roles (firefighter, policewoman, robber). Friends gives them that.
Why you shouldn't fly with “just this once” airlines.
It is about a president and the actions of a government, which seems somewhat politicized to me.
The thing is, the existing customers are locked in (or we failed).

The customers we want are those that aren't customers yet. Those customers require features that we don't have yet in order for them to become customers.

It might be the right decision as a business to screw the existing customers by aggregating tech debt in order to grab new market share before the competition does (again this is in a context where a customer has no chance of leaving once on board - which is more or less the case in all enterprise scenarios I have experience from, both web and desktop).

I hate this mentality and as a developer it's terrible - but I can't say that it's the wrong decision to make short term, business wise.
Making their ads on a search result page look more and more like their organic search results, for example.

Or making Android Location History on by default and then using it for things like http://searchengineland.com/hood-google-adwords-measures-sto... -- yes, they're reporting anonymized data to the advertisers, but of course they're storing your actual location data, with a well-hidden knob to turn it off.

Doing things people probably wouldn't like done to them if they knew about them with a well-hidden knob to turn it off is fairly dark-patterny as far as I'm concerned.
They still do it: https://get.adobe.com/reader/ (Checked today, Windows 10, while using Edge. Default checked on this page is to also install Chrome.)

It's worth noting that Sundar Pichai's claim to fame at Google, prior to Chrome itself, was getting the Google Toolbar installed on everyone's PCs whether they wanted it or not. The CEO of Google isn't just a fan of software installation dark patterns like this, he's the guy responsible for it at Google.
This looks pretty cool. The api.ai interface looks much more approachable (and logical) than Alexa for someone who is just getting started. I played around with Alexa a little bit, but creating a bunch of json and text files to map utterances, intents, schemas, etc felt way too clunky and unintuitive.

The api.ai UI for building interactions looks way more approachable and developer friendly. On top of that it looks like they are building out support for multiple platforms (Slack, FB, Alexa, Telegram) so you can (maybe) have a central integration point for your all your chat apps. Some of the integrations look very basic though.

The biggest downsides are that I have never heard of these api.ai guys before and the pricing beyond their free tier (1 query/sec) requires you to contact them, yuck.

Edit: Looks like I spoke too soon. Apparently they were acquired by Google recently[1]. I was wondering why Google was making this startup so central to their product. Now they just need to be more transparent on pricing, but I guess they are testing the waters right now.

1. https://api.ai/blog/2016/09/19/api-ai-joining-google/
API.AI is really great but I really don't like this UX.

From using and developing for the Amazon Echo for the last year or so this "Conversational" setup just sounds super unnatural.

You want bus times:
Amazon: "Alexa, ask [nextbus] [for the next bus]"
Google: "Hey Google, let me talk to [nextbus] <wait> when is the next bus?"
Perfect: "[keyword], when is the next bus?" (context set in advance for the specific bus you care about)

You want to control the lights:
Amazon: "Alexa, turn off the [kitchen lights]"
Google: "Hey Google, let me talk to [the house] <wait> [turn off] the [kitchen lights]"
Perfect: "[keyword], turn off the lights" (contextually turn off the lights immediately nearest the source of the voice. optionally "turn off the [named] light"

You want to activate a scene:
Amazon: "Alexa, [turn on|activate|start] [scene name]"
Google: "Hey Google, let me talk to [the house] <wait> activate [scene name]
Perfect: "[keyword], [time for a movie|it's bedtime|good morning]"

I haven't seen or heard of a single "Conversational" app for the Echo that has real usage. I just don't think that's the killer app (at least until they get smarter). The current killer apps are being able to:
- Set timers/alarms
- Ask quick questions (measurements, weather, time)
- Control home automation

I just don't think the experience of talking back and forth to a bot is that enjoyable (again, yet, maybe in a Her future).
Would this work with any object implementing the PathLike interface introduced in Python 3.6 ?
Yeah, I guess considering that there's no installation process for actions that's kind of a necessity.

Maybe as the technology matures Google will start getting smarter about being able to infer which provider I want to use for particular types of actions, but I recognise that's likely to be a rather difficult problem to solve.
A reasonable definition of "on their time" for a salaried employee would be things they asked you to do for them. (Presumably they did not hire Arandur to write HN comments.)
We've got a 50% off deal running now on all of our print books. And that includes a lot of LEGO books. Coupon code is a the top of the main page.
The whole notion of different stock classes for plebs vs insiders is a racket, anyway. It makes no sense that someone could own a small minority of shares and yet still exert total control over a company. If you want to raise money and put yourself on a market without giving up control, you issue bonds like companies have done for years.
An incomplete glossary of some software terminology
This is a pretty terrible attitude, and is a sad explanation of the churn in the JS community. FE does not work like this and I really wish some of the less professional crowd would stop keep spouting this sort of nonsense.

You start with the damn requirements and then look at how the application may need to be built.

The latest browser APIs are not useful for 99% of the FE work going on out there. Yes, I know it's more satisfying to pretend that it is important, but it really isn't. Just because you can hook something up to a users webcam, or post annoying browser notifications about the latest cat picture a user uploaded doesn't mean you need to or even should.

FE is not a special snowflake. It's no different from most software development (and yes, other, non-FE developers have to figure out cross platform issues as well). If you want to be taken seriously in software development, then stop with the unprofessional attitude and learn how to do something useful for your users, like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement">Progr... enhancement</a>.
You are right. I overlooked that. It should be encrypted.
To a first approximation, design patents confer the right to stop others from making/using/selling things that look too much like what is in the picture of the patent and not enough like what existed before the patent. How it functions does not matter-just how it looks.

Design patents do not last as long as utility patents, typically only 14 years, rather than 20.

Design patents are generally much easier to design around than utility patents -- you could use a sufficiently different corner radius, put a curve in one side, add a hood ornament, etc.

Most notably, and key in this case, the measure of damages is different: Disgorgement of profits for a design patent, versus a reasonable royalty for a utility patents.

The issue in this case was profits on what--the whole phone, or just the component of the phone to which the design is applied. A reasonable reading of the statute suggested the former.
I agree that there are problems with empathy, but when people disagree on basic questions of physical science and recorded history, alternate realities are indeed in conflict.
Hell to companies who treat their employees like assets!
Bugcrowd leaderboard provides insight into the top bounty hunters - https://bugcrowd.com/leaderboard
They screwed up the formula in the early 2000s, with what is commonly known in AFOL circles as "Juniorization" - lots of big specialized pieces replacing what used to be made out of multiple pieces. Think an entire car chassis, in one piece.

They turned things around again in the late 2000s, and in some cases, have gone a bit too far in the other direction, in my opinion. Some sets are overwhelmed with tiny 1x1, 2x1, etc pieces where larger ones (though still from the basic brick set) would be stronger structurally, and wouldn't inflate the piece count as much.
I'm finding the opposite -- it's always showing me information for teams I'm not interested in.

I'm interested in games that are significant cultural events -- my city's team making the playoffs, the cubs winning the World Series, etc. Outside of those times, I have no interest. Yet despite ignoring stories, I get frequent updates about players, teams, and events I have zero interest in.

Also, despite searching regularly for e-sports events, I see no updates on the teams in the LCS, or in Starcraft II's various tournaments. Or EVO. The sports events I do care about seem to have no support.
What Would You Pay to Make 27% of the Web More Secure?
The endless spigot of cash from Steam is something that does enable Valve to take some very experimental leaps (VR, Steam machines, SteamOS, etc.)

In my opinion, Valve also has the same shortcomings as google: practically zero customer support, and an un-curated app platform full of shovelware (finding gems on the Steam and the Google Play & Chrome Web Stores can be tricky).

But there is still a ton to admire in both organizations.
It's almost kind of the return of the mainframe & terminal.

Man, I hate to be Mr. Pedantic here, but with mainframes/terminals all of the processing and data storage took place on a machine you couldn't see and (probably) didn't control. Which is the exact opposite of having the machine in your pocket.

When really what we're asking for is better OS and device support for peripherals. If an iPad had mouse support, I'd have little need for a MBP save running Xcode.
This is the future but even better if it were without wires...
There is a quote out there about how people who put out their own controlled burns get more visibility than those that are sweeping up dead leaves and paper from the factory floor. I can't remember where I saw it or who said it.

That said, I do remember this one: "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." - Ben Franklin.
it could be wireless display and wireless keyboard, mouse
Wouldn't feeding an employee every day qualify?

Meals on the business' premises for the benefit of the business are not taxable income for employees (but are a deductible expense of the business). This is a black-letter IRS regulation; https://www.irs.gov/publications/p15b/ar02.html#en_US_2016_p...

Meals are a sideshow, though; healthcare is where the real action is. If work buys you a Playstation you get taxed on ~$300 in imputed income; if work pays $12k~$25k a year for your health insurance, that isn't taxed.