skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, if you can look someone's portfolio up online then, by default, they have a portfolio. What you're not getting from that type of search is the thousands of people who don't have a portfolio online.

Here's my github url: https://github.com/wwalser

That shows very little public activity. However, even that amount would be impressive to me if I saw it from a candidate. The reason is that, when interviewing a someone from a product company, I implicitly understand that they are going to have thousands of lines of code written for a private company (and therefore not publicly available). In my case http://askinline.com is that work.

Hope that perspective is helpful.
Founders will like the move.

If you are a big investor, the first question during an IPO roadshow of the next a16z-backed company may well be: "a16z, are you leaving the board after the IPO?"
Ask HN: Classification Benchmarks?
Hi HN,
I'm not sure if this is the place to put this (please let me know if it isn't), but is there a list of benchmarks for state-of-the-art ML classification algorithms (e.g. not sklearn's) that isn't for MNIST or images, but for a vector of features? Thank you!
A lot of people reduce advance directives / living wills down to DNR or not DNR, but actually that's the least useful bit of an advance directive.

Advance directives should ideally cover all the situations in which you lose mental capacity. Who do you trust to make medical decisions on your behalf; who do you trust to take financial decisions on your behalf; do you care what happens to your corpse, and so on.
Well, cheating is only to be expected in a system that puts a score/grade on the pedestal.

The point of school (American school, at least) isnt to learn, its to get a good grade. When the goal is a number, than 'cheating' is simply trying to achieve the goal.

If the goal was to actually learn, the "cheating" that you see in schools would become "collaboration" - much like in a workplace with quotas and ridiculous metrics, people will cheat the system - in a workplace who values output quality first, you end up with collaboration between employees to reach that goal...

The problem is - 90% of us went through the school indoctrination of "the grade is the goal" ... and carry a lot of that mentality out into the work force.. and at worse, many of them start companies and align their business goals for their employees with that same standard..
With all due respect to you too, didn't one of your employee's commit suicide? I think something must be wrong if so many people feel perpetually miserable there.
Throwing money at searching habitable planets that are light years away is what I'd call a terrible sense of what's a priority.
We have immediate problems on Earth right now, like getting enough energy, contamination, millions of people living in poverty, and various illnesses that don't have a satisfactory treatment.
Directing money and efforts to analyze objects that are light years away is complete madness, according to my subjective opinion.
> It is because of the close collaboration with the Fitbit team that the Pebble user experience will continue. Fitbit will maintain services so that Pebble devices continue to work as normal. Pebble functionality and service may be reduced in the future.

FTA
I am in SF and felt it. I live on the 9th floor of an 11 story building. The building swayed just enough to notice it. If I didn't know what an earthquake is, I may not have realized it was one. Had I been asleep, the quake would probably not have awakened me.
There is a rather strong quote by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht that for me drives home the point of how economics and politics are inseparable.

“The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.”
> It's 2016 and our best crypto messenger options are worse than what we had 10 years ago when Skype was peer to peer, or Jabber with federation.

I strongly disagree, Skype has always been a black box. The usability of Signal's crypto is a lot better than it has ever been for Jabber.

> I can understand the reasons for not supporting federation, but I disagree.

Yet you don't address any of the problems with federation.

> What Open Whisper Systems and Wire need to do is open source the server components of their solutions, and try to remove the reliance on servers as much as possible.

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Server
some of our best programmers are those whose skill with googling searching rivals their coding skills. knowing where to look for suggestions is nearly as valuable as knowing how to code it
So you suggest places like Italy and Japan fully evacuate due to being seismically active?
I'm curious, what was the trick question given to you by Microsoft Boulder?
I can see the point, but it could also be argued that a large part of the value of FB is created by the control of Zuckerberg. FB can move much faster without having to move everything past shareholders. And the shareholder's primary interests are making money.
Reminds me a bit of Marlinspike's Google Sharing: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/it-security/googlesharing-a...

The concept of hurling garbage into the all-seeing-eye is a good one and I hope it gains sustained popularity.
Probably referring to the post's point that they switched to arch in order to more easily get an updated emacs.
I could imagine this for collision avoidance in a very small UAV, e.g. a vacuuming robot.
"You get paid to write code, not tests" -My boss after telling me I should quit writing tests

I agree with Kent Beck mostly. I would add that tests can also be used to maintain invariants for future changes to increase maintainability. I just hope this quote isn't taken out of context.
The risk that the company will ignore or subvert their legal obligation to have a special committee review decisions that impact minority shareholders? No, I don't think that's a risk you accept. We live in a country with the rule of law.
I work for a company that decides that everything I've written belongs to them. Note that I did not include the phrase "on their time." I have to get explicit waivers for any project I want to work on on my own time. It is more than a little disconcerting. I'm pretty sure they technically claim ownership of this comment.
Doesn't that mean Netflix basically used really old-fashioned anticompetitive practices that are banned by law in a lot of places?
It doesn’t make sense to write no tests at all but I understand this sentiment based on problems with testing that I have seen before:

- 1. Test infrastructure is too complex. If I have to create a bunch of config files, obey a questionable directory structure, etc. before I can even write my test case, there is a problem. There should be very little magic between you and your test front-end.

- 2. Test infrastructure is too lacking. It is also a problem to have too little support. There should be at least enough consistency between tests that you can take a look at another test and emulate it. There should be clearly-identified tools for common operations such as pattern-excluding "diff", a "diff" that ignores small numerical differences, etc. depending on the purpose.

- 3. Existing tests should not be overly-brittle. Do NOT just "diff" a giant log file (or worse, several files), and call it a day; that means damn near any code change will cause the test to “fail” and create more work. Similarly, make absolutely certain when you develop the test that it can fail properly: temporarily force your failure condition so you know your error-detection logic is sound.

- 4. Tests should not be overly-large. Do not just take some entire product and throw it at your test, creating a half hour of run time and 40,000 possible failure points just because it happens to cover your function under test. It is vital to have a small, focused example.

If your test environment has problems like these, I fully understand the desire to balance time constraints against the hell of dealing with new or existing test cases, and wanting to avoid it completely.

And if you’re in charge of such an environment, you owe it to yourself to devote serious time to fixing the test infrastructure itself.
Furthermore, how do we ascertain whether or not group work is just "outsourcing" for teachers and the students that learned the concept aren't simply k-12 unpaid TAs who find their role as "assistant professor" pretty tedious thus turning off the best and brightest from a lifetime of enriching educational experiences?
Jesus Christ! Even when I entered programming competitions, which were supposed to be arbitrarily constrained, we were allowed any printed material, as long as it fit in a 1 foot-square cube. The world-finals disallowed printed material, but still let you write notes during the event and the documentation for each allowed language's standard library is pre-installed on each machine.

There is no possible scenario where this is useful.
Perfect toy indeed, and I'm glad to see how they've captured the girl's market with the Friends and related series. Lego had attempted to market to girls several times before 2012 but failed. I appreciate how this interview spoke to the specific outcome of their market research, i.e. the larger, more detailed figures. It must have been crazy to suggest to Lego that they abandon the "minifig" format for a major new product line, but it turns out that's exactly what they needed to do.

My own family experience is reflective: my daughter enjoyed building Lego sets (and got quite good at it) but didn't really engage with playing with them until the Friends sets came out. With Friends she can spend hours creating a huge narrative about their adventures. Now you can't find a coffee table in our house that doesn't have a couple Lego sets on it. And when other girls come over to play, they're drawn like magnets straight to the Legos.
Why? Maybe they didn't understand it when that coworker explained it the first time around.
Technically, we write tests to document what the code does. We could use any language, including english, to do that. However, using a programming language carries the side benefit of being able to allow automatic verification that the documentation is at least in sync with the code (although not necessarily accurate with respect to the project goals).
I wholeheartedly disagree. In fact, I believe that's the difference between an engineer and a programmer.

If you are hired as a programmer, then yes, just do whatever we ask of you.

But if you are hired as an engineer, everything the business asks of you comes with an implicit: "and make sure it's done in a proper way that won't break anything, or slow us down, or cost us too much, or limit our ability to gain a competitive edge."

You don't just change a 3 to a 4 because the CEO wants you to. You have to make sure the change doesn't come with unforseen impact that would put the company at risk, and you have to make the change in a similar way. That's what the CEO expects also. If you did the change, and it had caused impact to the business, that you had not pointed out, and for which the business believe is more harmful then having waited a few more days, you and only you are to blame, and you will be. You can't say, but CEO told me, you're the engineer, you're the person they hired to know this stuff and prevent these issues from happening, not the CEO.
There is no air on Mars.
What a nice summary. You write "what does feel important...is the manipulation of 3D space, coordination, and dexterity training..." and I wanted to highlight this versus "making machines" -- Minsky, of course, being a big proponent of machines even for no purpose at all (the delightful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine).

My kid has always enjoyed making shapes in 3D, but not so much the machines part. For 3D manipulation and creativity, she's spent more creative time with Magformers and the magnetic Y-ball and X-ball toys you can find at museum shops, than with Legos.
To be fair, Phages are also vastly worse than antibiotics in they need to be extremely targeted. So, it's really not clear they are worth investing a lot of time or money developing until we have zero other options.
"recruit"

It isn't that hard :)
This post (EFF, patents) does not have anything to do with this? Or did I miss something?
There is not a shortage of developers. And no, there isn't even a shortage of good developers.
On Twitter, they said they plan to sell premium features. They are currently funded by a founder of Skype.
Show HN: Serverless functions on a Pi cluster with Docker 1.13-rc (PoC)
Same in the US with post-completion OPT letting you stay and work freely for three years (including the STEM extension)
I think about stuff like this sometimes but where can you go within the United States ? Move south or Midwest and you deal with tornadoes and hurricanes that can kill you or rip your homes off. How about East/North-East ? Low chance of Tornadoes but then be ready to get hit with Superstorms (Sandy anyone ?). If these things don't get you, be ready to deal with shit load of Snowstorms and blizzards. If nothing else, flooding will get you. So take your pick.
Anything that needs rewriting a memory address without losing time by allocation and garbage collection.

Handling IO exceptions and masking them as different errors.

Thread, process, or machine coordination in parallel execution.
People tell us a lot of things, including a lot of contradictory ones.

If it were simply a matter of being told, I could have just told myself, since I've made that argument myself on HN for years. But the point was to try the idea for a little while and see what happened. Now we have actual experience to point to.
I'm a cheater too. I confess to using Google, Stackoverflow, Hacker News, and tons of other online resources to look up stuff every day. This is obviously stuff I should know already, and be able to recall on-demand. I'm so ashamed.

Seriously, though, that is one of the most surreal things I've ever read about our industry. I would have quit the interview too, but probably earlier in the process.
While I hole heartily agree with that line of reasoning, in this instance they are buying LinkedIn, not partnering with them.

Right, the point referring to that old saw was more of a comment on Microsoft's trustworthiness in general. That is, it is a suggestion that Microsoft are not to be trusted in terms of what they might do with the LI data.

I mean OK, Microsoft and others could extract useful data from it, but it's nothing you can't infer from other places IMO

Yeah, that's true.
I'd rather strip for dollars on the side of the street than take that job. At least you'd have a little dignity left.
i got an offer from them without ever interviewing in person. Frankly, i suspect a lot of people attempt to cheat because it's the difference between a life at a big name company making six figures and whatever their alternatives are. Especially for people like the poster who aren't american. We have all seen how much indians cheat on standardized tests.
I have very fond memories of playing with both Legos and my Erector Set with my father, growing up. My daughter has both Legos and Tinker Toys. All the "build things with your imagination" toys are fantastic.

Of all the toys that I had as a child, Legos had by far the biggest impact. When I was in college, my mother gave away my "big box of legos" to my cousins. I was, and still am to some degree, devastated. I'm buying legos for my daughter now and its going to be a long time before I can afford to replace what was lost. I still harass my mother about it from time to time (and it's been decades).

Side note: Buying new legos for my daughter, I've come to realize just how much my parents spent on toys for me (and my sister). Even given the fact that the price of legos has increased less (per brick) than inflation, they're expensive. I have dreams of coming upon a great lego stash at a garage sale, so I can jumpstart my daughter's collection and creative "scope". :)
> (it'll help me when I become old and think I am being clever working on then-outdated tech :)

It depends how old you mean, but if you're a few years away from retirement it could still be a good plan.
How does this work in Oracle? Seeing as the partitioning constraint would be time-dependent, wouldn't it need to re-evaluate it at regular intervals in order to shuffle data around? Is the feature explicitly time-oriented?
> We write tests to be able to change it in the future

Which works great as long as your changes are shallow. If your changes aren't shallow then you have to change your tests as well and that defeats the purpose.

Automated testing is good for freezing an interface and it's behavior; allowing you to change implementation while maintaining the same outputs. Lots of technology requires this: Networked API endpoints, libraries, etc.

But most change I encounter is from changes in requirements that necessarily requires reworking and re-arranging code that won't be compatible with the test suite.
Reminds me of this post a while back... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11700640

"Am I really a developer or just a good Googler?"
If this had been me it would have been a really short setup mostly consisting of me saying "go fuck yourself" and then writing an angry email telling Amazon to go fuck itself too.
I haven't taken a look at the Spark codebase, but it is very easy to write Scala code that is not purely functional.
>"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."

The lawsuit is alleging Andreesen had no right to do that, regardless of how you try to colour it.
Yeah, that's a fairly succinct summary. I suppose I put some effort into having a positive-by-default outlook on stuff others have created. I don't think those descriptions of PH are _bad_ things and even if they were bad, then I would assume that it became bad only by mistake not out of intention.
I wish I could, but it's been three years so I don't recall specifics.

I do recall the last pair asked me to re-implement a java standard library functionality that was rather complex. It seemed out of place for an interview question.

While there are valid reasons to ask such questions they need to be framed carefully as to indicate why the developer would want to do so. Failing to do that causes frustration because in general the first rule is don't re-implement the standard library.

EX of good question: Facebook has their own COW C++ string with small string optimization because libstdc++ didn't used to have that. It can also provide massive speed improvements on multi-threaded code, what are some ways to implement this?

Ex of bad question: Implement a stringbuilder.
The FlexBook demo is awesome!
The education system boils down to attempting to certify that someone knows what they claim to know.

This so that said someone can be slotted into place in the company production line.
I think both are important. Use property-based tests to fuzz for mistakes you might have made. Use hardcoded value tests to ensure that common future breakages of edge cases are caught, and to validate that your property-based tests are even doing anything.

Usually, property-based tests are more complex, which means that the chance of an logic error in the test increases, and having something easy to verify hardcoded brings peace of mind.
How about escalating to Bezos?
It doesn't, but the thread was guaranteed to be include this no matter what, since if I hadn't posted, people would be talking about it being off topic this week while we were trying out the no-politics idea. If you missed that one, the original post is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404.
A problem for some people with Signal is that it requires you to use a phone number, and they may not want to disclose theirs.

You can set up an SMS gateway number just for this purpose, but you shouldn't need such workarounds.
No, there are plenty of bacterial vaccines. ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoid_fever
Sorry, the CEO's job is not to talk about nitpicky technical details. He's got no voice in what a code or a test should be.
Windows, it took me ages to get a working spacemacs build on it.
Node has no built-in concurrency just callbacks. The whole point is nonblocking io in node not multithreading.
I mock things all the time with functional tests. It makes it easier to reliably test your code's response to unusual conditions (e.g. error conditions) and it eliminates a source of brittleness in the test (you can write functional tests that hit the real paypal API and run them every day but every 2nd Friday they will fail because paypal is shit at keeping their servers up).

This is in no way a benefit unique to unit tests.
This is where us Europeans have life easy.

Actually there's more to like in Europe than just the lack of deadly natural disasters. Good beer, whisky the variety of cultures and food being amongst my personal favourites.
The flu vaccine is seasonal because it evolves so quickly.

Same with HIV, a high mutation rate complicates making a vaccine.

I was really struck by this part of The Great Influenza:

https://books.google.com/books?id=BYsW6qTP0pMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA...

Influenza is an RNA virus. So is HIV and the coronavirus. And of all RNA viruses, influenza and HIV are among those that mutate the fastest. The influenza virus mutates so fast that 99 percent of the 100,000 to 1 million new viruses that burst out of a cell in the reproduction process are too defective to infect another cell and reproduce again. But that still leaves between 1,000 and 10,000 viruses that can infect another cell.
What about WhatsApp, Telegram? I don't use them, but saying that there are no options today for secure, encrypted communication raises my eyebrow.
Saying that Clojure and Scala don't do tail call optimization because of the JVM could be a little misleading. The JVM is a pretty general compilation target, I'm sure you could implement tail call optimization in a compiler targeting the JVM in any of the usual ways. If Clojure and Scala don't do it it must be for some other reason. If I had to guess I'd say it's probably (1) that the developers don't think TCO is that important (lots of language implementations don't have it and are perfectly usable), (2) for ease of implementation, (3) for better interop with Java libraries, or a mix of these reasons.
I do like the part about focusing on "the next feature for your customer" though, customer centric can take you far, that's good...most/many hobby projects focus on only the next "feature for me" and never get around the marketing/polishing side of things, whereas focusing on customer-ish stuff encourages the latter, the latter being 80% of success typically overall (or get a partner to do that part, the common successful way there...)
Show HN: IO – A minimalistic and anonymous editor
Or, famously (in a case where people thought carefully about both copyright and patents):

private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
if (fromIndex > toIndex)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
if (fromIndex < 0)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
if (toIndex > arrayLen)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}
Hmm. I'm trained in physics, too, to some degree, but I stopped at a bachelor's degree.

What, in your usage, is the difference between "unlikely" and "may be"?

(By the way, I'm not arguing against "unlikely" wrt any of these things...)