skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to me that part of the problem he was having is that he didn't really understand how these methods were being implemented internally. I know that all languages inevitably have these problems but how do the amount of leaky abstractions compare in Haskell to other languages?
Please forgive the heavily altered titled. Free lecture from Knuth open the public at Stanford.
I believe it also has a voice call option. Have you tried that?
Sometimes you need to prioritize yourself. This is one of those times: tell them “no”. Assuming they aren’t robotic enough to hang up on you immediately for refusing, politely educate them on how no other company on Earth has asked you to do anything remotely similar to this, and suggest that their process is way out of line. If they won’t listen, send a polite letter to someone else (heck, even the CEO). They deserve a clue, at least.

Remember that there are a ton of companies out there and you owe it to yourself to explore as much as possible before submitting to any one company’s ridiculous process.

Heck, years ago I used to look elsewhere just for being asked to format my résumé in a particular way.
1. Flexibility/freedom to distribute partitions in the future if needed.

2. Indexing doesn't work well in all cases. You can be better off scanning entire small partition tables lacking an index on a given column than with a single very large table whether that column has an index or not. (Indexes take up space and need to be read from disk if they don't fit in a memory cache, indexes don't work well for low-cardinality columns, etc.)

3. There are operations you can parallelize on a large number of small/medium tables and perform faster or more conveniently than a single very large table. One of my favorite techniques:

# usage: seq 0 255 |parallel -j16 ./alter-tablespace.sh {}

hexn=`printf "%02x" $1`

psql -Atc "ALTER TABLE tablename_${hexn} SET TABLESPACE new_tblspace" -hxxx -Uxxx xxx

4. A nice side effect of properly/evenly partitioned data you get for free is that you can do certain types of analysis on a single partition (or a few) very quickly and have it represent a sampled version of the data set. You can think of it as another index you get for free.
And it shares just so much ad revenue with publishers so they don't starve but can't develop at the same time
Any one aware of the technical details of how this was accomplished?

Is listening for other BLE transmissions low power enough that it can be done while keeping the claimed "several years" battery life, or is there something extra going on to limit the power cost of listening?

Is the protocol between the beacons themselves actually BLE in the mesh case? Or do they just expose that to phones?

Are the beacons establishing BLE connections for the mesh, or are they just taking advantage of announcements (which would likely allow avoiding some power consumption as long as the message is small)? A mix?
> The exact same lock is taken on both sides. There is no unfair advantage to WinFsp. If you design a file system that takes no locks and works on both WinFsp and Dokany, I will be happy to run the tests against that file system.

Alternatively you can show me that there is a lock already taken within Dokany for this purpose (protection of the data structures of the user mode file system) and I will be happy to remove the lock and rerun the tests.
What I meant is that "perks" are just an outcome of a certain organizational structure designed around a set of values.

There are multiple structures that allow for "perks", or are designed for autonomy. And, as you said, others have produced structures with similar results or based in similar values.

But, he's talking about the specific structures at Google.
Squareshot – Clear product shots starting at $9.95. You ship it – We shoot it
This bring to mind how Michael Dell decided to take the namesake company private so that it could focus on long term projects.

Similarly i can't shake the feel that the handset division of Nokia, never mind similar efforts at HP, got sunk because of board room having blinders for all but the quarterly earnings report.
'Super Mario Run' is just as much fun as we'd hoped
Obligatory Apple Doppelgänger patent link: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...
Sorry for my language but this is just fucked up. I honestly don't get how Amazon got so successful at what they're doing(I mostly mean cloud services), if this is the corporate culture they promote. Something just doesn't add up.
FCC’s Ajit Pai says net neutrality’s “days are numbered” under Trump
Of course, but having to stop using React as a result would be deadly for a company that built its company on it. :)
Amazon lost the phone and tablet wars, so they shifted their focus to the voice assistant market, and are now ahead of competitors with their Alexa skills SDK.
It's great to see Google now step up too. I expect Microsoft and Apple follow suit.

It's pretty easy to imagine how one could port simple 'voice command' apps between platforms ('hey, order a pizza/uber/etc...). Over time, however, these platforms should emerge into substantial AI. To be useful they will need to remember and understand more subtle contexts. "Hey, what's the score of the game" will have to remember that I like the Seahawks and Sounders, but only the Sounders are playing live right now, etc...

I like Google's choice to include a "conversational" model to the application design. "Let me talk to <x>" is pretty natural and allows <x> to then have full control of the interaction. Alexa's "ask <x> to <command>" model makes it easier to fire off simple commands, but awkward for deeper ones.
Its true that org mode is useful for organising various stuff, but it can also do other things, literate programming. it also lets you work with multiple programming languages at the same time. I think that is more powerful than even the jupyter notebooks.
http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html
Hi. Not a green comment, though admittedly I'm not using my real name here.

I worked at Amazon for many years and enjoyed it. Nice to meet you.

It's a huge company with a wide variety of teams and experiences. It's not for everyone. But I am still friends with lots of my former co-workers. Lots of them liked it and, believe it or not, many of them are still there. Some for over 10 years.
This might be pedantic, but stagflation doesn't describe our economy. Stagflation would indicate stagnant growth and too high inflation. Inflation is currently at 1.6% according to the BLS for the past 12 mo. If anything, that is a little too low due as the Fed's target is about 2%. Growth is also going the correct direction as the Fed is forecasting growth for 2016 of around 1.6-2%.

Does that mean the economy is perfect? Of course not, but stagflation probably isn't the right word either.
Ask HN: How to learn fast?
Learning by reading or
learning through school or
learning by doing
Yet, free markets beat out top-down managed economies because they have competing teams seeking to provide the same services.

Tech is, to an extent, a winner-takes-all market. If you build out two competing products internally, in the long run, it will cost you less then building one product, and having an outside competitor fight you for market share, by building that second product.

Case in point: I'm sure that Facebook would have loved it if one of their teams built Whatsapp. For 20 billion dollars, they could have funded a hundred competing internal products.
Understanding AOT and Dynamic Components in Angular 2
The existential crisis of peak car ownership
Watching his solution was the most painful part. His solution is to remove functions and put everything inline, and adding comments in the place of function names. To me, this sounds like a testing nightmare. It also sounds like a readability and maintainability nightmare.
Lucky for you Lego still sells tons and tons of sets that are just generic bricks for you to do whatever with: https://www.lego.com/en-us/classic/products and the Lego Creator line which directly emphasizes being able to make a bunch of things with each set: https://www.lego.com/en-us/creator

That was one of the points of this article—people see their themed lines, or their Friends line, and say "why can't it just be like when I was a kid?"—when what Lego said was "why can't we do both, and more?"
> I'm worried about the freedom of dissenting opinion in civil society from surveillance, not the privacy of my messages. Privacy is something I would easily give up for such freedom.

I see these two subjects as being inseparable. Before I feel comfortable asserting a dissenting opinion in a public forum, I would much rather discuss the subject among my peers where I don't feel I will be immediately eviscerated for a poorly constructed thought. If I don't feel that I have any privacy, I'm more likely to be subject to chilling effects.
>The rule set out in the ITT training materials instructs recruiters to call "a minimum of three times a day for the first three days." This was known as the 3x3 rule.

That is bordering on harassment by most standards. Taking advantage of the underemployed has been happening for years, and in tech I remember when MCSE training programs were mostly marketed towards blue collar employees. Many graduated as "paper MCSEs" who were largely unable to get a job.

I hope that bootcamps and accelerated learning programs for developers don't eventually go this route. They seem to be behaving to this point.
I'm disappointed that this article doesn't mention iMessage. From what I understand, it's end-to-end encrypted and Apple doesn't have a key.
FYI, C. diff is treatable with fecal transplantation with a 92% cure rate.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3365524/

A few facilities in the USA are currently treating with fecal transplants, like John Hopkins.

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/gastroenterology_hepatology/c...
During my childhood (80s) I only cared about 3 toys: lego, playmobil and zx spectrum. All the rest was crap.
Do you think it is feasible to allow some kind of voluntary FDA opt-out for individuals, in extremely limited cases?

I find myself wondering what I would want to do if I were in a similar situation: long-term, treatment-resistant illness, pain and inevitable death. At this point in my life, I think I would be okay saying "okay nothing is working. I volunteer to be an experimental subject - and if I die, please absolve anyone working to cure me from punishment."
Thank you for the reply.

I agree the comment would've been better without the use of the word coward, because it's obviously a charged term and a distraction here.

(See sibling reply if you care about why I chose to use it.)
No news here. To be honest, these practices are used by all marketers.
Did you not query that clause in the contract?
Solomon Islands Hit by Magnitude 8 Earthquake, Tsunami Alert Issued
Pretty neat, but from a user's perspective I'm a little disappointed that the current implementation seems to require me to explicitly tell Google what app I want to interact with. I'd rather be able to just ask Google "Find me a movie ticket for Rogue One on Thursday" and have it be able to infer that I want to use the movie tickets app installed on my phone, than for me to have to explicitly say "Let me talk to Fandango" first.

That said, it looks like deeper integrations are coming:

> We'll continue to add more platform capabilities over time, including the ability to make your integrations available across the various Assistant surfaces like Pixel phones and Google Allo. We'll also enable support for purchases and bookings as well as deeper Assistant integrations across verticals.
There are some bootcamps that are owned by for-profit education companies.
> Functional programming is great because it provides two (new) kinds of glue: function composition and lazy evaluation.

Certainly true for composition but laziness is more the exception than the rule in today's FP languages. And it's getting an increasingly bad reputation to the point that even Haskell is slowly (and reluctantly) being dragged in the strict direction (which it will never fully reach because so much of it would break).
I imagine that a continuously-running backup process could capture anything they do. There’s not really a way for them to “clean up” anything.
And that epicenter looks like it was on the Juan de Fuca plate boundary. I see some Bay Area folks in here concerned that this was a foreshock, but I think those of us in the PNW are the ones who should really be concerned.
Big companies seem to step in the same puddle, every time they try to set up one of these "breakthrough incubator" projects. They pick fascinating projects. They hire lots of smart people and give them great autonomy. But they inadvertently set up incentives that lead to the repeated creation of LINS (lavishly impractical non-solutions). And then the plug gets pulled.

I think the key problem is that the research team starts optimizing for periodic demo days with the boss. That's a sheltered environment in which clever (and easy to demonstrate) technical features are rewarded, and real-world annoyances involving customers, social norms, regulators, pricing, etc. are put off for "later." Not only are ecosystem problems not addressed, they aren't even vigorously considered.

The technology behind Google Glass was quite clever and some variant of that idea may eventually work. But what arrived on the market was LINS to an extreme. You can find similar failures in Detroit's concept cars, Paul Allen's first go at Vulcan, Xerox Parc's grossly overpriced STAR, etc.

I'm not sure how to fix this. Within the big-company budgeting system, it takes a daring CEO to allow super-innovative projects to break the usual rules about desired five-year ROIs. Once such a CEO takes a stand, it's really hard for him/her to get out of the way.

Suppose these CEOs do miraculously set up a system that approximates the scrappy, minimum-viable experiments of a true startup, with the marketplace being the true boss. That still is problematic. When a big company is pushing MVPs into the marketplace, the public scrutiny and scorn makes it really hard to recover from an awkward start -- and keep iterating in peace.
It's funny to me that investors and biz press are surprised that Brin & Page meant what they said in the 2004 letter.
Why even have an analogy. There is a perfect Example of Michael Dell wanting more control, and getting together with others to buy dell back, and its no longer publicly traded. They can not have to worry about shareholders, when the (for example) decide to buy EMC..
> and weren't as flexible in terms of what you could construct

The things you made were a lot more abstract, but people have even made computers using Tinkertoys: http://www.retrothing.com/2006/12/the_tinkertoy_c.html (which doesn't excuse the fact that Minsky was flat-out wrong there)
A few Postgres essentials
This ruling [ianal] renders null and void any design patent on components. The infringing party merely has to refrain from selling that component. To be assured of patent protection, the design pretty much has to resist extension or incorporation.

Now where does this leave UI design and UI components?
I don't imagine that Google will become super conservative and short sighted overnight; it's probably more about managing moonshots a bit more closely rather than not betting in them at all. It wouldn't be Google if they stopped placing bets that don't pay off immediately.
Well, possibly. I can't prove that that's not the case :) All I can say is that I've always taken them in good faith, because they match up with the temperament of some of the people I know and like inside the company.

That's really the problem with the social media policy. On the one hand, it protects the company from the worst possible outcomes of letting untrained employees loose on social media - and given the size of the company and the diverse views held by its employees, I could imagine those outcomes being pretty dire! But on the other hand there's a chilling effect on positive impressions of the company.
> rolling set of questions

This is the hard part, and I think it's why open book tests don't happen more. Coming up with good questions is hard. Don't forget that if they're not sufficiently work-like people on HN will still say that your hiring culture sucks.
Yeah my first thought was "this took 3 clicks"

edit: maybe that's why they market it as "2 clicks"... since ubuntu is selected by default and captcha definitely counts as a click
Exciting stuff. I think there's a lot of room to improve the UX sketch has with components. I like how Figma is approaching it. Everyday it comes closer to becoming the tool I'll reach for.
Phoenix Ecto Models Cheatsheet
Very much so.

Michael Dell effectively rescued his company from board room rampant shorttermism some years back because of just such a problem.

And we basically witnessed Nokia and HP effectively crash and burn because of boardroom demands for short term profits while the execs were trying to pull of long term "pivots".
Design UI with Figma Components (real time with multiple people)
How to Hire a Virtual Assistant
A castle for thousands of years? ... maybe some other kind of fortification at first?
That's almost wrong. There are 44.5 (edit: .44) visits to the ER per capita per year in the United States (admittedly, those are likely biased to some subset of the population). Of those visits, roughly 2 million result in urgent care admission and 16 million in hospital admission. So roughly 5% of the country has an ER visit that results in their being admitted to the hospital in some state. There's no quick way to tell what effect delayed visits would have on that but it seems like it could be significant.

[source: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/emergency-department.htm]
Google Now is about 95% of the way there on the sports thing (it is always showing me information about a couple of teams it knows I am interested in, including game status).
My dictionary gives "integer" as

> early 16th cent. (as an adjective meaning ‘entire, whole’): from Latin, ‘intact, whole,’ from in- (expressing negation) + the root of tangere ‘to touch.’ Compare with entire, also with integral,integrate, and integrity.

Indeed, whole numbers is another word for integers, dated in English, but that's what they are called in some other languages like German and Russian.

I also suspect natural is like in natural philosophy: occurring in nature, not like the other meaning of innate, although the two meanings are closely related.

Imaginary is due to Descartes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_number#History):

> [...] sometimes only imaginary, that is one can imagine as many as I said in each equation, but sometimes there exists no quantity that matches that which we imagine.

It says Descartes didn't like them, but imaginary literally means not occurring in nature, and this was presumably before people accepted mathematical concepts as being as real as anything else.

Transcendental also literally means beyond the algebraic numbers, since that's the definition, that's what they transcend.

Surreal numbers are surreal because somebody (Conway?) needed to attach a prefix to real, and my dictionary says sur- is the same as super-. My dictionary says it is surreal that is the odd word here: a backformation for surrealism, which is some kind of art movement (I wouldn't trust some French painters to get English etymology right, eh? ;)).

Also, what about dyadic, and p-adic, numbers? Ordinal numbers? Hyperreal?
> This will lead to hiring people who [...]

Every non-perfect solution is worthless?

I've found that the answer to all this is to give a 30-60m remote test (no proctoring), where they get to write the thing as they want, and a 15m discussion where you analyze their solution and assign one new feature then let them walk you through the changes. No code, no whiteboard, just discussion.

A lot of people can't whiteboard code from scratch but can take a piece of code they've just written and discuss next steps. And it's also an actual work skill that many good coders are bad at, so it gives you a good insight into high and low-level people.
Microsoft is bringing Windows 10, with desktop app support, to ARM chipsets
> My point is not that functional languages can't support mutation, I'm well aware of the whole gamut from State to F-Star, Eff, and Idris. My point is that you're going to spend almost all of your time explicitly mutating things, using whatever functional language as a "very fine imperative language."

The difference being that this "very fine imperative language" has much stronger type safety guarantees.

Maybe we can stop having ring0 buffer overflows some day when C programmer pride is sufficiently assuaged. I doubt it though... My experience with the linux kernel community is that it is a limitless void of insecurity and infighting.

> On top of that, you're not going to be able to abide the kind of allocations that functions in Haskell, OCaml, etc. can do with little provocation

OCaml does much better here (in fact, really quite amazingly well here, on part with some of the greatest common lisp distribution compilers which were stunningly good at it). But yeah, Haskell has a very poor focus on the needs of the "industry" when said industry is focused around extremely tight optimizations.

That said, I refuse to confuse a specific example of FP with a traditionally academic and research focus with the discipline as a whole. That's a dodge.

> So in the end you'll be in "Generic Stack-focused Pointer-pushing Procedural Imperative Language: The Monad".

Honest question: what's the problem with this if it offers additional safety and promotes the use of stateless functions? If it all compiles down to similar code, then it's fine. People act like monadic code is not functional, when it is in fact extremely functional code.

That's what's funny about all this: imperative programming is expressible succinctly and easily in functional languages.
See my reply to a sibling comment asking the same question.

In addition to those comments, another option is the Lego WeDo construction set (9580) [1]. Not as many technic parts, but it contains a couple of sensors (tilt/distance), and the USB hub for interfacing with a computer.

You could also just buy a small technic set or two from the toy store (they are all clearly labeled "technic" on the box), but after buying a couple of these, you'll wish you had just bought a single large set for the value for parts.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Lego-Education-Wedo-Construction-9580...

NOTE: Same caveat that this set uses the power functions 1.0 plug design, and version 2.0 is upcoming and seems incompatible. Maybe they'll make adapters.
And then, because the tester gets paid to write test, not to understand the product, you will operate with huge blindspots.

[Edit] I erased a cheap shot I took at Ken Beck. I still think the title of the article is stupid, but what the guy actually said is much more nuanced than that.
The buckets are labeled "one tooth fairy" and "two tooth fairies". Two tooth fairies are much less likely than one.

The way this works is that you've got some experimental result which appears to violate the laws of physics. After working hard to make sure that it's not experimental error and the measurement means what you think it means, then you consider a change in the laws of physics. This is a tooth fairy. Is your proposed change ruled out by other experiments? Is there a new experiment you can do which will have an unusual result thanks to the tooth fairy? And so on.

If, during this process, you find yourself needing a SECOND change in the laws of physics in order to explain something, then that's a second tooth fairy. You don't want that, because that's even less likely to be real then the first one.
> I think Linux beat them both to the point... many years ago.

Nope. Windows NT was written to be cross-platform. It wasn't even developed on an x86 processor.

And NT development started at the end of the 1980s, before Linus even thought of writing his x86-specific operating system. (Because he only had x86.)