skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
* 360 Peer Reviews in winter and summer

* 1-1 with manager and peer twice a month

* 15five once a week as a mental health check for the employee

It's not a perfect system, and it's ever evolving, but it the best I've experienced so far.

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 1-1's work for general sanity checks, but require preparation from the manager to have an impact. Too many managers show up with without preparing and expect the employee to do all the talking. I use 1-1's to discuss career progression, establish SMART goals, and ensure that my report is happy with the work they're doing.

15five is still a relatively new process for us, but the perceived anonymity of a form allows employee's to more direct with their feedback. A report is a great indicator for what to discuss in a 1-1.
> After about an hour of this, I tell the proctor that I am no longer interested in the interview, and that I want to quit. I’m asked if I want to reschedule. I repeat that I want to quit. I’m told that a Log Out Procedure(™?) will have to be initiated.

Isn't enough to have total access to your computer, you also have to leave them enough time to clean up (?) any copyrighted material they might have downloaded on your equipment...

Interesting that you'll never know if they have uploaded some material from you, be it documents, photos or whatever.
I really like this addition. We store a lot of data for different customers, and most of our queries are only about data from a single customer. If I understand it correctly, if we would partition by customer_id, once the query planner is able to take advantage of this new feature, it will be much faster to do such queries as it won't have to wade through rows of data from other customers.

Another common use case is that we want to know an average number for all/some customers. To do this, we run a subquery grouped by customer, and then calculate the average in a surrounding query. I hope that the query builder wil eventually become smart enough to use the GROUP BY clause to distribute this subquery to the different partitions.
U.S. Supreme Court Curbs Excessive Design Patent Damages
Thanks for the feedback.

I agree, I've considered how easy would be for Amazon to implement something like sorting and search, and of course their implementation would be better than mine.

I'm thinking of more closely integrating with them adding a cart feature (via their API) so that users can add products on my site and have them ready on their cart on Amazon, I think that could add some more value to the project.
I like having the linearity of definitions and files. It makes reading unfamiliar code bases much easier, as it means the code has a "beginning" and "end." To me it fits well with the F# theme of sensible defaults.

If you do need to get around it though, you can have mutually referential types in F# if you use the "and" keyword (although the definitions of the types have to be right next to one another). And in the next update to F# you'll be able to have mutually referential types and modules within the same file which is often good enough for most other things you might need that sort of thing for.[1]

[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2016/07/25/a-peek-in...
Blockbuster was owned by the Wayne Huizenga an interesting businessman and notorious South Florida character. Its hard to ignore the most important thing is he sold Blockbuster to Viacom for $8.4B in 1994.

Some say he had the foresight to see the writing on the wall, but I'm not sure that is the case and remember reading (if anyone can find it) about his preference for subscription based business models - Blockbuster late fees was the best they can come up with, which is nostalgic even to write, looking back they could have done a Seinfeld episode about the Blockbuster late fee) and so he was inclined to shed the business. If he had really seen the writing on the wall, he likely would have sold and/or just started the first subscription based movie rental by mail website (a la netflix).
It's an general aptitude test. If someone cheats they move forward when perhaps they shouldn't and they waste Amazon's time.

ProctorU does similar things for universities. I've taken a few, they're not always this intrusive, but I understand the sentiment. People cheat. It's hard to stop that and even harder to do remotely.
No - I get notifications for different apps there (ex: Twitter.)
I don't know of any process that makes plastics directly from CO2, but the gas can be used to produce several intermediates.

Saudi Aramco recently acquired Novomer's Converge polyol technology, which uses CO2 to make polypropylene carbonate polyols. Polyols are a main component of polyurethanes. The Converge-based polyurethanes are used in coatings, adhesives, sealants and elastomers.

Covestro is also producing polyols made from carbon dioxide.

As mchannon noted, these companies cannot use the CO2 emitted from power plants. The gas needs to be pure so companies can do chemistry on it.

There are also some renewable routes to making plastics from CO2.

We already produce ethanol from sugar fermentation. This ethanol can be dehydrated to produce ethylene, the building block for polyethylene. Braskem is already doing this in Brazil. I believe Braskem is the ONLY company doing this, so that should tell you how cost effective the process is.

A company called Proterro was in the early stages of using a cyanobacteria that consumes bacteria to produce sugar. This sugar could then be fermented to produce ethanol, which could then be the feedstock for polyethylene.

Other companies have developed microorganisms that can ferment sugar to produce lactic acid. Polymerise this and you get polylactic acid (PLA), another plastic. This is one of the plastics used to make filament for 3D printers.

Other companies were developing micro-organisms that could produce polyhydroxalkanoates (PHAs).
Actually it is not just the homeless guys who pick up the bottles. I've seen all sort of people picking up the empty bottles here.
Would you rather we were in a world where the 6502 was still current-generation hardware and any hillbilly with a fab in their shed could crank out a top-end CPU?

Intel's got a lock on top-end performance, but don't think for a second they're in control of the CPU market.

You can get a custom ASIC fabricated for under $10K in low volumes using process that's a generation behind. You can get things fabbed on the current process if you're willing to pay more, but it's on the order of $1-2M or so. It's not often people make new CPUs, but look at how the Bitcoin space took advantage of low ASIC prototyping and production costs to produce high-performance hashing devices.

The cost of producing a 6502 chip in that era was basically the cost of building your own foundry. Now we have places like TSMC that will make chips for anyone who can afford the tape-out costs.
Considering the captcha it actually takes 3 clicks to launch
Official NASA Pinterest page
It can help. Often does. But I treat it like spell check. If I need it, I'm probably using the wrong word. And I don't know how to use it to effectively search for words.
I found this a video about the rise of Netflix talks a lot about Blockbuster and their downfall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrpEHssa_gQ
This vividly reminded me of PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN
You don't understand what for are tests. Tests don't give a shit if your code works today - you write them to freeze today's state of code (doesn't matter, if your code correct or not).
Didn't realize QZ turned into click-bait trash.

It's called 'projection' QZ. No amount of shaming others "loss of value" is going to fix the fall from grace and value you are presently in. But you probably already know that, enjoy the booze and prozac.
> The GPL family of licenses are complex legal instruments which really don't apply in a sensible way to chip designs.

GPLv3 was designed with chip designs in mind, and the FSF has an article about it[1]. I'm not a lawyer (though I do cosplay as one on the internet), but I would assume that the FSF's intentions would've resulted in a license that was applicable to chip designs.

> Secure boot is a useful feature, but definitely one that can be abused to limit a user's freedom.

GPLv3 doesn't stop secure boot from being implemented, it just stops it from being used to take away users' freedom ("Restricted Boot" like Windows 8 ARM laptops that don't allow you to install anything other than Windows).

> I think projects like LLVM and FreeBSD show that a copyleft license isn't a pre-requisite for building a strong community of contributors, including from industry.

I don't think people are worried about community formation. The main concern is that someone forks RISC-V to create a proprietary chip design and then fools users into thinking that it's a free hardware design. Or they steal the market share that RISC-V would've had.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-hardware-designs.en.html
Have you talked with the managing director about your ambitions? Maybe giving the managing director more latitude is all that's needed to grow the business...ethical people are often more reluctant to risk someone else's money.

What are the potential downsides of disrupting the current operational context? Framing the option as "taking" suggests that someone gets taken from and that is likely to have effect on moral and workplace culture.

It might be better to simply expand your responsibilities in ways that are orthogonal to the existing working operations, such as adding a new line of business while leaving the existing lines running as they are. Then there's no taking and any pain occurs in the new structure rather than the old one.

Good luck.
Sure, but they also expect that the 'non-software' bits work OK/that you've thought of not only that the software works now, but at some point in the future as well.

If you tell people "You told me you wanted software, not MAINTAINABLE software :-)" they'll say "Aren't you a professional? Shouldn't you just be doing this stuff? Isn't it just implied?"

So yes, they're paying for 'the software', but the tests are part of it, maintainability, as well as things like security and scalability are things that should be considered as well as just whether the software 'works'.
Half-OT: Could it be that OOP was favoured for many years, because most professional developers were autodidacts and now that more people get CS degrees, we see a rise of FP?
He could just have set up a separate user account.
> for ex: while testing we found 'python syntax issue!'

Do you not at least have CI to run unit tests?!
Maybe this will help with adoption!

Not sure how I feel about the last part:

"That’s not to say Signal should be your only messaging app. You could use it exclusively for sensitive matters, like work-related conversations. Then for casual chats like making plans with friends and loved ones, you could switch to more “fun” apps like Facebook Messenger and send all the stickers you want."
Isn't the point of that action center to be integrated with apps that have notifications to push?
I think the linked thread is good example, changing 3 to 4 can seems minor, but i think even with rules in place, it is not a burning 'fire', it should be easily acceptable to run this with rules enforced in a day or two. Letting people to override rules is more damage in long run for sure. Maybe they would override next time when they shouldnt
Do index funds promote price collusion?
One of the better greentexts, probably because it hits so close to home.
Low-powered Bluetooth mesh with beacons
So it filters for only the good cheaters, then.

To be fair, those people are very likely to be successful!
Putting up with the bullshit is a part of the test.
Ah, I see. I have to admit I haven't knowingly enabled notifications from anything else so all I get are Adobe updates / GeForce drivers / new hardware notifications. I dread to think how disruptive it would be to get a desktop notification every time I get a piece of recruiter spam on LinkedIn!
Thanks for pointing this out! Never would've thought to check for DCSS for my phone... How up-to-date is this kept, do you know?
>> - as documentation

Thank you for including this - it's underappreciated. So many times recently I've needed to write code against some poorly documented API (not always due to lack of effort, some things are hard to document well in prose / JavaDocs, or just due to constant change), but I took one look at the unit tests and it all made sense - and I knew it was up to date for the latest work.
Slightly off-topic but kind of not. Through the website, I found https://hypercontainer.io/ which seems to fit really good for a use-case of mine.

However, it's the first time I see HyperContainer. Anyone have anything good/bad to say about it? The value proposition seems really attractive "Fast as Container" + "Isolated by VM" but can't find anything about the tradeoffs so would love someone who tried it to write about their experience.
FYI: same topic (not dupe) a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13076073
Holiday Season Deal for Endless Programming in ANY Platform
> In order to be able to use a programming language or paradigm well, it is especially useful to know what its weaknesses are. Functional programming does not work well in programs which handle a lot of states. It does not work well in programs which have high requirements for performance or memory. It does not work well for programs which have to do low-level stuff.

By the same token, whenever this conversation comes up a series of vague and poorly-formed criticisms come up saying, "You can't do low level things" without defining what on earth that means. Or, perhaps worse, conflating the idea that you must have Haskell in all its massive (and perhaps fairly: a bit bloated) confusion of ideas. People can and do write high performance code in functional style and with functional tools. People even do it with laziness as a core abstraction.

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.

It's difficult to treat the core question, "What are the disadvantages of functional programming" in the same way that it's difficult to answer, "What are the weaknesses of OO programming." Both use terms that encompass a very wide variety of approaches and decisions, but the way we evaluate them as bottom-up, on a case-by case language for each individual language.
I call those types of test, "testing that the compiler works." Not really something you should be testing! It also applies to testing code that is just a wrapper around third-party libraries.
The line between plugin and not is pretty blurry for Konqueror - even its HTML renderer is a plugin in a sense.
The previous HN submission about an Amazon interviewee being monitored during an online test was kind of strange but not a big deal.

But this... this is absolutely horrific. Clean your desk?? Do you expect people to not use paper in the real world, or what exactly?
I suspect you're being downvoted because your sarcasm isn't obvious enough.

Either that or you're living in a parallel universe where LinkedIn is a completely different company.
Hi HN, this is Jakub, founder of Estimote, Inc. (YC S13).

We just released a new firmware to support mesh networking with bluetooth beacons - you can read more on our blog: http://blog.estimote.com/post/153812538740/introducing-the-w...

Happy to answer any questions here! : )
Amazon is truly awful at hiring. Their engineers often give strange programming puzzles to solve, then add arbitrary constraints like, "this needs to operate in 16MB of RAM".

If Amazon can't spring for a $15 stick of memory it's probably not going to be a great work experience.

I also wouldn't want to work with engineer who asked BS questions like that. Waste of time.
That's a good point - what you'd be evaluating there is how good people are at talking about their performance rather than their actual performance.

A lot of excellent developers I've known (in fact I might say particularly the excellent ones) were rather modest and often rather hard on themselves.
Thank you for this! I've been patiently waiting for someone more motivated and intelligent than myself to create a free inline test runner. You are my hero. Keep the project open source, free, and plop a donations button on the page and I'll be quick to open my wallet.
The only way I'd agree to do that would be on a machine that I'd reimage before and after. Hopefully I'll never be that desperate for a job though.
Microsoft owns my "employee" identity thru office 365.

I don't love them owning my "job-searching" identity too.

Seems like the most valuable service they have to offer is to corporations. "Want to know how often your employee is updating their resume? Pay us for access." Of course they'll spin it differently, but in short that's the value.
> Considering the captcha it actually takes 3 clicks to launch

More like ten.

Six for the captcha choices, one to submit the captcha, one to pick the server type, one to submit and get a "Server capacity reached, please try again later", and finally one to close the browser tab.
The key insight is that immutability is not an end in itself, it's a tool to give us referential transparency.

If a language can allow mutability in an area of code without allowing side effects to escape from it we can have all of the reasoning advantage that FP gives us at a level above the mutations. We can also have the performance we want.
Nice long-form overview and, from what I can tell, well-balanced trying to deal with legacy / reputation as a "smart toy" and somewhat inconclusive research on the whole. Intuition is a good "out" in this case, because not every toy works for every learning style for every child, etc. One thing I did see:

>Marvin Minsky, the MIT scientist who helped pioneer artificial intelligence, has even said that “the decline of American inventiveness” can be traced to the rise of Lego, arguing that by becoming the most common construction toy, it’s pushed out construction toys like Tinker Toys and Erector sets that can get kids building simple machines.

Whoa, those are some names I haven't seen in a while but did grow up playing with. Tinker Toys in particular. To me, the criticism isn't fair - those were toys and learning tools from a prior generation. I'm pretty sure the only reason I grew up with Tinker Toys was because I had a Grandmother who grew up during the Great Depression and was of the generation that enjoyed them. My Parents much more embraced Legos, and, quite simply, getting bags or bins full of used, miscellaneous bricks at garage sales was a huge creativity boost. Then, later, turn around and sell or donate them. Rarely did I see Tinker Toys or Erector sets around. Technics seemed to bridge the gap between Legos and higher-level engineering / complexity / use of motors.

What does feel important about Legos & playtime, to me, is the manipulation of 3D space, coordination, and dexterity training. There is no such replacement via a 2D screen, and 3D / VR or AR aren't even close. The ROI on play time, age appropriate, with Lego-type hands-on exploration is worth keeping in mind. No batteries. Easy to clean. Hard to break. An Occam's Razor of developmental toys.
The title was the most informative part
It sounds like he didn't know it would've been this intrusive. I had no idea personally and I know a lot of people who have worked at Amazon.
Location: San Francisco, CA

Remote: No

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, React, Flux/Redux, SQL, HTML, CSS and Git

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/camachomartin

Github: https://github.com/camachom

Email: mcama200@gmail.com
I thought so. But surely then the announcement would be "LinkedIn Windows Store app coming soon". I read it as some lower level integration with the Live account I use to sign in to Windows. Perhaps I'm being overly paranoid.
...this is the beginning, not the end...
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CA%2BTgmobTxn2%2B0x96h...
Arduino is popular because you can download a single program, buy a fairly cheap board, plug it into USB and program it easily. Also it was the very first system to make microcontroller programming vaguely affordable, so it has kept a lot of mindshare due to that.

There's literally no other systems that are as simple as Arduino for newbies to use. The only one I know that is vaguely close is mBed, but that uses an online compiler (gross), or a relatively complex and not that great CLI interface. Arduino's IDE may be shit but at least it is simple and easy to install.

Almost everything else involves complex JTAG/SWD programmers and weird OpenOCD command lines and frankly that is just shit. Even as an experienced embedded developer the state of the tools is embarrassing.
Yeah, that's the reasonable interpretation (which is also backed up by the full article). As usual the quote is taken out of context and/or put into a headline that's deliberately much more inflammatory than the actual article.
If you splurge and get a nice Xeon chip for your system guess you're likewise screwed.

"Sorry, you spent too much money on your Intel® powered VR system."
It appears that your claim "Scala or Clojure that don't have real tail recursion because of the JVM" is in error.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1677419/does-scala-suppor...

http://clojure.org/reference/special_forms#recur
Everyone is expecting Zen to perform well. AMD also has been hyping it up a lot. I hope it doesn't turn out to be a pile driver kind-of architecture. Intel needs competition to keep prices sane, which currently they are not.
When blockbuster was nearing its final days one location in my city was purchasing DVDs for $5/DVD. Another location was SELLING DVDs for $3/DVD.

We filled a van with DVDs and arbitraged them.

After that experience, I became convinced Blockbuster's failure was due to gross incompetence.

If I ever apply to Ycombinator, I think this would be my "interesting hack" on the application.
Sorry for the late reply.

>what is exactly "exceptional enough", can you tell me how do you see exceptional enough?

This will be purely subjective. For me - one thing, for guys in Facebook\Google\whatever - something else. Maybe they'd want to see that you are exceptionaly good with algorithms, maybe you can come up with desigh ideas quicker than most of them or at least other candidates. I can't tell. The point is - you will have to prove that you are so skilled that you relly didn't need that one yera at school, certificate, degree or something else.

>what's etc

Depends on reqirements for the position. For programmers this is usually algorithms and patterns, but this will inculde something else. Maybe protocols understanding, maybe deep learning, maybe working with graphic imformation. Just look for what they have in their jobs descriptions: www.facebook.jobs
> Open Whisper Systems said it planned to add these features, noting that GIFs are already supported in the Android version of Signal.

And iOS for a while now! https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-iOS/pull/886
Thankfully, I would fail this interview the moment they require me to own a Windows or OS X license.

> ProctorU currently supports Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Mac OS X 10.4 or newer version of those systems. At this time, ProctorU does not support any Linux operating systems such as Chrome OS, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.

edit: but I'd like to see them muck around with my linux.git .config to make sure I'm not cheating.