skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've done the same thing, and on the windows side of things AutoIT (https://www.autoitscript.com/) is similarly flexible when all else fails. It's not pretty, but arguably is a good example of the hacker ethic.
It's a good idea to think through ideas before attempting them.

This experiment was like asking people to flag "news", and getting surprised that people were flagging tech news, when they really wanted to avoid crime news.
> Google doesn't do what it does to be successful. It does it because it is successful.

Those things aren't mutually exclusive and almost certainly are both true
With LinkedIn, Microsoft Looks to Avoid Past Acquisition Busts
No disrespect intended, and with the qualification that exam-taking is a stressful environment for many people, but..

You can't make that mistake in production. They were right to fail you.

I can see that it was a side effect of being more cautious than usual (so unaware of the effects of your actions), but that demonstrates a different problem.

All of which is to say, that you tried and failed, which puts you ahead of the people which didn't try at all, and imparts some hard won learning that will benefit you next time. We've all been there.

But you can't overlook a mistake like that. It shows that you were not ready to pass the evaluation in question. The rest of your actions (acknowledgement, discussion of error etc) show that you should be ready next time. But to shortcut it would be a mistake.
Seeing Circles, Sines, and Signals
I should note we pay for all of our employees training fees incurred as a result of getting the certifications. (On top of rewarding them for doing so.)

It seems obvious to do as a business owner, but as you pointed out, I guess it's not that common.

It is just strange to ignore basic incentives/economics. The more you can align the incentives in the same direction, the better result you get. Highly-trained workforces are not fungible. All of this sounds like being "nice" to employees, but in reality it serves the business simply better than the alternatives.
PicoLisp 16.12 released
I one spoke with a woman from the Netherlands who was surprised that these perks are not taxable. According to her, in the Netherlands perks like shuttles to work or company-provide food are taxable.
What dark patterns are you referring to?
* Disclaimer: Correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't used flow extensively but I did check the docs.

One big thing is TypeScript classes are entirely different than standard JS classes. I guess you don't have to use them but it adds Abstract classes, interfaces and access control (eg private, protected vars).
I think it is a mistake to buy into the logic that using encryption means you have something to hide.

Regardless of the framing of the article, many people likely read this and thought, "yes, it would be nice to be confident my messaging is private even from mass government surveillance."

This does not mean they are drug dealers. It means that they have concluded wide-dragnet surveillance programs are worth opting out of, especially if it's very easy to do so.
Sure, let's say you want to remotely control a Cisco router with a serial interface. expect makes it really easy to remotely connect to the serial interface, wait for a prompt, send a command, and take a conditional action that depends on the response.
That's because causation is really hard to reason about. Often times it's not that A causes B or B causes A, but C causes both, or A and B causes each other at the same time.
The robotics effort sounds like an absolute disaster. How shareholders haven't been demanding answers there is beyond me. Acquiring 11 companies to, apparently, satisfy Rubin's obsession with robots (it's named Android for a reason) and then trying to shut them all down or flog them off ... but nobody wants them? Yikes. How did they get so starry-eyed about Rubin that keeping him (also failed) was apparently worth such a huge effort? Yes, he ran a successful operating systems project and fully demands enormous praise for Android's wild success. But where are the limits to retention efforts?
I played with Legos extensively when I was a kid (1980s). Overall, they were definitely my favorite, and in fact I kept all of them and now my 4 year old son has them and loves them.

I'm not sure I agree with Minsky, but I have definitely noticed that the Legos of today are very different to the ones I grew up with. Today there is a far, far greater variety of pieces available.

This is definitely a very mixed blessing. On one hand, it does offer a skilled builder many more options, and certainly allows the creation of things that look much better than what could have been created with Legos of thirty years ago. However it also means that finding the right piece takes far more time, which I remember as being the least fun aspect of Legos.

Then there's also the fact that reduced constraints are often not beneficial to the creative process. As a kid, certainly I would have always liked to have had more Legos, but as an adult I realize that an unlimited amount (or, perhaps more importantly, variety) of Legos would probably not have been for the best.
I see what you mean; we know the ingredients (necessary elements and energy) for earth-like life are there.

However, we don't know the probability of all the steps leading to life actually taking place in the given time frame. The only reference value we have is earth, so it's just one data point and hardly possible to generalize. And mathematical estimations are difficult due to way too many factors to be considered (I've never seen one actually).

At the least we can say that formation of complex structures like DNA is far more complicated and thus less likely to form than methane, by orders of magnitude. So one could argue that it is generally far more likely for methane to be encountered than any (earth-like) life form.
Except the shell session is a buffer in emacs and you can do anything in it.
I find myself thinking about autohotkey.
Yes, and because it's a federated protocol, it still sends every damn thing in cleartext by default.
And then who or what documents the tests? Test code is code. That's important and all too often that fact is sort of elided.

"We" write comments and use "plain" language documentation, or formatted but otherwise plain language for documentation generators to parse to document our code, and that includes "what the code does."

I'd argue that if your test code is what you're relying on to "document what the code does" then you are probably (almost certainly) over-testing, testing the wrong things, or some combination. Oh, and also using test code incorrectly (as documentation).
The draft expired in April.
That's still a very narrow view of changes; the belief that you can isolate every part and that requirements changes would then only affect those isolated parts seems is pure fantasy.

I've had to completely redesign entire subsystems; break down components into different pieces; move code between different layers; etc.

Honestly as a manager nothing bothers me more than developers who try and patch complex changes into existing systems without re-thinking how it affects everything else. I have to re-factor a project that's a total mess because code was added but not removed or changed over the course of some very big requirements changes. I'm sure all the tests pass but it's impossible to follow now.

The problem with unit tests is it adds an extra layer of friction on making changes that benefit the product. You are actively discouraged from changing your design from your initial assumptions! This change friction can be seen as a benefit if you need all your interfaces to be stable (like with a library). But it's a trade off and it's not appropriate everywhere.
Yup. There was SOOOOOOOOO much bullshit work being done there that could ONLY be done because Google can afford so much top-notch talent to work on research, even if it reinvents the wheel. It was a big part of the reason why I left.

That being said, at least they didn't invest their dollars on loads of red tape, though to be fair it isn't like all of Google is incredibly regulated unlike many other multi-billion dollar companies
Except in 2008, during a developing worldwide financial crisis, when the new CFO Patrick Pichette started figuring how much was actually getting spent on things such as cafeterias and childcare subsidies (for the onsite service).

So, yeah, never.
Yes I'm seeing a lot of people criticizing Telegram on Twitter and in media. But after doing some research I couldn't find any proof of their claims that Telegram have a broken crypto.

You can use secret chats, those messages are not stored on the company server.
Flickering lights could help treat Alzheimer's, according to a mouse study
I fully agree with him. I've long maintained that a healthy democracy requires the populace to be politically informed and active, regardless of stance or belief.

It is deeply disturbing that 100M+ Americans didn't vote in the most recent election. I bet a lot of those were people who, as Brecht points out, are proud of the fact that they hate politics and don't care about it. They always spout ignorant bullshit like "both parties are the same anyway" and they say that with a smug, holier-than-thou attitude, as if they've discovered some hidden insight. It really rustles my jimmies.
My experience as a performance management vendor:

- For very small startups: just talk. A lot, every week at least. Setting metrics is hard until you gain more visibility. If you can though, do it.

- For midsize startups: set goals with clear metrics/achievements (we use OKRs), and still talk a lot (one-on-ones and amongst the team). Metrics are here to set expectations not to be your final rating. If your manager wants to screw you, they'll do it with any system.

- For larger companies: Do as above + add formal appraisals. The appraisal is more about career direction.

This tends to work well because employees find it fair and predictable. And as others mentioned, don't wait 6 months to give feedback. A review shouldn't come as a surprise.
Why do you need to consider Einstein's postulates if you can just look at a ball traversing a rubber sheet with a depression in it, for that matter? Same answer: because these rough analogues are not background-independent -- you would see a very different picture in each case if you moved the walking droplet or rubber sheet setups to the moon or to the ISS.

Einstein GR postulate number one: microscopic physics is background-independent.

These experiments' microscopic details behave the same on Earth, on the moon, and in the ISS, but their macroscopic behaviours sure don't. You have to input details of the local structure of spacetime into each of them if you want to predict their results (e.g., what trajectory the walk takes, or how long it takes for a ball to reach the bottom of a depression in the rubber sheet) successfully.
Sarcasm usually rightly deserves to be upvoted. It's one of the rare forms of critical thinking left in this trend-governed society.
I still haven't been able to register to Signal. It always fails with "error establishing connection with server". Does anyone want to suggest how I could get this working?
I hate having to shut down notifications for screen shares as well, but I found out that there is a pretty easy way to mute them temporarily on macOS. Alt + click on the notification button (top right corner) and it will mute notifications.
Ask HN: When to choose AWS over a more typical VPS provider?
Our startup needs to move the hosting for our web app from a dev shop's physical server into the cloud.

The app runs a pretty standard Linux/Apache/MySQL/Java stack, doesn't have any serious computation or storage requirements, and targets a very niche market; 25 concurrent users would be the absolute maximum load expected for the next 6-12 months. It needs to be accessible 24 hours a day, but it's also no big deal if the app is down for a minute during a deploy.

The dev shop keeps pushing AWS, but I've heard enough horror stories about hidden charges and billing overages that I'm wary. Given the minimal load on the server, it doesn't seem like we'd need the scalability of Elastic Beanstalk or the storage of S3.

Are there any considerations I'm missing? How would you choose a host in this situation?
British spying:tentacles reach across Africa heads of states and business leaders
I don't buy it. Many companies are able to get the perks, culture, and autonomy right without being a multi-billion dollar company. It does enable Google to do certain things (like moonshot projects) that smaller companies can't do, but a lot of the perks I've seen are replicated in other companies.

In fact, I think your comment "Google doesn't do what it does to be successful, it does it because it is successful" is completely ignoring how Google came to be successful in the first place, which was doing what you're saying it does because it's successful. Reading something like "How Google Works" goes over this exact thing in detail.
Shareholders can demand answers, but it won't get them anywhere. For better or for worse, Larry, Sergey and Eric own Google and can do whatever they want.
Hmm. The rare good point. I keep forgetting that I'm a libertarian fascist SFBA startup advocate.

(Checks wallet for official Thiel Fellow badge. Whew! Still there!)

Disregard my previous comment!
> I think it's time we just admitted that everything we type/tap/say into any device, regardless of how it's being wrapped up in transit, is absolutely and irrepairably insecure and we're not going to be able to fix that anytime soon.

We dont have to set the bar that high. Just lower it slightly and we can achieve great success.

Can we make the job of NSA and CIA harder? Not necessarily impossible, just to increase the costs they have to spend on whatever it is they are doing, much higher than it is now.

That would be nice.

We can do that with bitmessage, avoid Signal, use Telegram which means outsource to Russia/KGB - so NSA will for sure need to spend more resources if they want to access your "secure chat" on Telegram.

EDIT: but of course, as you say, the problem is socio systematic - any technical system which can or would be used to subvert the state is a threat to the state and will be neutrialized, by takeover, sabotage, lack of funding, the means the state has are enormous. The list we have of secure or safe systems are still zero. Only another state can go against the state.

For example, it was mandated that GSM had backdoors. Any system used for communication, especially mass/group communication, is not free and not allowed to exist. So simple is that. They even tried to go after the creators of secure systems, wasnt the PGP guy scrutinized?
Hah indeed :-/
This is surely where SMART goal-setting makes sense. As a way to control subjective judgments. It is old practice, but widely and effectively used. (S = Specific, M = Measurable, A = Achievable, R = Relevant, T = Time-bound). A pretty standard metric for larger companies, or any organisation.

And make sure managers and HR departments stand by their metrics.

Avoid, on all counts, what I have in the past seen "We are a quickly growing company, where out goals may change any minute. We cannot possibly have fixed goals or ways to track them or past performance ... Just show me the result" Anyone demanding such is dizzy and unable to steer any direction.

And 360s: They simply do not work otherwise than to give more senior management more transparency from their viewpoint - if they feel the need to use them, they don't feel sufficient transparency and this is what needs to be addressed.
I'm no businessman, but does anyone else feel this will kill a lot of potential innovation? Not every project pays dividends immediately, and some are worth pursuing even at a long-term loss. (imagine if we all had fiber today and bandwidth was ridiculously abundant. Just how different would the internet be, just as when electricity became abundant?) Also I understand that Google is a business, but the need for a business model for research might stymy forays into interesting tangents. (I can't currently list any, but history is full of examples of things that were invented while looking for a solution to a different problem) Sure a company shouldn't be hemorrhaging money or throwing it at anything that moves, but it also shouldn't be completely beholden to (my generalization of) investors who can be quite short-term-thinking and risk-averse.
Does this software work on Linux?
As far as I understand, a Lego parent company is getting set up (Lego Brand Group) and Knudstorp will be head of that company, while Lego itself will switch focus on just the brick themselves (a bit like the recent Google->Alphabet restructuring).

Source: http://www.brothers-brick.com/2016/12/06/lego-names-new-ceo-...
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.

Signal seems to me to one tool in a large profile to maintain freedom of information dissemination and information gathering activity.

It seems to me that speaking to a large number of people anonymously is not possible with any of the existing tools, Signal included, and it seems that this set of tools is the next set that is needed.

Candidates for this include implementations of "Dining Cryptographer Nets," though there exist scalability and DoSability concerns.
I worked on intuition and Google :-)
Thanks for the response; those seem like good learnings.

In terms of hot-button-topic stories getting buried, it's not just flagging - the flame war detection logic also plays a role. On diversity stories, for example, once they reach the front page we often see a large number of strongly worded (but clearly legitimate) anti-diversity posts. When people reply, heavy discussion ensues; and in any case, there's often a lot of piling on in agreement. Pretty soon the post is back to page 3 or 4. Of course there's the option of not replying, but leaving the anti-diversity viewpoint unchallenged strongly reinforces the stereotype of HN as a place that's hostile to diversity. So right now there isn't any good answer.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his internet-ego depends on his not understanding it."

If you refuse to see that I simply disagree with the fact their stickying constitutes vote-manipulation, and assume I'm arguing in bad faith because I don't hold the same viewpoint as you, then I think we're done here.
"If an employee is willing to run binaries from random people on the Internet on their machines, then they're a security risk."

Absolutely. I'm not surprised the Amazon SDEs are fuming about this.
Posit that the government wants to round up all the pressure cooker searchers. Now, instead of one searcher, they have a conspiracy of a dozen pressure cooker searchers. Are they going to just shrug their shoulders and say oh well?

The idea that it's possible to overflow the governments secret lists is founded on the idea that the government cares if a list gets too long. I'm not sure that's the case.
Most people only have the NSA as an adversary in the minimal sense that they're caught up in a very broad mass surveillance net. It's true that if you're a whistleblower with sensitive government information Signal is not a complete solution for you. But who cares? Almost nobody is in that situation, and people in that situation have access to other tools that actually do help.

Your last sentence is extremely unfair to Signal and dramatically underrates the privacy it provides to ordinary people. It's dangerous to suggest that because it requires a phone number and lives on an app store it provides no useful protection at all, because that implies it's no better than e.g. WhatsApp when in fact it has a much better featureset.
Absolutely agree. Stress IS the killer.
Yes, ProctorU is also used for full-time interviews.

Source: a friend applied, and they made her use it - except it didn't work, so she ended up not even having a second round screen before getting her onsite invitation.
The undeveloping world.

Widespread obesity, poor diet, sedentary lifestyles, the uniquely inefficient health care system, wealth inequality, etc, will likely cause overall expectancy to drop further.

Related and interesting:

> "As of 2010, the average, upper-income 50-year-old man was expected to live to 89. But the same man, if he's lower income, would live to just 76, according to the report."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/18/the-g...
I have 6yo and 1yo daughters and one thing that strikes me with the current Lego range Vs the sets I had as a kid is the amount of rubbish decorative tiny parts that the most recent sets include.

(I know you can still buy the basic box full of bricks, but these are sometimes hard to find)
This message was confusing to me because I've been using/abusing Postgres inheritance for partitioning for so long that I forgot Postgres didn't technically have a feature called "partitioning".

What I'm looking forward to finding out is if I can take an arbitrary expression on a column and have it derive all the same benefits of range partitioning like constraint exclusion.
Supply and demand. Most companies are willing to accept some false negatives in the hiring process to avoid the false positives.
I think we've had sufficient moratoria for a while.
What life is really like in Silicon Valley
He's not talking about the perks. He's talking about the design of the organization, beyond the culture.

The structures, the roles, the processes.

Autonomy is a value, but values only influence design.
>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.

Seriously, you're bothered because someone asked you to solve a toy problem? Most interview problems are things one wouldn't do in the real job; that's because all real job problems take more than an hour to solve.

Implementing a stringbuilder is a bad question because there's not much depth to it (after you get the basic implementation down, where do you take the question next?), not because there's a stringbuilder in the stdlib.
I started https://metafetish.com (NSFW, and when I started it was https://slashdong.org) in 2004, as a hobbyist kinda blog about the engineering behind adult toys. Almost 13 years later now and I'm still at it. Things just built up over the years to where my name kinda became synonymous with certain topics. Consulting has always been a smallish side-gig, because the industry is not a great place to make cash, but damn if it ain't constantly weird and interesting.
TL;DR: Blockbuster went under because they failed to systematically read minds and take actions on it.
A Brighter Outlook Could Translate to a Longer Life
As I kid I loved all the special pieces I could find; they became the centerpiece of most of my designs. Odd enough much of what I built as a kid, I can't build now because my son's large collection of Lego's doesn't include many of cool 80's space pieces. :)
The IRS rule is that these kinds of perks are allowed if it is for the company's benefit.

For example, if a free lunch allows an employees to have a lunch meeting, the IRS considers that for the company's benefit.

Whether all of Google's perks actually satisfy that test is a different issue, but that is the IRS's rule.
"Philanthropy" in this case meaning to set up a dynastic foundation as a tax shelter.
> Node ... popularized the event-loop

Tcl was doing event loops quite successfully in the late 90ies and was fairly popular, back in the day.

These days, I'd use Erlang (Elixir).

This is kind of ranty, but also makes me laugh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzkRVzciAZg
Haskell, worst case scenario