skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Shouldn't this be exactly the contrary? If you have 10 independent coin flips, the chance of getting 10 heads is < 0.1%, while if they are perfectly correlated, then it simply becomes 50%.

Having 10 independent causes of death going up simultaneously is very unlikely to be caused by random chance. Rather it's an indication of an external phenomenon influencing all causes simultaneously.
Cloaking Case Study: Spotify Violates the Google Webmaster Guidelines
Speaking as a data engineer: If your personal data is junk, it limits my ability to derive insights from it, and leverage it. I can't speak in terms of ad-tech/user data selling, I'm in an entirely different space, but if it prevents them from being able to both derive value from and further proliferate my identity as a datapoint, that's both a personal and a commons good from where I'm standing.
I've only heard bad things as well. I respect them as a company but it's clear they don't care about employee wellbeing. Everyone I know thats worked there said the hours and deadlines were unreal.
Generally PostgreSQL is a row database but Citus has release column drivers that make it perform similar to other columnar databases.

But this patch is about horizontal partitions.
Fair enough - but they have been working on video games for a few years now.

It seemed especially ironic that DeepMind is a media golden child and they received a ton of press for beating video games. At the time they didn't hide the fact that Ms. PacMan was not yet successful, but not one article mentioned it.
Show HN: Goodalert – Block Unwanted Notifications on Android
I first write good code. I then write unit tests to protect my code from:

a) Bad team mates.
b) Future developers.

I've been burned one too many times with junior devs making cavalier changes in code they don't understand. Unit tests were THE solution for catching these changes.
When a scientist reports some new finding, the standard is not whether the government has been objectively monitoring their actual experiment. Instead the same assumption is in play: most people tend to tell the truth.

Between the two contexts of science and poverty, the social and economic incentives toward misreporting are objectively higher in the former than the latter.
Seriously? Was this a professional program or something? Maybe I was a particularly poor undergrad, but I can't imagine being able to afford a separate computer, even a shitty one, with a month's morning. Nor could I justify the expense -- "oh that's just my test-taking computer."
That will expose your IMEI and not really protect you from people that would be tracking you based on metadata.

You gotta burn the phone.
You can consider this tantamount to a blackboard exercise. In all likelihood they're looking for basic algorithm stuff.

In that instance, in your daily job you wouldn't even cheat by looking it up, you'd just use a library. I would assume that they value people who understand how these things work rather than just being able to implement it. After all, you can teach someone basic Python and how to use Scipy in a couple of hours, but does that make them a data scientist?

Anyway my point is lots of companies have programming exercises/tests, and I'm not aware of too many that let you just look stuff up while you're doing them. Debate the merits of that, but it's common enough that seeing it in this platform shouldn't feel totally shocking.
It is a stupid, broad statement without proper context.

It really depends on what your project is, what your goals for maintainability are and what programming language you use.

Two things about testing:
- test to confirm your spec
- if you have trouble writing tests, your design is probably flawed
Would a particular diameter lead to a usable patent?

The patent holder would have a hard time defending their patent if it relied on some arbitrary level of precision. Either it is useless because there is no diameter and thus too vague or it specifies a diameter and is useless to the holder.

A meaningful patent on corner shape would have some reason for the shape. Perhaps the ornamentation related to the company's logos or style in some way or they deduced that something special about the size and shape of some special rounded corner has some better function... Perhaps the ideal corner shape for insertion into skinny jeans without sacrificing screen size (could be a minimum level of fu).
Prometric has done this forever. I took the GRE at a place like this in 2001.
I'm sure it's not the hell that you read about online. If Amazon were as bad as some stories indicate, they wouldn't be able to retain anyone decent. Still, I have heard almost exclusively negative stories about Amazon, even in person.
If the code is designed following the single responsibility principle, and tests are written to test behavior rather than implementation details, then each requirements change should only affect the tests which specifically test for the behavior which changes.
No it's not an absurd argument, you need to understand the actual carbon footprint for the entire supply chain.

In this case you can easily end up releasing more carbon by building the solar panels and all the machinery needed for sequestering the CO2 than you can actually effectively sequester within the effectively lifespan of your machinery.

You also need to take into account in the cost since each dollar (or any other unit of currency) has a carbon footprint on it's own based on the economy it was generated in.

There is a good reason why some things are not effective, viable or just plain stupid, otherwise you end up planning your freaking solar roadways or worse building them.
Tell that to my feet when my kids leave them in the middle of the family room at night!

Legos are amazing and are definitely the focal point of my kids (age 5 and 9) creative play.
Might be a good thing to resubmit and test out the detox effects :)
I'm not sure what you're angle is, but if you think it'll cause housing prices to go down you're probably wrong. Most apartments contain clauses saying if the building is destroyed the lease is terminated and that's all. So all of a sudden you'll have a bunch of people in condemned housing clamoring for the places that are still habitable.
My friends and I have used GroupMe (which is owned by Skype) for a few years now and some of us wanted to migrate due to privacy. We tried out Signal, but there were some major usability problems in you intend to use it as a "group chat" replacement. My biggest issue with it is that there is no mute feature for iOS. Yes you can turn off notifications at the iOS level, but I want the ability to only have @-mentions to have access to notifications.

I made us switch to WhatsApp instead as I think the usability/privacy balance was better (for our use case).
> What if the requirements were very slightly different, and you needed to do something different in the middle of the sequence, like writing a register of a different size or sleeping for a millisecond?

Interestingly, I'd argue this is actually a great argument for brittleness in this case. The table oriented code makes it clear to the reader that no such subtle edge cases exist, improving the readability of the code.

Although a local macro or better error handling system would also make such things a bit clearer too.
It could be perhaps because most people around here think Amazon is a decent place to work as developers (and it probably is) but posts like this bring recruiting issues at Amazon to our attention and awareness. Now if I were to interview with Amazon and given ProctorU, I know I should turn it down immediately.
Perhaps we're using the word "experiment" differently. I don't mean a controlled experiment, I mean making a change for a little while to see what happens. One doesn't need a precise definition to do that. In fact, if we had one it would have been useless, because in complex social systems like HN such information doesn't transmit. People would have flagged whatever they thought of as 'politics', no matter what we said. Which is what they did.
For starvation there is also clustering, which can shift the load towards worker processes that aren't busy with cpu-intensive tasks, as well as simple modules such as `https://www.npmjs.com/package/process-pool` which can be used to offload (known) expensive tasks.

While Haskell is truly better at concurrency (no need to serialise when passing messages, green threads yield not only at IO but also at memory allocations), that part of the comparison isn't very good. Spawning a cluster of NUMCORES threads using the built in cluster module would be an improvement.
Then why is it that most of the people I interview can barely write a for-loop?
They claim to have secure end-to-end encryption. In fact, I would say using wire.com is better than Signal because Signal does not make any guarantee of anonymity.

With the wire desktop app you can take steps to anonymize your connection to their server, although on a mobile device it's probably roughly equivalent to Signal.

Also, here is a handy chart that compares the differences between these two services (and other similar competitors). https://wire.com/privacy/
"Different people will have different testing strategies based on this philosophy, but that seems reasonable to me given the immature state of understanding of how tests can best fit into the inner loop of coding. "

The problem with comments like this is that they're too ambiguous. Someone who doesn't want to spend the time to write unit tests, will use this ambiguity as a mechanism for justifying their laziness.
Hell, every flip phone I had had rounded corners. There's nothing novel about rounded corners in a cell phone. Or, a "regular" phone -- I recall rounded corners on any number of landline phones -- some cordless handsets even pocket-able.

There needs to be some career downside for such abusive legal maneuvering.
By screen I mean entire viewable area.
From what I remember of my childhood Tinker Toys were just low-quality (things would fall apart easily) and weren't as flexible in terms of what you could construct.

Erector, on the other hand, was prohibitively expensive which made it hard to have a meaningful enough collection to build what you wanted.
The 50 Best Places to Work, According to Glassdoor
A lot of that stuff although is cheaper for the corporation to provide than for the employee to pay for themselves in money and time. The corp has a tax advantage and a bulk purchase advantage. Not having a payment infra probably adds a little bit of efficiency too.
I used a time of flight sensor in an attempt to measure the specific gravity of beer - https://www.anfractuosity.com/projects/zymeter-simple/

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12784 - Is the little board I used, and used a logic level converter.

I attached a little polystyrene circle to the top of the hydrometer, for the IR to bounce off.

Unfortunately the approach didn't work too well because of yeast krausen pushing the hydrometer about.
Rich has great talks.

However, I am not sure if what the author wrote ("Your most powerful problem solver is your subconscious mind.") is a spot-on articulation of what Rich means by hammock driven development. Here's my summary of what Rich means: immersive, focused thinking followed by unstructured, relaxed, open-ended thinking. It is the combination of the two that is so powerful.
If you don't have any of those problems, you're very lucky. Again, ssh is designed with the assumption that people never have a reason to do unsafe things.
Well, yeah, I wasn't too convinced myself.

Perhaps self-replicating solar array in space level of abundance?
Amazon's social media policy discourages employees from posting about their experiences in reply to negative PR. I'm guessing that means that the employees who hate their job anyway disregard the policy, while the ones who care either don't take action or post on anonymous accounts :P
Most effective way to learn coding?
I am learning python and django. Learn by building, or build after learning. How do you learn?
You must be a joy at parties.

How is any of the data private when you willingly use their tools, sites, servers, etc? You open up google.com and type things in, what privacy do you expect? Or am I missing something you are referring to?
Perturbatively quantized gravity exists and completely reproduces General Relativity as a quantum phenomenon.

Study of perturbatively quantized gravity is precisely why we know that General Relativity is not renormalizable by power-set counting in strong gravity, and precisely why we have a good definition for strong gravity (more than one loop of gravitons in a Feynman diagram) and also why we have a good idea about where to expect strong gravity (very close to the centre of mass-momentum of a black hole, and very close to the big bang).

Although the behaviour of arbitrarily high energy and high density matter may be found in a very different theory from General Relativity, there is no presently known reason why approaches involving renormalization group flow (e.g. asymptotically safe gravity) cannot "save" perturbatively quantized gravity by providing a renormalization scheme that works into the UV limit. One could likewise point to GUT programmes and say that at those energy scales a theory very different from the Standard Model will be more useful.

In the meanwhile, perturbatively quantized gravity is a perfectly good effective field theory, in the sense of the work by Kenneth G Wilson.

The point you're replying to is better addressed this way: the Standard Model doesn't even properly consider gravity, and it simply does not need to if in the UV completion of General Relativity you can recover the Minkowski metric in sufficiently tiny regions of spacetime. That's because the Poincaré group, the symmetry group of region of spacetime with the Minkowski metric induced on it, is baked right into the group theory of the Standard Model, and into General Relativity. One can read this as the Standard Model subsuming Einsteinean gravitation into it at that level, and thanks to perturbatively quantized gravity one could equally pencil in a gluon on the particle zoo tables and do gauge theory on that, and expect consistent results outside strong gravity as described above.

Finally, even if other symmetries are added (or the three matter ones are unified) in a Beyond the Standard Model Yang-Mills group theory, the couplings with the graviton outside strong gravity will be straightforward.

So, I don't agree that the fundamental theories of gravity and matter are a patchwork, nor that they mesh poorly, even though we do not have a meshing that works to arbitrarily high energy levels. But crucially, those arbitrarily high energy levels might not even be physically observable; we aren't certain about that yet.

Finally, whatever dark energy and dark matter are, how they generate the metric and how they interact with the rest of the Standard Model are subjects of various research programmes competing with radically different ideas for a theory of quantum gravity.
Oh no, a critical comment that doesn't conform with the political status quo in the IT industry, silence him!
This actually means they have good PR. If you were raising money, doing proper due diligence would reveal just as many issues with them as everyone else.
I'm sorry, but you're just not reading any of the replies.

> Calling negative emotions "depression"...

This is the core of your misunderstanding. This is not what depression is.

Blind people cannot see, because their eyes don't work.

People with depression cannot make correct decisions, because their brain doesn't work.

It's really that simple.
Yep - our already built fission plants are starting to go out of business because the power they produce is too expensive. I don't think we should bank on fusion plants being incredibly inexpensive to operate.
New Call to Regulate IoT Security by Design
Well, anything that reduces the size of a search space helps performance.

Partitioning can drastically improve query times because the planner can use statistics only from a single partition (assuming the query works on a single partition). Postgres uses (among other things) a range histogram of cardinalities to determine the "selectivity" — how many rows a query is likely going to match. If you have a 1B-row table and you're looking for a value that only occurs once (low cardinality), the statistics won't help all that much. But if you partition it so that you're only looking at 1M rows instead of 1B, the planner can be a lot more precise.

Another point is cache efficiency. You want the cache to contain only "hot" data that's actively being queried for. If most of your queries are against new data, then without partitioning, any single page would likely contain tuples from all time periods, randomly intermixed, and so a cached page will contain a lot of data that's not used by any query. (Note that if you use table clustering, which requires the regularly running of the "CLUSTER" command, then you can achieve the same effect at the expense of having to rewrite the entire table.) If you partition by time, you'd ensure that the cache was being used more optimally.

Write access is also helped by partitioning by cold/hot data: B-tree management is cheaper and more cache-efficient if it doesn't need to reorganize cold data along with the hot. And smaller, frequently changed partitions can be vacuumed/analyzed more frequently, while unchanging partitions can be left alone.
It's gonna kinda suck to be the engineering team where nobody actually learned calculus.

Or the surgical team where everyone "collaborated" on basic anatomy.
Concurrency using event loops is still concurrency. Older cooperative concurrent systems used to work that way.
Technics are awesome, as a 60 year old engineer I hated to part with the extensive set I had acquired while leading a Lego League team, but I passed it on to my nephew.

However, I see many kids building one model, and then sitting it on a shelf as something they have made. What a waste of Legos...
Now that's something interesting. I found it funny that the article didn't seem to even briefly question whether the drug approval process could be changed to make it simpler to get things like phages to patients.

If we're getting lots of political change, this sounds like something that could benefit.
Hey person of the world, I truly appreciate this comment. Please keep on keeping on, so many kudos to you. As a developer, I oath to pay more attention to my development practices in the future. I feel bad, but honestly, I'd never considered the ramifications of an alt tag in the context you mention. I'm sure there are so many ways I could make the any website I develop more user friendly, but they are just things some people, including myself, take for granted. Please create a github.io page listing in what ways webpages/apps can be improved. It's not about market growth, for me, it's about exclusion... and that be bullshit. Hit me up with a link if you do. I for one, would be indebted.
That's like saying there's a targeted campaign to ignore Skype because these articles don't mention it. You might like Wire, but it's not an app that people concerned with privacy should be using.

They have done a bunch of shady things:

1. They lied about having end-to-end encryption in their app: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2855745/new-communications-ap...

2. They lied about being open source for years.

3. They lied about being based in switzerland.

They also have serious problems with their app:

1. The "encrypted" calls leak enough information to be able to reconstruct the audio.

2. Many features in the app, like GIF search, transmit plaintext directly back to Wire.

3. They rolled their own crypto, and experts disapprove of the choices they made.

Journalists who write articles like this and don't mention Wire are doing their job. They've consulted with experts and aren't spreading misinformation.
Hurricanes cover a lot of land, but they are also predictable reducing deaths and thus loss of life.

Earthquakes are less predictable, but far more localized. Consider, Katrina had losses from Florida to Ohio the 1906 San Francisco earthquake had little impact on Fresno. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1906_San_Francisco_earthquake#...
It will take a long time for us to heal the chasm between those of us who want to temporarily ban politics on HN and those of us who don't. May I suggest a one week moratorium on discussing this topic?
Unfortunately ARM was bought out so we can't buy shares in them any more.

With news of the windows x64 emulator for aarch64, 2017 should be a very interesting year on the x86 arm battle for sure.

Might be worthwhile picking up qualcomm shares or stock in some other companies that license from ARM.
ocdtrekkie is infamous for having endless anti-Google arguments on Google+ for the past 5 years. Trust me, you're not going to have a fruitful discussion.
They're useful if the code changes, or if the code doesn't change but the runtime/compiler under it does and breaks it. This can definitely happen in large projects.

If your project breaks because of local changes I think regression tests with real data and bisecting is better and less work though.
But you've gotta have realised that a lot of non-problematic content about politics, like this story, would get flagged unnecessarily, then?
This bothers me a lot. I'm trying to cut back on useless information these days and this article really didn't tell me anything. And I knew the title from reading a better article yesterday that was on HN.

Would be cool to blacklist certain domains from your personal HN feed the way you can hide certain subreddits on reddit from /r/all.
> 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.

None of this is true. This is just the generic set of plausible-sounding but meaningless complaints people who haven't actually used FP for any of these purposes tend to repeat.

> a lot of states

What is this supposed to mean? ADTs are by far the best tool for state management available in programming today, and yet there are very few non-functional languages that support them. Languages like Haskell offer extremely powerful tools for state management like monad transformers and ADT-based exception management.

> high requirements for performance or memory

This is an old meme that doesn't apply at all anymore. Haskell has a number of world-class packed data management tools (repa, vector, bytestring, etc.) that can actually do a ton of cool optimizations that a similar library in e.g. C++ could not do. Any marginal overhead incurred by using a functional style (which you are not obligated to use) are typically more than offset by the fact that high-efficiency techniques that are typically inconvenient to represent (like cache-sized chunked text management) are extremely easy to use with strong enough types and flexible enough combinators. For example, if you're doing streaming text management, you can get higher performance in C than Haskell, but it's going to take 100x more effort over just using lazy ByteStrings. Tight numerical code will get unpacked and turned into more or less C-equivalent assembly.

> low-level stuff.

I'm not sure what your definition of "low-level" is. For me it's doing register operations on microcontrollers, and in that case I agree. But for anything you can do on Linux, you are incorrect. Haskell has better low-level support via FFI mechanisms than, say, Java.
Just because they make that claim does not make it true or even enforceable.

Generally anything you write on company time or using company equipment belongs to them though.
On Epic's side at least, they are actually overloaded with engineers/applicants now, to the point that they removed their referral incentives because they have more people applying than they can deal with. They're perfectly happy if they lose a few percent of applicants if they avoid some false positive hires.