skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Jumble words Solver using webapp2
A Possible Break in One of Evolution's Biggest Mysteries
Nobody needs to be able to code these in an interview. Ever. For certain domains you should be aware of them and be able to look up decent implementations. But to think that level of knowledge is important in an interview is bogus. I could just as easily ask similar questions and weed out most CS grads that get into Google or Facebook with these:

Please implement a first order low pass IIR filter.
Tell me how the butterfly pattern in an FFT gets your from N^2 to N*logN. Oh, and implement an FFT.
Write a basic PID controller implementation.
Tell me how you'd handle a Field Oriented Control system that needs to run in voltage limit most of the time - what stability issues may occur?
Write a fixed-point implementation of the sin(x) function.
Implement a 2-pole 2-zero transfer function. For bonus points do it in fixed point without rollover or saturation problems.
Assuming you have a matrix library available, give me the boilerplate code for a Kalman Filter.
What kind of ODE solver should you use for long term stability when simulating planetary systems?

These are similar difficulty questions from a different domain, but many of them are likely to be used far more often in that domain than any of the interview questions in TFA are likely to be used in their domain.

The goal of an interview is to ascertain weather the candidate is capable of doing stuff and learning stuff, and if that's likely to carry over into the stuff you need done. It's not to see weather they can produce an answer to some specific problem on the spot. How you do that I'm not telling - it's hard enough without helping you find the people I need ;-)
I look forward to learned models as a service. Which you can then script to do more intelligent things. This stuff is too low level for me. In fact that's a great idea for a startup. Learned models as a service via an API.
I remember Deluxe Paint for DOS and the Amiga before Photoshop existed.

I also remember Quark Express.

Somehow Adobe ran them out of business or at least trying to compete with them.
The Pascal-looking one in the paper I cited that academic publications and classrooms have used successfully going back decades. Strange you seem so unfamiliar with it.
Att got hit too. Dupe sms everywhere. Neville, the T-Mobile CTO was kind enough to answer me asking on their prep for it. https://mobile.twitter.com/vvtgd/status/814654159614050304
Someday when everyone switches to Rust we can have a standard library that handles all of this and software bugs will be obsolete ;)
Isn't the idea of preparing for software development interviews ridiculous?Instead of improving my algorithms skills to become a better developer I find myself memorizing a ton of problems just so I can answer similar ones during interviews. It feels like I'm preparing for the SATs again.
Unfortunately, epoch time is not literally "seconds since epoch", at least not as implemented/standardized as "Unix time". It skips or repeats itself in case of leap seconds. So it can't save us here.

I think if there were such a thing as a different kind of epoch time that literally actually is "seconds since epoch" it would help a lot and work like you suggest.
This is awesome! I believe it was Bob Metcalf at PARC had a box in his office that would go 'click' when there was a collision on the network. At the time there was great debate that a network where packets could collide would ever be useful (the big competitor, token ring, use to harp on this endlessly). So he rigged it up to click when there were collisions. It sounded a bit like a geiger counter but the relevant bit was it did not sound like a buzz saw (all collisions all the time).

The idea of having a light go off when your network sees certain packets sounds like it could be an art project for a Raspberry Pi :-)
100 seconds per minute, 100 minutes per hour, 20 hours a day. New seconds are 0.432 old seconds, or whatever ratio they need to make to quit leaping around.
But they do care what GPS reference time is. Which are satellites very much dependent on holding an accurate position in the sky (which is dependent on the Earth's rotational speed, which changes, which is why we have leap seconds).

So go figure: which part of this system should be broken because people keep ignoring that leap seconds happen?
It's difficult to write bug-free code for events that happen very infrequently. Even more so when the distributed nature of the system makes effective testing under real-world conditions nearly impossible.
Finish working through 'AI - A modern approach'

Finish reading 'From AI to Zombies'

Get to a point with Rust that it's my go-to language for personal app development and general scripting. Super happy to see Rust feature so often on people's lists btw.

Get to a point with general Machine Learning understanding and proficiency that I feel I can usefully contribute to OpenAI work.

Build a retaining wall under my house, and have it still be retaining the things it's intended to retain come the end of the year...
Now I've got a stupid urge to write a SELinux policy for this so you can safely run it setuid (I need some practice anyway).
Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time (2010)
This is what we're working on over at Asteria. It's been fun and challenging. It's still early days, but we're running HITL feedback for model building as well.
I made a tendentious statement, but a 5 year lag on even that seems unlikely.
They forgot to calculate how many certificates on the Internet use 2017 as one of their primes :-)
Yes, I agree -- I am not referring to any specific implementations. Didn't know that about Unix time, but it makes sense for compatibility given the current way we adjust for leap seconds.
Awesome idea. Even if it is just "text my emergency contact" that could be really helpful in a pinch.
I used to have a simplistic religious belief and a "worldly" one, but over time they have converged into one thing.

My understanding is that everything in the known universe is subject to time and light. Light is subject to time.

Looking at the number of planets, the probability of life is very high, intelligent life, I don't know. The problem for me is that if aliens exist on say the Sombrero Galaxy, a planet that we could "see" would probably be extinct or much more evolved in our 2017 AD. The Sombrero is 29 million light-years away. If hypothetically intelligent life exists on Sombrero, and we can prove it; would we be proving its existence millions of years ago?

Given that the fastest thing in the universe is light, and as it has a measured speed, it's subject to time. I don't think we'll ever discover modern-day life forms. Even teleportation would somehow be subject to the speed of light. I was fascinated the day I learnt that we technically can't even leave The Milky Way because it's so huge! So how will we find aliens, or they find us?

This is of course a layman argument. If someone with knowledge corrects me, I'd be delighted to spend my morning reading and expanding my knowledge!
Seems like nobody would use it, because they needed 16 bit apps to work for legacy support.
Proved only for non-negative numbers! :)
CakeML – A Verified Implementation of ML
Unfortunately, we haven't even figured out how we're paying for our existing budget.

The nice thing about an adult UBI is that it doesn't distort the market as much as our other social programs, and if its introduction means the elimination of medicare, medicaid, social security, TANF, student loans, unemployment benefits, etc. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_...), then that's a win in and of itself.

Some of the distortions I'm referring to: TANF incentivizes having more children to get a higher payout, unemployment benefits incentivize staying unemployed longer, student loans increase demand for expensive tuition (and hence each increase in loans/aid results in a relative 60% increase in tuition), etc.

To work, UBI has to be truly basic (i.e. most people would not be satisfied living on it and seek some form of supplemental income), which is difficult because people will vote for the Bernie Sanders' of the world who want to raise it -- especially retired folks.

I would prefer a negative income tax that has inherent balance. I don't know of any good white papers, but I've given it a fair amount of thought. Consider a negative 'flat' income tax such that the rate above a certain point is X% (say 15% tax rate on income above 40K) and (100-2X)% refund (e.g. 100-2*15=70% refund on income below 40K, so if you make 30K you get a 7K refund). If the formula is constitutionally locked in, and only the rate is subject to change, then voters have less incentive to raise taxes because it decreases refunds. The only incentive I haven't figured out is how to avoid getting people to vote to raise the cutoff point for paying taxes/getting a refund. Perhaps it should be locked at the (100-4X)% percentile, so with the above numbers the poorest 40% of the population would not pay taxes, which would probably put the cutoff closer to 30K. All of these numbers are arbitrary, and for the examples I've given it would basically lock in rates of 10-20%.
Funny. I thought Python implemented all the quirks of the original printf()
formatting, including using arguments at specific positions. Apparently it
didn't (and arguably it's a good thing).

$ printf '%2$s %2$s %1$s\n' aaa bbb
bbb bbb aaa
Or maybe you're both right.
In my opinion, it's a settled question now. If you are looking for a job, you better cram these lists or you are dead meat. The screening tests and the interviews basically boil down to these set of questions for most of the companies.
Really? The last time I checked out Paint.NET it didn't even support alpha channels and masks; or at least it required a janky plugin to do it and a sort of pre-made channel bitmap. It was awful. Has this improved?
Wouldnt a lot of instances of 2016 be simply because of its use as the year "2016" instead of anything mathematical? I found 38K instances of 2015, 42K of 2013 and 39K of 2014. I am not familiar with OEIS so just asking.
It's a reasonably well known tool among most 3D artist communities. It does something of everything at this point. The downside typically stated is that the UX for modelling workflow in particular is alienating, and most folks have trouble coming to grips with it. Commercial and proprietary packages often edge it out on certain features, and there is tooling path-dependency in industry work that has given Autodesk a position similar to Adobe's position with Photoshop, only with an added layer of fragmentation across products due to buy-outs of competition. Regardless, Blender does get stronger every time I see it, and it's had more and more uptake.

(What I tend to do when I need a 3D thing is to model it in Wings3D, which is also free, and then import the OBJ to Blender to do anything else.)
> If the recipient made only $2,000 that year they would receive of a check of $1,000.

A marginal tax rate of 100% up to the NIT stipend? That doesn't sound like anything I've heard Friedman advocate. I'm not in a position to listen to audio right now, so I can't check the video...
The Python version is a great implementation with extremely fast speed, and the Rust version has no advantage in speed or functionality. But the Rust version has more possibilities, it don't need OpenSSL to support multiple encryption methods, so it would be easier to cross-platform.
Fun fact: the reason we use 60 seconds and 60 minutes is because of the Babylonians who used base-60. IIRC, it's also why we use 360° for a circle.
I'm not sure if that is intentional or not, but these type of algorithms certainly favor someone who recently learned about them but hasn't had the experience to forget them. Because they are already incorporated into every framework that would use them, they are more "code trivia" for someone 10 years out of school.
I didn't see an outage at all
This site is EXTREMELY popular in India, and used a lot by students AND interviewers (I know many who simply ask questions from the front page of G4G on a given day). It's the inverted tree equivalent in India.

I'm someone who was actually interviewed by GeeksForGeeks because a junior from college connected them to me (They do interviews with people who have gotten placed in * dream * companies... not my terminology).

In the interview, which was done over email, I actually mentioned that resources like G4G are bad resources for studying because they over-simplify algorithms and reduce them to silly proportions, and also encourage rote learning. To my surprise, they directly published the same ON THEIR SITE. Speaks volumes of their editorial team (?).
This article too has little basis in reality, but more of one guy's list.

I strongly suggest you use much better resources for learning algortihms, rather than this site, which is (by and large) the W3Schools of algorithms/data structures.
> "If the supporters of UBI think like this, I don't want to be anything like them"

Careful with this kind of reasoning. There are really dumb statements made on every side of every issue.
It's not a proof of anything, so it can't be adapted to the reals. Specialness has no rigorous mathematical definition, and certainly the second non-special number is not special, even if the first is. But more mathematically speaking, given a standard real number, there is no "next" real number. Induction is one of the defining properties of the natural numbers and it is induction that allows one to construct proofs that show that some property holds for all natural numbers by showing that if it holds for n, then it holds for the successor of n. On the other hand, if you assume the axiom of choice, the real numbers are well-ordered. So if there is at least one non-special real number, then there is a least non-special real number with respect to this ordering, which makes it special (assuming there is something special about this particular well-ordering). Unfortunately, no one can exhibit a well-ordering of the reals, so it's a little hard to judge if any of them are "special". On the other, other hand, it is humans that seem to decide if numbers are special, and there are finitely many humans writing finitely many papers and other communications, which are thus countable. This implies that for there to be any chance of all real numbers being special, there must be uncountable families of special numbers. Once one starts thinking along these lines, one might recognise that all real numbers are special, because they are real (and not more generally complex). I can't personally think of any uncountable sets of numbers that are more special than the reals, except perhaps the transcendental reals. On the other hand, these are basically just all the real numbers that aren't special enough to be algebraic. So they aren't very special, and certainly not more special than the natural numbers.
I second that. It's good to know what tools to use and why, but not necessary to know how to make the tools.
Once again we're screwed by different people wanting "time" to mean different things. There is no hope for humanity once we start traveling anywhere close to light speed into and out of the solar system.

I propose a new "non-time" time system. It has exactly two real values which range from 0 to tau and an integer, the first real number is radians of earth rotation, and the second is radians of the rotation around the Sun. The integer reflects the number of complete cycles. So lunch time in Greenwich 'pi'.

It has the benefit that its "source" is actually the planet, so we can use a telescope at Greenwich to pick a certain alignment of stars as the "zero", "zero" point and then each time it realigns to that exact point, you can increment the "year" count.

I believe we can build a robust system to support this out of stone. We'll need to create a circle of stones but using a small hole drilled through a stone and a marker on the ground we can always identify 0.0,0.0, 0.0,pi/2, 0.0, pi, and 0.0, 3*pi/2.
Well the first number that doesn't appear in OEIS is 18159. That make it interesting to me, but apparently this number isn't interesting to mathematicians.

Of course since OEIS is finite, there will always be numbers which don't make it. What's really interesting is that some numbers are disproportionately underrepresented. They appear much less often than other numbers of the same size. And if you plot each number by the number of times it occurs, it makes a really interesting pattern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YysNM2JoFo
One use is working out ideas when you're not sitting at a desk. You can easily carry around a small notebook which is much more usable than a phone for this. (If you have a favorite on-phone programming environment that's better, I'd like to hear of it.)
My WAG (all points are conjecture):

1) There's only one SATA port on the southbridge.

2) USB-SATA chips are cheaper than SATA port multiplier chips.

3) They needed a USB hub anyway for other stuff.
There is a higher order issue here. DNS time stamps have been stable for decades. Why has anyone written new code to format them since the last leap second?
Yes you are right. That's a huge mistake on my part. I fixed it by using the prefix "seq:2017" so it only matches sequences that contain that number, not the metadata.
FreeBSD has a bunch of not-especially-secure stuff in it, but it's generally assumed that you've read the manual and will harden and tune a system based on its role. As a project, it doesn't have "secure by default" as a primary goal in the same way that OpenBSD does (not to say that FreeBSD developers don't care about security, just that security isn't elevated above other concerns to the same degree).
No they aren't. CVE counts are completely meaningless is all.
I just did sudo rdate -s time-a.nist.gov
What if the stones move?
Does anywhere include countries that the USA has embargos (Cuba) with?
The WiiU hardware is previous generation class of hardware and nothing it uses would cost the price they sell it for. Same thing for the Wii at the time, it was never sold at loss.
But it is affected by leap seconds. According to the example labeled "Unix time across midnight
when a UTC leap second was inserted on 1 January 1999" the unix time went backwards. So using epoch/unix time does not help.
You would almost definitely be better off getting a slow cooker and doing meal prep on the weekends for the whole week.

Barring that since you are in Seattle, you can buy fairly healthy frozen stuff at Eat Local. There is one in Capitol Hill and I believe one in SLU.
Pixelmator is also fairly nice and relatively capable on an iPad. Just wish they would add support for 16-bit images and wide color on iOS.
If we somehow manage to "reverse" the Earth's orbit around the sun, does that mean we will have invented a time machine?!
You mean like https://cloud.google.com/ml/ ?
"Why Venezuela's Economy Survives" (under Chavez)

It won't. Big government and economy stability are incompatible.
Is it safe to say that time() in php and Date.now() in JS do not care about leap seconds?
Psychiatric medications have a way of making people die before their time.

Carrie Fisher: Bipolar Meds and Heart Disease - https://www.madinamerica.com/2016/12/carrie-fisher-bipolar-m...

They got Robin Williams too.
Overkill App for OS X
A friend of mine recently wrote this app, before she learned of Felix Krause and the Overkill ruby script. She named it Overkill as an homage to Felix Krause. I personally find it useful if anyone can help her out she going through a tough time. Give it some stars, and perhaps look at her gofundme page. https://www.gofundme.com/replacement-macbook-for-career-goal
From [1], it is likely messier than that:

> The time() function will resolve to the system time of that server. If the server is running an NTP daemon then it will be leap second aware and adjust accordingly. PHP has no knowledge of this, but the system does.

> It took me a long time to understand this, but what happens is that the timestamp increases during the leap second, and when the leap second is over, the timestamp (but not the UTC!) jumps back one second.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7780464/is-time-guarantee...
Postcards without handwriting are just email.

I'm not even a postcard lover, I send maybe one a year, but the one I will send is going to be personal. All the personality and expressiveness that you give to a written postcard is lost once you use a font. Even a really really nice one.
Fascinating video - the distribution seems likely related to the HN post from two days ago on multiple random processes being sufficient to generate Zipf's law distributions [0] (given the observation a couple posts above that the first number not in the list is 18159 and the steady average decrease in frequency with value there isn't really much difference between rank-ordering and value ordering here). That exponent they find sure looks Zipf like.

Oh, and happy new year's!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13281787
Guess we better use really large stones :-)
The world is not binary. Between 0 Tax and 100% Tax is a lot.
National economy is something completely different than business economy. The main difference is the tax cycle in national economy. A simplified example: If the city of Vienna spends 1 Euro in buying trams, this Euro goes to the company Siemens in Vienna building those. Siemens employs a Viennese worker getting this money.
42 Cent of this invested Euro comes back to the city as tax. And a small part of the new tram. And a better public transport because of this new tram. And a new company settling in Vienna because of it's superior transport system. And another part of the 1 EUR comes back again as tax of this new company. If clever done this cycle does not stop.

Asking for ROI of Vienna's infrastructure investments is as absurd as asking how much tax did a business get back from his investments.
> Once again we're screwed by different people wanting "time" to mean different things. There is no hope for humanity once we start traveling anywhere close to light speed into and out of the solar system.

Time is relative, you'll have the feeling of angst until you accept the relativity. No pun intended.
Verifications of all the statements using SageMath, in case you want to be convinced or explore further: https://cloud.sagemath.com/projects/4a5f0542-5873-4eed-a85c-...
Deluxe paint! Guybrush
Its interesting, on Xbox one gaming feels less and less of an afterthought. :)
Suppose that you lived in a world where aging didn't exist, and people typically lived for hundreds of years. (There would still be deaths due to accidents, violence, and occasional disease). And suppose it had exactly the problems you're imagining, where 800 year old oligarchs had accumulated lots of money and power and were preventing changes that younger generations wanted. Would your proposed solution be to release a virus that would gradually cripple everyone's bodies and minds over several decades before eventually killing them?
The mplayer keys work in VLC too, BTW.
Thank you so very much for the effort to elucidate the real problem hiding underneath the usual slew of Leap Second issues.

I keep telling people to use TAI. I once contemplated writing kernel code to rebate internal clock stuff to TAI but at the end of the day it was not worth doing because I would have needed to build a completely new stack of things above the kernel to use it in order to avoid problems.
Related: The YouTube and stream dump problem

https://events.ccc.de/2015/01/03/the-youtube-and-stream-dump...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattanhenge
The internal representations of Python's core types are indeed pointer-heavy ("graph model"), and Python also encourages making references. But Python is not used like C, nor is it used exactly like Lisp; one does not usually increment loop variables, nor base everything on linked lists. If you are writing programs which use NumPy or TensorFlow heavily, you might actually be relying more on parallel array representations.