skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SRE is a difficult role because you need someone with the mindset of a sysadmin and the skills of a programmer. So Google (at least used to) will hire one and hope to find the other half. As a result a large fraction of people hired into the position are not a fit. And Google had no mechanism to identify and rectify this common problem.

I am a programmer. I tend to dive into things in depth and context switching is unusually hard for me. A sysadmin needs to be able to operate on relatively limited knowledge and rapid context switching is par for the course. I was therefore a poor fit in that role.

After I left I was shocked at how many people I met who had known someone else whose story matched mine pretty closely. I would hope that Google has solved this organizational problem since. But rumor from those I know that are still there indicate that things have gotten worse over time, not better, so I don't think that it has.

However it was quite educational. I wish things had worked out differently but I definitely learned a lot that has served me well since.
I built a small veneer on top of ZFS and rsync that I've been running for well over a decade. It has worked flawlessly, mostly because it is so simple.

A few years ago I got my company to release the code: https://github.com/tummy-dot-com/tummy-backup

I use it almost exclusively with Linux systems, but it should work with anything that rsync does a good job with.

The hardware is mostly commodity rackmount boxes with 8-12 drives running ZFS (zfs+fuse or ZFSonLinux more recently). Deduplication takes a shockingly large amount of RAM, so mostly I disable it.

The job of tummy-backup is to schedule backups, prune older backups, and complain if something is wrong. There is also a web interface for creating backups, manually running them and managing them, and exploring and recovering files (via a downloaded tar file).

BACKSTORY

I was running a small dedicated hosting business, and we had hundreds of machines to back up. We started off with the old hardlink + rsync trick, but it had two problems: Append-only files would cause huge growth (log files, ZODB), and managing creating and deleting the hard links would take tons of time.

We tried backuppc for a while and liked it, but it still had the problem with append only files growing, and lots of our backups were taking more than 24 hours to run.

So I took my old rsync+hardlink script, which had proven itself really robust, it lives on in this file:

https://github.com/tummy-dot-com/tummy-backup/blob/master/sb...

I started using it on Nexenta when they had their free release. That was ok, but about once every month or two the boxes would fall over and have to be rebooted. I realized in retrospect this was probably due to not having enough RAM for deduplication or just not having enough RAM period. Or maybe bugs in ZFS.

But Nexenta wasn't something our staff had experience with. So I started testing it with fuse+zfs. This also had bugs, but the developers worked with me to find bugs, and I created stress tests that I would run, sometimes for months, to report problems to them. Eventually, this was pretty reliable.

Now I am running it with ZFSOnLinux, and that has been very stable.

I'd love to try it with HAMMER to get deduplication, but I just haven't had the cycles. btrfs was also on my radar but at the time I was really looking for an alternative to ZFS, btrfs had been getting more and more unusable (I ran it for a year on my laptop but then experienced several data corruptions every time I tried it for 2-3 years after that).

Recently I've been playing with borgbackup of my laptop. I was hoping I could use it as an engine to get deduplication, but it really is only designed for a single system use. For a single system it seems good.
Super-charging grep,sed,awk,etc
I also immediately thought of edit distance as the obvious metric, and it has a reasonably simple and efficient algorithm too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance

But then i realised that it was only obvious to me because i spent years hunched over a computer crunching DNA sequences.

I'd also be interested in normalising edit distance by length somehow. It's no coincidence that higher-scoring words tend to be longer.
I always get them without even asking (Europe). I never received a "diploma" however. Only transcripts of classes.
Apologies, I didn't explain my response very well.

You're totally right to say that in the context of TZSET, to load the timezone specification from a TZ-formatted file it needs to be prefixed with ':'.

Rather than saying "Technically, you should set the value of TZ to 'Europe/London'", I was trying to say that my philosophical opinion of timezone recording - whether in a CMS, on an O/S level, in a compiled app, etc - is that it should start with the standard of geographical location.

There might be occasions to augment that with other data, maybe including the UTC offset for that TZ at a particular time, but the TZ specification can be subject to frequent change, whilst a description such as "Europe/London" changes infrequently and seems to have the least ambiguity.
A JavaScript journey with only six characters
Corporations can defeat all browser based features by forcing their users to use another browser.
Yes, precisely. exp() is the mapping from so(3) to SO(3), so you can use log to go the other way around.

Here is the relationship with the other representations [1]

Where it becomes interesting for our rigid-body transform application (or recovery of it, in the case of computer vision), is with Twist coordinates (6 element vector) which will map to a 4x4 Transform, again using the matrix exp() operator [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis%E2%80%93angle_representat...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw_theory#Twists_as_element...
One is never fully educated until after the fact ;)
Something certainly happened around 1970-ish: https://www.mises.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/graph-1.png

Looks like 1st percentile wage growth stagnated right around 1970, but 99th percentile wage growth didn't start accelerating until around 1980 - right around when bond prices started rising again, after falling through the 70s. And they've been rising ever since.
Looks like Creator's Update will have 16.04: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/10/19/wsl-...
System calls in x86 are fast. Other archs behave differently. And the syscall time is not the only thing that matters, but potentially yielding execution
Having a college degree can be a requirement for work visas.
I moved to SF from Europe, and this would have been a real problem without a master degree.
Not sure about requirements for european visas, but that's probably true too.
Yeah, so it depends on the way they detect it. You can bypass anything, even Google SafetyNet with stock ROM + magisk + systemless Xposed + phh su and using Magisk Hide if you're determined enough.

CM ships pre-rooted - you just enable it in the settings, but the su binary is present and can be detected by any app looking for it. So that's a very common way to detect it on CM.
There are a lot of people who agree with you, but that's the easy part. The hard part is: how?

Who is it that determines which news is "real" and which is "fake"? The scientific establishment is a truly wondrous achievement of humanity, but it's not perfect and the idea that there are facts that are 100% verifiably completely obviously definitely true is just flat wrong (and a scientist or historian would be the first to tell you that!). There are plenty of "conspiracy theories" that turned out to be absolutely true (see: the intelligence community's activities throughout the Cold War, e.g. MKUltra). There are plenty of "well-known facts" from the past that we now consider nonsense (e.g., look at the 50s-70s and take your pick from all the things we "knew" about race, gender, and sexuality). I truly don't understand how people think that giving the status quo the power to enforce itself will somehow lead to a misinformation-free utopia. You can pick examples of these theories that (probably) don't have any likely value or credibility, but that's not very helpful without a plan for how exactly this would be separated from the stuff that has societal value.

(And all of that is ignoring the inevitability of the gatekeeper's selectively using this power to their advantage)
The Universe
I get so many obnoxious unsolicited recruiter emails that I have set an email autoresponder that triggers when the word "opportunity" comes in from someone I don't know. Here's the template:

-----

Hi,

I get a lot of messages like these. Since time is valuable, I promise to fully read your original email plus any job web pages that describe the opportunities you are hiring for for $100. You can paypal me at <your email here>.

For $500, I'll even do a coding exercise or come in for an onsite interview.

Cheers,

<Yournamehere>

-----
I think you have hit the nail on the head, the old ideas of left and right are soon to be obsolete. This current Trump/Brexit world may be the last hurrah of the luddites. What will be the point in labour rules, when everything is delivered by robot? How will Thatcher/Reagan low corporate tax economies fare when there are no workers paying tax.

I think it is time for a new politics that addresses globalisation, technology and the internet, but I fear it will take a calamity, and the death of the current political dinosaurs before it is a reality
Why do you act like this would be the most common thing in the world? It's certainly additional work and not really necessary for a HN launch, imo.
>It isn't a crime in the US, but I imagine that it is in the UK and many other countries.

Yes, the US truly is one of the last bastions of free speech, believe it or not. Many other countries, including my own, can imprison you for things you say.
A story about foreign tech workers now avoiding the US
RT is state-funded as is the BBC and PBS, among many others. But none of them are immediately dismissed as propaganda. Why? Simply because "it's Russia?"
TARP is signed by the Bush administration at the end of 2008. The money kicks in with Obama’s entry in 2009 and has ARRA added to it as he begins the herculean effort of digging us out of the Bush recession.

By 2016 the deficit is back down to 2008 levels. And that’s despite Ted Cruz’s shenanigans.
It could be that people telling others about such quests seem to fail in those quests. Not sure most people seeking therapy for issues greatly bothering them are going to tell you.
Why astronauts are banned from getting drunk in space
Slack uses the Linux audit subsystem which is also certainly faster than you think it is. Consider how many system calls your typical application is issuing --- especially ones that are likely to be calling localtime() all the time, such as a web server. If system call auditing had that high of an overhead, everything would be horrifically slow --- but it isn't, because Linux audit sends its records out asynchronously and in batches.
> I want to seamlessly run an occasional windows app in linux, and I would pay for it.

Please define "seamless" in this context.

If you mean that you want to have the running Windows apps appear as window in your Linux environment, VirtualBox has a Seamless mode that will do that. I haven't tried it, but what I find with Google seems to say it works as expected. VMware Fusion (on the Mac) has a similar mode called Unity. The VMware one seems to work well enough, but I haven't tried it extensively.

If you want to be able to open files in Windows applications from your Linux environment, I'm not sure if this is possible. VMware Fusion (on the Mac) has this - I can right-click on files in the Mac and see various Windows programs on the "Open With" list. I don't know if this feature exists on VMware for Linux, but it would be worth investigating. I'm not aware of an equivalent with VirtualBox.

Combined, these two features would probably give you the closest thing to a seamless environment that you can get.

If you just want to run Windows on Linux and are willing to put up with the friction of using a VM, VirtualBox does a decent job and makes it fairly painless.
Maybe it has had its day. It influenced the mindset of the masses and is now mainstream. There is no alt anymore. Even Microsoft ships software that leverages newtonsoft.json
A major use for GPU in the cloud is not being limited to the 8-12GB(ish) limits of enthusiast cards. There's similar processing performance, and the ability to store all you need in memory is a much closer reality to why these cards go for $5k
Just 4 miles from Center City, a heroin hellscape hidden in plain sight
Well, I suppose they could alter and hand compile one as well, but there is a point where the work would exceed the value provided. It's too bad, from my perspective, that HPKP won't help with this issue.
Michigan Tech uses a former Ford company town as a field camp.

http://www.mtu.edu/forest/fordcenter/
I imagine banked money isn't taxed, but any spent would be, so every expenditure shoots up a bonus 20-40% relative to the value of just leaving it alone. Which means any revenue has to match, and exceed, the tax to actually be profitable (versus sitting on it)

Same way, I think, apple keeps $800bn unspent; not spending is simply more profitable than spending

And i guess at that level of money, its generally not worth doing much unless its big (due to all the overhead necessary to keep such funds available and tracked).
I generally disable all "web access protection" or similar. then again, on windows, I find that Windows Defender (since 10 includes the MS AV product) is good enough. I do use ublock origin and ghostery in my browsers though.

Most of the web interceptor products break things in very interesting ways (as do ublock and ghostery), the difference being it's far easier to tweak a browser plugin. These AV companies should be browser plugins not a local reverse proxy.
I disagree.

1) NYT, WSJ and Economist are one of the few orgs that can actually get away with a paywall. They might just sit behind a regular paywall even if pay-per-click were the norm.

2) Other news orgs are driven by ads - ergo their income is tied to clicks already. So they're already highly incentivized to produce click-bait.

3) If news orgs can actually make more money - they will produce less click-bait. They are 'for profit' but staffed almost entirely by people that want to do 'real news'. There are almost no serious editors who actually want to do 'click bait'. They do it because they are forced to by terrible economic conditions.
It's still misplaced anger, because the GOP refuses to expand medicare or to allow collective bargaining to push costs down. Voting GOP because Obamacare is mediocre makes no sense because the GOP has no intention (and literally no plan) to fix any of the problems with Obamacare.

Besides, the towns with 30k average income didn't vote for Trump, they voted overwhelmingly for Clinton. Trump did well in middle America among 70k household income families.

There is also a large gap between how angry people are at Obamacare and at the American Care Act. They're the same thing, of course, but only Obamacare makes people seethe with rage. So clearly the GOP has been successful in poisoning the healthcare debate.
for developers, i think in some ways it hurts you if you had college experience. and drop out students are considered accolades in a bizzarre way. sad but true.
>> "Bear in mind that no real left wing policies or media platforms exist in the US"

Newspapers in the US are overwhelmingly and verifiably leftist[0].

Out of the 46 major newspapers in the US, 41 of them endorsed Hillary Clinton for President, several endorsed Gary Johnson, and only 1 endorsed Donald Trump. [1]

[0]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/clinton-leads-trump-and...

[1]: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/clinton-trump-ne...
Coal Jobs and the Power of a False Premise
This reads to me like a glibc bug. Glibc should just be watching "/etc/localtime" for changes, rather than calling out to hundreds of times a second.
> But they like their way of life, they don't want yours, and want politicians to generally leave them alone and let them be.

Umm - they want to be left alone, let be, let them live their lives where they are, yet they are complaining about not being heard...

...can you have it both ways?
> Avoiding WWIII is in both companies and the publication intrest.

So is avoiding ecological collapse e.g. by depleting all natural resources. Yet, for each actor individually, person or company, there are higher incentives to harvest from the commons. This is a called 'tragedy of the commons'. Most popular economic strategies and certainly most corporations act in their own interest.

In the case of Facebook and fake news, that means doing whatever yields more advertising revenue.
Neither am I. Ruminating on how we are deficient is no path to happiness or balance. Exercise, eat right, volunteer to serve others who are down and out, learn something new, work toward a purpose or goal, and if necessary, get pharmaceutical help, because for some no lifestyle or conduct can help enough.
I do not agree. It's nice to have options, but one doesn't not need, and practically speaking cannot take advantage of, infinite options.

If maximizing the number of doors opened were the best choice, then a logical extension to "Do Developers Need College Degrees?" is "Do Developers Need A CS Degree From <'best' CS school(s)>?" Clearly they don't. When we're given infinite time, energy, and other formerly finite resources, I might feel differently.
It means that you don't have to bother with IT if you want to install an App, for example.

Many company provided phones are locked down completely, you can't install or upgrade anything yourself.
There are non-legacy non-mainframey modern RDBMS you know!

Hopefully I don't need to point out the very well publicised and ongoing efforts to revamp the .NET CLR and peripheral items to run on non-Windows systems.
> hopefully the people in need of therapy consult with professionals

If your health care system gives you the option, that is.
I'm someone who graduated with a non-cs engineering degree (and worked professionally as an engineer) whose now in a MSCS program after trying my hand in the job market. Not for a lack of trying, but my experiences definitely relate to an uphill struggle just to get even noticed. And before anyone says "you should do x|y|z", I've done my part pretty well. A few decent sized personal projects, constant studying, meetups, networking, github, etc.

I hear a lot of anecdotal evidence (mostly from professional devs who have degrees) that they know a friend or coworker who doesn't have a degree.

The truth is that the system for recruiting and hiring is really based around colleges, students, and degree holders. Starting from the application requirements, you see that most applications require a CS degree (or equivalent). Then the technical interview is aimed at fundamental CS questions, most of which students are accustomed to.

So for someone self taught, face to face interactions are a lot better. But even going to events/meetups, you notice a distinct change in demeanor of the recruiter when you mention you don't have a CS degree. It really is a tiring battle just to prove that you're competent.

Do I believe that you 100% need a degree to get a CS job? Definitely not. But without one, your options are very limited and on top of that you'll need a lot of luck and effort just to get past the first hurdle.
You mean the great advances in Deep Learning we keep reading about did not revolutionize search? Still PageRank?
>So 57,000 are worse devs then you ? This is what i hear from your statement, correct me if I am wrong ..

He never said they are worse.

>Many extremely talented people want to work for Google.

"Most people do/think XYZ."

Do I have to explain why that's not a good argument?

>They will take the tests, even if they don't agree with the hiring system at all.

Other people don't mind shitty treatment, so what?
I tend to run in to more critical issues than performance, like shipping the product/feature at all, meeting deadlines, writing maintainable code, and writing documentation.

In your highlighting example, instead of working with someone who will optimize, I'd much rather work with the guy who will realize we can just debounce the dialog, write a one line comment about the performance issue, and then move on to the next thing.

Maybe I'm biased though. I've worked with the performance guy; he was brilliant and the code was clever and highly performant, but he was also slow and didn't write clear, maintainable code. We didn't ship in time and I had to find a new job when the project got scrapped. Damned if it wasn't fast though.
Does anyone else find it kind of odd that Google, a company famous for having no human support at all anywhere who shuts down any attempts at contacting a human within its ranks for support on ANY of their products or services, always seems to deploy a small army of senior tech people to answer questions every time there is an article posted on HN. Strange double standards afoot, some users matter, others not so much.
Faker.js v4 demo with new APIs and 30+ locales
I was reminded of this advice from Ryan Holiday--

Reading to lead or learn requires that you treat your brain like the muscle that it is–lifting the subjects with the most tension and weight. For me, that means pushing ahead into subjects you’re not familiar with and wresting with them until you can–shying away from the “easy read.” > https://ryanholiday.net/read-to-lead-how-to-digest-books-abo...
Maybe I'll be down voted for speaking against the grain, but one of the benefits of someone who has the degree is that you know they have some minimal grasp of the basics (yes, there are exceptions) which make adapting to changes in the tech stack or industry practices less painful.

One of the obstacles with he thing hired out of the coding schools is that employers don't know even if you're "current" that you aren'the just equipped for their ephemeral needs.
The idea of "open source" is also unique, I can't think of any other professions that have something analogous.
The Institute for Figuring
The fix here is to reduce demand. By fining companies which hire illegal immigrants we'll make it cheaper to hire american.