skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> For argument's sake, suppose it is fair to ask such questions. What happens if you code the problem out in Java but it doesn't match the official answer written in Python?

I doubt the question would be framed like that. They probably hired real engineers to write the questions and then tested if those work properly on other real engineers.
Whether it's "par for the course" or not, this requires us to trust that every immigration officer in service is enough of an expert in every field of endeavor to A) come up with relevant questions and B) judge quality of answers.

The likelihood of that being true is incredibly low. What's worse, we know that typically people specialize within fields; a kernel hacker probably knows nothing whatsoever about using Ruby on Rails, but that might be the question the border agent googles up (or the web dev might get asked about kernel APIs).

Plus: making excuses for this makes you complicit in whatever evil it begets, so maybe you should stop making excuses for it.
I'm getting the impression that your comment implicitly endorses airport personnel [edit: immigration officers] attempting to find out if people "fake" their occupation. I don't think that wasn't your intention, but that's how the comment looks like, to me.

And people reading it might not like that, because airport personnel in general are (I think) likely to do lots of mistakes, if they start trying to verify people's occupations. So traveling somewhere, wold become like rolling a dice — bad luck dice roll = go home again (you happened to meet the wrong & incompetent personnel at the airport). (I didn't downvote.)
I am beginning to think there must be something about Ruby that poisons the mind in this way.

There is nothing (major) wrong with Forth, Lisp, or Python syntax, and if you think there is, it's just a prejudice that is slowing you down. Stop being so delicate and get over it.
One of my math professor (Canadian) once told us a story (~10 years ago) that the US border control asked him to "state and prove Rolle's theorem" after he had told them he was traveling to a math conference. Apparently he answered "it's something to do with the mean value theorem, right?" and that was good enough.
Yes, and also tax evasion and fraud.
Sure I've seen you on reddit
There's no one in this thread blaming Trump. Your points stand well enough without needing to invoke what 'people' are saying - perhaps that is why the downvotes?
One of the recent stories indicated border agents were literally comparing answers against a Wikipedia article; if you didn't have the answer in the Wikipedia article, you were wrong.

This would be in line with, for example, how Google does early-stage screening -- non-technical people are given a sheet of questions, and if you give an answer that's not verbatim what's on the sheet you're "wrong" and "not qualified" (see http://www.gwan.com/blog/20160405.html).
By the time languages have the DWIM feature, AI already took the whole job.
I have never been in the US, but I always thought it's the personnel in embassies who are educated/qualified to check and (in)validate my visa documentation. Once on a border, they will only check that I'm not carrying anything illegal, and that's it.

But the idea that my education/knowledge/experience will be checked again, that's weird to me.
Best String Manipulation Tool
Yes, the .svl file is a single layer from the session format, in XML. (The session format is itself an XML file, but compressed with bzip2 compression.)

One thing SV does lack is a layer file format that can easily be interchanged between SV itself (for label alignment) and a text editor (for bulk text changes). Neither is there any built-in text editor for editing the whole content of a text transcription at once. I suppose this has to do with the initial focus being on music rather than speech, and having no particular desire to "compete" with Praat.
I guess he meant to boot the whole thing, which means kernel plus userspace.
Back when MOSA got created, we were aiming for a pure approach.
For example, we were trying to use as few intrinsics as possible and a mostly architecture agnostic approach.

Furthermore we also focussed on Mono compatibility (that was way before CoreCLR came out).

Source: Ex co-creator of MOSA
Oh wow, it reads like what I would have written as my story reads the exact same as yours.
How is the CBP official supposed to know the actual answer if they haven't been to software engineering school?
You are (at length) confounding Trump's express statements prior to the election that he might not accept the results, with those of others to ensure that the results were trustable.

Verifying a process isn't casting doubt on it.

(Blocking attempts to verify it, as the GOP has repeatedly done, including the 2000 election's split and partisan SCOTUS decision, on the other hand, very much does.)

And the fact is that Clinton did not seek and did not assist the few election recount efforts which were made, at the insistence and initiation of Jill Stein. Clinton's campaign did provide observers to that process, but AFAIU didn't otherwise participate significantly.

(A category error on her part, in my opinion.)

You have (and repeat here) miscategorisation of the state of concern over Russian interference in the election process, though not in the election mechanics. Distinguishing process as propaganda, media manipulation, and voter manipulation through the media, and mechanics as the process of vote collection and tabulation itself.

There are numerous other ways in which votes and elections can be, and are, influenced, including gerrymandering (not a factor in US presidential or Senate elections, but very much so in US House, statehouse, and local elections), and voter suppression through elegibility (e.g., felons' loss of voting rights over their entire lifetime), suppression (ID and registration systems), and the location and outfitting of polling places (requiring hours of wait or miles of travel to vote), and support or rejection of automatic or late registration, or of voting by mail.

Your participation in this thread hasn't particularly enhanced your own credibility.
I've been asked my profession a number of times on entering the US (as a visitor - not on a work permit). I'm an electrical engineer, but my response is usually just "engineer". Electrical engineering is such an incredibly broad profession, including everything from chip designers to radio engineers to power systems. Just how many quizzes is CBP going to have design to cover every branch of my profession and not deny an antenna designer entry because he doesn't know anything about power transformers?
I've also been asked for my occupation, and then my business card, and then my website – which they actually started browsing as I was standing there in the passport control. This was back in 2009.
Ditto. I can walk to the restroom and my QC35 don't disconnect. 15+m, 2 walls (all tile bathroom walls) in between. Not so much as a crackle.
I was always taught to use X-height, personally. It's a very reliable means for sans serif.
It's for Perl 5 only.

I am wondering about the adoption of Perl 6.

Can somebody speak about his/her experience on switching from Perl 5 to Perl 6? For what use cases would learning Perl 6 make sense if you never worked with Perl 5.

Seems that "Perl 6 from scratch might be [1], or [2] if you need "a lightweight Perl 6-like environment for virtual machines".

As I already googled it, [3] is the (last ?) HN "Why hasn't Perl 6 taken off yet?" article since 118 days. Did something change since?

[1]: https://perl6.org/getting-started/

[2]: https://github.com/perl6/nqp

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12888784

EDIT: formatting
Sure, but imagine all you knew was C++, which is true for many people. Several hundred lines of code right there. I'm a hiring manager, given questions like this and seen that exact result. Remember that many people cannot solve fizzbuzz.
We are being racist here and are assuming that being australian means being predominantly caucasian white.
Key piece of missing information that is not in the article but is linked to it: he was entering as a tourist, not on a work permit. The guy just wanted to tour around New York for a week, not work under a specialized visa.
Why would the airport managers [edit: I mean immigration officers] be able to find engineers who can devise good tests? Why would they be able to find the right people to verify the tests on?

IMO companies have a hard time finding talented software developers. I'd expect the airport managers [edit: immigration officers] to find not-very-competent people who come up with the very wrong tests.
They just need to see your reaction not your answer.
Vacant Homes Are a Global Epidemic, and Paris Is Fighting It with a 60% Tax
I am not surprised by this. When I was at Newark the conversation with immigration guy was something like this:

Him: What do you do?
Me: I am an entepreneur.

Him: Haha, ... we are all entepreneurs, now really, what do you do?
Me: Websites

Him: I've heard there is a Sillicone Valley in Russia and they want to take over that ours.
Me: Um, okay. (I am from Czech Republic)
I think lots of people on this thread are missing the point. This won't necessarily detect a determined spy who's done their homework. It's not meant to. It's a quick and effective sanity check to make sure that a person hasn't fudged their visa credentials and they're well in their rights to ask and exercise their discretion. They've been doing it for years.

I doubt a perfect answer to their trivia question is required. If it's in your field you'll be able to say something halfway intelligent in response, if you've lied on your visa it will become obvious pretty quickly.

Outrage about confiscating phones and demanding passwords is justified. This, on the other hand, seems pretty reasonable.
Learn to love the language you feel most comfortable with and develop some great things with it. Become excellent with the language you love.

I love PHP. I think it is underrated and most people and companies prefer Ruby or Python. Those are great languages.. but PHP can do just as much. So I know some Python.. I could probably switch and write code in it, but I just prefer to code in PHP. As for Ruby, I longed to learn it, spent some time understanding it and while it is okay, my preference just returns back to PHP.

Sure, it is best to learn the languages in demand, but I'm strong and proficient in PHP. Why not stick with what I love?
That's the network transformers. Homes usually get single-phase 230V, while larger users get three-phase 400V.
Sometime in the past couple of years, Bluetooth turned into magic.

It went from something that had range measured in inches, constant static, incessant pairing headaches.. to something with incredible range, throughput, and connectivity.

I've got a Tivoli Audio bluetooth speaker from about 2009 that's maddening to use. I have to switch bluetooth on and off on my phone, and switch the device on and off about 10 times before I get the dreaded "failed to connect" doesn't pop up, and it actually finds the damn thing.

But now my iPhone's connected to my fitbit and apple watch all day long, can send usably high datarates to the watch (hell, it can even show the live camera viewfinder from my phone on the watch screen!), and has multi-wall-penetrating range. When I hop in my car and flip off my headphones, the music or phone call picks up on my car's audio system almost seamlessly. It's really amazing.
Because they contacted me and offered me to participate in the
recruitment process, and while I don't look for a job, I'm not against
checking where this can take us?
I don't think I would have been able to do that as a teen.
I agree your comment was unduly downvoted—the article mentions Trump, so I don't think your mention was unreasonble given the context. It's an otherwise interesting comment.

That said, any time people complain about downvotes, it simply begets more downvotes. Best to just wait it out in the future; downvoted comments which are substantive—especially in a new thread—have a very high probability of being upvoted again. It's usually a non-issue.
FWIW my understanding is, the support only sucks on the "paying for ads" side of things. Advertisers, the ones bringing money in, not the ones taking it out, receive extremely good service.

Makes sense, if you're cynical
Forgot to add, I recently bought some Outdoor Tech Chips bluetooth speakers for use in my ski helmet. The damn things lost connection with line-of-sight and about 3ft between my head and my phone in the pocket. If I sat down, they dropped. If I turned my head right instead of left, they crackled and stuttered. It felt like 2002 all over again. Returned, replaced with Sena Snowtalk.
Ask HN: Outsourcing support for small companies
My company has had to miss out on a couple of juicy government tenders lately because we're unable to provide support 7 days a week. Hiring people to sit idly by a phone seems silly, and obviously expensive.

Does anyone have any (positive..) experiences with outsourcing support? What caveats should we look out for? Thanks!
I feel like going back to Java (swing) would be a better choice...
Thank you for posting this, it explains why I wasn't able to check my Meetup for tomorrow AM from my browser.

Also, am I weird for thinking that this feels like a good way for Meetup to get bought by Amazon, seeing as they're now most of the infrastructure?
As a reference:
http://neurosciencenews.com/lymphatic-system-brain-neurobiol...
Show HN: An extension that allows you to customize the GitHub
I am from Europe and here (Austria) you definitely need to hook it up with two phases and we get 230V at a 16A breaker.
Why Finnish Students Do So Well on PISA Exam
There's plenty of professions a con can claim without this problem: an uber/taxi driver, hotel receptionist, child tutor, retail worker, farmers market vendor, stay at home parent, a convenience store, valet, or gas station attendant, a mall cop or bouncer at a bar...

This is classic security theater. Inconveniencing legitimate people while leaving gaping holes for any actual crook to exploit.

In politics and bureaucracies, orchestrating a perception is more important than instrumenting a reality.
That is absolutely not the case where I live (Austria). You get multiple phases into your home, at the very least to garage and kitchen.
Its tl/dw I guess
An acquifire, wth??
> “What is the best lense for close ups?”

It's just point and shoot really.
I too thought synapses clean themselves during deep sleep, just not that we'll understood.
And as far the lymph system + brain article(0) links =>(0) 2015 https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lymphat...
George Saunders: what writers really do when they write
>We are being racist here

No we aren't. Racism is when you discriminate against a person due to their skin color. We're not discriminating against anyone.
Singapore is missing in the map
Wait, I thought the expiration date was just theoretical. Nobody keeps the same card number that long without having the card compromised, do they? :)
> One cannot but wonder what happens if you answer the question in a different manner than that suggested by Wikipedia or whichever resource the CBP draws their questions from.

They're looking at your overall attitude, not checking your knowledge of trivia. Answering the question about inverting a binary tree wrongly still means you understand what "binary tree" is and can at least come up with a couple of sentences with that term that sound coherent and resemble what is written in Wikipedia in broadest terms. For comparison, ask your non-engineering friends to answer the same question, even to try to fake an answer as best as they can.
I always found the cold, hard manner of border agents in the US quite off putting in general.

Last year I was fortunate enough to attend AWS Re:Invent, standing in the queue at McCarran airport, I saw the guard laughing and joking with the people in front of me so I thought ah, maybe they're all not like this!

As soon as it came to me the guy completely changed, he went cold, he spent the most amount of time asking why I'd ticked "business" on my customs form, as I didn't know what to tick, then proceeded to ask me what conference I was going to and what it was about and why I was attending. I know that's his job and he's just making sure everything lines up, but it just felt unwelcoming.
They aren't airport personnel. They are immigration officers.

What I read in the last thread about an incident like this was that they are less interested in the actual answer and more in how you respond. I guess mannerisms can give away things.

I know the last time I was pulled aside in US customs and had them go through all my stuff at one point I said, "Sorry, I'm just a little out of it." And one of the agents immediately said, "Why?" I said, "Because I've been traveling for over 24 hours now." Apparently that was good enough but I think they are trying to look for things in people's behavior that may be off.

And it's not like this is just a US thing. My last visit to the UK I was asked quite a few questions about why I was there, where I would be, what I'd do, etc. I've got a Hungarian residence permit and if I'm entering Schengen in Hungary they never ask me anything but if I come in through different place - Schipol most often, it's not unusual for them to ask me stuff about myself, what I do, etc.

My last visit to Ukraine a few weeks ago, when I check into my hotel they made a copy of my passport information page and then had me find the stamp I'd gotten at the airport and they copied that. I know that's not the government guys but that was a new one for me. I'm used to giving passport info. for checking into a hotel but I've never seen them do that. Each place is different and to me it's all just a matter of degrees.
I love these kind of articles. For some people it might be a waste of time, but to me is really good to see such amazing willingness to discover the problem. I am tempted to get a pair of AirPods, not totally sure yet, but if in the future I will get one, I will definitely remember this post in case I have troubles with them.

Well done!
School. Or Education?
A few days ago a Nigerian software engineer was asked to balance a BST at JFK airport: https://twitter.com/cyberomin/status/835888786462625792
> Most of this should be done by the consular at the embassy when you apply for the visa

Australians don't apply for a visa at a consulate, they're a part of the Visa Waiver Program.
anybody knows if the scoped modifier is going to make it from m# into c#? that would be great...
This may have been par for the course in the past, but the threat has moved on some time ago. Most of the 9/11 hijackers, we're talking 2001, were professionals with advanced technical degrees. Several of them had PhDs. Asking these questions may help with an imagined problem, but I suspect the value is limited in practice.

And it being par for the course does not excuse Trump from blame for having his departments use it in an arena where it has been proved ineffective.
9p as in Plan 9 from Bell Labs? I only use that from LiveCD - and mostly as a goof and a basic test for a machine.
Coincidentally this appeared on BBC news today http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39169313
> Testing occupational expertise is not a bad way to find people who are lying.
> To be able to explain the difference between kernel 2.4 and 2.6 APIs or how
> to balance a binary search tree are questions one could not possibly answer
> without actually being in that profession.

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

Edit: formatting
it's nothing like interview questions, just "hey so what did the 30y bond was headed last week?". Or "So should I buy stocks?".

Probably just to check whether I would start crying and confess I didn't know a thing about finance.

They also asked my wife if she knew all my first names (I have 4!).

But yeah they definitely asked some occupation-related questions.
During the election, Trump Rally's always sold out of tickets(free so not sold) so as soon as they became available I requested the max per email(2) on several email accounts. They went to spam on my Google apps for business and Gmail accounts. I signed up to do campaign calls, they went to spam. Newsletters, spam. He became the president and sent updates - spam. (Whitehouse.gov) email. I manually whitelisted every single time. Parents inauguration invitation reminders - spam. Not to mention there are reports from all over the country of inauguration invitations showing up as much as a month after the event.(USPS) Weird. I guess the Gmail thing didn't really surprise me, seeing as Eric Schmidt was on Hillary's team and shared resources...
"He no longer requires a transfusion so we are quite pleased with that"

I like that language so much more than, than the increasing THIS IS AMAZING, SO AWESOME, WHAT WE GREAT GUYS ACCOMPLISHED!!!
even though it would fit here much more, than in the usual context people use it fore ...
I've had the same experience for the most part with a few exceptions. It's unfortunate and I'm not sure about the root cause but you are right. Of course I've met a lot of immigration/customs officials from around the world who are also pretty intimidating. I wonder if the job attracts people who enjoy having this kind of power over people. Or if maybe after getting the job, they are changed by knowing that they can very easily, on a whim, make life very hard for someone.

What bothers me more than the US immigration and customs people are the security employees - TSA. I've seen many more of them be well past cold. They are often rude. I've seen them yelling at visitors to the US who are just trying to get through security and obviously don't speak English well. The kicker is when the TSA person doesn't speak proper English themselves and are obviously not very well educated.
What's the use of the point if it stops u from expressing your opinion without racial bias.
I've always wondered about this, but given how slow WiFi connects I assumed it impossible. But with this new information....

You're saying that in a train, if I do a track once and connect to every open network (assuming no captive portal) and obtain DHCP offers, thereby obtaining IP subnet information and being able to guess an unoccupied IP address later, I can connect to the networks on my way back and get responses from a remote server to one or two packets?

Say there is about 20m of track where a given router is in range (train won't be running that close to the building and there is a wall in between) and we're doing 130km/h, that gives me about 20/(130/3.6)=0.56 seconds of range time. A server within the same country (the Netherlands) is usually <40ms RTT on any network, so PHY+SYN+data+responses = 10+40+40=90ms, easily in range of 560ms. A tricky part is knowing when I'm in range (I shouldn't wait for a beacon), but with GPS and triangulation of beacons it shouldn't be hard to figure out where each AP is and when I'm in range. Worst case I have to do the track a few times to get enough beacons to see where signal starts and stops.
I've read somewhere that, if border controls were abolished, about a billion people from all across the world would move to the US. I'm guessing that, since people already want to come to US pretty badly, being welcoming is not a high priority for border personnel.
But I bet it wasn't as exciting as this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ6g_TcevCE

unedited/better video: https://youtu.be/7p6hqMnsLFY?t=81

(As a pilot: that one was a super pisser, the upper Cessna flew into the lower one and punctured the wing, rolling it over his engine, nothing the lower guy could have done. Thankfully the lower guy was wearing his seat chute (required on these kind of ops) and the upper guy (who wasn't wearing his required seat chute) managed to survive)
With "I'm in autonomous robotics." I also got never follow-up questions...

I think enough specialization also protects you against the standard questions on file.