skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's common, and that's part of the tactic, to see if you're lying. Not based on your answer, but based on your reaction.

In 2004, I wanted to drive to Canada with a friend. She was from out of town and hadn't brought her passport. I wanted to go anyway, so I just left my passport at home as well and drove up there anyway. (I remember the pre-9/11 days and figured, no big deal, even though they CLAIM you can't get back into the US without one).

The border agent coming back into the US asked us each a rapidfire series of questions meant to throw you off.

"Where were you born? How long did you live there? What's the major industry in that town?" All quickly, before you even really had a chance to finish your answer.

After asking us each a few questions he just smiled and thanked us and waved us through.
I second this, I love using Lua tables as a data description language.
Evil?

Getting hassled by immigration is evil?

You should travel with my Albanian friends. Apparently every immigration person in the world is evil.
You mean hiring overseas?
As to the last part, if people are sufficiently determined, you're in for a hard time, anyway. A 30-second screening at the border is pretty good at sorting out the Epsilon minus semi-morons, though. (Whose numbers, one would suspect, vastly outdoes the really determined ones.)

As for false negatives, I wouldn't be too concerned as long as you got to talk to someone reasonably well versed in your field. Also, as suggested by golergka and rconti - they probably use the questions as a way to elicit a response from you and judge that, more than your actual answers. That makes a lot of sense to me, now that I pause to think of it for a second.
How Pencils Are Made (2016)
One example would be the tepid responses of most governments to having ships flying their flag hijacked in the Gulf of Aden. The first time a US-flagged ship was hijacked, well, the result became a Tom Hanks movie because the US government responded with overwhelming military force.

Pretty much any instance where the military has been sent in to rescue a country's nationals abroad is limited to the countries that have that kind of military capability, the ability to deploy it rapidly and the willingness to use it. Examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barras
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/9...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_8969
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Peacemaker_hostage_c...

Is this to say that the US or UK will always rescue its citizens abroad? No. But there are types of rescues that only the US, UK, France, and maybe Russia are capable of mounting.
> We reached out to all members of the city council prior to the public hearing...

I was on your side. But now you've contacted Four-Tops-Itis, I don't care anymore.
I was arguing for the existence of some conception of free will in a deterministic world (i.e. compatiablism).

Specifically, I was arguing against the definition of free will where someone has a choice in the sense of 'they could have done something else'. This gets into a harry discussion about what 'could' means.
Ive met my fair share of talented developers on the aspergers/autistic spectrum. While technically sound, they seem to lack the ability to react to time sensitive situation and hack things together in a short timeframe. Also, the best code might not necessarily be the best option. Its okay to push imperfect solution and let junior developers make mistakes so they can learn and grow.
True for travel, but I was more thinking work visa and other visas. I understand the article is about someone who was able to utilize the Visa Waiver Program, but this has pretty broad reaching consequences period if it's a unilateral policy.
The last two Homework assignments I got took about 50% longer than the hiring person suggested they would take.

I'm perfectly competent at writing complex code. In fact I'm usually the guy who fixes bugs or perf issues that nobody else believes exist.

A problem you came up with on your own is going to seem simpler to you than to everyone else. Why? Because you thought you picked it at random but your subconscious picked the one it thought was good. In other words, you picked the one you were already primed to answer, and it seemed simple.

So either people are going to work at it longer, the timid will give up (there's nothing wrong with timid coworkers as long as they have someone to listen to them), and the brash will get it done in the time allotment by cutting corners.

Are those the people you were trying to hire? Because that's who you're gonna get.
I guess they do that to not get a "connection" with the person in question. On the opposite, a technique to win someone over fast is to be nice and open about yourself from the beginning although you don't know him at all. If you like someone you might let slip something through (without even realizing it).
I base this opinion on my experience with grading students. Some people can get really good at it. I do it aswell so I know what to look for and try to avoid being "too nice".
Yeah's the big driver otherwise it'd be moot.

I think most everyone that tried introducing diesel aero engines in the early 2000's went bankrupt. Which actually isn't the end of things as long as the business is sound.
The Police Is Hunting Down Stolen Porsche
You've got some crazy spacing issues going on there, with your 'apostrophe-S's

The funniest thing in any propaganda photos released by NK are all the toadies in the background, dutifully scribbling down every pearl of wisdom that falls from the Great Leader's mouth.

The country must be full of lovingly preserved notebooks, full of pronouncements like "Oooh. It's a bit nippy out today, isn't it?" and "Where's your canteen? I could murder a bacon buttie!"
Likewise. This thread is the first time I've even heard of it and I've traveled on my H1B fairly often. None of my friends have ever had this happen either.

When I enter the US, it's always hand over passport, put fingers on scanner, accept passport and walk on.
> What if a company offered to pay you a day's wages, or something reasonable still (if it's less than that)?

I did an assignment like that for a company once, I'm still waiting for the money for more than one year...
Metasploit Team Released Metasploit Vulnerable Services Emulator
This is the sort of people who according to Libertarians are of no use to society because their work doesn't have economic value and nobody would be willing to pay for.
How many local jobs are lost due this? How much is paid to Redmond instead of local companies who pay taxes in Munich?

I think FSFE is doing a bad job reminding politicians and the public about that.
I have already mailed them but no reply from last 4-5 days...
> What happens when you swipe a credit card

People look at you funny for not knowing how a credit card has worked for the last 30+ years. Here chips got introduced mid-80's and all cards had chips circa early-90's.

Why did it take so long for credit card to feature chips in the US ? Because it took a while for CIA's in-q-tel to take over control of gemplus, the company who owned the smart card technology, which happened early 2000's. This is known as "l'affaire gemplus". Once they got control, the company HQ got moved to luxembourg tax haven and the R&D and tech moved to the US. A few years later in 2006 it merged with competitor axalto to form gemalto famous for making SIM cards and recently for their SIM crypto getting in NSA hands[1]. In 2009 french government tried to counter the takeover by becoming gemalto's major shareholder, but it was too late, CIA got what they were after as shown by in-q-tel selling its shares in 2010 which coincidentally was the years EMV credit card got introduced to the US.

[1]: https://theintercept.com/2015/02/19/great-sim-heist/
Yes, but then that helps down in narrowing down the focus in border control. If you are arriving in US and declare "I plan to work as a taxi driver" or "I'm coming as a hotel receptionist", but you lack the appropriate work permit, it's a flag.
Stop the Highest Paid Person's Opinions (HiPPOs) Ruining Your Design
If there were a "deal-with-humans-as-a-service" business that took a 20% cut of any money I could get back in situations like this, I'd totally pay for it.

Just learned a couple of weeks ago from a friend of me that there is something like this in Norway.

They only deal with technicalities around the invoicing, not actual usage but still claimed to maje a decent living by finding issues with invoices for 1/5 companies.

(Oh, and I think they took 50%.)
> So you block off 4-8 hours of your life for this job you're really excited about. What is the employer putting up? Generally nothing.

What?! Up until that point, typically, the employer had crafted the job posting, posted in on various channels, reviewed the responses, talked to promising candidates, and then give you the assignment. And a good assignment needs to be carefully crafted, a process that usually takes an order of magnitude time more than what it takes to prepare an answer.
I know nothing about spain but the UK is the exception to all rules, particularly electricity wise. It evennused to have its own color coding and circuit design.
Designing RESTful APIs with Node.js
Ah, so just like off-the-shelf RC planes at the moment, then :)

Batteries are heavy. Gasoline has tons of energy for how much it weighs. New battery tech shows up on HN all the time and I've never seen one come to market. LIFePO4 and other similar lithium chemistries are still state-of-the-art in terms of what you can buy right now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density has a comparison. Lithium air batteries are in the extended reference table here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density_Extended_Refe...

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium–air_battery :

"Indeed, the theoretical specific energy of a non-aqueous Li-air battery (in the charged state with Li2O2 product and excluding the oxygen mass) is ~12 kWh/kg. This is comparable with the theoretical specific energy of gasoline (~13 kWh/kg). In practice, the Li-air batteries with a specific energy of ~1.7 kWh/kg at the cell level have been developed."

"However, the areal power and cycle life of lithium–oxygen–air batteries need significant improvements before they can find any competitive market niche."

So, they're still an order of magnitude away from gasoline and you can't buy one today (or probably in 20 years either).
The point of the off-by-one error is that it exposes an assumption - did you start counting at zero or at one?
Got Spy around.. shouldn't be mention .. I'm malaysian
His name is David Thornton (mentioned in the article, if you bothered to read it before commenting). Not 100% conclusive, but pretty strong evidence of being white, as Thornton is an English/Scottish name.

FWIW, as a nonwhite person myself, I think that accusing someone of racism for assuming David Thornton from Australia is white is beyond idiocy.
Thanks for the link to cheery/chartparser. It is the first complete and readable implementation of the parser type with right recursion optimization and parse forest generation that I've been able to find, and I have been looking as I've been trying to implement this (and failed!).
Show HN: Periodic table of elements for printing
Hey y'all, I'm the person they mentioned in the article.

Because this is a fairly technical forum (and some people were asking about language specifics or runtime characteristics) I'll let you in on the question even though I left it out of the journalist interviews - hopefully this information will help you make sense of the article/interaction for yourself:

Write a Python program to take two numbers as input and if the sun is bigger than 100, output "this is a large number" but if it is less than 100 output the sum of the numbers.

Lol!
Another viewpoint is that in an academic setting, there is no reality-check, professors rarely loose their jobs, students are free, and operating budgets are small enough to be overlooked. The only people judging are your peers, who often have the same kind of nonsense scheme. Even if it doesn't work, and is completely useless, the idea of DNA storage is guaranteed to never die.
AskTheIndustry: Why should I build a PWA for my business?
incoming electron port in 5..4..
Installing Kubernetes on Linux with Kubeadm (Super Easy)
Computerphile: AI “Stop Button” Problem
How texture bilinear filtering works
Seems to me, that apple bosses want to put their name on every patent created in their division.
Sounds like a civil court issue?

There's a good chance they'll fix it if you even threaten them with that.
Neoliberalism Was Supposed to Make Us Richer: Three Reasons Why It Didn’t
I think he was asked to write a function that will return true if the tree is balanced, not to actually balances it, which in my opinion is an exponentially easier question.
Nice work though
Show HN: My personal tech support service – fork away
I didn't tell the journalists the question because it wouldn't mean anything to their target audience.

Most of these reposts (including this one in hacker news) have not reached out to me for additional or audience-specific details :)
Smog in Western U.S. Starts Out as Pollution in Asia, Researchers Say
Can we stop attributing "innovation" to the number of patents one company has? We know by now 80% are bullshit, especially if they are software patents.
Also a library for building special purpose operating systems (unikernels) in OCaml, which is actually used: https://mirage.io/
My adventures in digital history
One could consider how the Ruby parser would have looked like if the parser would have been built around a more powerful parser engine though. Would the developers have abused the added power to add even more exceptions or would the added power have made a lot of the exceptions go away?

(by more powerful I mean more powerful in the way the chart parser from the article is more powerful than an LR based parser, ie that it can parse a bigger subset of CFG in linear time).
She doesn't necessarily have to go offline given that everyone has a phone with internet access nowadays. Also, with week passwords, dictionary attacks, rainbow tables etc you might actually get compromised in minutes. And instead of de-auth, she might just as well wait.

As for "I doubt anybody would do that" - it's not really a good security argument when we have the means easily available.
Only difference being that remote parts of Wyoming or Montana are a lot more remote than most himalaya hill stations. There is literally nowhere in India that's as far removed from other people as remote parts of the US or Canada.
Removing a motorway to bring back the original waterway in Utrecht [video 6:25]
Every lawmaker that wants to gut the EPA should have to visit Shanghai and New Delhi.
Once the air or water is trashed, its much harder to bring it back.
PC Speed Maximizer Serial Key and Crack Full Free Download
Maybe they do it differently in CA than FL, but I have never seen any device that measures "how much their transformer" sends installed in any normal situation.

Indeed. I don't think that gets measured anywhere, other than in a general "this areas utilises "x" Mwh, so on average, section "y" would use "z"
Hey there!

I am the subject of the article and to my knowledge I wasn't 'assessed' in any formal capacity (certainly not at the level of cross-referencing anything with Wikipedia)

I am thoroughly convinced that just getting down and putting code on paper in a confident way got me across that border!

So, if I had any advice for others it would be to do what you normally do in a software interview: act really convincing - even if you're a bit flustered!
Applying the patch directly on production, with no backups, too (!)
> All their competitors offer only US layout, no matter where you buy.

I am so happy about that. These continental European keyboards have symbols in wrong places, useless (unused) symbols (like ± in place of a colon in case of the Dutch one) and a short left shift (German QWERTZ, Belgian/French AZERTY and Dutch QWERTY all have that).

I remember doing a PHP web development internship once (like 4-5 years ago) where they had keyboards with a short left shift key. Two weeks into it I gave up trying to get used to it and remapped the < key (that's the one left of Z on those keyboards) to shift with autohotkey.

I also remember buying a mechanical keyboard that had a long left shift on the cover but after unpacking turned out to have a short one. Felt silly to return it over that (by now I would) so I gifted it to my brother instead.

God I hate those non-US keyboards. French/Belgians are the worst, having to hold down shift to type a freaking number and that while having a short left shift key.
Serverless on Kubernetes with kubeless
Good article, if you don't read it, at least take this nugget away with you:

"A single pencil can draw a line over 700 miles long."
Men not at work: Why so many men aged 25 to 54 are not working (2016)
Expectations and Experiences with an Official and a Commercial SW Manual
I don't think I have ever seen medical professionals speak in the manner you described.
Bitcoin for Beginners – key summary at 26m [video]
Or we clicked on the link and verified that yes, an Australian man named David Thornton does indeed look white in the provided photograph.
Except that this thing happens many times long before Trump and not limited to US.
comments in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741746 tells lots such story happens years ago.
Millenials invest in snapchat
The guy was entering on a ESTA for tourism.
i wonder what its doing. it seems both really slow and like a really fun to optimise problem...
I just don't believe this. It's fake news. This line made it clear to me:

"He said the officer appeared to be mid to senior level, and there’s no chance the conversation would have been overheard by anyone else in line."

So basically there is no one who can corroborate with his story. This trash should not be allowed into any publication which calls itself 'news'.

I'm surprised that people actually believe that stuff by default. In this new world, the default should be to distrust the media and that line I quoted above gives a very good reason to distrust it.
Ateşli Esmer Şirinevler Escort Kondomsuz Kalan Yeliz
I did not say that, I was talking about other tech branches, startup hype speak etc.
Explore, yes, by all means, just not near politically fraught international borders, even if you are a white man from America, with all the privilege in the world to marshal.

All these reference to "American white male privilege" is a weird addition to the story that is completely in the mind of the author. Does she seriously think a woman would likely have been treated worse in this situation? A non-American?

This was the USSR. They worshiped women and third-worlders almost as much as the left does today (at least according to their official ideology). They funded and helped feminist and "anti-racist" organizations all over the west.

Mott was the absolute worst thing he could be in this situation - a white male American.
That's not what this is. First, this guy is in the US on a layover between Europe and Australia [1]. And second, these questions are being asked of tourists.

And before you say things are not affordable to people in those professions, flights are under $200 right now. A person of modest means could feasibly save up for an overseas vacation.

My theory is they have KPIs to hit and found denying entry based on challenging field-related puzzles is a decent way to do it. An indicator of how many actual thwarted espionage or terror events is likely harder to quantify (and for most, it's probably zero).

[1] I was wrong. He was on a 10 day vacation.
I'm in the US right now. Upon arriving in SFO (from Sydney) on a holiday (ESTA), I was asked the following non-standard questions:

"So you're a software engineer? What is your most proficient language?"

Response: "Javascript"

"What does the atob function do?"

I was quite taken back and asked to repeat, and the CBP agent spelled out "a t o b". I answered something to do with base64 decoding and was let through
I was the person in the story and I'm pretty sure this person could! https://twitter.com/cyberomin/status/835888786462625792
Understand that trust of my managers is the most important tool you can have as a developer.

Without that trust you are just a coder.

The trust is necessary to be able to push your projects, extend deadlines and have a general influence on the shape and quality of the product.

Architecting the product is much more valuable experience than writing code from specification.
OK, there is something scary in warping to, let's say, Proxima Cen, spawning an alien ship, and locking on to our solar system.
$300 000 'Self-Filling water bottle' FailURE [video]
> Let’s say you’re a hitman traveling to Malaysia to take out the estranged brother of a dictator

I'd go on a tourist visa. Why would I run the risk of being denied on a business visa?
I think it should be much closer to where they're plugging their site
I wonder how many responses fail the assignment for making assumptions like this (that 'numbers' means 'integers').

$ cat file
1
1.2
3
4.5

$ egrep --only-matching '^[0-9]+' file
1
1
3

Surely still demonstrates ability, but an automated testing suite is going to throw it out.
>First, this guy is in the US on a layover between Europe and Australia.

The article quotes him as saying he was on vacation in the US.
Currently they are playing with Span<> and Memory<> at CoreFX Labs, which make use of IDisposable, so they could at least partially support it at library level.

https://github.com/dotnet/corefxlab

https://github.com/dotnet/corefxlab/issues/952

As for scope M#/System C# style, I guess the door is still open for future C# versions.
margin interest is very high though
Electric stoves in Germany are usually hooked up to a special 3 phase wire in the kitchen, but thats the only exception in can think of, at least for apartments.
My provider here allows me to report my usage with either their mobile app or website. If I forget to do it, they charge me based on some average like the one you describe. It works quite well on the whole, and seems both fair and efficient.
Wrong. I've been asked to explain details of autonomous underwater vehicles in an Italian airport. They don't care what your answer is. They care how you answer.
I want this job or three others.

So now I'm doing a day and a half of unpaid work for them, taken out of evenings and time with the family.

Not hypothetical. I just described my last job hunt, 16 months ago.

The place I really wanted to go closed the req on me, and then opened it back up the day after I started at another place. My third choice (stars didn't align on the other 2 interviews, in part because of stuff like this).