skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think the technical test is a problem per se, it's the way we implement it in our field.

I think it's perfectly reasonable that actuaries take an exam that shows knowledge of vector calculus. I don't think it would be reasonable to ask a senior actuary to do vector decomposition in an interview, because he or she has already demonstrated this ability on a proper and widely vetted exam.

Similar things go for medicine. Totally ok to have boards and exit exams, crazy to be asking these questions of a radiologist with 20 years experience during an interview. Same for lawyers. They must take the bar, but the don't have to retake the bar every time they change jobs.

In programming, we have no widely recognized, properly vetted, industry credential. So we leave it to private companies, who subject applicants to some variant of an industry exit exam over, and over, and over. And what's worse, they do it in secrecy with minimal feedback to avoid lawsuits.

It's horrible, and if the industry is experiencing a "shortage" of candidates, that's a good thing. It's a sign that things need to change. The government should not rescue this industry from the consequences of their actions by creating special programs that allow corporations to force would-be immigrants to subject themselves to these interviews and work in this field as a condition of living and working in the US.

Let people be free, and they'll make their choices. If tech is too abusive, then they'll either have to go without workers, or change. But seriously, take away this crutch of employer controlled visas. I'm not saying don't let talented people into the US, I'm saying let talented people decide how and where they'll work, don't let corporations control that and dictate their choices.
Negative comment on all this in Forbes.[1] Too much centralization. CEOs read that.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanwhitwam/2017/02/28/amazon-s...
Imagine how much worse the clickbait headlines would become...
>Is this similar to Direct TV Now[1]?

DirectTV Now is $70 a month. They'll probably never compete against streaming only services because they need to be at a pricepoint that doesn't destroy their conventional satellite business.

Google's offering is half that. I imagine its going to have less channels. Considering Playstation Vue's selection, I guess we'll see how well they can compete.
Yes they do, however in some cities there are so many Uber X drivers so Uber does not have to send Uber X request to Uber Black drivers.
Captive portal authentication functionality has no business being part of a browser anyway. Why should I have to start a browser to make my non-browser client application connect to my non-HTTP server?. A captive portal is a special case of rich network-level authentication, which belongs in the operating system. Also, 802.11u is specifically designed to help create uniformity in this area.
You are contradicting yourself. The video then proves that he thinks the driver is capable of intelligent conversation. Unless you have seen videos of Travis talk to rocks, trees and bots. If so, please do share.
Yes, it's a niche but how many niches in a similar vein exist on Twitter?

What I heard davycro describe above sounds a lot like the K-12 mathematics community on Twitter dubbed the MathTwitterBlogosphere #MTBoS. It connects everyone from kindergarten teachers in France to university professors and has been a source of tremendous professional development for me over the past four years.

Are there enough other communities like us out there to be material to Twitter's business? I don't know, but the #MTBoS derives great value from having Twitter as a gathering place.
The long tail arises from niches in aggregate.
Yes, it is still pretty much work in progress, lacking many C++/UWP features to be usable for UWP applications, specially regarding VS XAML editor, Blend integration and UWP controls.

Microsoft is promising feature parity with C++/CX when VS17 comes out, lets see.

In any case, .NET tends to have the spotlight for app development on the MS stack, with C++ getting the low level high performance work, so C++/CX is nice, but as way to expose those low level APIs as UWP controls, just like C++/CLI does for .NET.
I didn't realize Heroku used s3 until today, when my heroku app failed. Makes me wonder why I'm using heroku instead of just aws.
Well, you've explained how to do multi-region in S3. Now let's cover EC2, ELB, EBS, VPC, RDS, Lambda, ElastiCache, API Gateway, and all the other bits of AWS that make up my services. And then we can move on to failover application logic.
boulous not in bad taste at all - happy google convert and gcs user works very well for us ymmv
> Travis is right on a technicality they did not lower Uber Black prices much if any. What they did instead was coerced Uber Black drivers to take Uber X request.

That seems like semantics to me. The pay was lowered.
> reject Uber rides ... kick off the system

I believe it simply sets you to inactive temporarily, because you're obviously not picking up rides and you're slowing down the rider matching process.
> He's not a stranger. He's the boss.

Yeah, I get the feeling that people who have a big problem with Fawzi's tone here are really saying "you don't talk to the boss that way!" But you know, maybe you SHOULD talk to the boss that way.
They should reduce business taxes out of urban areas to encourage companies to move and setup there. In today's world, there economic advantage of being collocated is not as strong.

Bankers, lawyers etc., sure, downtown, but everything else can be way out in the townships.

Aside from Paris and London, most European cities don't have sprawling burbs, rather, you go through tons of little villages in the periphery.

With high speed trains making 'town XYZ to Paris' in 1 hr, it shouldn't be so bad to put companies within a couple of hours driving distance from main centres.

This is also an issue of migration: most newcomers move to cities.
It's a clever intervew if you expect the answer to be "I would find an appropriate module on cpan".

People shouldn't be rewriting these algorithms.
iPhone Robbers Try to iPhish Victims
They're not weakening twitter by weakening western society. If anything, weakening the society with divisive gender war and identify politics empowers twitter. The western economy suffers and more people become reclusive and stay inside all day on the internet.

It's basic culture warfare and it's been happening for decades. Listen to some Yuri Besmenov [1] if you don't know what I'm talking about. Basically my point is they don't care, because any division in their enemies is a good thing for them. While they retain immense strength and nationalism.

I'll give you an example of poisoning the well. So many dual-citizen self admitted Zionists in America and Europe are pro-refugee. They adamantly fight for more refugees in these host countries. However their home country, Israel. Is entirely anti-refugee to a shocking degree.

It's all part of the same pie. Marxism, communism, feminism, egalitarianism. Destruction of western civilization.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gnpCqsXE8g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3qkf3bajd4
That's the cost of a new 500GB SSD per month! For the cost of three months' EBS storage and a couple of hours you could setup your own RAID array with a spare for backups and possibly get better uptimes than Amazon :P
I used to use Lyft and Uber interchangebly depending on where I was, but since the Susan Fowler allegations I've defaulted to Lyft. And I love the in-app tipping :), so much less awkward and more convenient.

However, I've had more borderline experiences with Lyft than Uber, mostly related to basic cleanliness of the car. Drivers have always been great though.
The Académie française predates the Office québécois de la langue française by over 300 years. That discussion has been going for a long time.
News and paparazzi are kind of an unfortunate consequence of being a public figure. You're not in a private place in someone else's car...
Because I find it incredibly hard to believe that he would engage like this if he believed there was a possibility of the conversation being made public. Sure, I could be wrong, but I am of the camp that the driver will find legal repercussions to this.
"Inc." is quoting comments from here.[1]

[1] http://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/amazon-web-services-outage.htm...
eu-west-1 is doing great. Obviously European ops are superior to their US counterparts.
For what it's worth, not everyone can pick up all of those channels with a $20 antenna. I can pick up NBC, PBS, and a few odd local channels with no national affiliation. I'd imagine those in cities and metro areas would probably have more luck. But anyway, the blog post [1] has a full(er) list of channels. But even then it doesn't look price-competitive with Sling for some reason.

[1] - https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/02/finally-live-tv-made-...
This kind of argument is like shaming people for not using solar panels or some other green tech because they are too 'lazy' to make the sacrifice. Or shaming people for not using linux as their desktop operating system. Or for using MP3s.

The reality is you need to make the economics and usage of it better than the current de facto reality. There are reasons why the current status quo is the status quo, and you have to be more compelling than the status quo to beat it.

It's why signal forces everyone to use phone numbers as identifiers & use google play services. It is why PGP has failed. It is why your next consumer privacy product will probably still use those cloud services, but client side encrypt.

Now that solar panels are meeting the price of gas, we will very soon see solar overtaking a lot power plant production in the world. Because it will be the cheapest.
Sand mining: the global environmental crisis you’ve probably never heard of
It's asymmetrical though. A reviewer can yea-or-nay my 1-hour assignment in a minute or two. If I'm desperate for work, sure I'll do it. But my position is in high enough demand that I can choose another position that doesn't require me to do homework. If they made some attempt to get to know me, talk to me, and then give me homework, I might bite. But I'm not going to do hours worth of work just for the chance to get a job.
Make the internet great again
I'm conflicted about this. On one hand I agree with the idea that the best way to test whether someone can do something is to look at evidence that that can do that actual thing (i.e. write real code using best of breed tooling).

On the other, a whiteboard provides a very real constraint and tests something a little less tangible than can someone copy/paste. A whiteboard test is not just a test of 'can you solve this riddle', but more about how you think and communicate your thoughts about software development. It's this point I'll defend below.

The example DHH gives seems like one I'd like to specifically call out. If you can't write a bubble sort there's some real problems. You're unable to take a few hints about an implementation that are obvious from the name. It's a sorting algorithm, and it the way it works looks like something to do a bubble otherwise why would it be named that way. Now I can't exactly recall the algorithm, but that's enough to make some guesses about how it works. Start at the first element of the list and bubble up the highest number we see until we get to the last position. Do it again for the second to last position, etc. Which leads to the following:

for (int i = 1; i < len(list); i++)
for (int j = 0; j < len(list) - i; j++)
if (list[j] > list[j+1])
list.swap(j, j+1)

A good interviewer would understand a situation where a candidate was unfamiliar with the problem stated and be able to provide hints that would get them to this algorithm. A good candidate would not let the lack of knowledge of the algorithm deter them from attempting an answer by asking clarifying questions, and talking over how they think something might work. Software development is just as much about communication as it is programming.
What I remember about the original release of the game was that the DVD had the game, but it was encrypted. You could pre-load it onto your machine, and when it released, they'd provide the key over Steam, and the game would decrypt.

Or maybe I'm confusing that with a pre-release encrypted file that you could download ahead of time, to save the download later. I'll have to look at my disks when I get home; I was pretty sure that they had the full data for the game on them.
It's a reach to suggest that the pressure to get to the moon directly caused the Apollo 1 fire. There's no evidence that the engineering decisions that led to the fire or the poor escape hatch design would have been avoided with a longer timeline, many of them were choices made in reaction to near death experiences for previous accidents - in particular, both the choice of pure oxygen and the hatch design.
SHA1 and Mercurial security
Rushing into coding something using abstract mathematical computer science techniques is a poor way to solve real world business problems. The person who has spent time in the real world raising kids realizes that you do not build business value by being a smartass know-it-all and that when time and money are of the essence, something quick and dirty, maybe even brute force, will save the business, please the customer, and provide you the money to fight another day.

Do not hire the smart ass. Take the person who lives in the real world.
You're absolutely correct. There are many problems with Obamacare and there are many other systems we could have. The very same people licking Trump's boots now are the ones who previously shot down every proposed solution and better system when others suggested them in the first place. Which led to the compromise (not as good as it could have been) system we have now.

The issue at hand is that Trump is either willfully or unknowingly ignoring that he and his people are the ones who actively prevented us from having a better system. And the only reason why they're only now acknowledging it's a hard problem, is that now they're the ones who have to fix it.
> It seems to me to be too little too late

Why can't we fix it? We can't do it tomorrow, but we can do it. We built the Internet; Facebook didn't exist 15 years ago.

The statement seems like the perfect propaganda, written by those who want surveillance and want to spread hopelessness among their opposition.
Nobody is saying a law was broken.

That doesn't make it right. Clearly you would not be happy about it either.

I think the interesting part of this story is not Kalanick's character based on the video, but rather the business decisions Uber made and how that has impacted their drivers.

It appears Uber has benefited from people investing in fancy cars. If it was their business plan to mislead people into doing that and then force them to take Uber X rides, then that is wrong, though not illegal.
Ask HN: Would you like a 2nd collapse button at the end of each comment?
This doesn't seem like anything more than what Sling has been offering for years....Am I missing something?
Looks like they have fixed the issue with their health dashboard now.

From https://status.aws.amazon.com/ : Update at 11:35 AM PST: We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard. The service updates are below. We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue.
Perhaps, but WP also has a large user base from which to pull from so I would hope vulnerabilities get discovered and patched quickly. However, I think it's quite telling that such a popular project still has issues with SQL injection even with so much active development apparently going on.
There are edge cases that are easy to forget about even if you have the general idea. This article is about binary search, not bubble sort, but it has a lot of the same problems. https://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/binary-search-redux-...
The gif did give me many words but not the ones you intended :)

403 Forbidden

Code: AccessDenied
Message: Access Denied
RequestId: 1A562E114530E51D
HostId: GPwxkg0B8oa+EB+haVBn92tO6h1VhCJJhDnRV+17lOXjS/L+tnZD6nzqQzvoppdOi4UooN1h2SY=
It was Amazon S3 US Standard (us-east-1) region that went down. This caused quite a lot of pain throughout the internet because people were using S3 as storage for their application and/or their static assets.

Other AWS services were affected, but this was mostly limited to creating, updating, and deleting AWS resources (EC2 instances, RDS instances, CodeDeploy deployments, etc.). There were no issues I'm aware of for already-provisioned resources. There was also some issues with the AWS console.

So Amazon.com was able to weather the storm because it did not have a hard dependency on S3 US Standard. They may not use S3 behind the scenes, they may be using another region, or they have cross-region replication to serve files from redundant regions.

EDIT: Another option, they may have put S3 behind a CDN and were able to lean on the CDN's cache while S3 was down.
Why is the language policy in Quebec bad? From my understanding, it was created to protected their right to be served in their native language. Not everyone has the luxury to learn and speak English fluently.
> If you have one candidate who has seen all of this stuff before and can use it directly from memory

Except that the continued success and popularity of books like Cracking the Coding Interview suggest that this really isn't the case.

The candidate who has spent the last month cramming on the best way to reverse a string in place, or the difference between the plethora of types of trees isn't guaranteed to be the best candidate for your position. All they're proving is that they can pass your screening process.

Edit: and to answer your question, I'd rather have the person with 20 years of experience in the field who can't remember how to draw the Lewis structures for arbitrary molecules off the top of their head than the doctor fresh out of school who doesn't have the slightest clue what this blotch on my abdomen might be.
When am I going to get a package with no Sports... about 40-50% of the channels are sports related...

I do not watch any sports at all
Got it. I'm usually in San Francisco, LA or Reno, so that makes sense.
When I write here, i try to write it on my own. Being a google employee doesn't have any bearing on what I think about google products. I don't use many google products, because there are better ones out there. I think that should be the perspective when you read most comments here.
I work for a gigantic corporation and you're right that the CEO wouldn't respond to me. In fact, if we were in a car together and I started talking to him about how my pay wasn't so hot this year I would expect him to be extremely uncomfortable. He should be! He makes huge decisions which affect thousands and thousands of lives. CEOs should be in constant contact with peons like me and Kamel. Maybe they would adjust their decisions so they wouldn't have to be confronted in this sort of way.
Is there a sweet spot for customers?

1 customer is a high risk.

10 are better.

But 1000 are Bad again?
Mailgun support, really?
As far as I know, France still allows McDonald's to sell "McNuggets" and people to register companies with English names.
I'm not totally down on white board interviewing but I think it is difficult to do well. By "do well", I mean get a candidate into a state where they aren't feeling like "deer in the headlights". For some candidates, That Is Never Going To Happen. As a result, the "It's just an interview. I wonder if they'll buy me lunch?" candidates like myself are going to "score" better than some really great candidates.

I've been doing this coding thing longer than many (most?) of you have been alive. I know enough to choose a suitable algorithm for the task at hand. I ship product. I copy paste out the wazoo.

That said, the people interviewing you aren't professional interviewers, they are developers who are winging it. They may have never have had a "good" interview so they repeat how they were interviewed i.e. a bad interview. Like the candidate at the whiteboard, the interviewer is out of their element as well.
> If that is the political situation then I do not think it matters whether I use my own server, or encrypt all my messages

I don't know why it wouldn't matter. And it is the situation; you can be put on the No Fly List without your knowledge and with no recourse, and now popular legislation would not only deny travel on that basis but gun rights too.
I understand the frustration at the core of this article, and it's the reason why I live in a bigger city. It's only in bigger cities in America that you can find institutions like a local butcher or bakery that you can walk to. It would be great if that lifestyle were available outside of a few big cities. Conversations about how to achieve this have been happening on the left for a long time.

Not sure what this has to do with increasing state violence against immigrants and minorities, which seems to be the entire agenda of this far-right wave we're seeing.
S3 is currently (22:00 UTC) back up.

The timeline, as observed by Tarsnap:

First InternalError response from S3: 17:37:29
Last successful request: 17:37:32
S3 switches from 100% InternalError responses to 503 responses: 17:37:56
S3 switches from 503 responses back to InternalError responses: 20:34:36
First successful request: 20:35:50
Most GET requests succeeding: ~21:03
Most PUT requests succeeding: ~21:52
I disagree with this quote. There is value in memorization. Times tables are an insanely useful thing to memorize. Memorizing historical events and literature can make you into a great lateral thinker.
How Blockstack could address Amazon S3 outages
Has anyone ever noticed that a whiteboard is the 1960's way of writing code? I started in the 80's and we used a scrap of paper sometimes and then a video terminal to type the code into an editor. Does anybody do coding interviews using an IDE hooked up to a fully functional Virtualbox server complete with all the usual tools?
Right, but from my perspective as a consumer, at least right now, the only service I'm even remotely interested in is YTTV, and the reverse would be even worse. If I didn't want the YTTV package, there's no way I'd pay $40/mo for play music or whatever. A la carte models are a lot more efficient, the reason I don't like cable (and comcast) is because of bundled services, why on earth would I want to move to another, even more bundled, service?

Plus you've only handled the subscription portion, even if somehow we fix that. Where do I view this content? Is there a unified media dashboard that connects to 3 parts of youtube, play, and such?

I guess my basic point is that these services seem useful for entirely different groups of people. Why would consumers want them bundled, either technically or economically, and similarly, why would Google?
Stocktwits
If the consumers are voting with their wallets that they want more Uber X rides and less Uber Black rides, well, that's what should happen. To bring supply back in line with demand, some drivers who used to drive Uber Black should either leave or downgrade, and if they won't do it willingly, then some drivers going bankrupt is a way how the market forces "driver supply" to go in the direction where it apparently needs to go.
On thing I learned here. When something seems horribly wrong, check HN first, it may be "global" problem.
One thing that is very noticeable in France is that people still buy locally made products. There isn't nearly the same trend to move production to China as elsewhere, so smaller factories haven't all closed.
Tumblr has some of it left: https://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/custom_themes