skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for the info -- it's consumer software.
"Someone barely making ends meet running their own courier service could do the same thing."

This statement reeks of ignorance. That's like saying a poor person could easily afford chemo, while ignoring the fact that they won't be able to afford food or shelter at the same time.
This looks great, can't wait to try it out.

I hadn't heard of Plaid until now. It seems like they are stealing Yodlee's thunder. Is there a reason why Yodlee is falling out of favor with the new fintech generation of startups?

Another question, do you rely on Plaid's categorization, or did you write your own ML for the categorization?
I think the optimal solution to the hiring problem requires trying out the actual relationship. It's similar to dating. Predicting the long-term success of a relationship based on a first date is sub-optimal.

A service that provides this "trial relationship" could work. When I'm looking for a new job, I could do one hour per day of real work for a few companies. After five days, both employer and prospective employee will have a better understanding of each other than a single day of interviews allows.

There's practical concerns. Companies certainly wouldn't give prospective employees full access to internal codebases or data. Companies would have to break off small tasks which could devolve into throw-away take-home assignments. Employees at the company would have to endure the annoyance of dealing with prospective hires. It might be worth it for everyone.
That's a lot to digest, but I'm still not really sure the probability I should assign to these assertions. That doesn't mean you're wrong, it just means that it's one thing to hear a narrative that makes sense, and another to actually have enough knowledge to know how accurate and encompassing that narrative is, and I don't have that knowledge.

> Now, perhaps in a small village everyone in the village, or everyone in the family, knew what you were doing, but there is a big difference between immediate friends and family having first-hand knowledge of your goings and doings and them having knowledge of your goings and doings and storing them on insecure devices which the government can search surreptetiously at will and at a mass scale heretofore unimagined by all but the most forward looking thinkers such as Orwell and Huxley.

For all intents and purposes, if you are born into a small tribe or village and die in that same village and have little or no interaction with outsiders, that village is your world. Everyone in the group knows almost everything about you, and you about them. There is no need for vast apparatus, because the scale is small enough to easily fit within a single person't head, and what's more it's in everyone's head, so is repentantly distributed. Some very personal information is known to a select few close individuals, but for the most part there's few secrets, and when secrets are discovered the likely spread very quickly. The group is the government, so the government does know everything, and if you exhibit unsanctioned behavior you will hear about it, and if it's bad enough you'll face ostracism or worse. The world (group) knows your secrets, and you know the world's (group's) secrets, and the world (group) will enforce their conception of what is correct behavior. Seems pretty close to where I see the future heading.
It's a nice sentiment and sounds like a good legal argument. However, your constitution doesn't do me any good and doesn't help you with foreign states. Five Eyes has been a legal work around for years so keep fighting the good fight, but in the meantime I will keep expecting the best and assuming the worst.
bzip2 is BWT-based and Zstandard is based on Lempel-Ziv. They are fundamentally different algorithms and each algorithm has its sweet spot in terms of input data. BWT sorts, so it benefits from sorting-friendly data. LZ benefits from long repeats.
Surprised I don't see my main pet peeve - early reference check. Before I even talk to anyone I'm asked to provide three phone numbers of three former managers. So I have to call them up, make sure the number is still working, and ask for the favor that they can give me a reference in case anyone reads my application.

All of these other things are on me. References I have to call two or three (or at one company, six) people and ask for the favor of giving a reference - just to apply to a job.

Of course I can fold my arms and refuse to give them, but if we're starting off on that footing, I might as well just break off the interview.

If we're nearing an offer, I have no problem giving references, it's just silly to have to worry about my references getting calls before I've even talked to anyone at the company.

My more minor peeve with interviews is not mentioned as well. That is, scheduling the in-person interview. If a company is flexible, I could take an extended lunch and have an interview wrapped up within a 60-90 minute lunch break (or better yet, go after normal business hours). But companies keep you around for hours, sometimes just sitting there waiting to talk to people. Inevitably one of the main people you were supposed to talk to is unavailable to speak to you that day. It's understandable an in-person interview is during business hours and can be a few hours long, it's more the ones that waste my time for no reason that annoy me.
On Maslow's hierarchy of needs ethics are most likely a tier 3 or tier 4 concern. We're discussing a scenario that directly threatens tier 1 concerns. So on what grounds is it shocking that ethics are the first thing to go?
Rust has a large ML influence from what I've seen. Pattern matching, restricted mutation, sum and product types, and traits immediately come to mind.
>once used it's possible for the enemy to vaccinate against them.

So think long term...

Is this an innoculation game >10 years out????
That does sound pretty spectacular, and really loud. What kind of case would you put that in? Would you work with ear protection?
A few days late here, but Nvidia Optimus is a general issue on all platforms, including windows. I raved for years about linux graphics support being crap, to the general amazement of the rest of the linux community. When I switched to windows, I found I had the same problems I did on linux. Oops.
For an industry that's all about disrupting others, tech isn't very good at disrupting itself.
Interesting, I ran into this issue in PHP a while back. I found a really basic loop that ran thousands of times per pageload that was running REALLY slowly. Caching the time before running the loop solved the problem entirely.
Rust is very much ML. It's the systems programming token salad that makes it look like C++, but if you squint you can see it looks a lot like ML. As does swift.
Kyle Simpson has a good writeup of the class keyword from his series of books "You don't know Javascript". https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS/blob/master/this%... You can read through the gotchas section and come up with your own conclusions.
Don't stop this. It's essentially harmless and in the case of certain people, welcome. You want your interviewers to think have empathy for your candidates. Interviewing is already stressful and a full bladder or dry throat makes it worse.
Depends on the language, C# won't allow that, if's don't accept null, they accept bool.
I don't see why it's suddenly up for debate whether companies need to abide the letter of the law. Origin of the law is irrelevant, if you disagree with a law you can campaign to have it changed. Corporations should not be allowed to violate the law to execute their business model.
Wow, this blog has some painfully funny "The Onion"-style articles on it (click the links at the bottom)

I particularly liked "Startup Engineer Unwittingly Implements Crappier Version of Open Source Project" [0]

[0] http://www.mattfriz.com/#/outbursts/open-source-rehash
Seriously, did anyone read the article? The defendant consented, Amazon didn't want to.
1) is completely false. If you have a entirely full airport at peak like LAX, JFK or LHR, how do you add more flights? The marginal cost of more flights is another runway or terminal building, which is (tens) of billions of dollars.

The same problem exists within electricial grids. Providing 'peaker' plants which are only used 5% of the time are incredible expensive. cf how expensive electricity got in california when Enron shut these plans down intentionally in summer.
True, but this is somewhat covered by considering everyone not us an enemy of some degree or another, which is natural in game theory.
I was also genuinely impressed with the translation work done by google, I didn't realise it was translated until the second sentence.

Edit: ironically a typo
Ok, so we didn't prevent the maximum amount of wrongdoing? No program is perfect. Those pedophiles would've been just as free had they not developed the programs in the first place.

You're comparing reality against a theoretical world where we can both prevent crimes and never need to develop the tools necessary to do so.

As to the second point, sure, we don't know. That's tangential to my point. Let's assume the government is abusing their power. What does that have to do with these tools? Nothing, besides it maybe makes it a little bit easier for them. But, like I said, they'd do it anyways with sufficient motivation.

I still optimistically believe that an important tenet of liberalism is that you put some trust in your government, but recently it seems for many liberals that trust only extends to cushy (not to say I don't want them) domestic programs like healthcare, equality programs, or whatever the program du jour is. I'm willing to trust that our intelligence agencies aren't some nightmare Orwellian monster hellbent on subjugating the populace. Abuse of power could happen just as easily through other agencies, it just doesn't sounds as scary as when you slap a three letter acronym on it.
The highest compliment I ever heard, not paid to me, alas, was: "Your code reads like a story!"
I absolutely hate whiteboard interviews.

I have been lucky enough to have had only one whiteboard interview in my career and I will say it was awful. Luckily I didn't really need the job as I had freelance on the side. IIRC the company was TripAdvisor... I will not name the interviewer's name but he does have a blog... sadly I think he is actually proud of his interviewing and management techniques).

I have absolutely terrible handwriting and even worse ability in penmanship layout (basically what I call consistent and appropriate spacing).

Before the interview the interviewer didn't even shake my hand and barely made eye contact with me. He looked pissed before we even started (its ironic again because the guy praises his people skills in his blog). In the interview I was asked to do a binary tree sort. I did it recursively. He wanted it to be not recursive and with an array.

At this point I was pretty nervous and my whiteboard looked like a 5 year olds scribbling. I just wanted the interview to end so I sort of just gave up.

A couple months later I ironically started a successful recruiting software company. Even more ironic the interviewer later tried to start his own startup but failed and had to go back to TripAdvisor (this was about 3 or 4 years ago).

I tried to connect on LinkedIn with him to give him some feedback... alas he did not connect.

The reason I wanted to leave him feedback (besides the sick inkling to rub in my success) is I have learned so much from my recruiting software company. I see people desperately applying for jobs everyday (we are career portals as a service. We try to make the apply process as painless as possible).

People seem to forget how uncomfortable it is to go looking for a job (probably why he went back to his old company).
In the same way as zlib does, if you compress independent chunks and provide an index for the beginning of each chunk.
CIA: "Hey! lets see how the whole world responds to this 'leak' while we know we are 10+ years ahead of them... lets figure out how they all responds, the fucking idiots....
Good... Dangerous.... See how even the writers of this article see in black in white.... I can believe handguns are dangerous and still believe they should be legal.

It's reasonable to look for reasons why Trump won but this is really stretching it all.

People often care more about fighting against something they don't like than they do about being 'right'. If the author needs a scientific study to tell her that maybe she's a little out of touch herself...
Honestly everyone should be defaulting to the TSC on modern x86. Timekeeping on a single OS image over the short term[1] is a hardware feature available at the ISA level now. It's not something to which the OS can add value, and as we see in circumstances like this it tends to muck things up trying to abstract it.

[1] Long term issues like inter-clock drift and global synchronization are a rather different problem area, and the OS has tools to help there.
I guess the way it is now, property taxes go into a common municipal budget and then a share gets put toward road maintenance, right? I wonder if it would work to reduce property taxes by the amount that's currently spent on roads, and replace it solely with tolls that go into a fund that is dedicated to road maintenance and nothing else. So taxes for everyone would fall by 43% or whatever it is, and only drivers would pay tolls. I suspect it wouldn't work because current property taxes are already insufficient to pay for roads. I still like the idea though.
You catch more flies with honey than vinegar. You can have the best damn idea in the world, if you're an arrogant ass about it, no one is going to listen to you.
Do we though? What if the current system is the least bad option out of a set of much worse alternatives?
Actually the article itself said that exercise and portion control lost the most weight.

"In general, diet with exercise can work better than calorie cutting alone, but with only marginal additional weight-loss benefits."

Then they show a chart where people who exercised ate a little more didn't lose as much weight. Well big surprise , they were cheating.
Testing GraphQL with Graphene Django
This was the one that stuck out to me, though my take based on the tone of the article is that it's an easy way to pretend that you care, even if you don't. If you do have a caring process, this fits in just fine ("you doing ok? need anything?"). But if it's the only kind words you hear in the process it's sure to be weird.
Brad de Long addressed this a while back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13734768
Ditto. CoffeeScript made JS almost Ruby-level fun for me. I've now switched mainly to TypeScript, which is also great (so many fewer runtime errors!). But I still miss thin arrow functions, array comprehensions, the existential operator ... What I really want these days is CoffeeScript on top of TypeScript.
The question sticked as a tradition, everyone had it on the interview.

Noone ever gave the smart arse answer, by the way, but some people said "you're not looking for the library method, obviously".
There is so much opportunity for learning here... I agree, I wish podcasts had some kind of technology that allowed you to follow things that are hard to convey through Audio.
> Do you think IDE would help much? I don't think so.

It'd help quite a bit with the parts that make writing this in Java different from talking through a pseudocode implementation, yeah.

Or just let them write pseudocode instead, since you've written you don't care much about the details (aside from knowing you need to take care when manipulating strings that you're operating on the correct unit in order not to turn it into gibberish, which is a universal detail, not specific to Java). Bonus to that approach: you haven't just made your candidate incredibly self conscious over and distracted by things you apparently didn't care about to begin with, and there's also a lower chance they'll try to correctly use the language in ways you don't like and expected them to guess you don't like (e.g. using a single utility method that solves the problem immediately).
http://hub.jhu.edu/2017/03/02/health-effects-for-children-sw...
> That is, scheduling the in-person interview. If a company is flexible, I could take an extended lunch and have an interview (or better yet, go after normal business hours).

Good point. Having to always blow a vacation day on an interview seriously limits the number you can do per month/year. Want to do 10 interviews a month? You've blown half the month right there.
Next time you get a common cold, pick any (non-toxic) substance you like, ingest it twice a day, and within about a week you should be feeling much better.
A lot of people say the same thing you do -- their diverse anecdotes agree that regular cabs are obviously (better, worse) than uber/lyft/etc.

The trouble is, they don't agree which way it goes.

I think the resolution to this conondrum is, it varies based on city/region. Some areas had traditional taxis that are worse than ridesharing, and some better.
Barbie Scooter
Hello, is this (Candidate)? (Assuming you can pronounce candidate's name, otherwise, try a different opening.

This is X from company Y. Is this a good time to talk?

Great, so the way this usually goes is I talk about A, we talk a little about B, I'll ask you about C, and if you have any questions D

Sound good?
Oh goodness. Thank you. edited. :-)
Maybe we should try a few more options before deciding that we're in the best of all solutions.
I've never been to LA so I'm speaking from ignorance but some of the objections raised in this thread seem like they have obvious solutions to me.

1) Tolls are regressive. I believe cities in the US have power over some taxation so why not offset the extra cost by reducing another tax? e.g. property taxes in low value areas could be cut, or sales taxes. Alternatively spend all the toll revenue on heavily subsidising public transport so that it is cheap and plentiful.

2) Other cities have had tolls and it did not effect the traffic. Why not just raise the toll until it does effect the traffic? In London the charge for breaking Ultra-Low Emission Zone requirements will be £130/$160 after 2020. Raise the toll to $100 and it will have an effect.

Sounds though that the underlying issue is that LA's urban geography doesn't lend itself to public transport so that whatever you do people will still have to use cars if they want to travel any reasonable distance. Short of undertaking a Shanghai-metro level of construction (from nothing to the world's largest rapid transit system in 20 years.)
If you think about professions with legitimate 'keep a cool head under incredible pressure' needs, none of them handle this with uncomfortable interviews.
> Do you not think that the Corporate Vice President of Visual Studio would be a qualified person to be speaking during this event?

Public speaking and the ability to give a presentation well don't necessarily follow from that title.
The Story of “Nadine” – A Tale of Mailing Lists (2007)
> Did the legal time at your work review the patent issues?

(assuming you mean "legal team", not "legal time")

If it did, they almost certainly couldn't say.
Whenever I read articles like this and the ensuing discussion that follows, I'm reminded of this quote from Dijkstra:

Don't blame me for the fact that competent programming, as I view it as an intellectual possibility, will be too difficult for "the average programmer" — you must not fall into the trap of rejecting a surgical technique because it is beyond the capabilities of the barber in his shop around the corner.

Dijkstra (1975) Comments at a Symposium

Whenever I read code written in the "so boring it cannot fail" camp I get exhausted. This code is inherently procedural and rolls itself into a giant ball of mud -- composition is difficult to achieve so as requirements change the code accrues more loops and conditionals until it is nearly incomprehensible.

It might start out neat and clean but rarely will it stay that way.

Good, non-leaky abstractions are key. This can even be achieved with procedural code but I think functional programming techniques like pure functions, immutable values, and a sound type system help a great deal... even at the expense of the initial "cognitive load," it takes to learn how to employ these tools.
I created a programming language called NCD. It is a mostly imperative language but where each statement can make the program backtrack to that point. The original intended use case was for configuring the network on Linux but it is really practical for similar things like starting programs based on the presence of hardware.

The interpreter is written in C and is open source [1]. There is quite some old documentation here [2] (needs to be moved, this was from a google code wiki). An online demo with several example programs can be found in [3] but it does not have all the latest features of the language.

The interpreter is completely asynchronous (uses epoll etc; this is why the Javascript demo was so easy). It has many build-in modules that allow to do quite a lot of things (including sub-processes with pipe I/O, TCP client and server, receiving events from input devices, observing devices through udev events).

The language is actually built from a relatively small core which defines the syntax and basic semantics, and a larger set of modules which implement different statements. Many of what would in other languages be part of the language exists as a module in NCD, e.g. the var() statement and even If.

And here [4] is a real program written (mostly) in this language, that does something completely different from network configuration (allows controlling a Sphero robot using a joystick).

[1] https://github.com/ambrop72/badvpn/tree/master/ncd

[2] https://github.com/ambrop72/badvpn-googlecode-export/blob/wi...

[3] https://rawgit.com/ambrop72/badvpn-googlecode-export/wiki/em...

[4] https://github.com/ambrop72/spherojoy
It's an interesting idea! How does one know what each sound represents?
This HN thread is the third result already o_O
There is no such thing as enlightenment, only the worldview you choose to adopt and the results that it confers.
I disliked the article. I think sama is simultaneously over-personalizing and also losing context and perspective.

Sure, maybe it is a generalizable description of virtuous qualities but it also strikes me as something different and much worse. Here's another interpretation "I sure am fortunate that I know this wealthy, well-connected person who helps me with my businesses that require knowing wealthy, well-connected people."
Just be patient. With the advent of automated cars, Uber/Lyft services, delivery drones, and eventually flying taxis, the congestion should finally start to ebb.
I love this "No credit card required" phrase. It's really appreciated in developing countries like us
How about:

window
.FindCanvasForObject(obj)
.Color(RED)
.MoveTo(10, 30)
.LineTo(50, 20)

This avoids the repetition of the local variable name, while still making it clear what's being called on the object.