skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They aren't "in bed with the government", but, and that's probably what you mean, they are indeed "in bed with the system".

That is: they operate within the current system, meaning there are certain assumptions underlying their work. These assumptions (or heuristics, if you will) were traditionally shared by their readers, and therefore were neither mentioned, nor attacked, nor defended.

One example may be their trust in certain institutions. Before 2016, the data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics was reported without questioning its truth. That didn't mean the data wasn't criticised: the common critique that the statistics are collected with certain definitions that under- or overestimate unemployment go back a long time. But that criticism is very much "inside the system" because it's just a reflection of an argument playing out in academia and within the bureaucracy for a long time.

What's new is this reporting being consumed by people with a very different set of assumptions, or an incomplete understanding of these assumptions. Or, rather, what's new is everyone getting to watch this interaction.

Now, you get people reading an article about unemployment rising/falling and they'll say "These statistics are completely made up! My uncle Jim just got fired! Why isn't this journalist verifying this information before regurgitating it? They are just in bed with big government! Literally!".

The best possible interpretation here is that this person just doesn't know about the heuristics being used. They want journalism to work without any of them, meaning that, when my just-invented "Journal of alternative employment statistics" sends out a press release, it's put on the same queue as the "traditional" data reports and, when someone gets around to either of them, they audit the data and report their findings.

That is, obviously, completely removed from reality and would never work. We need a certain trust in "the system" for functioning in the same way that your family would probably break down if, any time you saw your father or brother, you demanded that they go through genetic testing to prove their relationship with you.

Note that doesn't mean that somebody could cook those statistics without any fear of discovery: if some whistleblower sends a journalist a thousand pages of proof, they'll look into it, and try to verify or falsify it. It just means that long-standing institutions with a track record get a certain benefit vs unknown, new entities.
Well to each his own right? I personally would hate to work in a place where there's little socializing and quiet all day. I love the open office.

I always get a little annoyed when people make the assumption all programmers want peace and quiet. My day concists of a lot of banter and wouldn't want it any other way. I worked at a major financial services firm for a while too where there there were private offices and lots of silence and I felt isolated and miserable.

How about we all just look for jobs where the work ethic fits our personalities instead of judging if someone else's doesn't fit yours.
On the Turing Completeness of PowerPoint (SIGBOVIK)
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You're likely correct overall - However worth adding in this case it was Imagination making (and phrasing) this announcement, not Apple.
This feels way over-engineered. I just want to click and jump into a challenge, Project Euler stye. Every single page is overflowing with "Table of Contents", screenshots, code snippets, etc.
There is no doubt that there is inequality and that inequality is accelerating, especially in the US and West.

What's the global picture look like? I mean we do want our fellow humans to do well too, right?

Maybe not spending so many $$$ on things that go boom might be a good start and instead bomb places with broadband connections, social media, las-vegas strip clubs and NetFlix.

At least that would generate US jobs and still be educational and to all our benefits to some degree.
I don't think so. I had to purposefully subscribe to far right news sources and block a lot of mainstream media outlets in order to see much right-wing news in my Facebook feed. That trending news feed is still biased left though, I can't change that.
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First, I'm a conservative though I lean heavily towards libertarian. That said, who called anyone names? Would you have felt more comfortable with my statement if I had substituted xenophobia for brown people? I don't think racism is as huge a factor as simple scapegoating and opportunism by politicians. The public is being misled and comments like the parent's ignore the very real impact automation is having on society.
Clickbait title keyed to feed our current robot fears. Should at least have the qualifier " for low skilled jobs in the manufacturing sector"
Ok I see.

Completely agree on your idea of a state of affairs being "normal"/optimal/best/whatever....getting everyone to agree on that principle would be a good start.
How often have you had to code up solutions to any of these challenges in the last two decades?

These sort of challenges are great for learning some of the theory behind computer science and getting you thinking, but they're not a useful part of the interview process imo.
> If ARM really cared, GPU stuff would be open source. The fact it isn't pretty strong indication they don't. Don't just accept it when lawyers say no.

Easy for you to say, harder when millions to hundreds of millions are at stake.
It sounds like a moot point. It's not possible to acquire the extensive experience necessary to have intuition without having another strategy in the first place. Intuition is the long-term consequence of employing a strategy: no longer having to step through the same sequence every time.
Is "taxis are even worse" really all that positive?
Unless someone can't study these things because they're too busy writing real-world code.
It doesn't matter how good the people you hire are, the current educational system is absolutely horrible. A good teacher can salvage some results from the disaster, but what we really need to do is switch to a system that doesn't need superstars to produce results.

It is a sad state of affairs that the thing education teaches most effectively is that learning is a chore.
Thanks for your response. I'm very familiar with DPDK and am looking forward to the changes Skylake brings as well.
The lack of or extraneous apostrophes is clearly a grammar mistake, not only a spelling one.
It's like QuickCheck, but instead of testing random values, it tests all values in a certain range.

For example, if the function takes an array of 128 bit values, it's test all the possible arrays of length 0, 1, 2... up to the length you want to test for.

(Actually, not necessarily all, but all that an exhaustive generator generates; the generator would normally go through all values, but it potentially could only test some values, but would not select them at random).
It's never occurred to me to turn off WiFi for any reason short of debugging; can you explain why someone would regularly disable it?
"There’s been downward pressure on jobs since the Industrial Revolution due to leaps in productivity brought about by human ingenuity and lucky discoveries."
[citation needed]
there were never more jobs
Welcome to Mastodon
Facebook requires women and ethnic minorities to make up 33% of law firms' teams
Yes, you're expected to be able to write basic stuff like most of these challenges without Google or StackOverflow.

There are some however here that you really shouldn't be, like remembering specific algorithms - if you're just memorizing 20 different sorting algorithm's exactly implementation, clearly that's not producing much if any value for you.

If someone however was to give you this Algorithm section https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/donnemartin/interactive-... and tell you to implement it, that would prove whether you had the skills needed to properly use Google and StackOverflow for anything but a direct copy+paste and could be a very good test for a programmer.

Basic data structures, knowing when to apply them and how to solve fairly straightforward challenges like "does this string contain any duplicate characters" when you have full use of Python's builtin data structures are completely fair interview questions in my opinion.

Just picking 1 or 2 of these questions that seems vaguely related to your work is enough, combined with asking some basic technical stuff like "What's the difference between a class and an object?" can weed out a shocking number of people, showing they don't even have conversationally useful knowledge about a topic.
Shit Startups Do Episode 2: Building a Team
> DHT indexing already is possible and done in practice by passively observing get_peers queries. But that approach is inefficient, favoring indexers with lots of unique IP addresses at their disposal. It also incentivizes bad behavior such as spoofing node IDs and attempting to pollute other nodes' routing tables.

Source: DHT Infohash Indexing < http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0051.html >

Figurative speech aside, bittorrent.org acknowledges the need & the issue, and calls it bad, not "egregious". The paper[0] mentioned in the BEP 51 proposal describes more or less how magnetico works ("horizontal attack") and states in conclusion that

> Through an extensive measurement study since December 2010, we have identified that both of these attacks are happening in the real network. We have analyzed their exact behavior through honeypots and have shown the scale of the on-going activities. We must stress that we have
no concrete proof of actual malicious activities; our work only shows that the scale of attacks is large enough for this to be a concern.

Repeating for the last time (as I feel this slowly creeps into a flame war):

1. As I have said, these technique is already in use. This means that the network is more resilient than you claim and the chances that a few hundred (or thousand, in future) magnetico instances will harm the network is near zero. I could answer in a more direct way if you did not use rain forest metaphor and addressed the issues you see more directly.

2. magnetico uses a similar but also a lot different technique. The horizontal (Sybil) attack requires the offending node to maintain its identity: "First, the attacker only has to answer two types of messages, `PING` and `FIND_NODE`; he can ignore every other message."[0] magneticod, in contrast, answers only `GET_PEERS` and `ANNOUNCE_PEER` queries, which are essential for the remote node to register itself as a peer downloading the torrent. magneticod will send hundreds of `FIND_NODE` queries per second[1] using forged node IDs, and that's all! According to the BitTorrent DHT protocol[2], "after 15 minutes of inactivity, a node becomes questionable." Hence, presumably, magneticod should be forgotten & removed from the routing table after it does not answer several `PING` queries. Consider that `FIND_NODE` queries that magnetico makes are targetting (at every single time) totally random nodes, so same set of nodes will not be targeted ever (statistically speaking).

The problem is, BEP 51 is still a draft and AFAIK no clients in the wild implements it, so it's simply impractical to write a DHT search-engine depending on this particular behaviour. Once it becomes more widespread (hopefully together with BEP 42), magnetico will (and has to) drop its current technique and support the new and proper one.

[0]: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~lw525/publications/security.pdf

[1]: https://github.com/boramalper/magnetico/blob/257912a12f862d9...

[2]: http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0005.html
Good, responsible companies don't let that become a barrier to doing the right thing.

Despite what Stallman would have you believe, open sourcing your own code is neither right nor wrong. It's just a choice.
Its always easier to be an armchair critic, but I bet there are more than hundreds of millions waiting for whoever can de-crappify the embedded ARM driver ecosystem.

Especially when this crap is at the root of why virtually every embedded linux product has serious security flaws that never get fixed. You cant update the kernel if you cant update the drivers.
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It was a strange time. We quickly went from PC speakers to far better cards like the Soundblaster/16/AWE32 (one couldn't find the other makes where I lived).

But since then the PC audio market has gone rather quiet? Apart from built in you obviously still get Soundblasters and the ASUS Xonar's, but there seems to be very little to no competition and drive left in the field.
Yeah, this is an open letter informing the world that imgtec is turning from a company producing useful stuff into yet another patent troll.

Patents belong in the garbage.
Thanks. I look forward to trying it on gce, but as others said, it would be nice if it was officially supported.
> It's either (yet another) proof that the patent system is broken, or that their patent are as invalid as can be.

Right. Well, you could say it's both.

The patent system is broken, and no matter how "valid" their patents are, they're bullshit anyway because patents are bullshit in and of themselves.

A patent is just the government granting you a huge barrier to competition.

If you don't want to develop new tech because someone else might "steal" it, then just leave it to others. Someone will develop what you would have, and make plenty of money with it.
Expressed in a very rough way:

I think one has to be realist about their tools and idealist about their goals. And the drive is the most important factor. If they're just going through the motions without intent, without ideal, it won't lead anywhere.
The will to preserve (imo absurd[0]) or the will to change.

Of course, there isn't any one true model of thought. So I'm surely wrong.

[0]: I don't think anything can last, civil rights included, but things can come and go
I only use raw milk for making yogurt. As part of the process the milk is heated to near boiling point. And I process the raw milk into yogurt quickly, within a few hours of it leaving the cow (to avoid botulism). Living is fun!
I think companies are just beginning to learn how to do this in a way that benefits them and their customers (which is why I largely agree with the poor UX and blandness you're describing).

I work at a company that's helping businesses automate parts of their customer support with chatbots and you'd be surprised to learn that CSAT improves when they employ some automation. Usually this means getting a quicker first response to the customer's question (and some of the time successfully answering it!) as well as automating tedious data collection (what device are you on? what's your email? etc.).

It's early days for chatbots and I think we'll see a lot of improvement where automation through conversation should be and I think we'll also see the rest shake out.

More to your point: I agree with you, IVRs are usually really bad, but some of them are impressive. Have you used Apple's recently? It's very good at routing and making cases where it's uncertain invisible.
Finally, Android beats Windows as world’s most popular OS
Retiring in place is actually quite boring, and the feeling of uselessness that results is depressing. People won't actually do that unless the alternative is worse. If you hire people who are passionate about whatever it they were hired to work on, they might not do work that is profitable, but they'll do work that is interesting and has some benefit.
TDD actually takes less time than not writing tests, if you do it correctly.

No matter what, when you're writing code, you're doing "testing". That can either mean "run my code and see if it does what it's supposed to," or it can mean, "run a test that I wrote."

If you do the latter, the upfront time is longer -- maybe an hour -- but you save time by having automatic tests instead of manual tests.
A lot of it is having control of your tools/environment and also having a clear idea of what your code is supposed to do.

A bad case for unit testing is when you feel that you are fighting with the apis you are using. If you are not so sure where your program ends and the stuff around it starts, that is bad for testing.

On the other hand, it is easy to write unit tests for integer arithmetic, string parsing, compilers, etc. If a subsystem is "functional" in the sense of no side effects, then testing is easy.

The book "working effectively with legacy code" systematically deconstructs the excuses people have about why code is not testable and shows you how to make it testable. Although the title mentions legacy code, it applies every bit as much to new code.
Because an alternative explanation exists that fits the data just as well or better. The way science works is via Bayes Rule:

Pr(T[0]|O) = Pr(O|T[0])Pr(T[0])/sum(Pr(O|T[i:n])Pr(T[i:n]))

This tells us the evidence for a given theory given the observations depends on the ratio of two things:

1) How well the observations fit a theory (you can substitute hypothesis/model/etc) and how plausible a theory would be without the observations in question.

2) The above for all other theories

In other words, the default for the scientist is to be skeptical of any explanation until the others have been rendered implausible (ie ruled out). There is a bit more to it (eg the Pr(O|T[i]) terms depend on the precision of the predictions, which remain vague in the case of NHEJ despite generous funding), but that is pretty much it.
Haaaaang on.

When Apple started designing their unibody Macbooks, they needed to put a hole in the aluminium for the power LED. There was only one company in the world with the equipment to make those (multiple-of-nanometers-wide) holes.

Simple solution: Apple just bought the whole company. Voila, now Apple can cost-effectively produce those holes with one less renewable contract.

This one might get interesting...

---

EDIT: With the above being said, note this nearby comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14022436
> They have had a lot of years of experience with academic code mostly written as a proof of concept without an eye to maintainability that later rots in tree and makes everyone else's job worse.

Well you don't have to use interns to get production code. If that's a concern, they can be put to work doing something outside the main code base, like perhaps writing tools that speed up some tedious process. There's probably opportunity for OpenBSD to get something out of GSOC, but if the standard is "shippable code or bust", well, no wonder they're disappointed.
When I ask the admins at my school about this, they laugh. If you look at the pie chart of where the money goes, it basically goes to salary. So the rise in cost has to be from a rise in salaries paid.

They say the driver in the US is health care, but there are also more people on the payroll.
My Firefox Add-on went live in less than 24 hours
Um, no, now you are playing the wrong game.

See, we have two ends to optimize the system and we have to choose one. Either the system encourages the most talented to thrive or it's designed for mediocre individual performance where the worst performers are kicked out. In the former high performers thrive while in the latter the best we get is guaranteed non-zero output.

There is a beautiful dualism in rewarding and measuring. It's actually quite hard to invent good measures for creative work, so whatever measure you come up with probably does not measure what you want it to measure. The second problem is from intrinsic versus extrinsic motivators. Extrinsic motivators like pay rises or the risk of losing ones job work fine only if the task is simple and mappable to linear performance - like, say, logging. For any creative efforts extrinsic motivators kill performance.

Thus, it's very hard to measure creative work, and even if you could, you would not really want to use that data for anything because that would kill performance.
Neither it says anything about measurement. What I wanted to stress is that it isn't "just" a limitation about measurement precision: it forces you to switch to a description of nature which is far away from the classical one, at least at the microscopic level.
There is a long history of customers using their leverage over a supplier to say that you either allow us to buy you, or we take our business to a competitor - or in house.
Are you saying that all vendors provide sriov sightly differently in an incompatible way? Because as far as I know, all the vendors have supported it for quite a while (Intel, mellanox, chelsio).
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Yes, but getting a work permit from one EU member state to another is even easier. And you can put down roots there.
Brexit Britain Could Replace Human Migrants with Robot Migrants.

They don't take up space in housing but they don't pay tax either
I had the same experience at University. We didn't learn how to use a debugger and rather relied on logging data to see the flow of the program. That, plus the fact that our code was a big mess since we were just starting didn't make it easy to find the more obscure bugs. I was really impressed the first time my friend fired up Netbeans and showed me that how he could find the value of the variables at runtime, at any point in time of the execution.

Today I find it unacceptable when I'm in a situation where I can't debug a program I'm working on, it just seems like a waste of time.
Tech jobs are thriving nationwide – up to 7.3M
Its most definitely a quantifiable, collective wrong when that choice leads to a total security disaster like the embedded ARM situation. It might not be so bad if they bothered to update their drivers, but they dont even let other people try to do so.
Page 30 for those interested. I was surprised that it was actually in there, phrased that way.
From what hear about some startups, the challenges are for the general candidate pipelines the company wants to weed out w/o fearing legal repercussions. The inside-track, friends, and frat candidates often get to skip right through the process or have copies of the problems/answers from insiders. (Illusion of merit.)
Seems like in IT the spread of different process systems is exactly this. To reduce each job to a set of functions that people with similar levels of training can do the job at the same level of output, interchangeably. So we're left with jobs that are 90% following inane process and 10% producing something useful. All to make sure if we quit, we can be replaced in a few days.
I'm lucky in that case. Robots dont look so good wearing stilleto's.
So I will not be replaced.
"It means that Google Summer of Code imposes too much bureaucracy onto Free Software projects. In other words, GSoC is only viable for those projects whohave enough spare volunteers to begin with.
"

Except, as at least two people in this discussion, who are org admins, have said, they basically see no bureaucracy or overhead.

So ...

Usually, what this means is folks had unrealistic expectations.
The truth is the coding level of even the average high end BS freshout is really not that great, so it usually takes actual mentorship and guidance to get good code out of GSoC.

That's not "bureaucracy" though, unless you have an endless source of high quality coders willing to join your project, that's how you get anyone to be a good contributor.
Fermentation as a method of preservation is substantially different than UHT, and you couldn't substitute one for the other without changing the product. Heavy amounts of nitrates are dubious way of preserving food. But your point is generally correct. For example, shelf stable vegetarian dishes should be nutritionally very close to fresh.
“Tell me how you measure me and I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way… do not complain about illogical behavior…” - Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt
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U.S. Tech Industry adds 182K Jobs in 2016
Thanks.

Any recommendations written by a historian instead of the author?