skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I interviewed this week. While there were a few whiteboard coding questions that I personally wouldn't ask, most of the interviews were quite reasonable (mostly algorithmic still, but it was in robotics, so understandable). But yeah, I actually don't understand why people insist on using a whiteboard so much. Everybody has a computer these days and typing is much faster.

At my previous company (not robotics) I conducted a lot of interviews and I think we hit a good balance between algorithmic problems and design/architecture ones. Then again, even algorithms questions can be formulated as real world problems - it help weeding out obvious brain teasers. We also didn't asks people to write code on the whiteboard - there was a separate coding exercise.

I don't even think that asking about algorithms is such a bad thing if you do it correctly and it's not all what you do. But perhaps too many people just throw a problem at the interviewee without and help or guidance.

Overall, conducting a good interview is hard and it is not a primary job of most engineers who do it, so it's not surprising there are quite a few bad interviewers out there.
If you need cancer surgery and you want the best you do the opposite-- fly to the US. E.g. MD Anderson has many patients come from all over the world for surgery.
I have the feeling remote works only for people who have an intrinsic motivation to be good at what they do.

I met a whole bunch of people who want to be a dev because it pays well. Most of them need constant supervision.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289

scott_s

> I agree with what people have already said, but I think there's one more point to add: people usually over-estimate how funny their own comments are. We have a tendency to think, "This idea of mine is hilarious! And different! Surely this witticism is the exception." And we are usually wrong. When you have N people all doing that, there's a lot of noise.

> I try to gently point this out to people who complain when their attempt at humor has been downvoted by the community. It's not that we don't like humor. We just don't like banal attempts at humor, which becomes noise. Or, put in a less charitable fashion, "You're not as funny as you think you are."
Clickbait also is based on whetting curiosity.
I'd rather have a descriptive title so that I knew what lies ahead, than an enticingly mysterious title ("you won't believe...") that I'd dismiss as clickbait.
What makes you think that you would have done better in a brick-and-mortar programme?
> I'm not totally convinced your story with the cup of water was an ego related issue.

Ok.

> The workflow of doctors in the hospital is complicated, and different doctors and nurses have different privileges for different patients, which can make things appear to be ego related. In your scenario, you're a post-operative patient. Your primary doctor is likely the surgeon that performed surgery on you. I'm thinking the doctor that saw you and wouldn't get a cup of water was a consulting-team doctor that was asked by your primary doctor (the surgeon) to see you.

All that's correct.

Even so, I was in some pretty serious discomfort, the guy asked me if he could do something for me, if I could have I would have gotten up myself and instead we spent a couple of extremely uncomfortable minutes waiting for the nurse (busy elsewhere) to perform a 10 second action. That discomfort could have easily been avoided.

If there was a more complex situation at play then there was plenty of time to explain that but no such explanation was given, when I asked later about why the doctor didn't get me the water himself (to the nurse that got it for me) her answer was because they're too good for that.

So FWIW I think the story is simply as it is at the simplest level without any need to bring in larger scenarios or extra complexity.

After 6 hours of surgery without any water and a tube down my throat a bit of water was not too much to ask for to receive right away, my throat was burning and my tongue was parched.

To me that's basic humanity, it's nothing to do with bureaucracy or complex reasoning, after all if I could have gotten up I would have gotten some water myself.
Show HN: Structor's User Guide (React UI Builder)
The author risks to make mistakes related to the Dunning-Kruger effect [1].

Quote:

> The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive incapacity, on the part of those with low ability, to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their competence accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: high-ability individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Rosa Parks wasn't the only person who was a victim of institutionalized racism, but she is uniquely remembered for her form of protest
Not quite. Some medical jobs could be among the first to be in jeopardy, for example. I believe those will be replaced before some very simple, low wage jobs like tech support in a call center.

Why is this? Because many medical jobs consist of looking at information, making a diagnosis, and suggesting the course of action most likely to work. This is something that machines excel at. Many medical professionals never even communicate directly with the patient, leaving that to the doctor, while they assist the doctor with diagnosis behind the scenes. Take a radiologist, for example.

On the other hand, a call center employee must be able to communicate in real time with a human at conversation level. That is doable by AI, but is much more difficult, and requires something closer to AGI.

So the jobs that will be replaced first have nothing to do with education. They have to do with jobs which are reliant upon pattern recognition and information analysis. Those will go first, and some of them are very high paying and require quite a lot of education.
I don't think that parent wanted to be pretentious, as an Italian I was confused by the article too, then I realized that it's a description of the italian sweets that you can find in a certain part of the US.
It seems natural to me that someone would try to skew the usually US-centric view of HN by stating their experience.
Partially agree. The big problem IMO is momentum in the code. While they do solve many issues, once a browser is not supported anymore the library doesn't get "cleaned up" to reflect it because it just works. So you end up with this stark difference (disclaimer: Umbrella is my own):

- jQuery's addClass(), 35 lines: https://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/master/src/attributes/...

- Umbrella JS's addClass(), 5 lines: https://github.com/franciscop/umbrella/blob/master/src/plugi...

So the choice is either well-tested libraries that slows your users down so you'll lose a % of them, optimize the hell out of them so you'll "waste"* time, or use a smaller library which is a compromise between them you'll loose a tiny % of users who you don't support, but you have to invest some time to learn it.

It is not black and white, so luckily we have a choice here and different scenarios warrant for different libraries.

* I specify waste since it's probably something you already know and just have to do it; if you're learning it for the first time then it's not wasted at all
There is as much noise here as any other place on the internet, we are not special here.
Lack of price transparency is a huge, huge problem.

Without price transparency you can't have a market system -- America already has a socialist health care system because no one can price shop.
Yes, people are not really aware how ignorant and arrogant they look when they use the wrong Italian words to describe Italian food :-)

* cantucci NOT biscotti

* salame NOT salami or pepperoni

* zucchine NOT zucchini

* melanzane alla parmigiana, NOT parmigiana

etc. etc. etc.
I am 100% convinced that colleges were created for good reasons but were quickly exploited for profit. Today's version of college is designed to empty savings in the maximum way possible. I can't think of too many professions that require the general education requirements that colleges claim you need. I'd say most if not all professions can be learned through training and on the job practice. Take nursing for example. Today's nurses have to write countless nonsense papers that have nothing to do with improving their knowledge. Dental Technician can do their job without prior education yet many are swindled into a technical program. They say designers need formal education to be taught human computer interaction, color theory etc yet here providing for myself and family with less than 8 months of self-taught reading. One time I wanted to check out a Standford online course to see what designers learn there and was blown away by the uselessness of that information. Pardon the typos, I'm on mobile with whacky autocorrect.
At some point someone can't get on the plane. If there was no maximum amount then people could game the system and get tens of thousands of dollars. Maybe the legal maximum should be higher though.
Burying the lede:

> The fact that the same fooling images can scramble the “minds” of AI systems developed independently by Google, Mobileye, or Facebook, reveals weaknesses that are apparently endemic to contemporary AI as a whole. [...] “All these networks are agreeing that these crazy and non-natural images are actually of the same type. That level of convergence is really surprising people.”
Native ads will always evade this tool.

Also the end composition of the page can reveal to javascript what is or is not removed
I love that japanese medical care is mostly inexpensive compared to the USA but at least 1/2 the doctors and dentists I've visited here over the last 20 years were complete quacks and would not be qualified to practice in he USA. No training to certification is required to be a nurse here. And, if you need special treatments like surgery it's common wisdom you should do your research on your own to find a good doctor a and then pay a several thousand dollar bribe to see them. (of course thats still cheaper than the USA for the same treatment)
whenever i need a figure, instead of opening paint I hand code a SVG. It takes a bit longer then painting. But is more acurate. its basically just xml and math. maybe a bit of css for styling.
i would like to see less bitmaps and more SVG especially by web devs.
> Can you really expect high school students to perform well in online classes? The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work... and yet we're going to do remote with our students? I took online classes when I went back to complete college at an older age... it was the worst mistake of my life

I think this really depends on the person. I learned coding on my own as a teenager off the internet, I was entirely employable at 19, so I think its totally reasonable for this setup to work... if the kid is interested in the subject. Thats really the unspoken weakness of modern education -- we feed kids into an environment that resembles a prison, stamp out their natural curiosity about what adults actually do, and then act surprised that our glorified state run day-cares have taught the children nothing.
The author makes a lot of great points here but I took issue with this sentence:

All jobs that currently require a degree, should instead require a knowledge test. The employer should not care how the knowledge was obtained, just that the applicant has the knowledge.

I would argue that the degree does provide some value beyond what can be easily tested in an interview setting. I'm not sure if it is the only way but the type of person who completes a degree is the type of person who is able to sit down and start a difficult task and complete it. Often these tasks are not directly related to what the student is passionate about, and sometimes not even necessary without taking into consideration the bigger picture of a multi-year program. In my experience dealing with the drudgery of the tedious day-to-day of most white-collar jobs, this college education degree provides a coarse litmus test for the type of person who will thrive in this environment. A person who will do things well and thorough for their own sake and deal with the bullshit.
The question to ask is what jobs require you to get educated through either close social interaction with others or needs access to resources you can't just get at home.
This looks interesting... one of my pet peeves is writing imperative code in functional languages like Lisp or OCaml. For example, hand-written lexers and parsers are heavily stateful and don't really benefit from the functional style, even though they are pure functions from the outside.

It just feels and reads a lot worse than doing it in say Python. So you could make a program clearer by writing the functional parts in one syntax and the imperative parts in another syntax.
I couldn't help it.

Take a look at map/filter/reduce loop collapsing, and function inlining using AST analysis. It makes the code go really fast in LuaJIT. https://github.com/meric/l2l/#zero-cost

That kind of abstraction can be written as an extension module and imported as easily in the language as if it were another Lua module.
Lots of interesting ideas here, but also some wacky or condescending assumptions about other people's lines of work. Let's take two:

TRUCK DRIVERS: They don't just move big rigs around. They also need to keep detailed log books, plan out routes, pass inspections -- and know how to talk civilly and constructively to DOT inspectors. An eighth grade education will not get you there. Especially on the last part. The back-and-forth of a high-school classroom socializes teenagers to work with authority. Most high school dropouts give up because they can't conform to those norms, not because they can't do the work. Trucking companies rightfully insist on a high school degree for exactly this reason.

FINANCIAL ADVISERS: Met any lately? I work in a co-lo space with several within 50 feet. They're all college educated, and they put non-obvious skills from their education to work, every day. They need to provide their clients with highly literate, personalized updates via quarterly letters. They need a sophisticated understanding of clients' expressed and unstated needs -- and you're not going to be fully capable of doing that with just a high school education. Some college-level psychology classes, history classes or behavioral econ classes will get you in the game. And if you actually want to be a financial adviser with some understanding of how markets work, an econ/finance major is your best path in.

Some of the other analysis is quite interesting. But the classification errors in this piece are more than just a matter of tweaking a spreadsheet. They come from a deeper misunderstanding of what many jobs are all about.
A Real Free Logo Maker
Which “Which Buzzfeed Quiz Are You?” Quiz Are You?
More importantly, you'll probably not have the financial resources to walk away from the job.
The timing on this, the day before Easter is great: if you live in the US and have an Italian bakery anywhere near you, go in and get yourself a 'pizza rustica'. It's an Italian-American pie made of sausages, cheeses, and eggs in a crust, and it is wonderful. It's pretty much only available around Easter (my family has had one for Easter brunch basically as long as I can remember), so now's your chance to go try one.
I recently helped transform a customer service department from being an embarrassing shambles to something we could be proud of. The queue of tickets is now empty whereas before, when we didn't have things automated, our many customer service agents were struggling to keep up with the back of a 4000 long queue. Things are now pro-active, we fix problems before customers know rather than wait for them to complain.

Essentially it is the same job but done properly, however, now everything is in order, we just need two people rather than hordes of people. Note that these two people are college educated, i.e. able to listen and learn, write good
English and show up in the morning.

We get customer service ratings and these also come in for the things that the computer does rather than just what a human agent has done. The computer always writes impeccably, my human colleagues are nearer grunt and point level. The humans are lucky to get 76% satisfaction level, the automated stuff consistently gets 91% satisfaction level.

The net result is that our remaining customer service staff are the educated ones, their work is now pretty professional albeit not to rocket surgery levels and the job pays fairly rather than it being a temp type of arrangement. As a company we no longer need the hordes and the people to manage/hire/fire them.

My point being that college education is more helpful than one might think. It does not matter what the education is in particularly, it is the skills of being able to do basic things like work without disrupting others, being able to write and being able to learn that matter.
This person has a bunch of essays but he comes across as an sad person who doesn't believe in civil rights for women.

In an eassy on his website [1], he says "Men have natural abilities and disposition towards leadership. To deny this, to mandate equality of results, to push women into masculine roles, to domesticate and feminize men, only results in misery for both men and women.

Universal suffrage elections are virtually always a bad idea."

1. https://devinhelton.com/principles-of-formalism
Yep, the article should be explicit about that. Calling American-Italian food "Italian" is incorrect, but also incredibly parochial.
Cleaning lady, construction worker, janitor, plumber, electrician, building inspector I could go on.
A Free Logo Design Tool
The Logo Maker that is really free!

A new free logo maker has emerged in the market, allowing companies to create their logos in a “Do it yourself” concept. It is called “Make Logo Online Free”. As soon as this new logo creator entered the market, thousands of logos have been created. A new logo is made every second and a new logo is downloaded every 5 minutes, but we are just starting to scratch the market surface. As soon as more start-ups and individuals start using our online logo maker we would expect that the logo design costs that companies incur, will decrease by 95%.”
5 Reasons why this free logo maker is the best logo design tool
This Free Logo Maker will definitely change how companies and businesses start-up their activities. It is not only special due to the 3 steps and 5 minutes process, but also due to the following facts:
1.	“Make Logo Online Free” generates professionally designed logos and not just strange icons. The designs are really well curated and dedicatedly developed.
2.	The whole process is free. You don’t need to pay anything until you make all the tests and get the perfect design from the logo generator.
3.	You can download all the vector logo files straight away. There is no waiting period. EPS, and large resolution PNG and JPG files will be delivered.
4.	The format of the free logo designs allow you to use them for your email signature, your business cards, t-shirts and other corporate merchandise. The logos are ready to print!
5.	The Free Logo Creator gives you all the rights to use the logos you’ve just made for any activity and for how long you want.
What are you waiting for to start your business? Visit now “Make Logo Online Free” and create your logo straight away!
Some of the most profound observations in this world were made by accident, or through jokes. Some of the most effective speakers routinely incorporate humor into their presentations, including John Carmack.

If you really feel this site needs more technical manuals, nobody will stop you.

But if you think humor is less important than the debate about Italian vs French bread that is on the front page right now, then I wish you luck in your very dull life
THE HISTORY OF CHINATOWN – Chinatown Report
You catch low hanging fruit first before even you think about palm trees. In other words, take care of most common use cases first before you run out of breadth chasing the extreme and difficult scenarios.
Things I have learned about orthopedists:
- they have only one tool and it is surgery. If you don't need surgery, you need to see a physical therapist. PTs know far more about soft tissue injuries and rehab than orthopedists.

- orthopedists make money from each surgery they do. Many orthos are honest, but some areas of US have orthos who run joint replacement factories to maximize profit. In the past few months I've gotten two junk mailings from orthos advertising joint replacement. If doctors are advertising, you know their financial incentives are wrong.
To quote Joel Spolsky [1]:

> For review: Bloatware and the 80/20 myth. No matter how much it bothers you neat freaks, the market always votes for bloatware.

See also [2].

Basically, one peron's bloat is another person's necessary features.

Hell, I should have posted this on the Electron rant thread the other day.

[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/04/07/20020407/

[2]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html
Ah, he's an NRx guy....
From the HN guidelines:

Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
CMSless for Startups (Node.js)
Hi, Everyone.

When you build an app in few days but it requires some content management you can use this tool in order to keep content as GitHub Gist https://github.com/askucher/cmsless

Of course, when you prove your theory you should use some WordPress, etc.
Do you really think the companies working on self-driving cars are unaware that there are portions of the world where inclement weather and poor road conditions exist? People keep bringing this up in every self-driving car thread as though it's some great insight.

yes, car companies know about snow. and i'm sure they'll solve it when they're ready to. Problems aren't typically tackled by solving every aspect at once, and the fact that nobody is demonstrating anything outside of perfect conditions in southern california should tell you a lot about the state of the technology.
> The most elite companies in the valley have correctly found out that remote doesn't work...

The success of remote workers is entirely dependent on the culture of the company and team. I may not work for some hotshot silicon valley startup or Google, but our entire development team works remotely without issue. Daily standups ensure work is getting completed, and we all have GoToMeeting licenses so we can jump on a call and talk when IM doesn't cut it.

> and yet we're going to do remote with our students?

Probably not a wise idea for every student, I'll agree with you on this part. However, I don't think the idea of self-paced curriculum is a bad idea either - and it can be offered both in-person and online with ease.

Before I dropped out in my sophomore year in high school I attended a self-paced program for a semester, and it was amazing - I could burn through the topics at which I excelled leaving me time to focus one ones that gave me difficulties without pressure of getting the assignment in on-time. All in all, had I stuck with it I could have easily graduated a by the end of my Junior year.

Now, this is my personal anecdote - so take it for what it's worth.

> You're giving too much credit to students, they don't know what is best for them. This $100k will be exploited in some way by profit-seeking companies before you have a second to glance back at the money.

One only needs to look at for-profit universities to see how this is a bad idea. It would have to require you use it on a state-run institution or one that has been properly vetted, at that point why not just offer free tuition at public universities and call it done?