skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I would never take a proctored test for an interview. ... Relying on testing alone is going to get you good test takers.

A conventional interview is basically a set of tests already. A conventional whiteboard coding interview segment is a proctored test, with the interviewer serving double duty as the proctor.

This proposal aims to reduce the stress by having an impartial proctor instead of an interviewer looking over one's shoulder as you code.
Wow. How many people does Uber hire to troll on HN?
We have SaaS aimed at developers[1] (platform for coding/hosting chatbots) and have tried 3 major prongs to getting our first 100 users (in order of usefulness)

- Meetups

- Content marketing

- Adwords

By far the best is our meetup group. We host a weekly meetup[2] series where we go through the platform and framework and help people write their first bots. It's nice because it also allows us to see how people are using our platform and where the rough edges are. This has been invaluable in quickly fixing small bugs that are meaningful to new devs. Some stuff we wouldn't have even noticed through analytics. We're working on getting better follow-up engagement. We have about 5-10% come back week after week.

We write entries on our blog[3] and post links to a few places (FB groups, twitter) and it's helped out too with recognition. Though our conversion from people signing up for an account from the blog is about 3%. We try a mix of posts that range from non-developer focused to developer focused. We host on medium and have had success with medium's tags and getting readership from other medium articles and the suggested articles bar on the bottom.

Adwords is almost useless at this point, though neither of us has had any prior experience so it could just be us not using the tools to their full potential.

Finally we've gone to 1 conference, NY Techday a few weeks ago. We handed out ~150 business cards and >250 stickers. I think we may have generated 3-4 leads. It was exciting that a few people recognized us from the blog and posting in FB groups, so that was a good reinforcement to keep posting on the blog.

[1] https://alana.cloud

[2] https://www.meetup.com/from-just-a-thought-to-your-1st-chat-...

[3] https://blog.alana.cloud
So link any evidence of it happening, from Wikileaks or otherwise.
> One problem is that some students cheat. They develop and pass around open-source sets of answers. If the problems don't change, then students don't learn as well.

The solution to that is to not revise the textbook, it's to pass out different homework handouts each semester.

IMHO, the textbook problems sets should be for student practice and all the solutions should be in the back of the book (vs. just the odds).
"open source"
Likewise, I always find an animation when I need to explain it to someone. A great example of an intuitive understanding of a tricky problem.
> I can no longer trust the baker! That corrupt flour-power-wannabe is taking money to make bread!

you jest now, but in past eras there was SIGNIFICANT political conflict about the role millers and bakers played in distribution of grain resources.
When I was attending Harvey Mudd College I worked on an engineering clinic team with a significant software component and was shocked to find that none of my teammates knew how to use an interactive debugger. This really slowed the team down and made the work far harder than it needed to be. At the end of the project I wrote a letter to the department head suggesting that they add a unit on debugging to the core curriculum. But I don't know if they ever acted on it.
Bresenham's algorithm is for rasterization, and I think the article refers to the function f(t) -> (x,y), which is just a linear interpolation in 2D.
Wow, I didn't know that. Thanks for the link; that was very enlightening.
Something like this was tried in the post-War era when the top marginal tax rate was very high and the government had large incentives to promote policies opposed to wealth concentration.
At what point did I or anyone else suggest "Hey you don't need to use Google's LB, because you can install your own and never monitor it, and never engage anybody to take emergency action when required".

> Google gives you away the solution to your problem for free. Take it

I'm pretty suspicious of anything any company "gives away for free", particularly an overblown advertising company.
Decoupling front end and back end
Yeah, because computers never crash right? <pun intended>

I think way too many people are viewing self driving vehicles with rose colored glasses. They underestimate the cost and overestimate the utility to the public.
Instead, choose to consider them an exhortation for your benefit.
I started exercising when I was working full time and going to school part time. It was a lot of work and it was very stressful because neither work or school knew (or cared) about the different demands they would place on my time, so I spent most of my time putting out a fire in one part of my life knowing that another was building somewhere else.

I contrasted two semesters, one where I would tell myself "I don't have time to go to the gym, I need to stay at home and do this problem set" and another where I would tell myself basically the opposite, "I don't have time to NOT go to the gym." What I noticed was that the semesters where I made more of an effort (3-4 times a week) to go to the gym, my grades were better.

Over the years I've found that exercise sharpens the time you have left over. So sure, you spend an extra hour a day exercising but the other 23 hours are just better - you're more alert, you think better, you have more energy, you sleep better, you're less irritable.

You do you, but what I found works for me is working out in the morning. On good days, I get to the pool at 0630 and swim for 40 minutes, then go to work. As a bonus life hack, I've discovered that this combines your post-workout stupor with your early-morning-coffee stupor so you get all the stupor out of the way in the morning while you're checking e-mail and no one else is doing anything anyway.

Do this 3-4 times a week for a few months and see how you feel at the end of it.
Easy or hard are always relative terms. I think in this case the author means easy or hard relative to the status quo.
Shit, I use an elliptical.
There are vastly more vehicles on the road today, and people expect to maintain higher average speeds. Also, maintaining speed becomes exhausting on smaller bikes, for a variety of reasons.
> machines can work only from the information given to them, usually by the white, straight men who dominate the fields of technology and robotics.

> one Google image search using technology “trained” to recognise faces based on images of Caucasians included African-American people among its search results for gorillas

> Microsoft created a chatbot, Tay, which could “learn” and develop as it engaged with users on social media. Within hours it had pledged allegiance to Hitler

> Robots are racist and sexist. Just like the people who created them

The author is determined to see sexist intent in everything, and bends the truth to match. (E.g. claiming Microsoft software pledge allegiance to Hitler.)

That said, steer clear of the opinion pieces and you can avoid the worst of this junk.
Transportation in general will become much cheaper. Because driverless cars will get into far fewer accidents than humans the cost of insuring them will be a fraction of what it costs to insure a human driver today. And when transportation gets cheaper basically every product that needs to be moved gets cheaper (assuming the companies using this technology don't just pocket the savings).

Also, basically drivers of all kinds will no longer have jobs.
What does it say about the construction and stability of our society that this should be true? I can see why someone might appreciate it, and I used to feel the same, but on further reflection I find it cause for considerable trepidation about the future.
“Today at Apple” bringing new experiences to every Apple Store
Weirdly, the site disables the normal scrollbar but adds a new one inset, which doesn't respond to SPACE to scroll down.
Worlds First Container Based Cybersecurity Platform
What were those incentives?
Uber is perhaps just a symptom of a bigger problem. Wasn't HSBC accused of money laundering and then were just fined because they were too big to jail? Same with 2008 crisis. In capitalism there will always be such actors who will go scot free because they are too big and have tons of money.
Or arrange some kind of (perhaps NFC based) token signing system.
I'm an adrenaline junkie and found my love of exercise in biking. You can go fast enough that it's a decent rush, and going out on trails can be really exciting. Once you get into good shape you can hit over 30mph for short times.
I completely agree. In fact, I think running a debugger should never be the first option. My process:

1. Read the code and think about what it's really doing.

2. If that leads nowhere, write (more?) unit/integration tests.

3. Only if the above two fail, run the debugger.

"Contemplating" code has another benefit: since you're looking at the whole picture rather than jumping line-by-line it develops your intuition about why things fail.
How do you define "unbiased" that doesn't also apply to Fox news? For instance, on the foxnews.com homepage there's a feature "FATCATS' FRIEND Obama pulls in $400G with Wall Street speech" which is factually correct. While a casual perusal of nytimes.com homepage has a "There Are More than 2 Jobs in Solar for Every 1 Job in Coal" article, which is again factually correct.

"Bias", such as it is, is entirely in what stories are presented, and the slant given to them.

As another example consider this NYTimes article[0] "Free Market for Education? Economists Generally Don’t Buy It", which refers to a study where 36% Economists surveyed think vouchers would be good, 19% think they would be bad, and 45% are undecided. By lumping together "undecided" and "bad" the article can correctly make the claim "generally don't buy it", but another way of interpreting the data would be "about twice as many economists are pro-voucher as anti-voucher". But that's a headline you'd expect on Fox rather than NYTimes. But both are true!

[0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/upshot/free-market-for...
Uber won't be banned in Bratislava
> While this might be good PR the real driver of college costs is the ever increasing number of administrators:

Exploitative textbook pricing is also a problem that needs to be solved, and its unproductive to pass up lower-hanging fruit just to focus a higher one.
US considers cabin laptop ban on flights from UK airports
Our latest quality improvements for Search
You can do URL routing to different backed services like you mentioned, but you can also have a single LB route traffic to the closet datacenter running your service that has capacity. This means you don't need a DNS based system with multiple LBs for a global or HA system.
5 must-see Elixir conference talks
Easy Deploy of GraphQl and GraphiQL on Google Cloud Functions
The most interesting graph is the 'Child Income Percentile vs the Parent Income Percentile' compared between 1980 and 1940 [Graph D].

The rest can be explained away by a general stagnation of real wages. This graph, however, shows clearly a stratification taking shape.

There are a two ways to explain this:

1: The wealthy are enjoying artificial advantages to income generation that the less wealthy don't have access to. This would be an erosion of meritocracy in the US between 1940 and 1980

2: In 1940 the more 'naturally' gifted as far as income generation potential were somehow mixed more thoroughly with the rest of the population. The 1980 data simply shows that families are finding their ingrained strata in society. The meritocracy exists but those with more merit are simply rising to the top.

Occam's razor would suggest that explanation 1 is more likely since it doesn't require a whole population of people who would be naturally more apt to high income generation to be evenly mixed into almost every other income level than the one where they would rightly belong like oil being inexplicably emulsified and evenly distributed in a cup of water.

There is a growing and pervasive trend to believe that explanation 2 is the case. It may be possible but I don't think we can accept that without evidence.

The American Dream isn't just a feel good notion. If people are more or less biologically the same as they were in 1940 and there was no unnatural mixing occurring at the time and income can be used as a rough proxy for value creation then the income stratification represents artificial barriers to full productivity that hurts every single one of us. There are people out there -- a huge majority of people according to that graph -- that are not creating their full value potential.

That is a picture of a society in decline.

[1] https://d2ufo47lrtsv5s.cloudfront.net/content/sci/early/2017...
> but I had gradually built up a perception over the last couple months that it was a sort of click-bait, mediocre source like, maybe, HuffPo or BuzzFeed. I put it somewhere above Daily Mail but below BBC or The Guardian.

Is it just me that finds it's amusing that you came to a conclusion based off of feelings and conjecture than hard evidence? You know given the subject matter. Not disputing your points it just tickled me.
We provide SAAS to financial institutions and their corporate clients (so the below may not be relevant to your market):

1) make sure your service is a pain killer not a vitamin. This industry does not believe in vitamins and we didn't have the resources for such a long closing cycle. Our tech can be deployed in minutes, is easily understood and requires very little to no backofdice Support
2) Cold call to get meetings. I can't emphasize enough how powerful a cold call is. People on Wall Street get hundreds of emails a day but they are trained to always answer their phone. Be nice, be genuine, solve a painpoint
3) "ask for the order". Sales cycles can drag on, at some point you have to draw line in the sand and ask for the order. Do it humbly and respectfully and be prepared to hear no. The will almost always say yes

Final thought: we never took VC funding. In the beginning friends and mentors said we should as it would "add to your credibility", anecdotally I believe the opposite has happened. I've sat across from many entrepreneur CEOs who chose us not just because we were good at what we did but out of a desire to pay it forward. It's the unwritten code among founders: you grinded to get where you are and people who had no need to helped along the way, you do the same when the time comes. Point of this story is find these people as early as possible, they will become your champions.
I find it smart that Waymo waited until the snowbirds left to start this. It will be comical when the blue hairs come back next winter and smoke a few of these self-driving cars.... or vice versa. Obviously I don't want anyone to get hurt, but... it is going to happen.
Inheritance (of real and movable property e.g. herds) is ancient in common law and applies in some form for thousands of years across most of the globe to people of all station who had the right to own such property within that society. It's very much not just a modern concept.
Blurry Box hacking contest
I know some Japanese, including the phrase "give me my money back", because I would constantly play the Japanese version of Ben Folds Five's "Song For the Dumped". So there's some anecdotal proof that this works.
He also bought Bill Gates dinner with coupons at McDonald's.

(A) He uses coupons.
(B) He eats at McDonald's

Make of it what you will.

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/17/warren-buffett-once-paid-for-...
We had an economics professor that had a $110 textbook with tear-out homework assignments that needed to be completed in pen.

He said that he did so in order to make sure the publishing company would keep printing them, intentionally and openly ensuring there wouldn't be a used book market. His justification is in the syllabus here https://economics.byu.edu/Documents/Syllabi%20-%20broken/201....

Looking back, and having printed a book, I'm 99% sure that's BS. Or, at best, you could print the book much cheaper yourself.
I don't get why people use GitHub for their random lists of shit they like...
Oracle is building a 'transformational' startup inside the company
> It's really easy to fall into the trap of giving each customer exactly what they ask for ... this is the sort of product strategy that easily leads to disastrous results.

do you know any product/company examples where this was/is the case?
I prefer to state is as, more freedom to live where you want and how you want. still find it odd people complain about commute times by car when by rail/bus can be just as bad in many places.

while many choose to live outside of cities many are forced to because of bad city planning, regulations, and other government practices, which only served to protect vested business and political interest.

still I say though, you should be free to live where ever you want and can afford to.
The Essential Adapter for the New MacBook Pro
/r/whatsthisplant FTW
I don't think this is the same. The top tax rate post-WW II was ~90% and wasn't regressive.
Classic. When I was at UCSD (also a long time ago), I had the privilege of taking a course from a professor who used his own $70 textbook, then "taught" by reading it in front of a whiteboard. Undergrad tuition was also going up 20-30% per year at the time, for something that could only charitably be called "education."

There's very little excuse to create new versions of a calculus textbook. My decades-old Thomas still works just fine.
There is an advantage to electric cars here though. If you don't need to wait while the vehicle charges electric vehicles are a lot more attractive even with relatively small batteries.
A Project in Haskell: One Week Apps
lending out at rates that were designed to nearly guarantee profitable returns for those companies. it was, in essence, an exceptionally huge windfall profit that they "earned" by nearly going bankrupt and taking the whole global finance system to the brink with them. it was ransom money, in other words.

you're right that the practical concerns about trying to address the borrowers were significant and discouraged the Fed from even trying it (and congress wouldn't go near it either). however, that there is now a long-simmering batch of political backlash and ill-will should surprise nobody.

Bernanke broke the moral hazard limit and now we're suffering the consequences in our national polity and discourse.
Considering Waymo's vehicles drive much like stereotypical blue hairs (slooooow and cautious) I think everything will work out fine.
Controversies Take a Toll on Uber’s Stock
Suicide of an Uber engineer: Widow blames job stress, racism
Oh, my bad. I could've sworn they were originally sold for at least $10 but checking WP, they apparently were given away right from the start.
Flour sugar? I'm Dutch, we call it powdered sugar. Doesn't invalidate what you wrote in any way regardless, but still.
>>It's unfair to be hard on a man for simply living in a different age.

Unfortunately this how most current day news, trends and discussions are shaping out to be. Pretty much a lot of things considered bad now, were once perfectly acceptable.

Another annoying things these days are people who pick up some kind of negative thing about a famous personality and use that to discredit their whole life's work. Like talking something negative about Gandhi, and then use that ruse to make it look like his whole life was a waste.
This is hilarious and I love it. Nice work.
The product looks cool. Seeing as it's a free service, how do you make money?

Edit: nevermind, now I see the option to upgrade to lanes plus
How are you so sure driverless cars will get into less accidents? Furthermore, how is this technology going to be make everything less expensive. Please explain.

For the record, I think this technology will make the prices for these vehicles prohibitively expensive for the mass market.
How much of this is because there's more personal risk involved in cutting a budget than spending too much? Like, who in their right mind would cut any sort of counseling? One suicide and you're in trouble, whether or not it makes sense. Diversity-promoting staff? You know the second you look at that budget sideways your school will be in the news for some asshole senior wearing blackface at a party, and your name will be in the resulting national stories as the guy who cut that budget. Better increase it just to be safe. Predatory lending hits the news again and your school's on a Bottom 10 list for financial counselors per capita that's published in USA Today? Yikes. And so on, and so on, for many far more mundane things. You cut anything and any performance or enrollment metric takes a hit (and gets press)? Or sports, and The Team does poorly the next season? Oh man. Hope you have a good severance package.

Way more personal pressure to increase budgets than decrease them at schools, I'd think. Cut something and anything sort-of related to it goes wrong whether or not the cuts caused it you will be in for a rough time. It's really easy to point at spending levels and increases when someone asks if you've "done anything" about some issue.

[EDIT] because this is the Internet I guess I should state explicitly that no, I'm not against psychological counseling for students or anti-diversity or anything like that, that's just the kind of thing that sometimes makes the news and if there's anyone we can justify blaming for any reason, we definitely will, so I picked those as examples.
But the quality of a school depends on quality of students.

In two ways, even: first, if you select good students, they show good test results and place good jobs anyway, because they're smart. But also (and this is most important for me as a potential student) your school's _product_ is not only interaction with instructors, but also interactions with other students. The better your peers, the better education you get - even if you disregard the "school network" factor.
USSR tried to hide all the "gory" details of WW2.

For example, Babiy Yar (a place in Kiev where Germans killed tens of thousands) was a garbage dump until 1970-s.

Or (which is ironic, given their "Nothing is forgotten, nobody is forgotten" motto) - they didn't search for the fallen soldiers. Probably because they feared that there will be too many Soviet medallions compared to Germa ones...
Your comment couldn't be more on point. I viscerally disagree with the direction that a lot of "coding" initiatives are taking in schools nowadays. The claim is that the intentional move away from actual computer science is that it is a way to attract more people.

Fine. But when the course is just about making "whatever you want," then that really valuable time of learning these debugging skills gets missed, 'cause you can always pivot and do something else. The most valuable lessons I've learned about coding -- and the ones which, like you wisely stated, are applicable elsewhere in life -- had everything to do with needing to work through a tough computational challenge.

That taught me how to know I don't know something, how to poke at an issue in such a way as it would reveal something about the system (or my own understanding), the oh-so-currently-hyped skill called "grit", etc.

Every thinker or scientist I deeply respect has a treasure trove of examples of being stuck and working through hard and challenging problems even as little kids. That somehow we think an avenue for a more educated populous consists of presenting fewer experiences like that to youngsters is beyond me.