skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Programming has not really progressed as a science since the 90's. There are 3 items that are keeping the entire IT Market and technology in general from progressing.

1: Overtime exemptions. Management has zero incentive to hire experts and drive labor costs out of projects, which in turn hides those labor costs. You get lots of unpaid OT and tremendous immeasurable technical debt that managers spit-shine and pass onto the next investor or manager.

2: IT employee's can't work freelance due to IRS Tax rules that they are an employee and not a contractor which creates both criminal and civil liabilities for managers. Remember the programmer who crashed his Cessna into an IRS Building? This was why.

3: Anti-Labor market policies. H1B's, allowing silicon valley corps to enter into agreements not to poach each others employee's, and so forth.

Today, the IT market is 10% actual people who can program, architect, manage and in hack in general, 20% maintainers who spit shine the solutions and keep them running, and the remainder are empty bodies in a position who know almost nothing or just barely enough to do their jobs but if you throw anything outside of that very narrow expertise at them they disintegrate. The entire market, from education bodies straight up to the c-level execs and investors, encourage this as high-tech is the new whip used on the working man to run bubble after bubble and make money.

In that environment, the real hackers make decent money but have to be careful to continue progressing their craft. Everyone else has to fuck or be fucked.
To be fair it's only in the last couple of years that second hand devices haven't been complete dogs in terms of performance.
He's not trying to reform it, too many of his friends' profit margins rely on this behavior. It's probably more likely that they didn't bribe the right people and now have to be taxed with a fine (without admitting wrongdoing).
I guess you can look at it that way. But the point is that we want to produce employment. So yeah, subsidise away.
Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have proposed, and sponsored, legislation that would increase legal immigration, and help undocumented immigrants gain legal status. The problem is that while the vast majority of Democrats in Congress support such reform, less than 50% of Republicans support it.

Just as an example, take a look at the bill that came closest to greatly improving our legal immigration system[1], and helping undocumented immigrants (S.744 of the 113th Congress), which passed with a super-majority in the Senate[2]. It was promoted and sponsored by some very well-known Republican Senators (e.g. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, etc).

This bill contained provisions that would have fixed many of issues discussed in this thread, like what these unscrupulous consulting companies are doing with the current system. It would have made it easier for skilled immigrants to get green cards, for foreign students to stay in the country after they graduate, among many many other things. It was a compromise between parties, but yet it was a beautiful bill.

But Republicans in the House, lead by then-Speaker John Boehner prevented the bill from even being voted on. If the bill had been allowed a vote, it would have easily passed the House, and become law today. But a minority of the House (i.e. a majority of the Republicans in the House) unilaterally blocked passage of the bill. John Boehner actually said that the Republican party would "be over" if the 11-12 million undocumented immigrants were allowed to acquire citizenship eventually (as the bill would have enabled them to).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Security,_Economic_Oppo...

[2] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/113-2013/s168
Obamacare increased the cost of my families healthcare from $400 a month to $1800 a month, and now my family doesn't have long term healthcare insurance.

So please keep telling me how it's better.
Uber's CEO Plays with Fire
Everyone here complains, "I've said it before it's broken". Alright, that's easy to say, implement a better solution then? I can't think of any.

How is merit going to be measured? Prove me there can be a rule set that performs better. That's where I'd like the conversation to be at.
So what you're saying is that market forces prevent this behavior that harms consumers and pushes an inferior product?
That depends on the actions of the market leader no?

There are any number of anticompetitive practices that the market leader can engage in to effectively eliminate any threat to their monopoly from tying to predatory pricing to exclusive deals.
Those implicit conversion rules (largely inherited from C) are one of the bits of C++ that bit me the most when I was a primary C++ dev.
Its not just low pay. A friend of mine employed a developer who was a senior at WiPro earning over 1 lakh per month. He was employed for my friend at a junior developer salary simply because he was sick and tired of writing random throw away code. This developer finally wanted to gain some real skills, work on a real product, and took a huge pay cut to come to start working at a product based company. So far he is doing pretty good.
But might you not work just for the satisfaction of producing something of value to the world?
you have to handle the case in which you have no remaining items as well, breaking up a chunk log(chunkToBreak/chunkSizeNeeded) times. And in the case that you have no viable chunk to use, you need to call back to the OS.
I had a similar experience my first time, but I applied again a year later and passed. I did study algorithms (mostly DP and graph stuff) via HackerRank for two weeks before each onsite, but I never did fully succeed with any of the algorithms questions.

The second time, I think I was just lucky with questions I liked. I don't think my programming ability changed drastically in the year between.
An amazing text on this topic is Martin Wainwright/Michael Jordan's Graphical Models, Exponential Families, and
Variational Inference: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wainwrig/Papers/WaiJor08_F...
I don't think I'd ever done a full branch squash. However I have done small `rebase -i` squashes where I put together small commits that were related. At the point of where I am rebasing something into master I'd prefer fewer commits. However, it really adds no value to my git commit history other than it makes me feel better about it. I get no complaints from my coworkers in these scenarios.
Watson IoT with Common Lisp
While O1 is more explicitly geared towards highly skilled, a lot of professors and researchers (and certainly most of the great engineers employed by FB, Google, etc.), from both India and elsewhere, actually come over on the H1B as the paper work is far more complicated for the O1.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14178397
OK, maybe it could work. I remembered that ATmega port as slower. Maybe it should be tried.
The various compounds released by the (organic (containing carbon)) explosives can be metabolized by bacteria. And bacterial metabolism is often linked to sensors within the bacteria already - so that the machinery for metabolizing X isn't actually produced unless the bacteria can sense X in its environment. If we find a bacteria that already has this system, we can commandeer it so that upon sensing TNT/DNT/Nitrates it produces a reporter (color, it moves, another sense-able chemical) instead of or along with the enzymes used to metabolize those explosive materials.

A list of tested analytes and reporters: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4625088/table/T...

And a very basic diagram:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4625088/figure/...

And images of what the bacteria look like when 'turned on' by TNT, DNT, or nitrates: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4625088/figure/...

[From the paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4625088/ ]
Rural America could bust monopolies tomorrow if they voted differently. They've done it before, and they don't need to be rescued by us for that. More like they need to rescue themselves and the rest of us.
Hmm, I don't think it's _that_ bad...
Rent vs. buy is a great example of how useless broad unqualified advice is. Whether to buy or rent varies from district to district within the same city, as well as from city to city, and also state to state inside the US, never mind different countries.

It also varies from individual to individual; their savings, their finances, where they are in their career.
The embedded Lyft ads (knowing full well they are adaptive to a given reader) throughout the article is a brilliant touch on the part of Uber's main competitor.
I don't believe 20M more people have medical coverage because of Obamacare, that's a lagging indicator that's likely dead wrong. If you are self employed it made medical insurance unaffordable. Before Obamacare I paid $400 a month for a $5k deductible plan for my family. Post Obamacare I paid $1,100/month, then $1,400/month and quit when it went to $1,800 a month.

So my family has no long term medical insurance and no one is counting our dropping medical insurance in any statistic.
But how are you going to discuss the accoutrements of being intelligent without admitting that yes, you are intelligent? (Wealth has the same problem.)
Weve had data that was fixed size but wouldn't fit on the stack.
What makes you think those authors are trustworthy and reliable? Especially Ferris.
Ebay, I've never had any trouble disposing of old computers.
I'm sorry that this happened to you.

But don't you think you could have prepared better? Understanding code others have written is important and in my opinion asking about bits is not unreasonable.
And, as with many other things, the revealed preferences of many people is that they don't care much about quality of the call relative to other things.

I was just having a conversation with someone earlier today about how the average quality of most of the voice calls we make is far lower than it was decades ago on Ma Bell landlines. Of course, calls are much cheaper now, we have mobile phones, etc. Nonetheless...

Sprint's early on ads about hearing a pin drop on their fiberoptic network seem really quaint today.
haha, good point.
This is some f'd up stuff. I came here as a student for my Bachelor's degree and I wanted to gain some more experience before I go back. This is my 3rd attempt of trying to get the H1B and it just sucks to see these companies doing stuff like this.
I am not sure people want another social network. It's not like search or computer OS or even Netflix. My feeling is that FB, as is (social news feeds), has no real future. I think the future is messenger, WhatsApp, instagram, vr, etc.

The reason fb is popular is zucks sheer force of Will and not because it's particularly necessary.
My biggest question about this is did the guy not understand why the flag was called `MONKEY-SEE-NO-EVAL`? Because that name was my favourite part of the article...
Given how awful wait times for green cards have gotten for Indians (even with a Masters from a top university (and sometimes even PhD...), if you apply now, you can expect to wait a couple of decades while for every other country but China you get it immediately), I think a lot of Indians are fine with gambling on drastic changes to be honest and seeing where the chips fall.
even std::unordered_map is easy to beat on most workloads if you relax the standard's requirements a litte, because the standard more or less requires hashing with chaining ("The elements of an unordered associative container are organized into buckets. Keys with the same hash code appear in the same bucket"). A good linear probing hash table will be faster most of the time, e.g. Google's dense_hash_map.
Obamacare made private medical insurance illegal, so millions of self employed lost coverage from that.

The exchange policies have increased in cost so rapidly they are unaffordable for anyone not getting a massive subsidies. Many self employed are now without insurance because of that.
Isn't it obvious that it's a matter of perspective? Ask two non-programmers the difference between Python and Haskell, and they'll say, "They look the same to me." Ask two programmers the difference between Python and Haskell, and it's a fair bet that they'd be able to list off a laundry list of differences. Both perspectives are actually right, and neither one is a "trope" as you put it.

What you think of as meaningful differences someone else might think of as nominal differences.
The article: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/dec/24/julian-assange...

The reason their extreme bias shows: https://theintercept.com/2016/12/29/the-guardians-summary-of...

This is a bit of an exception, because it is quite possibly the worst article I've ever seen them put out. But they definitely have a bias, towards the Clinton/Blair faux-left to the point where they not only dislike the right, but also the people like Sanders/Corbyn.
The NSA leverages these exploits to spy on foreign nations. That's fine, spies should spy...

But it does beg the question: who's protecting our information from foreign intrusions?
An allocator doesn't have to be slow. You can implement allocator yourself that asks for memory from the OS up front, and just hands pointer back to the caking application. If you know the order of allocations is the reverse of the deallocstiond (as an example) you can do allocations with a pointer bump!
I'm pretty skeptical about your claims. You start with dubious claims about minimum wage increases driving down employment which has never been proven (the contrary has been observed in natural experiments).

So, not very worried.
I never got any feedback from a Google onsite, is that new?
I agree. After I have interviewed and seen Google pass on a candidate, I sometimes feel I was lucky in my interviews.
Bonus annoyance: After rejection, get 15 contacts from Amazon recruiters in the next 5 months.

Those made me wonder if it wasn't for the best.
I mean, look at the shenanigans Wells Fargo gets caught up in, which are worse than "buying likes" bot activity. Is it that unbelievable some manager with a bonus tied up in vanity metrics would use bots to boost them?
Isn't the whole thing an over extended joke based on The Office?
Is the dupe story detector not working?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14171295
For a practical application of using graphical models to "solve" a bayesian problem, I recommend Frank Dellaert's whitepaper, which cover Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM, a robotics algorithm) using similar techniques: https://research.cc.gatech.edu/borg/sites/edu.borg/files/dow...
These are all developer centric points. What about users? Android already needs huge batteries, make everything run JavaScript and they'll need to be even larger. And forget computationally heavy apps? The hardware android runs on doesn't exactly have the best JavaScript performance.
Savanna DL Caravan Full Traditional Seasonal Awning – Camping for Family
This problem isn't a Bash problem, nor is it a shell problem. '[' is a binary that takes a set of args terminates with a ']'. It's often just a symlink to the 'test' binary.

The other "problem" is quoting. In which case what would you expect to happen? Most people avoid spaces in file paths for this very issue. Argument passing is whitespace separated, so an application has no idea that you meant two (or more) args to be just one. Simple solution, use quotes.

If you were to shun all CLI usage in favor of another programming language, then you would be doing the exact same thing with system calls; Using the example from the article for consistency (even though it wouldn't make much sense in a more expressive language):

var = "some value";
exec("[", "-z", var, "]");
I had a similar thing happen, but in the opposite direction.

Back in September (two months before the election), a random meme of Hillary Clinton popped up on my Instagram Explore feed. It was funny, so I liked it. Immediately after, after one like on a seemingly innocuous meme, I started getting full blown "Hillary is a criminal" memes. Along with that, gun activism, taxation is theft, and that WW3 was going to happen. And I tried to fix this by flagging all the suggested posts as "not relevant to my interests", and even blocking the meme accounts, but Instagram wouldn't get a clue. So for weeks afterwards, my Instagram account was bombarded with pro-Trump memes. All because I thought one joke about Hillary Clinton was funny.

With all these automatically curated feeds, there's no space for moderates anymore on the internet.
What I'm trying to say is there is no 1to1 comparison between a Linux distribution and an Illumos one because of different structuring of upstream base and tighter community. But I don't disagree even when this considered 3 distros still may be significantly more detrimential than 1.
I think 90 vs. few hundred, can't remember the precise figures.
Dump VBA for C# or Python or something. VBA is trash.
Patents are government monopolies created to incentivize inventors to share their inventions so others could build upon them. The fear was they'd hide their IP behind factory walls and innovation would be slow.

Now patents are used by those who don't make anything and often don't even invent anything in order to blackmail those who do.
Parts of this definitely resonate with my experience; there's a reasonable amount of high-level documentation about fixing specific Android build issues, but nearly nothing describing how the system actually works. Lots of StackOverflow answers exist saying "add xyz to your build.gradle file" but there's a dearth of anything describing what the real build process for an Android app is.
(For various reasons I didn't have to deal with a lot of the actual app coding, so the XML layout systems were less troubling to me than the author).

> When I get the call from G’s android team to build a better buildsystem

I can only hope that this is "when" and not "if" ;-) I can't believe the current system can't be improved upon though...
> Why didn't they use Python

Are you seriously suggesting using 50x the processing power as a native program on a mobile phone?
> Which is what exactly? That a spy agency is spying?

To spell it out: backdoors are of course a helpful tool for a security agency, but once the key for the backdoors falls into the wrong hands the potential for misuse is monstrous because, well, the backdoors are in all kinds of potentially critical systems systems, e.g. even in the cellphones of high ranking officials (or in cellphones of their families) etc.

To get the same intel by different means than a backdoor is of course much more expensive. So one needs to find the sweet spot, where the utility as a function of cost and security is maximized. That sweet spot likely does not involve backdoors.
I frequently lately have had to have people call me back on my cellphone because the Skype call quality has been awful. Skype seems to be much more dependent on network conditions.
Better than assembly in the 80s is not a high bar.
> Wow I think this unroll.me thing is the real scandal here.

How is it a scandal? Competitive intel is a normal and widespread thing and it's not a scandal that people don't read a privacy policy that says, "We may collect, use, transfer, sell, and disclose non-personal information for any purpose."
Stop overusing interfaces
The interviewer really should have wrapped up the question in less than 40 mins if it was obvious the candidate was not doing well.
It's strange because in my mind I'm paying for youtube service of getting me videos (either with money or by wasting time on ads)

And with this I would continue to pay for service AND also receive ads.

I kinda understand perverted logic of licensing content and region locking due to price discrimination, but just in my mental model Youtube is more of a service provider than content seller.

Edit: Either way, I'm paying for not seeing ads - so why would they still show them to me, after taking my money? It's their problem how they deal with second side (content creators & right owners, etc.) And right now it just seems like punishing paying customer (hey, adblocking is free :)
Walmart. Walmart has destroyed thousands of businesses. Now you can argue the consumer got lower prices, but low prices don't matter when no one has money to afford them. Additionally, those economies of scale produced cheap, disposable, polluting goods that have an engineered lifetime so that customers have to keep buying the same appliance (or whatever) over and over.

The question isn't when economies of scale hurt, that's a loaded question. The question is "when does consolidation no longer benefit the consumer?". I would argue many, many industries have reached this point, with ISPs being the most obvious one, but there are many examples (like the syringe one given above) where a business you've never heard of silently corners the market through consolidation and trust building.
Since the privacy policy explains in clear English that your data will be sold it would be more deceptive if they didn't sell your data.
Or any software ;)

But it's "situation normal" for most software development activities, no?
And yet the Audubon society, after considering all the various risks to birds, is pro-wind turbines, as you can tell from the angry commenters attacking them for this stance in the article you linked.
Hmm, discrete only? So, can't take averages, state the law of large numbers, the central limit theorem, convergence, completeness, do linear regression, etc.
Can't multiply a random variable by a real number. Hmm ....

Will be in trouble when considering a sequence of, say, independent random variables, say, as in coin flipping.

Will have trouble with P(A|B) and E[Y|X].

And the notation is still wrong.
I have a different take on this, as an American by birth: at least there is some recognition that engineering roles are second-class roles. Americans, and particularly bubble-dwellers in this industry, have this incredibly naive view that individual contributors are social equals with management (any tier).
A friend recommended unroll.me once. I carefully read their ToS and it was clear that they get full read access to your whole Gmail-Inbox.

Now we know what they are doing it and how. I hope they get shutdown within the aftermath of this story.
How do you figure? Most historians credit the rise of the middle class to the post-war boom in the 50s. Standard Oil and US Steel were broken up during the Roosevelt and Taft administrations in the early 20th century.
As is the original commenter, who nevertheless got attacked for quoting a "bullshit fact".
You are lucky.

There is a neat workaround for getting old apps onto an old IPad. 1) you can gift from one ipad to another, 2) you can install the older app if you have bought the newer version but it wouldn't install. I did this for a friend who bought an ipad but couldn't get Goodreader (no longer recommend) to install because they pulled the version that works on IPad1.

I think companies should be required to release the encryption keys or provide a way to install software on devices that are EoL. So many IPads got "recycled" that could have been put to better use.

I think Goodreader could do the world a great service by selling a version that installs on first gen IPads, they make pretty good budget ereaders for pdf content.
I continually heard some years back that Obamacare was basically Romneycare which was basically the Republican plan from the Clinton years. Further, as we can see from the current state of things, the Republicans might say they hate Obamacare, but now that they have a chance to repeal it and put their own plan in place, they've failed continually. There's no politically-tenable position to move further rightward unless you are in favor of less people having care or people having worse care.

In short, the Democrats basically adopted the old Republican position on the only economic issue listed by the OP - exactly in line with my earlier point.