skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Overcoming technical debt/bad decisions of the previous group of programmers.

This is often a gold mine, just make sure your interview doesn't become a discussion about how bad other programmers are.
I can understand putting the headline first (Let me tell you about the time I re-wrote the widget code for Acme.), but I don't think I ever tell the story backwards... maybe I am just strange in that I appreciate a good (concise) story?
"In much of Europe the preferred way of doing that was to produce beer."

In much of Europe the preferred way of doing that was indeed to use alcohol, but in more than one form. Beer's usage, compared to other alcoholic beverages, was higher only in germanic and western slavic regions (like Czech). The french, the spanish, greeks, romanians, and maybe others in the Balkan Peninsula, preferred wine. Eastern slavic and northern Europe had their vodka-like beverages. Europe is not only Germany, mind you!
Yes they do. However, the cultural and business environments in European nations are often different so it's not a perfect comparison. For example, in most countries you can't just start taking payments and call yourself a "sole proprietor." Creating a business involves money and time which can also be a deterrent.

A better study that could represent the effects it would have in the US looked at rates of entrepreneurship before and after people become eligible for Medicaid (age 65). After controlling for all other factors they still saw a sizable increase, and the 65+ age group is certainly far less likely to be first time entrepreneurs than younger age groups:

https://thinkprogress.org/universal-health-insurance-boosts-...
He has.

https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/856603660737945601
I will concede there are multiple factors. Lack of access to capital, winner takes all (pro-corporate) Freedom Markets[tm] decimating competition, etc.

New business (and therefor new job) creation in the USA has tanked. Especially in rural areas.

However we got here, what is the fix?
Unless vendors are discriminating against customers, I don't understand which rules are being skirted in your examples. Higher demand should cause higher prices (or more vendors, but that requires prices to reach a certain amount first).
Are there any places in the world where these two things aren't true?
Not a negative income tax with a flat rate above/below a threshold. The tax that hurts the poor the most is obviously the sales tax.
I used to work at Google. I didn't study for the interviews, I just showed up. It went well enough to be hired. I did study CS and know my algorithms and data structures though.
@sbuccini This is the exact problem we have solved with our "influencer search" mode. There, we show you influencers based on keywords in content they've shared. :) Not based on their bio text. Though to do, but solves the exact problem you're talking about!
I've done localization conversion projects a few times so I can relate. There's never one way to translate everything (e.g. page content, URLs, database content, images, forms), there's usually several translation methods to evaluate, you have to trawl your whole codebase to tag text for translation, translating routes/URLs tends to break all code that doesn't expect those names to change, new developers have to be taught to develop new content with translations in mind, you have to schedule allowing content to be translated along with time to get it translated to get everything done on time and you need a new workflow for how translatable text is delivered, translated, reviewed and deployed.
But if you learnt how to implement quick sort before an interview and it proved useful in your interview, then you are succeeding on your merit. It's not like you are cheating during the interview. At the time of interview you do know how to implement the algorithm and that is your merit.
It was exactly one year ago, so I've started simply with Angular 1 and Angular Material. Later on added Webpack to use ES6 modules.
Really long time ago at an boot sale I bought essentially complete security system made in early 90's by some smallish company that was probably spun-off from Tesla (ie. the elecronics manufacturer "Tesla n.p.") as part of privatization and then probably failed outright. The thing consisted of obviously repurposed parts of other systems and looked like one giant kludge.

But what was the interesting feature of this was that most sensors were based on infrasound, notionally they were meant to detect shattering glass, but somehow the sensitivity was tweaked in such way that they even detected opening of doors/windows (this was mentioned in manual as feature) and even could detect person moving around the room.
We = this article and the commenters on this article. We are commenting on travel between two US states, nothing to do with crossing country lines. The grandparent topic was, specifically, about ground transportion for four Americans from one part of the US to another part of the US.
An acquaintance of mine had a part of her skull replaced by a 3D printed part, made by Materialise. While it sounds spectacular, she was out of the hospital in days, none the worse for wear.
> I never seem to find a quick good answer for this.

So do what polititions do -- answer the question you wished they had asked instead of what they actually asked.

In my case, at most places I've worked I end up being one of the go-to people for gnarly bugs that have stumped the regular crew. So part of my interview prep is to condense a war story into something short and coherent that illustrates why people should have faith in my intuition, a bit of a tough sell. Then during the interview I latch onto any semi-related question and tell my rehearsed story.
For the same reason that just because you can balance on a balance beam 30cm from the ground, you'd probably be hesitant balancing on one 5 meters off the ground.

EDIT: If you want to see him testing the concept in a bunch of iterations, you can check out the vimeo page here: https://vimeo.com/gravityindustries/videos/

Arguably, the leg-mounted jets COULD be close enough for ground effect, but they're apparently destabilizing so they switched to two backpack-mounted engines instead.
From Serialized to Shell: Auditing Google Web Toolkit
In a former life I worked with a large procure-to-pay ERP system, and we were even stricter.

Vendors had to be pre-approved and their bank details managed, who were explicitly matched to POs, explicitly matched to invoices, and finally... invoices had to be matched to inventory receipts before any sort of payment was triggered. POs had to be approved by someone internally with specific approval levels as well.

Not sure if we were insanely overboard but... no idea how this happened.
Terry, is that you? B^>
I grew up in a college town (a large state land grand university) and this isn't really how I perceived things. The complaints were more about college students littering, drinking too much, or playing loud music.
Handling concurrent INSERT with SQLAlchemy (2015)
Law enforcement is funded by taxation, which is theft. If you avail yourself of law enforcement, you are benefiting yourself from the proceeds of crime for personal gain.
It's all relative. Sometimes solutions require insights. Other times solutions involve a ton of grinding. Many people have a tendency to overemphasize the first and greatly underemphasize the second, even though the grinding may actually be harder than devising clever solutions.

We build tools that read and write Excel files (open source library: https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx) There are plenty of very difficult problems involving ill-specified aspects of the various file formats and errors in specifications, but it is largely a matter of grinding and finding files in the wild that capture the behavior you want to understand. Those are "difficult" in the sense that people still get these things wrong (related: recently a bug in the Oracle SmartView corrupted US Census XLS exports, which boiled down to an issue in calculating string lengths with special characters) but they don't feel difficult since most of the work didn't involve any really clever insights.

IMHO the hardest problem is now fairly straightforward: How do you enable people to test against confidential files? The solution involves running the entire process in the web browser using FileReader API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FileReader , and that is an obvious technical solution in 2017 but few thought it was even possible when we started.
Like the ACM/IEEE Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice [1]? The tricky part is enforcement because Professional Licensure in Software Engineering is relatively new and I suspect won't become widespread.

We had to study this code in my Computer Science program's ethics course.

[1]
http://www.acm.org/about/se-code
Buy snake
This hammer is making a terrible screwdriver. Goodbye hammer and good riddance.
Dealing with legacy code.
"Security" through obscurity vs. the spotlight of the BBC! Both sides are pretty much true: the simplistic proof-of-concept XSS requires the target device's internal IP address. This product winds up accomplishing its intended purpose simply because of how few active users it has.

It is unfortunate the takeaway from the initial post was a "works on my machine" XSS attack rather than emphasizing that there is only one widely shared public/private key pair "securing" all communication all of the devices. There is plenty of precedent demonstrating that not-private private keys is a serious issue eg. https://isc.sans.edu/diary/22076

Speculatively, all that old software is a juicy target as well (obscured by ARM vs. x86). However, since the security researcher appears to specialize most in XSS that wound up in the spotlight. I'm most curious about how this person was selected by the BBC to review the device. Imagine if Matthew Garrett had done it!
> In a perfect world competing infrastructure companies should spring up out of thin air due to infinite availability of capital...

You wouldn't need an infrastructure company, nor would you need a big capital expenditure. The point is that the infrastructure would be state-owned and available on a non-discriminatory basis already. If demand exists, a competitor could bootstrap by buying fractional bandwidth from the last mile infrastructure, fractional bandwidth from a peering provider, and connecting the two.

The problem at the moment is that huge capital expenditure is required because I need the majority of a street to be interested before digging it up becomes economically viable. This problem would go away.
Where are you living now? I want to move there.
This was one of the reasons I felled in love with Turbo Pascal back in the day.

Algol derived languages, while not as powerful as ML ones regarding the type system offer quite a few possibilities to ensure safer code via type definitions, ranges, enumerations and ADTs (Abstract Data Types not to confuse with Algebraic data types).

C++ also allows for this, but requires a bit of boilerplate with templates, classes and operator overloading, which is way more work than a few type declarations in Haskell or Idris.
In theory the purpose of automation is humanitarian.
In practice results vary.
FCC Chairman Pai: We Need an Open and Free Internet for the 21st Century
Thanks! Sounds pretty solid. I may check it out if my investment side gets a little more complex.
Combining fonts – JakeArchibald.com
I can't wait until I grow up and get the power to downvote comments like this which contribute nothing of value to the discussion. Your horse could not be more dead.

$34 billion dollars and many of the biggest names in finance and technology seem to think there's a little more to the story.
Versus in situ (eg stored procedures)?

I currently agree.

There was a time when the database engine was the "app server". Before client/server & ODBC.

I miss those days. That strategy is overdue for a comeback.
From the words they're using, I don't think they were selling on Amazon as a 3rd party seller, it sounds more like Amazon was buying from them on wholesale terms, and then selling to end users as sold and shipped by Amazon.
All work is an assembly line. It's not a value statement, and it doesn't take the art away from the work. Work is work is work. Developers just have their head shoved too fair to get away from feeling like special snowflakes.

You're talking about risk management, not individual worker ability. Yes, it is a poor idea to have any one portion of a system maintained by only one person. So don't. It is a poor idea to have only one person who understands the system architecture. So don't. It's a poor idea to not recognize the different strengths and weaknesses of all your workers regardless of context. So don't.
I love the way Rails does new releases, always some good features in there. Been working with 5.1 since the initial rcs and using the Capybara, encrypted secrets and webpack integration - all have been working well.
Not should it. That is point of courts. If the courts uphold the decision, the it by definition within the code of conduct.
> It's all so perfectly tuned to draw in an endless supply of suckers that I'm almost kicking myself for not thinking of it first.

well, clearly it's not too late to get in on the game ;)
Instead of calling it a corporate tax cut I would prefer to state it as equalization among competing jurisdictions. Meaning, even Canada runs a 15% tax rate and brings in more by percentage of GDP than the US does with a 35% rate.

Its pretty dishonest in linking new jobs as the metric to make startups look better than corporations when its always been small business which employs the most and works through more people than start ups.

Plus the idea of lowering the tax rate is to give the big players a reason to bring the money back here instead of sitting overseas.

We did it before and the treasury benefited, other countries have done it as well; see Canada which went to 15%. So please tell me how we justify more than twice that rate????
Thanks, that is a very nice link! I'll give it a try, being a lefty with horrible handwriting.

Do you know if that font is anywhere on-line? The author suggests not focusing on the letters at first, so I was thinking: what if we make a scrambled character generator that creates work-sheets with non-words to trace? This might help with the unlearning process.
The gap between "No, you should not be breaking the law." and "One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws." is huge and cavernous, but it does exist. That some people or companies will abuse this fact, should not mean that the difference is to be denied or minimized.
We're here for a civil and substantive discussion, and this kind of trolling is not that. Please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Borg-again humans?
Maybe a plug, maybe not.

However, I strongly agree here (about the blanket on the couch).

The perfect system should be able to do both 1) passive device-free detection as well as 2) inferring information about your location of any personal device.

To have a device in every room is no problem for me. As long as it is invisible and cheap.
Getting Started with GraphQL and Node.js Made Simple – How We Innovated Our App
You are probably part of a really a small percentage.
The parent doesn't appear to be suggesting that people of a certain economic class should not be allowed to fight unjust laws. Rather they appear to be countering the popular narrative that the American revolution was necessarily populist, or popular, and by extent, that all civil disobedience is necessarily justifiable.

This is an important distinction to make when one is attempting to argue from authority, and the simple list of Wikipedia pages you linked to above is a weak argument from authority. Without an accurate portrayal of what that authority was, what its goals were, and what it actually believed, one cannot make a good faith argument.

One example being Benjamin Franklin's often cited quote about those who give up liberty for the sake of security deserving neither. This is often invoked as a warning about the inherent harm of trusting the state, when in fact Franklin was arguing (in a very specific context regarding taxes to fund a defense against Native American raids on the frontier) against the "security" of personal defense versus the "liberty" provided by the state. While the core argument being made in the fundamentally modern reinterpretation of Franklin's words may be legitimate, one cannot ascribe that intent to Franklin's words without engaging in revisionist history.

To use the American civil rights movement as an example, both sides considered themselves just, and considered the laws they disagreed with to be unjust. It cannot be the case that any law considered unjust by any party is equal to any other in the degree of its injustice, otherwise one could argue that those who considered laws against segregation to be unjust were morally equal, and equally justified, in their opposition as those who fought for segregation's end.

What one considers to be unjust, and why one opposes that injustice, should be relevant to the conversation.
Blockchain doesn't seem like the most appropriate solution here because what you really care about is basically document signing. The ledger can be maintained by a central authority (accounts payable).
If I truly believed that automation, especially in the short term, would include UBI or some other social safety nets, I'd be far more optimistic about this.

I'm nervous that in the short term, fewer people will continue to get very rich, and more people will fall out of the middle class.
Perhaps you can get returned stock back to see if there's something wrong with it, but not unsold stock? It seems strange to me as well, but I've also seen plenty of Amazon items that are obviously effectively about to be out of stock forever, lingering on those last one or two items still in some warehouse somewhere.
well those are implants rather than transplants.
> The tax that hurts the poor the most is obviously the sales tax.

Right, which is a flat, or proportional, tax.
That objection could be seen as compatible with the original thesis in the title, though. Equate the need to work with unexpected things on the job, with improvising a job interview. In both cases, you need to expand beyond your knowledge, but you also need a baseline of knowledge and ability to even get started.
Amazon is not really an appropriate distribution platform for 6-week custom-made-to-order products.

Seems like there's a place for such a website.

There are quite a number of things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSR8wKQ-TEU

Maybe there's another well-known retail site that caters to that type of vendor

Massdrop? However, this requires a different set of adaptations from manufacturers that some might regard as "compromises."
My raw sql can call out to stored procedure if that's the best tool for the job.

A database is a perfectly good application core, if you application primary about creating/updating/deleting records.

If your application is business workflows, and complicated business logic. Then this is something to be considered.
Show HN: New Dark Reading Article about OWASP
Exactly. Plenty people complains about the state of our privacy right now. But when Google offered a job interview to me, I refused and my entourage though it was a bad move. Well, you live in the word you create.
This is a just an ad or marketing stunt for the company.

As most of you pointed out, they picked the wrong distributor for their business model. Now they are mad and severing relationships.

However, 75% of the article is about their company and their handcrafted products. Then they offer a discount at the bottom tells you everything you need to know what this is really about.

This is a publicity and marketing stunt.
My anecdata with hundreds of interviews over the years is that getting people to talk about their projects is the single best/fastest way to verify their involvement and knowledge of the projects they list on their resume. When someone can't elaborate on what they did and why, or what problems motivated their work and what they learned, it's a strong indicator that they are puffing up the projects/keywords on their resume (which is super common) but didn't actually learn much.

Moreover, getting people talking is a great way, in my experience, of identifying strong thinkers, strong coders, and strong experience. It helps you see someone's personality, it helps you literally get to know them. I can't think of any reasons why I would worry about that before hiring someone. I would worry about not doing it.

I would like to know what you would offer as a better alternative approach? Do you prefer the idea of coding questions to stories?
> as we’ve demonstrated to the blogger, the media and our customers

There's no demonstration, and they can't know if a customer has been compromised or not.

Selling snake oil is .. well, let's say despicable; but clearly lying when exposed is perhaps even worse.

I expect the decency to be silent, please.
Microsoft's "Cloud" is growing at that rate. Not Azure specifically. It accounts for Office365 as well as other cloud usage/licenses, and all sorts of other

Both companies are growing crazy fast. I don't get the premise of the article -- AWSs' growth is unparalleled at those numbers/run rate in the history of enterprise IT.
The part-art comment is certainly true. I have a 3D milled ceramic crown that was done years ago during the early days of the technology. It is absolutely great in every way, and has been since day 1. My wife went to the same dentist a few months later, another 3D milled ceramic crown. Same guy, same machine. The crown had an awful fit, was never right, and she had it replaced with a different technology within 6 months. Getting to three-9's reliability is hard for all of us.
> Could you work at a targeted advertising company or at resource extraction (eg mining)?

You're on the right track. These moral codes are supposed to get people thinking whether their acts are really ethical, or just rationalized as such.
The author is giving way too much credit to the interview process and way undermining his abilities. Interviewers are humans just like the interviewee and the process can be (and is in fact) screwed up. Interview performance has little correlation with actual job performance. You do whatever you have to do get in the door and learn new skills on the job. He is missing out on some great opportunities (and most likely salary) by having this attitude.
Is that racism or nationalism? Do you think it'd bother him if someone of Chinese descent lived in their hometown and made that money? I don't know.
How is Amazon even possibly a good place to sell this kind of an item?

For manufacturers like this, Amazon is only useful for selling returned items, "Used - like new" or "refurbished".
It will reach the point that there are no more layers. Only idea => implementation.
A car with replacement parts is still a car.
Much more are thin walls when you hear your neighbours.
Ansible currently only supports Python 2.7....
Finnish technical writers are great – TCEurope Colloquium 2017
I'm very excited for this technology. But not as much as hockey players, who would love to be able to have their teeth replaced.
it looks a heckuva lot more simple to me. and clear.

and that's just from an "easy on the eyes" standpoint.

when i also think about actually typing all those unnecessary angle-brackets, i break out in hives. it's not "difficult". but it's terribly tedious.

but you should stick with what you like... :+)
> Cryptocurrencies are a brilliant scam.

Quite a bit too broad of a generalization.