skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
assuming that spiders are actually a serious risk where you live, and if it's a phobia in any way like my own irrational fear of heights, then yes it's a good idea to overcome.

the sudden panic reaction when you perceive something that looks like a spider[0], really isn't going to keep you safe when it counts, while acting calm, rational and with common sense will.

heights can be dangerous but my fear of heights is not doing much of protecting me. the heights I may encounter but prefer to avoid aren't actually dangerous (see-through/grated floors are the worst :) ). the situations that are dangerous, I'd rather have my full faculties if I were to find myself there.

[0] i know people who react very strongly to just an image of a spider. living in NL where there's zero dangerous wildlife (just 1 or 2 endangered species of tiny poisonous snake, a lost/dead wolf every few years and 17M humans), that's quite an irrational fear but I won't mess with that because the panic reaction is very real and involuntarily. For fun, however, we tried an experiment where I very slowly drew a cartoon spider, to see at what amount of legs the reaction would kick in :) turned out drawing tiny hairs on the legs did way more for the response than whether I drew 5,6,7, 8 or 9 legs (at which point the other party didn't think it was fun anymore, so I had to end the experiment). and just in case you wondered yes I play with my own phobia in a similar way, whenever I find myself on a perfectly safe balcony that triggers my acrophobia, I like to see how many minutes I can enjoy the view before the GTFO feeling becomes overwhelming (on balconies it's not quite immediate, but still very strong when it kicks in, making it an interesting process to observe).
Failing the test is an indication that the person is 'not' a programmer.

You are mostly right, but are there any cases that a programmer wants to join a company and he can't even write a FizzBuzz program?

I have asked that question to all the programmers that I've worked with (with various levels of skill) and all of them can write it.

Is there any data on that? I would love to know if that test actually have helped recruiters to identify bad programmers. Like if they can explain what Ajax is and how it works, but fail to make a FizzBuzz program...

Sorry if it's a bit off topic
Cool, kudos for taking a responsible approach!
Random advice from the internet.

0. Talk to the people asking the question and ask them what they are comfortable with. Relying on AWS lambda is great so long as your credit card still works, the code contains no bugs, there isn't a problem with the email, and somebody at the client's office understands what the email means and can quickly do what it takes to keep everything working...and there are no other problems or circumstances.

1. Consider the business value derived from continuing to be an information bottleneck. An alternative is to set up servers and databases on accounts controlled by your clients.

2. To me, the conversation suggests at a minimum the client has done a risk assessment. Though the questions may have been prompted by conversations with a larger competitor (a competitor only needs two programmers to provide a more robust bus factor).

3. This is a business problem not a technical problem. It is also a business opportunity. Maintaining servers and databases is commodity work. Expertise in solving the businesses problems and an ongoing relationship is value added work and can lead to better contracts and better clients.

Good luck.
I spent the last 24 hours figuring out how to procedurally generate an island
Their governor looks like Michael Scott. I've never understood why governments go into debt. It's just stupid.
Couple of questions. How are they powered (solar?). If someone were to get a ticket and protest that the sign changed after they had parked, what process is in place to allow them to review the content record for that sign?
It's more common than you think, I really didn't expect it to happen that often until I've started interviewing people.

Of course it's a minority, but a simple test like a fizzbuzz that we can be done with in a matter of minutes can save a lot of time to both parties.
Comments like this make me lose faith in HN readers. These were human beings. This wasn't a job interview. Not caring for a human being on the grounds of IQ is a really disturbing thought.
China announces tighter regulations for online news
Consumers view "capturing the value" as "ripping them off".

So while yes they may value the good at the price they're willing to pay, they view the "fair value" at much closer to the marginal cost.
Musk Initiates Climbdown from Tesla's High Horse, Production Rev Postponed
I disagree with most of the points made, I think Apple has done more to make software a viable product than any other company. The problem however is that they paint everything in very broad strokes. Everyone pays the 30% Apple tax, regardless of whether you sold a single or a million copies. The absolute numbers on the tax paid for a million copies is higher, but so is the revenue. I'm not sure a progressive system is better than a linear system either, where the top earners would pay more than those at the bottom.

In any case, out of all the issues with the App Store I think this one of app cost is the least interesting. Rather, the ever changing landscape of Apple approval policies and the severe platform lock-in effect is worse. Apple can more or less kill a viable business simply by denying an app in their store, and that removes the entire iOS market for that business with little to no recourse. This is the bigger deal I think. Figuring out how to get people to pay you $3 instead of $1 is less important I think, when you'll most certainly get $0 if you can't sell the damn thing in the first place.

I don't fully understand how Apple is allowed to effectively close off a significant market like this.
Actually, does anyone have any evidence that skydrone has ever shipped anything?
Not quite. You make the mistake of adding significance to individual each loan. The reality is a lender might loan to 100,000 people and they know some of those loans are going to fail. If they had a process to only lend to people who would never default, well, impossible.

The interest rates you're being charged aren't tailored specifically to you. But they look at everyone else with similar income and credit and look a the default rate and figure out what they need to charge to make a profit.

It's the sum of the whole lending business, not individual loans, that matter. They'll do as much as they can to mitigate the loss on loans that do default. It's just throwing money away not to. But they've got it all figured out to loan money, have some of it default, and still make plenty of profit. The idea that the minority of people who do default and declare bankruptcy causes them any pain is really quaint and naive.

But boy is that an image their PR would love to get everyone to buy into. If you can convince people to feel bad. If you can convince society as a whole to shame and pressure people into doing something that's the most advantageous for lenders, that is just a lending vision of utopia.

(Disclaimer: I've never been in serious debt or declared bankruptcy. There's no morality that should be implied or assumed by that.)
Google Settles Italian Tax Fight for $334M
Adventures of an Ancient Web Developer in JavaScript Land
Netflix Edits ‘Bill Nye’ to Remove Segment Saying Chromosomes Determine Gender
Show HN: A.I platform showing you what Elon Musk, Bill Gates and others read
Tests like that need to be done for H1-B visa.
Why Security Backdoors are Bad (2016)
One of the reasons I've switched to a microframework (Milligram) is that the source is extremely easy to read and understand.

Compare mini.css (https://github.com/Chalarangelo/mini.css/blob/master/src/min...) to Milligram (https://github.com/milligram/milligram/blob/master/src/_Form...).

Unless you're planning on inlining your CSS in the head tag, IMO the network difference between 7kb and 20kb of CSS is just splitting hairs. I've gotten far more out of optimizing my CSS for programmer understanding than network size (though the two tend to be correlated!).
And capitalism is a term coined by Marx to denounce the idea that in a free society, outliers naturally occur.

I don't want to live in a country that is run exclusively by peasants. That happened, successfully, in russia. In the 1920s. And the result was not pretty.

Sure, russia is "capitalist" now. Capitalist means absolutely nothing in terms of philosophy. Its just a word used by marxists to express their annoyance with a vague concept that results in the creation of value (and they obviously have no problem with value, but the returns should absolutely, entirely, end up in the hands of the peasants, not some hokey dokey CEO. That aside, russia was not "capitalist" for a long time, and still suffers the consequences.

Specifically in the case of Russia, they have another big problem - which is the idea that they are still somehow the core of the USSR and have to restore that thing, instead of trying to fix their real issues.

People seem to forget that there are janitors at microsoft who drive ferraris. They took stock options over vacation time.
I understand it might be a trade secret, but what LTE modem do you use on receiver side?
I would like to use LTE more, but finding suitable modems for embedded uses has been a challenge.
Having inflicted even easier versions of FizzBuzz on interviewees, I think you'd be highly surprised at the results. About ~30% of developers could not write any form of a loop, in any language, pseudocode or otherwise. This involved a sample size of about 100.

My personal theory is that many of these people constantly fail interviews and therefore skew statistics by reapplying, i.e. at any point the active market is filled with them. Nevertheless, I was shocked.
Be a better UI Designer by not comparing yourself
That's interesting. I struggle with imposter syndrome, so I only apply to things I feel pretty confident about. I've also never failed to get an offer though.
Do you (also) work for visionect?
Nobody wants to stop you from doing it. They want your kids to pay taxes on it. That's different.

If I go to work this year and get $100,000 for doing stuff, nobody seems confused that I have to give a massive chunk of that to the government.

So if you don't go to work this year but get $100,000 from your parents, you shouldn't act confused that people expect to cough up your share as well.

When families transfer money to the next generation it changes hands. The way we finance our society, generally, is that when money changes hands a substantial portion of it is remitted in tax.

So you already paid taxes on it, sure, but that's irrelevant, your kids didn't. When you give money to your nanny or your driver they have to pay taxes. When you buy dinner at a restaurant the chef has to pay taxes. So when you give it to your kids they should pay taxes on it too.

Because when people get money they have to pay taxes on it. That's how taxes work.

The real question is why the rich kids think that the specific way they get their money is special and shouldn't be taxed.
Actually this provides a solution for a very serious problem which is usually the main bottleneck in machine learning experimentation (in terms of speed). For me at least, this was a great read and I'm pretty sure I'll be trying this out soon.
When will they provide full support for CAD?
> It's not at all natural that he should argue for hollowing out the constitution, or favour the needs of own organisation over the rest of the state or over the entire society.

Very true. But I think it's safe to assume that no good, just individual would end up in the role of Director of an intelligence service. Who really aspires to be the leader of a team of secret police?

There are some professions that are not strictly speaking unethical, but that tend to attract an ilk of people who are unconcerned with ethics. Used car salespeople, brothel owners, chiefs of secret police forces, people hired to do telephone cold calls to sell shady investments to the elderly, etc.

If Comey is viewed in this light, we can see that he is acting predictably. Sadly, many people have the mistaken idea that people who dress in nice suits and wear medals and get appointed by presidents somehow deserve the benefit of the doubt. They do not.
How to Onboard a UX Designer with a New Client Partner  InShare
Or in other words, an article I wrote a while back explaining (to complete idiots) why a security backdoor is a bad idea in general. Why no, you can't 'have an encryption hole just for police/authorities to use'.

Perhaps a few politicians may even reconsider their attitudes towards encryption and security in general.

Eh, probably not.
The Essential Skills of a Digital Marketer
Transfix | Front-end Engineers | NYC | On-site

Transfix is creating a marketplace to connect shippers with truck drivers. We're in a $400B industry that's ripe for automation. We're dedicated to reducing the amount of miles being wasted by optimizing the way shipments are handled from creation to delivery.

We're looking for mid-sr front-end engineers to join our team!

Tech stack: Aurelia.js, react.js, es6, ruby on rails, postgres, AWS

Process:
Recruiter Screen (20min) > Tech Screen (1-1.5hrs) > On-site Interview (3-4hrs)

If interested, please apply on our jobs site (https://jobs.lever.co/transfix) or reach out to me at michelle@transfix.io
The drivers don't vanish into thin air if the mobile phone app dies
It's an amusing read, but he freely admits that he doesn't get Veblen and that is correct:

> Do I prefer terrapin à la Maryland to fried liver because plow-hands must put up with the liver—or because the terrapin is intrinsically a more charming dose?

This misses out Veblen's central argument in "The Theory". The terrapin is not intrinsically a more charming dose; in fact, many "uncultured" people would instinctively recoil at eating turtles. Same for other luxuries like lobster (a century ago, lobster was only fit for servants, and then no more than twice a week [1]). Ironically, fried fois gras is probably nowadays a more elevated dish than terrapin.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster#History
> Self driving cars will be quiet, electric, clean, shared and won't need the parking space. They'll make living in high density areas that much more viable and pleasant.

Which will drive up housing prices in high density areas, which will make suburbs look more attractive.
Looks like /u/skydrone might be able to share more info or shed some light?
I'd say it's not either or. Do both. Give a short summary of who you are with related projects you worked on. Explain shortly how these experiences made you an authority on their problem. Then explain how you would handle that problem of theirs.
I'm trying to come up with a situation where loading a 199kb css file would make a difference. Maybe websites that target an audience that is expected to have a slow connection (banks etc.) but this kind of rules them out by not supporting IE.
I'm big on the free market, laissez faire, and deregulation. As with many topics that incite so much handwringing in congress (health care being another great example), many of the problems would likely solve themselves if regulations protecting giant corporations from competition were done away with. If it were possible for startup telecom companies to compete with the big 3, then the competition in telecom would likely enforce net neutrality on its own.

In other words, we are spending a lot of time and effort debating the wrong problems here.

No system is perfect, but I will always lean towards less is more when it comes to regulation.
It's misalignment of incentives rather than stupidity (well, in some cases, maybe also stupidity). Governments make decisions from one election cycle to the next. So taking on debt that will be some future administration's problem in order to finance public projects now, and increase the current administration's popularity makes perfect sense.
This is quite interesting and shocking too that we can be tracked from these apps. My question is, if it is so and many tech geeks here have said that if the mic let's say is irrelevant to the actual context of the application, so why Android App Store does not block this using AI or any intelligence techniques?
This is fantastic, great job!
My problem with this comment is that it really sounds like you haven't even tried to use the fizzbuzz for a hiring process.

And if you haven't, what point was there in you commenting?

Here's one of the original blog posts that afaik made FizzBuzz famous back in 2007, it deals with your issue:

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/01/dont-overthink-fizzbuzz....
> You are mostly right, but are there any cases that a programmer wants to join a company and he can't even write a FizzBuzz program?

Maybe I'm just being cynical but once you get involved in the process of screening candidates you realize that people will literally apply to any job regardless of their ability to perform it. So yes, there are thousands of cases every day where someone wants a programming job and can't even write FizzBuzz.
> He is playing the word game

That's the worst thing about Comey. He is totally comfortable and unabashed about going in front of the American people and playing a word game.
What's new in Mercurial 4.2
> I don't want to live in a country that is run exclusively by peasants. That happened, successfully, in russia.

No, it didn't. The Leninist vanguard were not all (or even largely, especially at the highest ranks) peasants.
Have you used a mobile connection in the subway lately? That's a key use-case, I think.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/833/833-h/833-h.htm#link2HCH...
Show HN: Little tool to evaluate your cryptocurrency trades on Poloniex
> I would love someone to explain to me why using insider news is a crime.

Because a market isn't fair if everyone doesn't have the same information available to them. Trading on insider information is literally stealing from those who don't have it. Imagine the CEO of a company knowing he's about to announce bad news and shorting his own stock ahead of the announcement to make millions from it, then buying it all up cheap at the bottom before announcing some large new government contract causing the price to rebound and making more millions again... all that money he's making, he's stealing from the general public by knowing what's going to happen ahead of time and using it to have an unfair advantage. Insider trading is like knowing the future, that's not a fair market.
React Desktop – React UI Components for MacOS Sierra and Windows 10
>But there's no question to me that Bitcoin is by far the most decentralized

3 people control 95% of all hashing power on the network!

http://bytemaster.github.io/update/2015/09/29/Bitcoin-is-100...
And then, they would be asked to work longer hours and accept salary cuts to make market confident again :) Not sure it would work in that direction, I don't think most people would intentionally deteriorate the company they work for.
> I don't know of any stores that take ETH, while plenty take BTC. BTC also completely runs the economy of the DarkNet.

Bitcoin is "digital gold" while Ethereum is a bit like "digital oil". So the main value of Ethereum should (in theory) arise from decentralised apps and smart contracts.

Therefore, if use cases like (for example) Bosch's proposed idea of using smart contracts to eliminate fraudulent odometer tampering[1] or Santander's experiments with allowing their customers to buy digital tokens from their bank account takes off[2], that's where the value will come from - not necessarily DarkNet stores or other transactions.

[1] https://www.ethnews.com/bosch-using-blockchain-technology-to...

[2] http://www.coindesk.com/santander-vies-become-first-bank-iss...
StartUp Tools Monolith
But isn't it the case that any patents that would affect the use of react/prepack would "dominate the product or any uses of the product..."?

Yes, the grant is better than nothing, but also, the risk if the grant is removed seems minimal.
> The situation isn't that worrisome, as users have to open an app with the Shopkick SDK for the beacon to be picked up.

False, on Android
Ask HN: Why wouldn't FB “steal” my startup idea?
Ok, I am not a native English speaker so please bear with me and try to make sense of what I am typing.

Like for all of you, I do have many IT project ideas constantly spinning around my mind and for some of them I am really convinced that they could be made into something profitable. But for a series of reasons including that I am already busy with other things, I never got too serious about them..

Even worse, lately there's something else which is stopping me from even thinking about it. Which is: looking at how agile and flexible is today's development and how this has been embraced by big players too, I've almost convinced myself that no matter how good you gonna be at your new project, giant corporations like FB or Google could jump into the same wagon and make their own ten time better version of it or add hundred more feature in a fraction of time my team would need to do so.

This is really discouraging, and I find myself loosing faith in my ideas.

Is there a fallacy in my reasoning?

Why wouldn't a big company like Facebook grab anyone else's proven-right concept (i.e. the first iteration of a new sharing-economy app) and make it theirs in no time? By now they have all the resources and flexibility (hundreds of engineers only busy at exploring ideas) to do so, don't they?
I feel this is wrong way to optimize:
First, bootstrap gzipped is <100KB after removing font. Check any reasonable site from youtube to amazon, they download ~ 1MB gzipped data on load and do just fine.
Second, if you are really concerned, you can just remove a lot of components from bootstrap to reduce its size. I do it for my project where i don't need for example the glyphicon, carousel, etc.

When using a framework, you want it to just work on all platforms. When I look at bootstrap issues, I see so many issues of the form X does not work on Y and then it gets fixed. These little kinks are hard to get right and I am not sure its worth reinventing the wheel unless there is a clear benefit other than size.
There's nothing that you can do with a RESTful api that can't be done with GraphQL. If you wanted to you could build a RESTful GraphQL api -- we did this at my previous company.

GraphQL allows you to do things though like query for nested data structures without making round trips, require typed arguments for queries, and pass arguments to specific fields, things that would take a bit of doing with a non-GraphQL api.

It's certainly not perfect, for example I at least have found query tuning for large nested queries to be a bit more complicated than I'd like it to be, but overall I've had a really positive experience with it and unless I have a good reason not to will be using it for any apis I'm building going forward.
How many HN id's do you have dude?
I'm counting at least 3 on this thread alone; luka-birsa, Ursa83 and esteradezelak. I get that you want to put your ad on HN but atroturfing us isn't going to help you.
At the end of the day, they're all just humans making bad decisions

But it seems like it would honestly be the opposite (i.e., government bankruptcy being bad). The more people that are involved, the higher chance there is of a tragedy of the commons
Chances are his job is to make those right "10x" decisions for teams of average programmers who do the actual work, to ensure that those average programmers are writing the right code.
I think your points are definitely valid if I was being objective. But.. that was just a subjective statement :)