skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Forget about a small technical blogs with almost no multimedia content (just text and code). They're not the problem. Or maybe they are… One reason my web site is light is because of the scale issue.

Think a mildly popular vlog, or basically any YouTube video you've ever watched. I expect the costs so soar pretty quickly, if one wants to sustain the slightest Reddit Hug.

Thing is, it doesn't have to go through the web. Bittorent for instance handles massive distribution in a way that doesn't DDOS the sender. It doesn't work as well as it could however, because our collective upload is severely limited.

Also, the fact one has to rely on an external provider at all it already a problem.

---

The internet is more centralised than you realise. To take just one example, think about how much Alphabet actively spies on for profit: most web searches, analytics for most popular web sites (found this with NoScript), all the content of Gmail, including when one is not on Gmail (even I send email to Gmail users).

Sure, we can still escape it. But there will come a time where our choice will be much simpler: either we use some big provider that will spy the hell out of us, or we stay out of the network altogether, effectively ceasing to participate in society at all.

I have a Facebook story. I first subscribed under pressure from my peers from my music club (ostensibly because it's more convenient). I got flooded by notifications I did not want. I cut the notifications, but still didn't get into the habit of checking out Facebook every day. Then I started missing things that were talked on Facebook (decisions, invitations…). And then I got told "you didn't know? But I sent the email…" (he didn't).

I have since shut down that account, and vowed never to use Facebook ever again. Next time a group forces me to use Facebook, I'll consider not being part of this group.
cmon, hiring cleaning service did work :-)
THE KNOCK – Short Horror Film
I'm a high school graduate (2016, took a gap year) and I've been lurking on HN for almost a year in my free time. All the folks on here have really piqued my interest for math (I hear terms like category theory and abstract algebra being thrown around) and CS theory. If there's anything I'm thankful for from this community it's this thing. However I cannot bring myself to tackle such topics(because I feel that I'm not armed enough to learn them). How do you think I can overcome that?
Both of you are taking joy in use, but in a different kind of way. You take joy in using a thing carefully, where you absorb the objects demands.

Your friend takes joy in using an object aggressively, so the object absorbs their demands.

It's a difference in where you see beauty... Do you see beauty in the human activity that surrounds the object, and the imprint of that? Or do you see beauty in the object itself, and the imprint that makes on the world around it?
Switzerland is not in the EU
I call it decentralization when a huge number of people must agree so the unethical taking of the money is reversed.
Do you agree that a web service is not a private residence?

A coffe shop, a supermarket, a bookstore, etc. doesn't have right to check your ID.

Heck, from what I know, in the US even the police cannot ask you for an id without "reasonable suspicion" that you did something illegal.
The article talked about representing 3 states, and you suggested encoding those 3 states in a way that has the same split-brain issue that the article discussed.

You can tell that 4 states doesn't match up with the article based on how the loading state is rendered - the pictures are ignored in those examples.

Now sure, if you decide you really do need 4 states, then that's a different story and your suggestion works just fine. But that's not a solution to the article's problem.
Well what is the purpose of this piece. The purpose of this piece is to play down how much more compensation CEOs get. It's basically a P/R piece to tell all the working classes that everything is fine, and the CEOs are being reigned in. So obviously some sarcasm is in order. But the picture is complicated, that on one hand CEOs are made to appear a certain way, as if they don't have privilege and are working harder than everyone else to deserve all that extra compensation. At the same time they do have much more privilege than any time in history, in terms of their compensation.

Another way of looking at it is that this is exactly how the shareholders want the situation to appear, in that CEOs are working hard for them, their bosses, and they don't mind paying for that hard work with extra compensation, which I guess is the exact dynamics of the situation.
You miss the point. Everyone has something interesting to teach you. Listen to the sages and the sycophants alike because there's no profit in closing yourself off.
I think it'd be great if there was a google JS snippet documentation sites could include to have a list of dynamic gotchas or faqs.

How many times have you read docs and thought "well that's relatively straightforward" just to end up googling an error message 10 minutes later and end up on SO.
Amazing article. And a great way to show that being environmentally friendly and business friendly don't always have to be mutually exclusive.
I can't thumbs up this enough. Packages that start services when they are installed can cause so many issues between not giving the user the chance to fully configure them, to weird interactions with distributed applications talking to each other before all the configuration is ready.

This is definitely one of the defaults that I think RPM gets right over debian packages.
Here's just two examples as to why online anonymity is so critical, there's cases like this every single day. You might think, so what? You're free to keep on thinking that right up until you're the one going to jail for criticising your boss.
http://www.eutimes.net/2016/12/facebook-bans-german-woman-fo...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/thailand-woman-...
I think you were thinking of something like a county library in the United States, which deal primarily with mass-market paperbacks. That's not a great analogy. When you're talking about breaking expensive equipment (as in a maker space), the median user doesn't matter. The worst user matters. Books (at least mass-market books) are several orders of magnitude cheaper than expensive hardware.

Also the last interaction I had with a college library was being charged $200 to replace a textbook that had a cup of coffee dumped on it, so in my experience libraries aren't really model replacement-cost internalizers.
So you didn't post this message three hours ago?
Have you tried sending your resume in yet? If you haven't, you really should.

Also, if you are not getting through at the resume screening stage, but feel like you can crack the interviews, consider using a middleman like interviewing.io or TripleByte. Google doesn't seem to use these, but FB does, and a bunch of smaller high profile companies do, so that may be a useful path.

Also, consider that companies can be pretty stupid about their recruiting (because they do get so many resumes) and focus on things like the companies you've worked at before, so it may be useful to work at another respected company for a little bit and then try again.

If getting interviews isn't an issue: study up on CTCI, and depending on seniority "design interview" questions (which tend to be, how well do you know software end-to-end).

Also, don't get hung up on these companies, they're certainly good places to work, but they're not the only good places to work.
I keep saying this but no one seems to be listening. Use triplebyte, interviewing.io, or recurse.com for all recruitment. You are not going to beat those folks in terms of quality of candidates. They have data and stats. You have anecdotes.
For a specific example, iMatix had DSL's that outputted C which they used for high-performance server apps. If doing that for web apps, one would need a web framework for C that the code could call. I believe I've also seen both a C and C++ framework in the past. Both bragged about efficiency with the servers cheap.
Any RPC-style endpoint can be represented in REST by exposing the resulting event as a first-class object you can read and write.

Turn your verb into a noun: instead of "move $10 from Alice's to Bob's account", your clients will ask to "record a transfer of $10 from Alice to Bob". A transfer is a type of record the client creates with a POST, not a function call that results in money being moved. Creating it records the client's intended result; how and when to implement the actual transfer of money is not the client's concern. If Alice wants to check if Bob received the money, for example, she can GET /transfers/<ID returned by the POST response> and look at the fields.

For emails sent to users, I'm not sure what you'd call it. The simple verb-the-noun rule would make it a "send", but sometimes you need something better. Maybe a "thread" or "communication."

This would be a natural API design for CQRS/ES, but you could also use it (with adjustments, maybe) to present a RESTful interface to something that, behind the scenes, just moves the money right away and never thinks about transactions as an entity.

The key to modeling this way is in the name: REpresentational State Transfer, meaning clients send a snapshot of the current or desired state of a resource instead of calling functions that change it. And sometimes, to make it make sense, you have to invent a new kind of resource.
Have you looked at Lua+C and LuaJIT+nginx (CloudFlare, OpenResty)? Work is underway to compile a subset of Perl6 to LuaJIT+nginx.
It's enforced if people choose to report you, and 'proving' your name to them can be somewhat involved

It's also more likely they will hassle you over it if your name isn't white. Maybe those sorts of names tend to be fake more often, but probably not.
Mailing lists are awesome! E-mail is an open protocol so it's easy to write advanced filters that you can't do with Facebook or other walled gardens.

I had an algorithm trained to recognize free food, for example.

At MIT they can also double-up as AFS groups so it's easy to control access and message a team without having to update membership in two places.
It depends, documentation is organised very differently than SO. If you want to read up on how X works in general, then documentation style is useful; but if you want to find out a single narrow application of X, then stackoverflow style is useful.

For simplified example, if you want to find out what flag -wtf does in some unix utility, the man page would be useful; but if you'd want to find out which flags should be used to achieve WTF then you'd often need to read the whole documentation to find out - stackoverflow serves as a "reverse index" in this case.
Wondrous, tailor-made Pokémon themes for your Hyper terminal
That's a very interesting example, but it doesn't contradict what I said. Let's recall how we got here:

> > The past state of the universe is encoded in the present state only in the same way, and to the same extent, that the future is.

> Only in a classical universe, not a quantum one.

In in Norton's dome, the indeterminacy extends equally into the past and the future: you can't tell when the ball will leave the dome, and you can't tell when it arrived.
Here's a web app that gives a concrete example of an asymmetry in time arising from time-symmetric rules:

http://timmaxwell.org/pages/cellular-automaton/index.html

Each row of the grid represents the state of the universe at a certain "time". Given any two adjacent rows, we can compute the row above them or the row below them according to a predefined rule, which is symmetric in "time". So we randomly generate the two initial rows and then from there derive the rest of the pattern. However, by default the two initial rows are mostly empty, corresponding to a low-entropy initial state. From this initial state, applying the rule either forward or backward in time leads to states of higher and higher entropy. So the system exhibits "arrows of time" flowing from the low-entropy initial state forward and backwards in time to the high-entropy equilibrium states.
there are quite a lot of Telecoms having the same parent company, so it's just pure profit for them.

If the regulation implies improving the local infrastructure and the companies invest something, even better.
Am I missing something? I thought the devs had to have everyone agree to do a hard fork. If the devs were in complete control, that wouldn't have been necessary.
Domestic violence and sexual assault are extremely common, and this policy results in victims getting isolated since their attackers can use FB to locate and pursue them.
hostile relationships with suppliers;
poor treatment of employees;
shoddy store conditions - the UI is utterly wretched!
One option might be you don't pay for it, but you are banned from using it, or banned from the whole space for some period of time. Shunned, in other words.
The divine right of meritocrats!
Didn't realize you folks did that :).
> Can you elaborate on what you consider "contributing to the engineering of a software product"? and more generally what "software engineering" entails?

Actually, not in a space appropriate for an HN comment. Here's a very brief summary: I think in its current state there is very little actual engineering in this industry. It seems to me to consist of a large number of folks who approach every problem like a CSX01 project. It could move toward a more mature engineering footing if there were less focus on CS trivia and more on broader, deeper understanding of systems and relationships between them.

To be blunt, your "reverse a linked list" question is something I consider an example of the Law of the Instrument (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument): every problem is a CS nail to hit with a CS hammer. It's great for exploring the items you note at a very low, narrowly-scoped, and shallow level. It's not so good for gauging actual problem solving ability or engineering ability.

> How do you interview?

Interviewing is a crap shoot, and my methods are at least as flawed as any others'.

Phone screens with a shared editor are the place I ask questions like yours, except I'm not looking for a correct implementation, complete solution or discussion about it: I'm looking to see if they at least have some vague notion of what writing source code entails (even if it's just because they read about it and memorized it).

At the in-person interview I tend to do two things: discuss in depth a project in the person's past and a higher level discussion about something pertinent to their work at the company. For me the latter has varied from details for some feature to be implemented in a real time system to motivating a data exploration approach in the context of developing a data science product.
No, I use Docker to run a single process. You still need a base image. Some people use Alpine, some Ubuntu, some Debian and some roll their own. Here are the Debian base images:

https://hub.docker.com/_/debian/
I looked into renting a table saw recently and I could basically buy a second hand one for less than what it would have cost to rent for a week.
"A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate — these are the folks who reap the largest rewards. The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world, and to share their luck with others."

-- Ben Bernanke, Princeton University Commencement 2013
Do you want buffer overflow? This is how you get buffer overflow in web apps.
Sure, the law cares about intent.

But the question that is to be debated is, was the intention of the DAO too follow the code of the contract EVEN IF it had a bug.

There is an argument to make that, given that "the code is law" was plastered all over the DAO, that being hacked and having all their money stolen, was explicitly allowed.
Congratulations, keep up the good work.
I think "not Rails" should be expanded a bit, because it risks someone saying "ok, so... sinatra?"

Web applications have some very distinct profiles. Most requests:

1. Parse HTTP

2. Parse the request body (likely JSON), build ruby objects from the data.

3. Load data from a datastore, builds ruby objects from the data.

4. Do some manipulation of data.

5. Serialize Ruby objects into a response.

Basically, because of the stateless nature of a web request, most of the work done (ignoring IO) is serializing and deserializing data.
By not having Ruby be responsible for the state of our application, we make Ruby responsible for fetching and sending the state.

Now think about a stateful system (like we would have with embedded Ruby). The state is kept within Ruby for the most part. We don't have to hit a data store to restore state every time we want to do something. This significantly changes the operating profile of the application, and therefore the optimization strategy changes.
Scaling engineering efforts in software
Basically, author would like the people to work 100% of the time (and for free). Or alternatively, author is surprised that programmers who enjoys statistics and pursue a BS in Biochemistry can be also interested in politics, world and like to share thoughts about those.

The puzzle would be sold if he stopped to think about comments as "contribution" and treated them as what they are - something to do during 10 minutes break, change of pace, communication for those who are lonely.
Because it seems like a misc plug? Recruitment is ridiculously ridiculous. Data and stats, so what?
From the article"

>"Google’s Class B shares have 10 times the voting power of normal shares, enabling the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to retain control of the holding company Alphabet without owning a majority stake."

This implies that these two are the only two posses shares with voting power, is this accurate?

The article also references FB and the consolidation of voting stock in one individual. My question is what is the protocol if something were to happen to person or persons who retain all these voting shares - death, or incapacitated etc?
> I'm kind of disturbed that this suggestion is so prevalent.

I don't think you should be. I'm glad people are thinking up solutions, even if they turn out not to work.

It isn't an unreasonable naive idea. After all, domestication (turning them into symbiotes) has helped some species enormously. Others that could not be domesticated (e.g. whales) have survived only thanks to technological change. Even "wild" animals like deer and trout survive through a symbiotic relationship.

Yes, I understand it doesn't make sense for elephants in particular, and of course domesticating some animals usually spells doom for others. So I understand there's an argument to be made that domestication is inherently bad -- one I disagree with but there's a legit case to be made. But I'm glad people actually care.
Why wouldn't that be the case? The golang authors have been pretty strong on backwards compatibility so far (even though it is admittedly a young language).
There are certain jobs where "knowing the details of a red-black search tree" are actually very important. These jobs are generally related to implementing low level, high-performance libraries in certain contexts, conducting research, etc.

They're appropriate questions for interviews in some cases. But very few. Even at the companies you note.
Another case where it'd be nice to have a "Why are we doing this?" section in the README.

If it's just a demo then it's neat. Interesting that it can be done.

On the other hand, if it's a real push to get people scripting Emacs with Go, then I don't see the point at all. It's solving a problem people don't really have.
This is a great idea. I bet some kind of point system for careful use would encourage folks to use caution.
Nine CEOs ... what? That made my day.

Seriously though your background story is awesome. I haven't done electronics for a while, so this unhealthy "meh" attitude is starting to creep in ... but now I have an 8 year old kid to compare to (!) What's your startup about?
This seems strange to me. People usually vote along tribal lines, so why throw the baby out with the bath water. Why not make it regional favorites?
My local public library has a Makerspace[0] with 3D printers, recording studios, plus a bunch of other stuff. I haven't checked it out yet, but it seems like every time I visit the web site there is something new. Plus they're renovating (right now the building has been stripped all the way down to its concrete structure) the main branch of the library, it looks like the renovation will have a pretty big section for the Makerspace. Access is available to library members, and membership is free for Edmonton residents so there's virtually no barriers to entry.

There's also the Edmonton New Technology Society[1], which was the original Makerspace in Edmonton. Unfortunately for me, the location means that I'm unable to visit regularly.

[0] https://www.epl.ca/browse_program/makerspace/

[1] https://ents.ca/
CEOs dating subordinates is hardly uncommon. Melinda French met Bill Gates while she was a product manager at Microsoft. That seems to have gone well for both parties. I've worked with a few executives who were employing a significant other in some form or another. Admittedly this sort of thing can go very wrong, but I think there are much bigger sins a CEO can commit...
I can't blame you, I don't even take myself seriously. But going back to the point, is anything in my article inaccurate – as far as you know? The being overheard thingy isn't scientific research, one would reckon. Do we agree that trying to inform and empower people is a sensible way to progress? I could argue that our blog is probably doing better than FB and the philanthropist Zuckerberg.

Going back to WhatsApp, some of the aspects of its encryption layer are still unclear, to quote your link:

"The threat is remote, quite limited in scope, applicability (requiring a server or phone number compromise) and stealthiness (users who have the setting enabled still see a warning–even if after the fact). The fact that warnings exist means that such attacks would almost certainly be quickly detected by security-aware users. This limits this method."

This paragraph alone, when put in context, would at least ring a bell and make you question the security and encrypted statement. Especially when it's coming from one of Zuckerberg subsidiaries.
> These "solved problems" are the result of countless hours of research by computer science experts with masters and Ph.D degrees.

We're talking about reversing a linked list, right?

This is the second time I've had this kind of surreal conversation on HN (the first was summing a list of integers), and I confess I am completely baffled. We are talking about reversing a linked list.

I absolutely expect somebody with a even minimal programming competence to be able to perform simple manipulations on interconnected data. And I can't imagine a much simpler manipulation, taking into account the connections, than that.

Knowing the difference between a problem that you can solve intuitively, And one that requires hours of PhD research, is also a good skill to have.
I'd like to see packages be handled differently to where nothing is forked.

Instead of pinning to, say PHP 7.1.5, pin to 7.1 and stop backporting fixes. It's okay to have 7.1.6.
As the article notes, they're useful against angry dogs, who seem baffled by their deployment. My experience is that even large dogs won't advance against someone whose leg or arm or torso they cannot clearly view.