skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I dunno, I think Java vs Rails is a great question if asked right. There are large meaningful and practical differences between the two and every non-jr programmer should at least be able to talk about the technical and business merits of using one vs the other.

There isn't a right answer, you basically just start shallow and probe until either you or the candidate can't go any deeper. This question could lead you into exploration around the JVM, concurrency, memory management, typed vs un-typed, choosing libraries, toolchains, dependency management, strategies for persisting state(i.e ORMs), back-of-the-envelope performance, etc

I'm pretty sure I could get a full 45 minutes out of that question.
> it makes it very difficult to prevent logic errors that disclose user data in unexpected ways

Oh that's a new one. But now that you mention it, I'm starting to recall all the operators that will fprintf the contents of ~/.ssh/ to the network socket upon misuse.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could use a simple assert to test the state and inputs before we proceed to shovel private keys in a totally not privsep'd process handling public, unauthenticated connections. Heck, even a simple condition would do, if we could just return an error and stop further processing when things look bad. But you're right, that kind of code would've been too advanced for 1958 or whenever we got this language...
Sure, I'm just saying I don't understand how people that like dynamic typing can't see the productivity value in being told e.g. a variable isn't defined or a function call is missing arguments at compile time.
First, cash in hand is not meaningless. If Amazon is breaking even, they're able to use that $21B to subsidize stuff. One of those $21B is probably more than Instacart has taken in as revenue total, and a couple of them would buy Instacart.

Second, most of that cash on hand comes from the last 18 months or so, when Amazon started doing some profit-taking - maybe for the sorts of Whole Foods acquisitions they're doing. It's quite clear that Amazon can make profits - thus far they've just been pouring them back into growth and R&D. See the first chart in https://www.recode.net/2017/4/27/15451726/amazon-q1-2017-ear...

Third, don't be so rude.
Generally I agree with most of the submissions, but this one is the most important.

I really love debian because of its principles (and I would love to contribute), but I feel that new contributors (like me) have problems because of the many (and some old) tools and outdated and non-friendly documentation.

Also, I don't know how many contributors come and stay, but even in unstable I see some outdated packages in weeks, and also some useful software that is not packaged.
I imagine that for many people, that is far less expensive than needing to buy everything they might need once a year, find storage for it, and go get it/return it/ to that storage. It quite possibly this wouldn't be convenient for something like a set of wrenches which you might be able to buy outright, but for someone who needs them only once a year and has other things to borrow, this could be very reasonable.
I'm a firmware developer, have been all my professional life. C is my goto language. Rather than look at this through the lens of an experienced web developer, consider the value it provides to C natives such as I.

This is to C devs what the micro bit is to kids learning computing - a starter experience with server side dev
It might be just be the right move for the times. Increasingly, Whole Foods has been coming across as pretentious.

The last time I went in one I was confronted by an entire freezer case of renaissance mermaids basking in flowers on pizza boxes, each signaling virtue for some ecological or pseudo-science health idea.
Forget the GUI: The return of the command line
stop titling articles like this...
>not many of them have launched a rocket and landed it on a barge...

Are you saying this was something thought to be impossible before?

>I'd like to ask what you think Musk's real intent is?

Spacex is a space transportation company. Its business is getting things into space. The more it's reach, the better. Right? So ultimately they might get to mars.

It is a business target. But the problem is that it is now being painted as a mission to save humanity. As a business, spacex wants to reach there as soon as possible, but for humanity, there is no urgent need to go to mars or anywhere. And what Musk is doing is creating a boogeyman of a "catastrophe" and generate fear and proclaim himself as a savior that could save us all.

And this generates a lot of good will, which translate to a lot of funding. Imagine asking for funds by saying you want to run a business mining asteroids. It will get a lot less funding than a project to "save humanity. So basically, these funding is based on generated fear, funds that could have put to a better use right here and now....

>Musk is doing a great job of aiming for mars, and even if he misses he sure looks like he'll get close.

Note that aiming for a business of asteroid mining or aiming to get things further into space generally will look a lot like aiming for mars. I mean, they can milk this cow as long as possible, because they are not really promising the investors that they will colonize Mars, right. It is just good will based on their "ambitions". They can discard the colonization idea, just like they did with Hyperloop, and the people will forget it just as easily....
Okay, cool. Will it update automatically or point to the same version forever?
Animats asks "what did they buy Whole Foods for?"

- Locations: WF is located where the well-off go,

- Warehouses: good for use after WF employees quit, and

- Real estate: sell unusable locations off.

If Amazon can convince customers to pick up packages they may win a bit; but that works only in densely-populated parts of larger cities.

Whole Foods was a grocery chain; Walmart is a retailer. But Walmart can't compete in the grocery business (they've been trying awhile and never gained traction).

Whole Foods cannot become a retailer like Walmart w/o starting from scratch (except for the real estate, buildings and a bunch of cash registers, refrigerators, meat bins, butcher shops, beer distilleries, escalators, etc).

So this move, in the end, is a liquidation sale. It came about b/c Whole Foods simply couldn't gain sufficient grocery market share. All Amazon will get out of this acquisition is the real estate and the buildings.

If Bezos was _really_ smart, he would have let Walmart buy up Whole Foods and then watched as the Whole Foods golden goose weighed Walmart down and drained its money. Believe me, WF is a commercial "tar baby". A better metaphor is the grocery market as a "tar pit", now with both Amazon/WF and Walmart trying to stay above the surface while all the other grocers have been living there happily for centuries.

Amazon need to be broken up by the Justice Department. Their "creative destruction" is more "destruction" than "creative" in this instance.
Seems like there's other brands that you could acquire if that was the goal (Safeway, Ingles, Publix, Kroger, etc), but maybe those are too big? Anyways, just seems like a waste to trash the Whole Foods brand when I imagine that's a pretty solid chunk of their value.
"Do not use the Internet. Do not use phones. Do not use bank accounts. Do not travel by plane. Do not enter public spaces. Do not show your face.

Otherwise you accept our Terms of Service.

Thank you for trusting us."

(C) QuantumRoar, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12958035
FWIW, I'm not sure why infidelity is so stigmatized. With all the things going on in the world that seems so minor in the grand scheme of things. Also, presumably the secretary is an adult, so they're two consenting adults (yes, I understand the power differential issue but there's also the risk of being accused of sexual harassment, which I'd argue is more damaging nowadays). Relationships are so complicated I've learned not to pass judgment on anything.

I'm definitely not saying infidelity is good, only that I think it's treated way out of proportion.

To be honest, I think it sounds more shitty to unilaterally declare respect or lack thereof for a colleague based on their private life rather than their professional performance.

Take credit for work that's not yours, and leave with millions in severance after they've fucked up the company? Totally fine. Sleep with your secretary? Unforgivable (and the CEO's fault).
You need to know that "person with knowledge..." is code for "Jeff Bezos".
Ha, this looks great, thanks. I have no problem paying for good content.
It's probably a lot less chatty, and wireless data transfer eats battery.
You can fly them in if you're building your own air freight network.
Why? It was a haughty comment that didn't address the substance of the original comment: Whole Foods customers are in better shape (hence expect and demand healthier food) and are more polite.

I agree with the former, but not the latter.
I've been fully insured to the extent that insurance was available. Meaning that before the ACA I was generally uninsurable so large amounts of money were set aside and state high risk pools were applied to (those are a whole other can of worms).

As someone who has done this for fifteen years, my point is that anyone looking to get into this has to plan ahead financially for unexpected situations. Even with planning and insurance you can find yourself in a tough financial situation unless you consistently earn enough money to set aside large amounts for emergencies.

And for the love of god talk to accountants and attorneys about how to structure things. If you need access to funds rapidly you don't want to screw up your taxes by being forced to draw from penalized sources.
They don't. The gaps in coverage are very small at least for basic phone service. LTE is available for at least 93%/90%/80% of the area respectively for the three networks. Good coverage is also the main factor of competition.
Front End Guide in 2017
Forcing moderators scrutinizing terrorists to use their real identities was a stupid, stupid idea that I hope facebook will change going forward. Perhaps facebook can look into getting some sort of anonymous identity for its moderators.

At the same time, it seems a false equivalency to use a story about people using real identities to scrutinize terrorist to support a position that it is dangerous for anyone to post real identity and photos online.

Certainly it is dangerous for children, teenagers, or people involved in dangerous work to post their identities online. As to ordinary adults who not involved in dangerous lines of work and with sufficient discretion . . . any danger inherent in this is a much weaker position that this article doesn't give much in the way of support for.
A/C? Unsaleable in USA w/o A/C!
No. China recognizes it has far too much to lose in a war with the United States, and America realizes it too. There will always be saber rattling, and tension, because each wants to dominate a sphere of influence. But war? No. Proxy wars? Absolutely but all out, country to country combat? No.
Well, here's 37 lbs of free advice, Bezos & Co: Change the name to "Half Paycheck" to at least be self-aware enough to know why the customers have left for Central Market, Trader Joe's, and Sprouts. Whole Foods became a parody of itself. Sure, it took about 10 years, but who are you kidding - the CEO and Board just sold out to Amazon. I wonder if beard care products will still be provided for free to employees in all stores...
This is the philosophy behind why I went with Knockout years ago - and am now helping maintain and write version 4.

Specific, narrow focus and it's served me well. Sensing the innate liability, I've never felt the allure of the full fledged framework.
Fairness is a rather interesting problem with many definitions, see for example [1,2,3], I was hoping for a more extensive set of implementations; still good work!

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Cake-Cutting-Algorithms-Fair-You-Can/...

[2] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~arielpro/15896s15/docs/paper10.pdf

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_cake-cutting
Yes, it's true.

To replace PID 1 with sysvinit, run:

apt-get install sysvinit-core systemd-sysv-
reboot

To prevent it from coming back, create the file /etc/apt/preferences.d/no-systemd.pref containing:

Package: systemd-sysv
Pin: origin *
Pin-Priority: -1

This works great on servers and lightweight desktops. As others have noted, if you want GNOME you also need to install systemd-shim. I have no experience with this, but I have no reason to doubt that it works.
Facebook is not completely optional.

https://spideroak.com/articles/facebook-shadow-profiles-a-pr...
Whether you can give real-world questions depends a lot on the domain. If you're using popular open-source tools, you may be able to test a candidate on the ability to complete standard tasks with them. But what if you're using tons of proprietary software and working in a specialized domain where you expect people to learn on the job? That was the case where I used to work (quant finance). We need programming questions that assess candidate's general ability rather than anything domain-specific. The linked-list question is a perfectly fair non-domain-specific question.
So you mean Java vs. Ruby? ('Rails' being 'Ruby on Rails')

Java vs. Rails is a bad question as it's comparing two things that aren't equivalent. One is a language, the other a web-application framework.
While I don't advocate for piracy, I also don't advocate for buying the wrong books or hoarding books that you won't use. This is why sometimes having the ability to look at a book before you buy it (same as you would do in an actual book store) is useful.

The "look inside" feature of Amazon is sometimes very limited. Sometimes I've taken a look at PDF or DjVu versions of books, not with the intention of reading them but just looking at them before buying them.

Books approach subjects in varying levels of detail. Sometimes you are interested in deep theory and proofs, sometimes you just want workable formulas.
It's implemented on Google cloud as a cloud function.

So, for whoever made this, the risk would be mostly about running up their bill I suppose? Some risk to Google if it's possible to escape their container, though I suppose they've done a bit of work in that space.
You have to paste it somewhere before you can put it to use. Paste it somewhere safe, like a bland text editor, to see what's in it.
I'm the definition of boring, being a white male Canadian, and I get no end of hassles at the US border.

YMMV.
7.7 EUR per gigabyte is still a ridiculous price. I simply refuse to believe that this is even close to the actual costs.

This is very problematic, since in some countries operators are selling fix price 4G subscriptions with no data cap for prices like 20-50EUR/month. Now they are supposed to let us roam free, but still pay the outrageous per gigabyte fees to other operators.

This benefits large, multinational operators which sell data capped subscriptions. Small, local and competitive get hurt.
I've had a clearly fake name on Facebook for years. A couple weeks ago I got message from one of their reps, letting me know that there was an issue about my name, and that it was currently being reviewed. I had no intention to link that account to my real name, as it was mostly political whining and interaction with a few close friends. I basically told them that I wouldn't change the name and that they should just delete the account. A couple days later they responded by telling me that my name did not break TOS and that I was free to use my fake name. So I'm not even sure that policy is even enforced, steered... maybe.
You'll have to use one hell of a postal service since 200mbit/s LTE is common now (1TB will take around 12h).
It was never my only question.. I vary through the years.

Another favourite of mine is basically "implement a very sparse 100Mx100M matrix". Thought process much more important than result. (important things to consider: access time, storage size, static vs. dynamic, use cases, adversarial coordinate selection).

I actually consider the "cycles in the input" question a bit of a trick question -- I calibrated the test on people I knew were good, and no one who didn't know it already was able to come up with "the trick" in reasonable-settings-for-interview-time, and not many were able to come up with any O(1)space O(n)time solution.

The discussion with those who don't know the solution is useful, of course.
It might be a PR stunt to provoke exactly that :) If Amazon is not going to do anything crazy with Whole Foods, it's time to long more Amazon.
How about in 10 minutes at a whiteboard while the interviewer waits patiently to judge you?
These schemes remind me of Amy Gooch's 1998 SIGGRAPH paper:

"Phong-shaded 3D imagery does not provide geometric information of the same richness as human-drawn technical illustrations. A non-photorealistic lighting model is presented that attempts to narrow this gap. The model is based on practice in traditional technical illustration, where the lighting model uses both luminance and changes in hue to indicate surface orientation, reserving extreme lights and darks for edge lines and highlights. The lighting model allows shading to occur only in mid-tones so that edge lines and highlights remain visually prominent. In addition, we show how this lighting model is modified when portraying models of metal objects. These illustration methods give a clearer picture of shape, structure, and material composition than traditional computer graphics methods."

http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~ago820/SIG98/abstract.html

http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~ago820/SIG98/gooch98.pdf
Im pretty critical of aspects of fb, but it's hard to take this blog seriously. The same author has a recent post ( http://theartificialintelligenceblog.com/being-overheard/ ) referencing the terrible WhatsApp guardian article written in January, something declared as false journalism by several researchers: http://technosociology.org/?page_id=1687
Tweaking binaries with elfedit
LOL, reminds me of the Unbreakable Umbrella Internet classic [1,2]. Not sure if I would walk around with such an umbrella, though. I used to do a lot of martial arts before I realized that the general problem with self-defense is that most thugs who want to rob you have more spare time to train and tend to be better at it than you.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO8G5zsQohg
[2] https://unbreakableumbrella.com/
Base docker image? Sounds like you are using docker to run a complete OS.. not sure if that's the best way to do either thing. (Container: run the app, not the OS. Need a virtual OS? run a vm..)
That wouldn't surprise me, last I looked Whole Foods had a substantial amount of their house brand (365) in inventory. Amazon can just tap into the existing pipeline and rebrand if needed.
They don't really care about the customer base. They figure their own customer base is bigger than anybody else's already. They wanted an in on the grocery retail business, and WF was a way in.

I guess we will have to just wait and see what happens. Normally when one company buys another, they say "nothing will change," which means that in six months all trace of the thing will be gone.

Personally, I'm not looking forward to the change. One of the things I like about WF is that they're pretty good about stocking products from local/regional producers. And they have a pretty good cheese section. I'm betting Amazon will not care about these things.
Exactly, the inherent problem is the creation of shadow profiles of non Facebook users. The most annoying part is the fact that they can make your friends snitch on you, just in case you're not using your real name
That's partially true, Open Source can be very competitive. Especially now with big corporations getting involved.

I think it's actually a bit of a problem. Open Source used to be a refuge for indie developers. Now it's mostly dominated by big corporations. Now it feels like you can't really make a difference in open source (or anywhere else) unless you join Facebook, Google, Microsoft or some other mega-corp.
Crypto is a weird thing. It has a lot of properties that no other asset in history has had. I believe there's a realistic chance that this "bubble" will end with nearly everyone in the world going crazy over it, in a few more years.

That might even be an economically very bad thing in the end.
Technically optional, but as it encloses the common forum, decreasingly so.
Still use all those things to your heart's content; just don't create a Facebook account...
This ship has already sailed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FindFace
My (free) roaming Three service works in Norway, which is not in the EU so there is some hope.
One feature I'm planning is to let you deploy your snippet as an service, like https://bash.rocks/Gxlg31/3/api?url=i.imgur.com/1uYroRF.gif

With this and maybe a crontab enhance, this could be somehow useful for daily automation.
I think his point is that standards are inherently arbitrary and inflexible and that these specific standards are only beneficial to a "small group". My point is that these standards aren't arbitrary, but well-reasoned, and that they are broadly beneficial (see my post elsewhere for some more examples).

Some standards are enforced by law - fire codes for instance, or food handling standards. Do accessibility standards merit similar treatment? I'd argue that most people now need to use the Internet for basic functions in their lives. For instance, you can't even get a job at a chain grocery store around here without filling out an online application. Given that, there's a strong social interest in making sure that everyone has access. That interest has to be balanced against other interests - costs to businesses for instance. I'm not necessarily suggesting that we should treat WCAG the same way we would treat a fire code (which a government agency enforces) or as we treat ADA building compliance (where customers can sue to force compliance), but I do think that a debate on this issue should look at what these standards actually do, and try to balance the interests. I don't think the parent is doing that.
Perhaps SO could include the titles of questions marked as duplicate somewhere in the markup so that Google indexes it?
Yes, all the calc classes made us by textbooks so we had access to the online homework software.
. . . short passing lanes (terminology?) . . .

I believe "siding" is the word you are looking for.
It's not a "bad" question, but your reply is a fine starting point for a good answer:

"Well, for starters, Rails is a framework while Java is a language. Granted, Rails is THE framework on Ruby, so I can tell you about the differences between Java-based webdev, vs Ruby/Rails. With R/R, you have convention over configuration, which means blahblahblah and is good for getting started but at times you run into blahblahblah. And community blahblahblah, etc. Java, OTOH, has stating typing, which gives you guarantees blahblahblah but there's no standard web framework like on Rails so you'll spend a lot of time researching not-so-great choices, etcetc...."
> Yeah, you know, trans-comps, Translation Competitions. Those were you put a bunch of documents in Sanskrit, throw some beverages and pizza, and invite translators everywhere to lock themselves down for 48 hours to see who can translate those the fastest. Sometimes they add free prizes to spice things up. Have you ever won any of those?

lol... I actually won a trans-comp when I was in (middle?) school: I was attending a catholic school and we were taught latin and went to some translation competitions: you had to translate a chunk of text as fast and accurate as you can. It was fun :)
Valid quibble.