skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right, so my particular use-case is scraping SPA's for meta since they don't initially have it on load. Because this can be slow (thanks a lot JavaScript), I needed a way to parallelize multiple instances so my app remains snappy. This eventually drove me to write Navalia.

Other ones I can think of:
- Testing (run a series of acceptance tests against a website)
- Screenshots
- Rendering of PDFs
- Web crawling (especially for SPA's)
Why are you sure? Lots of great programmers are terrible at live coding.
How Mountain Dew and Bug Spray Inspired Our Pricing Model
This info would look really nice as stacked bar charts. And the average sleep / wake times would look great as parallel timelines to show start / end times of sleep.
It's handled like this.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXyUPYPwWbg&feature=youtu.be...
Why 99.95% of Entrepreneurs Should Stop Wasting Time Seeking Venture Capital
Introducing BrowserView for Electron
The other challenge here is that it's hard to vote with your feet in insurance because you might have employer provided insurance that gives a specific company a monopoly, have fewer options for other reasons, or face turning a condition acquired while insured into a pre-existing condition (might be relevant under Trump's attempt at reform).
In this case, none of the IPO proceeds went to existing shareholders. Based on the prospectus, it would appear that all insiders are subject to either a 120-day or 180-day lock-up post IPO.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1701114/000104746917...

This seems more like a liquidity raise to fund future growth that just happened to be timed incorrectly with respect to the Amazon / Whole Foods announcement.
All insurance companies have the temptation to disqualify claims to improve profits. The nature of the problem is that when you buy insurance, you are disconnected in time from the point where you might need to make a claim against that policy. And it is only when you make the claim that you find out how nice or terrible that company is at actually delivering the product you've been buying.

There is a better way than just purchasing a policy and hoping. E.g. in CA, you can inform yourself about various home insurance companies before you buy. By looking at the data the CA Dept of Insurance publishes, you can see the ratio of claim complaints to policies.

In some lines of insurance like healthcare via employee benefits, you aren't the person deciding on the insurance company - and that definitely leads to problems...
Ex Machina's Scientific Advisor – Murray Shanahan [video] []
Only two years ago, Hortonworks IPO'd and then had to do a secondary offering one year later as well: http://www.businessinsider.com/hortonworks-shares-tanking-af...
I may be mistaken, but I think existing shareholders are not selling as part of the IPO. The company really needs the money...
They could provide mean, median and min/max.
You could go even a step further and ditch the hash table altogether, and just use a 2^32 bit set. “Only” takes up half a gigabyte of memory.
It's not an example of that at all though!

It was on the YCombinator blog - which I don't think PG has ever written on. He writes his essays at http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
I'd be okay with less innovation if it meant that everybody got decent medical care. Statistically speaking, most people don't die from exotic conditions but rather from mundane things that just need treatment.
Even $94 seems high to me, but $460?!

I don't have any context for those figures though, does anybody know of a common cost per customer acquisition across industries/products? Maybe my intuition as a humble programmer is way off, but that seems incredibly high.
> Hong Kongers don't care about the ideological differences between mainland China and HK,

Pretty sure some do. See the umbrella movement.

> This article takes an economic situation and tries to frame it as a political one

Seems short sighted to say politics and economy are unrelated. Politicians make laws that impact businesses.
What kind of work would this new applicant be doing? What product does your company make?

> What is Big O notation, and why is it useful?

Curious why you lead with this question? The rest of the top 11 questions are very Web dev and Javascript specific so that question sticks out. If people don't know the answer to it do you fault them for that?
Plus there are environmental issues where you are pumping water out of places where endangered species are living or spawning. Removing water has an environmental impact, which California already feels due to water already being diverted in large amounts for agriculture or drinking water.
Attempted tl;dr version:

Insurance is a horrendous industry and someone should reform it because it sucks and could do so much better.

Insurance exists in a horrendous sales market where connections are required to multiple providers across multiple roles in a complex sales process.

Insurance is subject to highly fragmented regulatory complexity making it difficult for any company to scale to multiple markets. This not only affects you, but it affects many of the providers you build partnerships with, making each new market often require new relationships.

So my takeaway is don't do insurance unless you have something so overwhelming that you can't do it no matter what. Also expect that Idea & Working Technology gets you 1% of the way there and 99% will be building relationships, sales channels and regulatory compliance.
Are there bonus points for doing it in a way that doesn't hang the browser?
What's to be done? They ban people where bans are deserved. Almost every comment that's off-topic has been flagkilled. The system seems to be working pretty well.

The comments are unpleasant for the ~8 or so minutes they're active, but they go away swiftly. It's hard to imagine a solution other than pg's "all comments start dead and need a vouch to come alive" idea from several years ago. Reddit deals with this situation by locking threads entirely, which many people wish wasn't a feature. Do you have any other suggestions?
Zillow and McMansion Hell bury the hatchet after nastygram rouses internet’s ire
The dangers of AI in health care: risk homeostasis and automation bias
Presumably that's the same one that's described in the article as "an “ancient” safe that functioned so poorly, it opened only if Serber kicked it at a particular point while typing in the lock combination."

That's also sourced back to a book about the Manhattan Project: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=Ys0N4rFgt6UC&pg=PA160&l...
> They basically all repeated a number of the same points.

Well, now you know what a think tank is for! :)
Congratulations on getting to the IPO, that is a huge amount of work and worth celebrating.

That said, it pretty much defines squeaking through the exit. Interested to read the reorganization they did last year in the S-1 [1] presumably to normalize all of the various rights clauses from previous funding rounds and to dump some otherwise undesirable baggage on what was left, aka "Opco". That they had a 1:10 and 1:5 splits on their early stock and have not done a reverse split prior to the IPO suggests the employees will do ok, assuming they can sell their stock at some point. It seems healthier than the Silverspring Networks IPO (SSNI) which was anemic at best and just got worse over time.

Let's hope that they keep their expenses in line and can crack the nut of acquiring new customers more cheaply than their competitors.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1701114/000104746917...
Or, like you know, researching them (with essentially zero time overhead) on the job. The way engineers routinely do.
I noticed in the buffer example's image the text

...et '*weapons-pistol-upgrade-only*]

That looks Lisp-inspired to me. Does anyone know if Naughty Dog still uses something Lispy to compile game data? (I'm not talking about writing the game engine itself in a Lisp.)
> most of the time restaurant food is simply not as hygienic as meals prepared at home

I've become much more conscious of this lately. I called the health inspector to report a restaurant for the first time this month, and did it again just a week ago.
I agree with you wholeheartedly on point #2 but am completely in disagreement over point #1. It's definitely fraud because he's manually inserting the errors specifically to deceive and give the illusion that he's doing something he's not. Whether the job is automated or not doesn't really matter. To your point, he could just have gotten so good that there aren't any errors anymore after 6 months and no one would bat an eye. To deliberately insert errors that don't exist simply so that he can give the appearance of not doing something is intentional fraud.
I know it feels that way, but every side of every passionate argument feels that way.

Classic flamewar topics are boring because they're always the same. Even though no one whose passions rise above a certain level believes us when we say it, we moderate HN the way we do because it's an anti-tedium site. I'm not saying we do that perfectly (far from it, there's much that is tedious) or that the topics that gratify intellectual curiosity are the most important ones (they aren't, not by a long shot). I do think that a site dedicated to intellectual curiosity is a good thing to have, and if you agree with that then you should agree with the things that follow from it, such as that flamewars are off topic.
"In its IPO prospectus, the company warned that it may never be profitable, adding that it anticipates that “operating expenses and capital expenditures will increase substantially in the foreseeable future.”

Wait, what? Between the ICO craze, the amazing levitating stock market, and things like a company that admits it probably won't ever make a dime of profit being able to IPO, I've been feeling like nothing in the financial world has made any sense for so long that I barely remember when it did.
I've tried sleeping with my Fitbit Charge HR 1 but often found that it hindered my sleep. The green light that monitors activity would show ever so slightly and ruin my sleepiness.
What's the statistics in your case?
As someone once said to me, "Think tanks don't think; they justify."
For some of them, what they say can be important (though this doesn't invalidate the rest of what you're saying). The Heritage Foundation is basically writing our executive policy in the US these days, for instance.
Given this is a means to an end, I'd like to see the overall team hired and the output they're responsible for creating, maintaining and extending. (I'm assuming that's something they do.) And then, of course, the code repositories.
> Hong Kong still has some first-world advantages to exploit, but the number is dwindling day by day.

Beijing/Shanghai have yet to demonstrate the level of innovation that comes out of the Hong Kong/Shenzhen connection.

And, parents still send their kids across the border in mainland China to go to school in Hong Kong.

China may have opened up, and is continuing to open up more, but by no means are the gates fully open at Shanghai. Innovation still primarily comes from the south and regions that are farther from the federal government's base.
Paint the Sky with Clouds
I work at The Times on the team behind these stories and FYI we did a whole previous investigation focused on just that

http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-capacity/
Which questions specifically would you have trouble with?

While technically these aren't things someone absolutely has to know in order to be useful on frontend work, I think they are all very useful and practical things to know, so maybe you should learn about them!
Or go outside the US and avoid both. I was surprised many foreign schools didn't require GRE scores.
moment.js mostly
I agree. The Charge 2 is pretty accurate with the sleep start/end times, and when I'm awake during the night.
The only way you can evaluate customer acquisition costs is to have the other number their lifetime value (LTV).

In a 'goods' business it costs you $X to make the good and sell it (COGS) and people who buy it (after averaging sales, incentives, etc) as the average selling price (ASP), so to the extent that ASP > COGS you make money selling your widgets.

A service business like this (or cable TV or whatever) has a customer acquisition cost (CAC), or the cost to get someone to sign up. and a life time value (LTV) which is the amount that customer will spend with you over the lifetime of their relationship with you. To the extent that LTV > CAC it tells you whether or not the business is viable.

In both cases, when the ratios are wrong, the company loses money faster by either selling more widgets or getting more customers.
Artificially intelligent painters invent new styles of art
I wonder how much extra insurance companies are able to charge consumers because it is so complex for most people. There is massive information asymmetry there in favor of the insurance company which almost certainly is reflected in higher margins than they'd otherwise have if they had an educated customer able to properly assess the offering.
I am careful about what I post. You just put words in my mouth. The idea that referring to someone as the wrong pronoun accidentally could become illegal is absurd. Try to guess the gender of the next baby you see roll past in a stroller.

Also that quote is about police misconduct, not criminal charges.
No I don't think so. The analogy was, just because you have a fantasy about being a spy doesn't mean you're willing to act on it and really want to be in life and death situations as often as Jason Bourne.
It's a basic programming and communication skill. If someone doesn't know what it's called or what the syntax is that's fine. What's more important is the intuition:

If I have program A:

for (let i = 0; i < m; i++) {...}

And program B:

for (let i = 0; i < m; i++) {
for (let j = 0; j < m; j++) {...}
}

Then A is more optimal than B, because A runs the loop m times, but B runs the loop m*m times. That's it - if an engineer can reason through that, it's enough to explain to an interviewer tradeoffs between a few possible algorithms that solve some question.
> Is there a technical reason that a blockchain isn't suitable as one part of a possible solution to improving the speed, reliability and security of voting in the United States?

The better question is: what do you gain from using a blockchain? Distributed ledgers aren't magically faster, more reliable, and secure than a centralized ledger. They just don't require trusting any single party. But you're proposing using a distributed ledger to record voting on policies executed by centralized political entities.

At the end of the day, you still have to trust the MTA or some state or local government to do what your voters tell them to. And your voting eligibility is tied to citizenship and/or proof of residency, as established by your inclusion in some centralized database anyway.

So assuming electronic direct democracy is the solution here (and that's a big assumption), you're probably better off just having the MTA set up a webform tied to a database and calling it a day.
So... no forward guidance about fair use. It's very disappointing, the EFF is supposed to be on the good side of the law, it doesn't to serve popular bloggers! Who wouldn't love to play fly on the wall during negotiations?
Except Zillow sort of won. So they are the beehive and McMansion is the dick being removed.
> TDD always worked for me.

> All successful projects in my career had full functional regression test coverage.

Regression testing is not the definition of TDD, however.

TDD is this crazy religion of writing tests for everything, including the lowest-level helper functions in a module that don't correspond to anything that would be tested in a regression test suite.

You write these little tests first (which must be shown to fail at least once and then shown to pass). Then you keep them around when they pass and keep running them all the time even though nothing has changed.

For instance, if you develop a Lisp, you must forever have a test which checks that, yup, CAR on a CONS cell retrieves the CAR field, CAR on NIL returns NIL, and throws on everything else. The image is 10X larger than necessary and it takes 27 minutes to get a REPL prompt on a fresh restart. :)
Average revenue per customer is flat. Marketing costs increasing. Average repurchase rate seems to be flat. Yikes.

Also this:

> [W]e anticipate adding additional products and increasing the portion of our marketing expenses focused on brand awareness and customer retention in order to drive increased customer engagement and growth in our net revenue from existing customers

When marketing is for "brand awareness" and "customer retention" that reads "we don't know how to acquire new customers profitably so the problem must be our brand". And brand awareness marketing is _very_ expensive.
As a take home project then. Pressure isn't important, it's ability to reason through a problem and basic algorithm writing skill.
Roger Schank would disagree, I think:

"'Everyone should learn to code' is the new way of saying we need to create compliant factory workers and that the real purpose of school is to make sure that we are training people for the 'factory jobs' of the future."...

"I was amused when President Obama said that everyone should learn to code, since while I am guessing that Cook can code, I am pretty sure Obama cannot, so why does he care? And, what does he actually know about coding?"

from
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/learning-code-new-way-create-...

It's a short but interesting article about the evolution of Schank's thoughts about teaching programming.
16 years here and I failed a fibo question a few years ago. I don't do live coding well and it's rare to do that kind of "classic" recursion in a JS app. I've since added it to a list of practice questions I go over before I start interviewing, just in case somebody asks it.
Most customers don't want this. You have to realize that slightly negative costs in some slots (and your power cost would not actually be negative, as it would be more than balanced by the transmission and service costs) would come with eye-poppingly high rates on other days, like 50x the normal rate.

Imagine the horrible news stories and "NBC on Your Side" pieces that will come about when someone pops their A/C on at the wrong time and gets a $1000 power bill.

Even with smart meters (which we all have already in CA) I don't think residential customers will ever see more than three tiers of time-of-use cost per day, although those hours may shift around. However, utilities already contract with major users like universities and large businesses to shape demand, in return for deep discounts. And, smart home devices like EV chargers and battery storage units will be connected to the grid to provide near-instant capability to suck up excess power, or curtail usage.
Yes, Naughty Dog's internal scripting language has always been their own Lisp flavor and I imagine that they use the same scripting language to define game data.
All those questions seem perfectly reasonable to me.
Wow at $460 CAC you'd have the retain the customer for well over a year before you made that back (assuming 2 weeks of Blue Apron at $60/week per month with ~30% margin).
Re: health – that's because what you really want is a single-payer health care system funded through taxes, not commercial health insurance, but your country's ideology does not allow for that.
You're contradicting statements made with sources cited without citing any of your own, or explaining how they would nullify the other points made on why this use is acceptable.
Wrong. EFF has gone after both Facebook and Google. Specifically, they filed an FTC complaint against Google claiming privacy violations, and they defended a client against a CFAA lawsuit from Facebook. This took 30 seconds to look up. I'm sure there's more examples, but I can't be arsed.
Does it track snoring?
It goes both ways, though - the tacit deal is basically that the HK tycoons do not challenge the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on power, and the CCP doesn't challenge the HK tycoons' economic monopolies.

But, all in all, I agree. As I've written in another thread:
The grievances of HK's population are real: a political and business establishment dominated by property tycoons (and increasingly mainland Chinese political factions) keen on maintaining their privileged position; huge economic inequality; a slow erosion of political liberties ("salami tactic").

That all, of course, gave rise to the Umbrella Movement in 2014.

However, given that the Chinese Communist Party is not inclined to weaken its grip on power, and extremely protective of the (perceived) territorial integrity of China, I don't really see how this will end well. :-/ Here's hoping.

For perspective, BTW: In 1997, HK's GDP was about one sixth of China's (even though China has 200x the people), and HK was an important conduit between China and the world: HK's port had more volume than Shanghai and Shenzhen together.

Today, HK's GDP is barely 3% of China's, and the ports of Shanghai and Shenzhen together have 3x the throughput of HK. (Just have a look at these pictures: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2478975/Shanghai-por.... )

HK used to be hugely important for China. Now, it isn't, and with rising Chinese nationalism, HK is being seen more and more like an unruly and spoiled child.
> I think it should be pointed out that Hong Kong never had democracy. The British ruled the country with the same iron fist the Chinese do

Note that it's not because the British never tried to introduce democracy. In fact they were heavily dissuaded from doing so because of ... surprise ... China. Source: http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/18/asia/hong-kong-handover-china-...

Declassified documents from long before handover
negotiations even began show that some British officials
did seek to introduce more democracy in Hong Kong but were
angrily rebuffed by Beijing.

Allowing Hong Kong people to govern themselves would be a
"very unfriendly act," premier Zhou Enlai reportedly told
British officials in 1958. Another Chinese official in 1960
threatened potential invasion if the UK attempted to
introduce greater democracy to the colony.

More details here too: https://qz.com/279013/the-secret-history-of-hong-kongs-still...
That's the one thing that's probably pretty standard. Here's Amazon's S-1 from 1997, or over 20 years ago:

[T]he Company believes that it will incur substantial operating losses for the foreseeable future, and that the rate at which such losses will be incurred will increase significantly from current levels. Although the Company has experienced significant revenue growth in recent periods, such growth rates are not sustainable and will decrease in the future. In view of the rapidly evolving nature of the Company's business and its limited operating history, the Company believes that period-to-period comparisons of its operating results are not necessarily meaningful and should not be relied upon as an indication of future performance.

http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/filing.ashx?filingid=3847...

(edit:format)
I'm not aware of any utilities that pass on spot pricing on power to their customers on a minute-by-minute level. Even with smart meters, most just tier the pricing into 2-3 levels per day that stay constant for 6 months or so (here in CA, it resets every summer/winter)
“may never” is substantially different “probably won't ever”.

The former is fairly common for companies to acknowledge in IPO documents, the latter would be noteworthy, but isn't the issue here