skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You don't have to give up on price: there are other areas in which sacrifices could be made.

You could give up some model churn, lowering actual costs by using the same parts in many model years. It's hard enough to maintain parts inventory in an automotive repair context, and there's just not enough money in the devices to sustain a similar level of complexity in appliance repair.

You could sacrifice some compactness, using interchangeable brackets and larger assemblies that connect together with fasteners instead of custom-molded brackets and glued-up assemblies that can only be assembled, never disassembled. These might be more expensive for a single model, but over several years economies of scale would catch up.

Finally, you could make these replacement parts available at home improvement stores and at the same retailers that sell the devices, instead of through distribution chains only usable by licensed professionals. I was able to repair my furnace this winter when the exhaust blower failed (and my AC when the capacitor failed) because I could buy the part I needed on Amazon with next-day shipping. I had the day off, and was willing to drive around, but on calling 12 different places within an hour I found none that would sell the parts to me. And just a visit for a quote would have cost more and taken more time than shipping the failed component from Amazon.

The manufacturers would prefer that you buy an entire new appliance from them, and have made decisions which harm the environment and harm consumers, but benefit them. Regulation is required.
I'm still a student, but I have a feeling, if a job interview asks me to do a big 'assignment' of sorts, I'll ask them how long it would take an average dev to do. I'd do the assignment, provided I get paid those hours * a dev wage.

Surely if they were serious about me, they'd pay me to do a stupid task, right? Or am I way off base?
We paid around €700 for an A+++ fridge from AEG which produced way too much ice and condensation and broke down after 6 years. Horrible investment. We replaced it with a €850 AEG fridge.
Part of me is saying that while the guy was screwed over by SoundCloud, he simply didn't cover his bases in the contract.

There is simply no way I'd sign a contract that requires me to quit my job, let my accomodation go, move to a different country, without some clause about compensation for termination.

It may seem obvious now, but I always require 3 months of pay from the last day of employment - this is in effect from the moment they sign the contract, so they can cancel it all they want, but they still have to pay me 3 months of salery. If they don't want to sign on that, I don't consider it a serious offer anyway. This is only for jobs in a city where the jobs are plenty. For moving to Berlin it'd have to be higher.
I'd rather spend 20 hours in a weekend doing an homework like this than inverting a binary tree on a whiteboard. At least I can actually show that I know something other than just sweating and look really dumb.
>"Why do recruiters do these silly "homeworks"

It's not the recruiters, they are just the messenger. But yeah this is a joke.
Lottery doesn't require skill and execution.
Binary plists have been around for ages, in fact they come from NeXT. But most stuff on OSX will still happily interpret XML (and now JSON) based plists just fine if need be. For all your conversion needs there's plutil.
That's a very particular spot to discuss. I often wonder what the hell is in a new washing machine. I suspect that most of the new machines mostly give you a bit newer dashboard and a few program options.

All in all, if house appliance were designed to be modular, you could keep a piece and use another one with it.

Alas I don't want it to end up like the computer world where standard competes and forces other problems.

Maybe a middle ground with blocks that aren't too coupled/soldered and more modder communities to discuss how to adapt etc
Yeah I missed that one, although I've never heard it used voluntarily? Yankee maybe, but still not common.
FizzBuzz is a great way to see if the dev experience listed is total bullshit.
Tangentially related: if selling bombs to our enemy who we are at war with would bring in more money than the cost of rebuilding and insurance claims we would do it. What sounds insane to you is criminal for an executive not to do.
I can't name names but it used to be a known practice a few years ago (say 5+). It might still be although the dating space has changed dramatically since the prevalence of social media platforms.
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Early in my career, I thought I was always doing someone a favour by making them a job offer. After all, I'm just giving them more options to choose between, right?

Later I learned people who end up out of a job won't see it that way. Especially if they've quit a secure job and relocated.

In my case I was on the fence about a guy I interviewed, I gave him the benefit of the doubt, it didn't work out and I had to fire him. Hiring someone just as you're about to have big layoffs is even worse, as the blame isn't shared - it's all on the employer.

Now when I hire, I do everything I can to avoid this sort of mistake :)
It's my understanding that you can also say "Hey Google" to issue commands, and it's possible in this case that in the heated discussion the device heard "Hey did you..." as "Hey Google". I've activated my iPhone's Siri assistant before by saying "Hey Sir" to a boss who walked into my office.
Privacy badger has a nasty habbit of breaking login for sites using a login subdomain though. In my experience privacy badger has vastly more false positives than ublock for instance.
Have been wondering if these consumer protection things also extend to software side. For example is a mobile phone or Internet router considered broken, if the software contains critical security problem for which no patch exists?

I believe the answer should be yes, but not sure how courts and consumer protection officials view this thing. If they would go with defining security bugs as defects, this would have implications for example to IoT security. This would create more incentives for manufacturers to focus on security and figure out how to patch the products that are out there.
OCaml uses C's linker model, and yet still manages to have working Modula-like modules (even with cross-module inlining). So there's an existence proof that it's possible to do it well.
They [systemd] shouldn't piss him off too much. He will sit down for a week, come out with his own init system which will take over the world. /s but not entirely :)
Idea for a browser extension: randomly when you go to a time sink site (even if the sink is only a few minutes), pull up some ebook text to read instead.
The problem is that most of the time is like solving newspaper puzzles.

Last time I got a stupid exercise about counting amount of 4s and 0s in a number, while obeying to a specific pattern, then generate numbers that according to that pattern would match a specific formula, while taking into consideration some GCD relations among those numbers.

Yeah, cool exercise for a weekend. Zero value when writing enterprise distributed systems with web/native GUIs.
Who gives a fudge about "CTO having a bad time"? It was their duty to actually keep head above the water, and maybe... not hire people knowing the shit is going to hit the fan? Unless the CTO didn't know, then it's a completely different level of indolence, and the company is going down, super hard, super fast.
LTCG as of VS2015 is an incremental process when it can be, which did wonders for build times.
Do we need graph databases? A benchmark vs. RDBMSes
The heir to the Pascal/Delphi kingdom seems to be Nim[0], though it takes its syntax from Python.

Compilation is impressively quick, even though it goes through C.

[0] https://nim-lang.org/
Was going to comment with this.

I think homework assignments can work great, but compensation for the time seems totally logical, and it should somewhat be in the area of reasonable too, not just a 'spend 20 hours but get 200 bucks' either.
I don't know why you're downvoted.
One thing though: if Lennard blames the drivers, he should at least implement some fallback mechanism to use when a feature is unavailable or can't be relied on to work reliably. Honestly, if with the same drivers ALSA works fine and PA doesn't, it's hard to blame the drivers.
But, it breaks a standard Unix behaviour going back years, and it can't be configured by a non root user.
I agree, but I think it is incredibly uncommon for people to think critically about employment contracts in Tech. People generally just take whatever "standard" contract they receive at whatever small-mid-large size company, and I would guess that most don't even read them all the way through.

Even as someone who likes to think that they consider contracts carefully, I recently signed a contract with a 12-month (!!!) non complete cause. Clearly I don't think critically enough about employment contracts either. It's so hard to know things like this without experience, and there aren't enough people spreading (this kind) of knowledge.
Where could you possibly live that it's 60 miles to the nearest secondhand store (or rather, what's the fraction of people that live similarly far from them)? I have four Goodwills within 25 miles of me, plus a bunch of secondhand clothing botiques, flea markets, a couple Salvation Armies and a Habitat ReStore.
Wasn't that Wirth's rule for Oberon and/or Pascal? Any optimization introduced has to have sufficient cost vs. benefit ratio that it makes the compiler faster compiling itself.
Not nearly enough engineers care about MacOS at the same emotional level as Linux. People who use Mac usually don't care much about internal architecture but their actual experience while Linux users who are also developers are extremely vocal of every single component inside Linux
Because despite the apparent skills on people's resumes, a lot of people still seem to fail to write fizzbuzz in an interview.

I have no problem with short sanity checking exercises during interviews. The problem is when they expect a lot more unrealistic whiteboard code.
Last time I was hiring an iOS dev, we had a cool 2 hour pairing session (it was supposed to be 1 hour, but time flies when you're having fun), doing something really simple in the scope of the project. He shown how he works, and tackles problems, answered some questions, got hired. You really can hire in a humane way, you just need to want it.
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Honestly this is what scares me about moving countries to join startups and small companies (and even established companies). It doesn't help that I have 3 months notice at current job - plenty of time for the company to dissolve the contract.

In fact, a friend of mine did the very same thing (wanted to move to a Berlin startup two years ago) and also he was terminated before he arrived. Don't know how the financial side of the issue was solved though.

Regarding the notice period, regulations probably differ by country, AFAIK in some countries notice is period is gradually increasing, i.e. on day 1 it's measured in days, not in weeks/months. That complicates things a lot. When you move countries, the company is in much more comfortable position for the first few weeks.
That's something that really bothers me about pulse: it looks like it should have a nice unixy design and work well, but actually using it is, in my experience, a complete potshot.
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When "shit happens" and you're responsible (as SoundCloud is here), you sure should try to compensate for the trouble (big trouble in this case as he left a job and moved to another city just for the job). Here they just said 'sorry' and left him hanging. They clearly still have money and should have paid him, IMO, at least some compensation. I'm not sure how do you justify advocating for them. They totally deserve being thrown under the bus and the blog post barely did it. It just stated the facts.
No one disputes that the sellers would prefer to make more profit. But we don't live in an anarcho-capitalist society (yet).

The article is about the EU preparing legislation that would require this sort of guarantee. A functioning government would not allow them to turn the process into a hellish ordeal.
That's only because they just started working on incremental compilation, it will get faster soon enough.
yeah like that one company asking me to do Slack to work at their inventory management startup ;-) Totally related, in so many ways.
There's various levels of bullshit, of incremental bullshitness

a) I won't believe you got your PHD legitimately, do fizzbuzz for me.

b) You're faking both your diploma and your 4 year experience at Megacorp, prove me wrong via fizzbuzz.

c) Alright your credentials check out, do this entirely unrelated to the job assignment to prove that you have what it takes to do the job.

d) Alright you aced your assignment which despite being entirely unrelated to the actual job, domain and language, convinces us you got what it takes. Now, tell me an example of when you resolved a conflict with a colleague and how you did it...
I'm curious, you seemed to have a pretty bad experience with your first AEG fridge. What made you go for the same brand again?
Oh you're entering house of pain believing "companies are loyal" ;-) Definitely NOT in Berlin.
A more recent source (MBW's follow up to the linked article) - https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-denies-its-pl...
Right -- people sometimes fail, or make mistakes, non-maliciously. Even if it's 100% the CTO's fault that doesn't stop you from being gracious -- It's not like you chewing out the CTO is going to bring back the company's position. If you think it was malicious (or you think the person should be held personally accountable), file charges -- otherwise I think it helps to at least think of the position the company as well as the CTO that's personally delivering the bad news to you.
XKCD explains it the best: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1827:_Survivorshi...
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I heard once from a German boss of mine, that these non-compete clauses are anyway illegal in Germany ;-)
It is. Although, as far as I'm informed (having last used it in 2013 or so), even with that approach, you'll likely have problems linking all the output in the end if your project is large enough.

Of course, thats another separate problem to begin with. I still remember dabbling with D and vibe.d and replacing the default GNU linker with ld.gold because over 90% of the build time was due to the linker...
All in all, the issue is too much hearsay and not enough ways to check anything. Maybe old fridge are less efficient than new ones, but for what reason ? electric conversion ? bad radiator ? stupid motor ??

How these built in fridge done ? how many ? (I guess a standalone is made in more numbers so they have more know-how and mileage)

Also brands are deceitful after some time. At once they meant skills (say 60-90s SONY) but after a while, on mainstream product it's mostly a tag. For instance I found an AEG beard trimmer and was thrilled because AEG means gold in my eyes, when opened, it was a generic chinese PCB / assembly with a cute and sexy AEG case (you pay for the rubber).
Packet Publishing has 50% off as well:

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I used it ~3 years ago on Funtoo; there's definitely still people that use it!
I would call this the "Schrodinger's Byzantine Friendship Problem".

You start with a case where the Yes or No are equally probable. Then you apply functions to this system that may or may not change the outcome to the "Yes" state. And then you make the measurement.

No matter how many times you have applied that function there's always a probability the person in question is lying, or otherwise - there's always a possibility a person is simply afraid of opening up and is hiding behind politeness.

Point being - you can't analyse it too much. You can't make progress in science without experimenting. Neither can you progress in relationships. Sometimes it backfires. Sometimes it may even backfire more often than not. But it still is working with experimental data.
Amazon is quietly rolling out its own Geek Squad
Real title: Failing news outlets seek government protection for past failures and outdated business models.

The legacy news media has completely failed to understand two things 1) that distribution is king, not content and 2) that their potential customers have so many more options now than just news. They gave away their distribution to Google and Facebook and still think that better content is the driver of their businesses. I am sick of hearing the CEO of News Corp whining about Google and Facebook. They could easily have invested in creating their own alternative distribution networks, but they completely blew the opportunity they had, with MySpace and they could have bought Instagram, What's App, SnapChat (if you don't think these are news networks then you've not been paying attention). So now they go whining to the government? Shame on them.
Seems to have settled down now(?) but firefox audio was def glitchy for a few releases after for me requiring system restarts to get sound back.
You will need to disable automatic starting, and start it manually. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=PulseAudio&mobile...
(see also linked upstream docs)
I feel like the (brilliant post) is missing the context that if you were debugging the latency on Linux, you would have the source code to continue the investigation until you found and fixed the problem, as opposed to just teeing it up for Microsoft.
>"The feedback from candidates (including those we didn't hire) has been extremely good - they much prefer this to puzzles or whiteboard coding sessions."

This whole idea of asking people do use up their nights and weekends to do free work is completely ridiculous. And the justification is always the same - "we think its better than implementing algorithms on whiteboards."

Well who ever said writing code on a whiteboard was necessary? This justification is ridiculous as it suggests there are just two possibilities for hiring people - algorithmic puzzles and unpaid work.
My background is in tumor immunology research, so I'd be especially interested in how this is applied to the immune system if you are aware of any good papers there.
I think it's a common idea. I thought of it before bitcoin was a thing (public signed transactions) and heard similar ideas many times. Still waiting for a working system because at this point in pretty sure I'll never actually create one myself.
And now this has been flagged? Why???

HN should really implement some kind of system where flagged posts would be listed, together with a reason (and maybe, why not, an appeals process).
Typically in the EU (or at least here in The Netherlands) you can be fired on the spot (without a notice ahead of time) in the first month (usually referred to as a "trial month"). I suspect this is what SoundCloud took advantage of.
A rural area...

It's remarkable to me sometimes how painfully and obviously ignorant many people on HN are about the lifestyles of the huge portion of the global population that lives in relatively undeveloped rural/agrarian areas. You don't even have to live there, just visit sometimes.

I spend a good fraction of the year in locations that are at least 10 miles to the nearest business of any kind, let alone something like a second hand store that requires a reasonable population to sustain.
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I agree with your comment. The author seems taken back by the callousness of the cuts, but this is nothing new in the United States or even in other western countries.

I think Indian IT firms have gotten a free ride for many years using labor arbitrage. Now that there's a whiff of protectionism in the air from the United States and cloud computing is surging things aren't so easy anymore.
Sadly this scenario is not uncommon even among bigger employers.
I was with a big investment bank abroad when after a few rounds of redundancies that I somehow managed to survive over the few months I was with them, we were finally told the situation was now stable and we have lots of work planned for the next few years.

Hooray. Tell wife, terminate nursery contracts for our kids in our country of origin, arrange moving our stuff to the country I was working in for good, commit to renting a new apartment for the next 12 months, buy airline tickets and lots of other expenses.

Then I get the news. The remaining few people are being let go.
No apology, no compensation. Just like that.

To some degree it's a game of luck, I guess, but I've been actively refusing their offers ever since. Fool me once...
You may be able to craft something like this in org-mode, by writing a little bit of elisp.

org-mode already provides all infrastructure to organise your ideas and tag them. You would just need to do the clustering part.
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Not sure why you think people don't dislike launchd.

The problem with systemd was that there was potential to be better; the idea is good but the core developers reek of hubris.

Launchd is OSX, and osx has some horrors but that's ok because they're desktop systems and you don't work on fleets of thousands of them usually.

There was a time where Apple were threatening to upstream it to FreeBSD- but aside from that I think the consensus is that launchd is quite horrible too. It's just systemd could have been so much better and not tried to gobble up the entire Linux ecosystem.
You know I didn't mean to say all lived 60 years, but more a "we were wrong on the limit". I've never heard of even 40 years lifespan. At best once a 30yo washing machine. The usual is 20 years (and tears). 3x
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To put it simply - bathtub curve [0]. Basically, every component has certain failure rate (probability that an item will fail after certain amount of use, usually hours) profile, which tends to resemble profile of a bathtub. It turns out to be possible to engineer a product in such a way, that combined probabilities form:

a) very steep bathtub profile (critical/expensive components fail one after another)

b) very flat bathtub profile (critical/expensive components have highly differing lifetimes)

c) something in between

Planned obsolence is a

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

--- edit ---

Reading other comments, I think it is important to make a distinction between terms "planned obsolescence" and "engineered to fail". My comment was (and the proposed law, as I understand, mostly is) regarding the latter, others commented on specific ways it can be implemented.

Even though these terms are used in various ways, obsolete product is still technically usable (at least to some degree), but is unattractive, malfeatured or expensive to maintain, compared to current competition, often all in conjunction.
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I've given up on C++ 5 years ago, after 10 years of getting paid to develop it. I find out the extra money that come from a C++ job doesn't cover the gray hairs of trying to tame the language so you don't shoot yourself in the foot a dozen times every time you call a method.