skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To the best of my knowledge, current studies seem to suggest the cause of myopia is insufficient exposure to bright light (i.e. sunlight) during the developmental phase. That's why it looks like TV/phones/etc might be the cause yet every controlled study was unable to find a link.
In your experience, does it make sense for Facebook to also hire low-level recruiters to go over a mass of students? Would those recruiters be expected to do the same?
Cool -- We're a small operation atm so will take a look at that dev tier. For more context, we also do some block storage off-cluster in GCE.
Years ago I had a recruiter pull a list of questions from their technical guy to ask. The first question was something about constructors in C. I carefully explained that the question made no sense for C but would for C++. They insisted the question was correct, so I told them what the answer would be in C++.

They also asked me about if I had experience with the EMACS editor, but spelled out the letter E-M-A-C-S. Why that was an important skill I have no idea. Especially since this was for a contact that several companies were competing for and I was hired by the winning company to work on it. No special knowledge of EMACS was required. Any text editor would work.
Some schools do still maintain a lab of Sun hardware. Extremely weak speculation: Perhaps they are targeting those schools and/or professors, without being explicit about targeting them?
Apple and Amazon reportedly pursue James Bond franchise rights
> One thing i learned with css is that as a programmer you have to take it seriously. We generally don't consider it a programming language so we work on it the least

Agree with this. I've seen frontend work collapsing under its own weight because the CSS was kept in one huge file, you couldn't tell what was dependent on what, JavaScript was being used to alter the DOM based on classes and window resizes, there were around 20 different media query size widths, nothing was shared as variables...changing anything was terrifying and took forever.

You need to keep CSS modular, stick to naming conventions, reduce duplication and keep code concise; exactly like you do with regular programming languages. You can get far with CSS without any programming knowledge but at a certain scale you need to understand good coding fundamentals.
I'm doing this right now - Video to MES (manufacturing.)
This isn't unusual at all - you understand the value of domain experience so do the things that will make you an expert.

1) Give training sessions to those who are also new. It will force you to learn the software.
2) pick up pager rotation. Supporting the software will force you into new areas of the domain.

Those are the things that will get you there fast. It's scary and hard but just wait 6 months to a year or so and you'll be effective. Any new domain that is sufficiently interesting takes a long time to get into.
macOS is certified UNIX: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3627.htm
That's not incorrect, but at the same time it's not improbable that he was essentially trolling at this point and expecting to show this nonsense to his peers (which worked!).

Solid engineers, even ones still in school, know who they are and that their skills are valuable. To this candidate the value of any one recruiter is near-zero. He was chasing lols, basically.

The story here is that Facebook messed up by having this person front their recruiting efforts, not that Stanley Zhang was denied a job.
> He did like a 75% good job.

I'd say a 75% good job for a fresh grad is a really good score. Explaining technical jargon to the computer illiterate is not really something you can learn at school.
> I feel that range-anxiety is a real concern

The term "range anxiety" seems crafted to make people not take it seriously. The implication is pretty clearly that range is actually fine and it's your feelings about it that are the problem.
I have setup my own methodology for loading external files and preprocessing (ala postcss and whatnot) which works to my preference. As well, one can still namespace to match. Win-win.
No - the recruiter is not doing their job. They are marking time in a role and collecting a paycheck, but decidedly not doing their job.
... Until the first person ports QT or GTK and suddenly WASM is just pushing 60 PNG frames a second into a canvas.
As a unix sysadmin, my dad worked on tru64 in the 2000's. Mostly switched to linux/vmware in the last years before he retired though.
so you didn't get the internship. did you get one with a different place, after all of that? if not, do you think your response and this subsequent post increase your marketability?
The kid was pretty green (when you apply for internships you usually are), he had no idea that first-line screeners at a big-5 company could be that awful. With age comes experience and low expectations but as an undergraduate you can be excused. You might even demand a minimum standard of discourse, interviews go both ways.

Storytime: back then us students were doing a factory tour, we went to Hoechst in Frankfurt (yes, it was that long ago). There was lunch with company research staff in the Jahrhunderthalle (they did have longer time horizons then). Strangely, the majority was from our university. That was puzzling, do they mostly recruit from our university?! They solved the mystery for us, this was a recruitment visit, they wanted us to consider them and wanted to put their best foot forward.

Something happened to the employer-employee relationship in the meantime.
The link should be changed to Forbes[1] as that is the primary source.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/antonyleather/2017/09/05/amd-ry...
The Mission to Archive Nintendo's Dying Social Media Platform
And yet that's the hand you've been dealt. You can be right, or you can get the job.
And if you look at the HTML file in the website repo it is redirecting to GitHub. Not DNS' fault
However you view it, the damage is done.
Another possibility is that they are sowing the seeds of confusion in the developer community as part of a larger power grab (c.f. React.js)
>Hold on tight!!

An apt caption for the uncertainty in Toronto introduced by Wynne's last desperate attempts to change people's minds on her.
>I think the one thing we are all learning from this experience is: JUST USE UBUNTU, doing python with Windows is a headache.

Meh. I use python on Windows all the time - it's not a problem. Mostly pip just works.

Of course, I have over a decade of experience with Python - albeit only the last few years in Windows.
How to Win a Nuclear Standoff
If your expectations from a recruiter are this low, might as well replace them with a spam bot, web form, and a recruiting video.
Why do you think it's over engineered? Don't you think the Times have considerable capacity requirements?
I could only get the basic beat after tapping Start Demo on my iPad. I couldn't mix in with the selection buttons :( I could see some toggled on, couldn't toggle them off and vice-versa, whether the demo was started or stopped.
Had a former boss who when he was being interviewed (sometime in the 80's) claimed proficiency in Lotus 1, 2, and 3!
Link to an image of the manual, for the lazy: https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/101/264672507_307376d26c_z.jpg
...where "A Subset of TypeScript" = JavaScript?

If I am not using this, what are the other languages I can use today that compile down to WASM?
If I understand correctly his hypotheses is that the Roma while migrating from India to Europe picked up features of various languages, in particular they used an earlier version of Syriac for spelling their language. The Voynich language was based on this language but diverged substantially by losing the /d/ sound and more.

Watch the third video[1], it's much shorter but provides quite compelling evidence to support his theory.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhtZc-nFNt0
Absolutely false.

While PHP has gotten better recently, the language is not nearly as powerful or complete as almost all of the popular alternatives. Up until very recently, something like the Django ORM was impossible to express in PHP. Take an honest look at the available frameworks (especially in comparison to something archaic like Drupal) and you'll find there's no competition.
Why lies are so viral
> then it should minimally reflect on Facebook.

If a business hires cutrate idiots to source candidates for the largest investment expense it has[1], I guarantee you that it will cut costs elsewhere as well.

[1] Yes, people are an investment. At a quarter of a million dollars a pop for proper coding talent, multiplied by however many coders the company has, people are the largest expense Facebook has.
I'm not sure what part of all this explains why it is a good use of computing power. If you don't skip around in memory as much, you don't have to wait as much on memory latency. If you process data in bigger chunks, you don't have to skip around as much. On chip cache doesn't matter as much here since that can be worked around by making sure data will be prefetched.

Also OOO cores already pre-load things into memory so they can be actually executed, not speculativly executed. Speculative execution on modern CPUs will execute both sides of a branch to prefetch data further.

What I'm saying is, if you traverse a graph with tiny amounts of data at each node, it is wildly inefficient. Mitigating that inefficiency with more hardware might be faster, but is still an inefficient use of hardware since it doesn't confront the real problem of skipping around in memory.
> Kafka messages are immutable. Each of those green boxes on the right hand side of the first diagram will need to have special-case logic to unpack the kafka stream, with knowledge of its changes (up until 17 May 2017, treat the data like this, but between then and 19 May 2017 do x, and after that do y).

One solution would be:

Kafka allows you to easily create new streams from the "monolog" stream that normalise the data to a certain schema. Consumers can then just consume these new derived streams.

Another was mentioned in another reply (create a new stream that ultimately replaces the monolog).

> Document pipelines is a rare instance of a context where XML is the best choice.

XML does not really offer anything here that could not be achieved with tools that are nicer to work with? It's just a file format, basically. Why wouldn't Protobuf work? It also saves a huge amount of disk space vs. XML.

> Secondly, they should have a gateway coming out of the file store. For each downstream consumer, they should have a distinct API.

This is Kafka. They can have distinct streams for the consumers since you can always derive new kinds of streams.

> You shouldn't use it as a long-term data store.

Why not? Kafka has support for infinite retention and Kafka has very strong guarantees about always writing data to disk and not losing a single event.
Australia hasnt had 0% interest rates or even close, and all banks compare you against an 8% interest for seviceability comparisons - and the prices still skyrocketed with so much foreign investment.

They are doing the right things here and targeting increased rates for investment owners over home occupiers
> It would be good to know if this was an internal or external recruiter. If the organization has contracted this out to another organization, then it should minimally reflect on Facebook and have maximum, laughable effect, on the contracted organization.

This is a large part of why they contract it out and they shouldn't get a free pass on it. If $company contract out customer support (very common) we don't say "sure I was on hold for 7 hours, but the support was contracted out, so it doesn't reflect on $company".
>The very definition of over-engineered.

I agree, it is a lot. However, it is an interesting approach to their problem. The over engineering makes the flow much easier to handle.

>Any database can serve as a log replay, as long as you save all the versions then it's just called a query.

The article addressed their potential issues with snapshotting
Isn't this a result of referential transparency, not Turing-incompleteness?
They claim in the article to have 100GB of text data. Let's bump that up 2 magnitudes for all text and metadata ever (outside of media files) and you can still run the entire thing on a single rack of servers and meet any performance needs.

Many industries and applications are leagues ahead in both data size and speed - this isn't an example of such.
As others have pointed out, more people coming out of school know it.

When I started my job, the company (fairly large one) was mostly Perl. Perl was the big language of a past generation, so when those engineers were hired, Perl was king. I was told by at least two people that having Python on my resume is not a boost for engineering companies (not counting software), as most managers had never heard of it.

Not too many years later, a lot of new work in the company is being done in Python. Why? Because that's what the newer employees know and prefer.

I think in the software world, Python was big a long time ago (even in the days I joined). But non-software companies were stuck with Tcl and Perl for much longer. Now that they're shifting, you will see some of that growth.
Ask HN: Should I not use MongoDB?
Hi guys, I'm a mostly front end dev who's built some mildly popular applications where Mongo has worked fine as a data store. By mildly popular we're talking maybe 1 query/s. Today, I just launched a product (www.bliss.flights), and it's unexpectedly gone viral, we have more signups than I could have ever imagined.

I peruse HN a lot so I've read a lot of the recent articles about how Mongo has failed a lot of startups as a production DB. Now that we're figuring out the technology stack for this, I don't want to do work that is going to have to be redone later.

Unfortunately, I've only ever used Mongo, so I'm used to mongoose and it's syntax. Would you guys use a different datastore for something like this, and if so, what? I've written maybe a few lines of SQL in my entire life so not so bullish on learning something new as it will really slow us down!

Really appreciate it.
Their construction relies on two unproven conjectures.

In particular the "Extractable Witness Encryption" conjecture is impossible under a reasonable falsifiable assumption: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8587/dba4ff31e8118e9bd5914a...

Under that assumption, general purpose differing-inputs obfuscation cannot exist.

The way I understand it, FHE being applicable to anything other than "unwrapping a path through a circuit" seems implausible. Any claims of arbitrary encrypted computation should be viewed with the highest dose of skepticism.
There Is No Perfect Teacher (Just a Bunch of Great Ones)
It goes on to say

> The Lisp Machine uses your username (or the part that follows the last period) as a first guess for your password (this happens to take no extra time).

Looks like they won in the long end and got a perhaps semi-surreptitious way to at least opt-in to an open environment.
Encrypted profiles for Signal now in public beta
Its related to IBMs QISKIT, which has been up and down in public opinion.

Started off with "not enough" qubits to do anything meaningful, then became more useful, but less clear how much 'power' you get access to.

These documents just sort of demonstrate, "Hey! You can actually compute stuff now!"
Fair enough, but lack of evidence in this one case is not evidence that IFE systems are invincible. That's quite an extraordinary claim.
This is a tricky exchange. Both sides could've done better. To be honest though, a company like Facebook gets so many resumes that these mistakes are inevitable. Not saying it's acceptable, but it's just the nature of recruiting.
There were native Pascal compilers available for the PC at the same time as the first C compilers. The Pascal ones didn't generate p-code, people just preferred writing in C.
Very much this. We're not called "creatures of habit" for nothing: regular hours of sleep, varying by about 15 minutes at either (or both) ends, regular meal times, differing types of exercise at regular times, all this contributes to motivation and "stickability."

Of course, there's some variation between individuals, but ultimately if you're oversleeping then your life will start to become a mess. Right now, I'm in one of those screwed-up timetables and I'm not getting anything done. I'm meant to be learning C++ and I've done nothing in ... what, three weeks now. I'm going to bed at 1, 2, or even 3am, getting up anywhere from 10am-12pm. By then, I've already lost the most productive part of my day. I really hate that I'm at my best during a morning, and it may be that you aren't. What really matters is the routine.

A few others have made comments about running or working out - it's not necessary to be that intensive. A 30 minute walk will do the same for you - do you have a dog? Does your neighbor or a friend? Do yourself (and it) a favor and take it for a walk. (I recommend against taking a beagle for a walk, though. As they're scent hounds, it'll lead you for hours when it's tracking something interesting.)

tl;dr on your day off, set your alarm for (say, not knowing your work schedule) 6am, and get up, regardless of how much sleep you've had. Live your life that day, then go to bed at ~10pm. Next day, get up at the sounding of your alarm. Do what you need to do, and sleep at 10pm that night. Keep it up, and try not to let it vary too much.

In fact, I might go and set my alarm right now...
The secret to Germany’s scientific excellence
I think that the belief that all cultures are equal is usually a mistake based on fuzzy thinking. The underlying thought is that “all cultures have value”, which mutates into “all cultures have equal value in terms of increasing insight into how humans interact with the world and each other” and this gets universalised via a mental shortcut into “all cultures have equal value” and then anyone who questions it gets shouted down.

Additionally, cultures are porous, overlapping aggregations of chaotic, abstract and mutating human created concepts which resist analysis almost by definition.

Assessing a culture based mainly on its economic expediency seems like a startlingly narrow criteria?
That's a good question, but I don't have the data to answer it.
if you read more closely, this article is not about the amount of data, but the way how it is managed.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point -- no one gets into the club by arguing with the bouncer.

My point is that the recruiter is a collossal screw-up, and its imprecise to describe what they did as 'doing their job'. Unless their job is to alienate qualified applicants.
Never heard of the term until Trump took office.

Whataboutism was okay during President Obama's term. Bush's screwups were often brought up to deflect criticisms lodged against President Obama.

edit: meta
Fun idea, but as soon as I hit `Start Demo` my CPU usage spiked up. Good way to exhaust a laptop/mobile device's battery ;)
I think the best cure for the "lots of silly parentheses" argument is to ask someone to count the amount of (, ), [, ], {, }, < and > characters in their code. Java, for example, is easily on par with Lisp here.
no, i'd be right behind you with the pitchforks for that ;)
I welcome your honesty.

Its also one of the reasons, why i like family fathers and mothers so much- even though most of them vote conservative. There is something selfish, that wants to see that the selfishness last forever.
Thats why those future persons need a spokesman, a long term selfish bastard/algorithm, who is able to veto on short-term behavior that is ultimative self-destructive.

The problem here is, that with such a control mechanism, its easy to go idealistic and try to "patch" humanity up while your at it- ending up with something, somialhinn, socialism.
So the patching up process, known as government, needs a reality check to prevent a run-a-way - and balances, to prevent a lock-out of the living from base resources and short term solutions on the way to long term solutions. Some flaws might be unfixable, and only work arounds will prevent them from flaring up again and again.

For example i can not get this generation to worry about the earth of tomorrows temperature.

The obvious solution would be to have a Future-Gen-House-of-Parliament veto on all usage of coal and oil.
Leading to a total standstill.
Thus the future-gen, could be bargained with- give us oil for another generation, and we will trade you in Carbon-Emission-Taxes and the development of fusion.

I dont claim to have a answer here, but it would be nice if there was some modeling software on how to build a better government here- including a simulation on how to reign in corroding elements like financially well endowed industries and tax-strained voters.
Sydney is up there as well. A one bedroom apartment in my building just sold for nearly US$900k. This is a nice area, 30 mins from the CBD, but still..
If you're experiencing persistent procrastination, you may be suffering from ADD!
It's funny. I have a philosophy that work at its core should be viewed a generous act for society so work-wise that's all I've cared about doing for years.

And yet, I've found it hard to actually contribute positive tangible things. The only thing that philosophy has brought me is a kind of smugness about my unnecessary poverty.

Honestly, the whole experience has given me quite a reverence for capitalism. At it's best, it helps direct a human being toward a path of contribution. There are problems[1] but I think the thing I've learnt is that the task of finding and following through on something that actually contributes to society is hard, and the fact that capitalism makes it easy is kind of amazing.[2] Left to your own devices you tend to massively underestimate the difficulty of whatever scheme you come up with, and burnout/get demotivated without others around you who are doing the similar work.

Ahh well, hopefully I figure how to properly do this "contribution" malarky in the next ten years.

[1] Apart from avoiding externalities, the other major issue is that capitalism serves dollar-weighted humans, and with the current wealth distribution that is vastly different from serving humans.

[2] Find a job that isn't obviously evil. If you succeed, you're probably contributing positively to society.
https://blog.context.io/ seems very much alive. Do you have any other information what they were not able to make work?
Both. In a Turing complete language there are programs without normal forms. For example, in the untyped lambda calculus you will loop forever if you try to normalize the following expression:

(\x -> x x) (\x -> x x)
OP 'Balance Factor' has only made political comments with their HN account. Repeated discourse with an unstated agenda is an attack vector most of us aren't prepared to defend against.
>Explaining technical jargon to the computer illiterate is not really something you can learn at school

...but, yet, probably should be.
> The article addressed their potential issues with snapshotting

They say it would be outdated - but if you store all the versions like I said, what is getting outdated? Kafka consumers are essentially doing the same thing - it's a poll-based model that asks for more data from the current offset, no different than a SQL query with a where clause.
Some people - yes. Some people prefer all sorts of things. Some people may prefer jumping off a bridge. That's irrelevant. On average, people will prefer an objectively better thing to an objectively worse thing and pay more for it
HN skews very anti-mongo, but it can be a good fit for certain apps -- I would stick with what you know until you think you've outgrown what you can do without sharding. I'd probably never shard mongo, but if you can vertically scale it for awhile, I'd do that.

If you're on ec2, the i3 instances have very fast nvme instance storage at a reasonable (cloud) price.
>As I understand it, Voynich has a too low information content to be an alphabetic.

Natural language can be very surprising. :)