skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sauce Labs (www.saucelabs.com / www.testobject.com) | Multiple Positions | Berlin & SF | Onsite

Sauce Labs is the premier platform for testing apps or websites on real devices, emulators or simulators. View all our jobs here: http://grnh.se/ex5dth1

However, I'm a developer in the Berlin office, where we create the real device platform. We have thousands of physical Android and iOS devices that we make available for automated and manual testing for our customers, as reliably as possible.

Here are some of the challenges we're taking on:
* Writing software does low level interactions with phones (e.g. getting video and simulating gestures) and ensuring this software works across nearly all devices
* Cleaning/resetting devices after tests
* Moving to zero-downtime deploys when we can't avoid state (we do have physical phones connected to servers at some point after all)
* Making a library of hundreds of different models of phone with different requirements and compatibilities and reliability all appear consistently and reliably to our customers
* Lots more, depending on the day!

Our tech stack is Java, Docker, Angular and React. There's only ~8 of us on the real device team and we need help, preferably from folks with Java experience but low level Android or iOS would also be great! Apply with the link I gave above or if you have any questions please reach out to me (mcrum at saucelabs dot com). I've been here for a couple years now and we have a great team!
You're conflating communism and authoritarianism. Nothing about Communism as a concept requires massacring people. It's just that in the 20th century those who were murderous autocrats used Communism to convince their (often poor) countrymen to give them power and they killed people in service of that power.

Communist and Socialist governments were a popular vehicle for getting poor people to join an uprising in the 20th century and despots took advantage of that.

Maybe that's a distinction without a difference given that we've never really seen a non-authoritarian communist government. But communism has only been around for a century, so it's not out of the realm of reason that there'll be a Communist government that isn't brutal at some point. We certainly have somewhat Socialist governments that treat their people well right now.
Sounds to me like you're a detriment to your entire office, callously leeching people's time.
It's subtler than that. Because it is hard to measure, one has to make explicit effort to demonstrate value. This wastes time and energy that could have been used to increase the very value that needs to be demonstrated.

Value is lower because of the consequences of being hard to measure.

Then there are actual bullshit jobs, whose value is difficult to measure because they have no value to begin with.
I totally agree that html+javascript isn't a good answer to cross platform (for the reasons you mention, and because of javascript's own merits). But the ability to develop an app once and run it on multiple platforms is long overdue. And any effort in that direction is welcome. Having to learn 10 different languages and UI frameworks isn't a solution.
Not knocking the DB. I use it myself. Just noticing a trend.
Is the setting never relevant? Or is this just your anecdotal experience?
You'd think after you take down an API you've be furiously checking the server logs for any referrers coming from inside the house.
Is hiring developers a challenge for you?
If you could give an adversarial network control over a 3D camera around an object, you could train that way.
Neat to think about, but a bit arrogant regarding our abilities. Each of those dams would have been a single point of failure, the failure of which would have meant utter devastation of a scale probably not seen... ever.
Microwave oven UI's are terrible but they weren't always that way. My old Amana had 5 controls: a knob for intensity (never changed it) and a knob for the timer, plus start, stop and light buttons. When the the start button broke we just jammed it in the "on" position with a penny making the UI even simpler: put the food in, and turn the knob for the time.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Cookmatic-Radarange-Made-by...
> Sometimes you can just walk around, bug people, and get shit done. It's very efficient.

This might increase the efficiency of the person walking around, and decrease the efficiency of the people getting bugged. I wouldn't say it's a net win for the company.

> But all of these things also involve communication which isn't relayed to remote workers. People either forget you, or including you in the conversation is a hassle, so they don't. You feel like the unwanted stepchild, constantly pinging people to get some kind of feedback and never seeming to reach them until much later. It's really inefficent.

Yes, working remotely with a team that has an office is awful. Working in a fully remote team is much easier, more pleasant, and more efficient.
I assume EdgeHTML isn't open source because it isn't fully new like Chakra. For example, the first Edge versions had the same select box rendering bugs as Internet Explorer 11 had.
But isn't Google auto-updating on all devices, including old ones?
Fair enough. I'm a space alien cat, and choose not to disclose my identity online. Though I can assure you if I'm on Boeing's payroll, they've been severely delinquent in remittances.

That said, there might be a more productive discussion, perhaps in future, on linguistics rather than French aviation mishaps.
He also has freedom of speech.
The extinction of megafauna (eg, mammoths) didn't begin until tens of thousands of years later, so the effects at northern latitudes could not have been too severe.
Haha, that practical example in the end. Thanks.
In the Netherlands (EU example) as en employee:

- You can do it in mutual agreement (see below).

- You can quit directly but you generally forgo any company benefits (like build up bonuses) and you might/most likely not have rights to state-supported unemployment benefits (70% of your last paycheck).

As an employer:

- You can either in mutual agreement (in which case the employee usually also keeps his/her rights since the contract does not end abruptly).

- By court order but this usually requires extensive documentation on malpractice of the employee.

Notice time usually is at least 1 full month in most cases, can be shorter if the employment is not time-fixed or by agreement. All notices are for both employer and employee.

I do not know exactly but if you have build up "vacation days" you usually cannot use those in your last month and forgo those, unless you agree with your employer in some sort of scheme. "Going in sick" will get you reported in which case a investigator will check you out and you most likely will forgo your sickness benefits. (I've had this once already, but not for contract finalization but reporting it really late. The guy was very surprised to see someone actually sick when he checked it out so I guess abuse happens often.)

There are some contract termination clauses (money mostly) in some contracts I've seen but as far as I know they are not enforceable in any way (since that equals servitude by power). Thinks like immediately handing back lease-cars and laptops under force of fine are though.
You're just making stuff up, which is far worse than anecdotal data by itself.
This seems like an exceptionally cynical and judgemental view of a person based on what, a couple of sentences?
because your tricking poor investors into thinking the returns would be better. "Most" people that don't pay usually don't pay because they can't pay. And people that don't live up to their obligations and can pay will probably sue you for your predatory lending and cruel loan terms.
> Nothing about Communism as a concept requires massacring people.

Elimination of exploiting classes and abolition of family are two things that certainly require massacring people. If you see any other realistic means of achieving these two points of Communist Manifesto, am all ears.
We have a similar system in Austria and I got curious when ROCA was announced. Turns out the cards here generate ECDSA keys and are thus not affected. Naturally, there was no announcement of any kind, so this took quite a bit of sleuthing to figure out.

Maybe Spain happens to use ECC keys too.
Requiring a formal meeting - booking a room (of course the only available room ends up far away from everyone's offices), negotiating a time with everyone, etc. - is sometimes unavoidable but certainly adds a lot of friction. And worst of all, it must be planned beforehand. Not spontaneous. Some of the most useful work discussions I had were during short, unplanned encounters in the corridor.

I suspect that a workplace where work discussions happen only in form of formal meetings would be rather unproductive.
Open-Source Iron Battery Project
I've been growing increasingly concerned by MariaDB bugs. The latest Debian versions from mariadb.org had annoying libmysqlclient symbol conflicts with Debian packages and it still isn't fixed in the latest stable release.

I also recently found out that MariaDB still ships the query cache built in (which is now completely removed from MySQL) and even with query_cache_type = off, it somehow still enabled itself and is in a broken state that was causing simple SELECT statements to return empty results.

This article is making me consider the switch to Percona Server quite seriously.
Glad I'm not one of the millions who live below the Three Gorges Dam.
They gave an explanation of the security issue, along with a (rather unhelpful) link to LineageOS' stance on the matter and explained which defenses they employed to keep it secure (put it behind a permission prompt that is only available for system apps)

This seems reasonable to me. How is this more dangerous than, e.g., giving an app permission to continously track your physical location?
If you have something to say, could you please say it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> native UI driven by React + JS.

https://github.com/Microsoft/react-native-windows

Watching how Microsoft manages this project may give an additional insight into how ideas you are suggesting would fare. (It doesn't seem to be a tire fire or anything from initial impressions.)
Prof Francis Allotey has died at 85
What makes it so good?
I find this fascinating, even if it does seem unrealistic.

Even if this were achievable, I'm curious to know what the environmental impacts of displacing such a massive body of water would be to aquatic life in the mediterranean.

It does seem like something that could have become more realistic after the EU got off the ground had there still have been someone to push for the idea.
It's impossible to deny that studies of our biology attracts a lot of interest, and we're not best placed for objectivity. That said, tghe splitter-lumper dynamic always exists. Are polar bears just big, white, aquatic brown bears that don't hibernate, or a species? New information about interbreeding should tip the balance in favour of subsceices. That's happening. Science works. I don't think there's an ideology problem here, at least not more than anywhere else.

ideology: 1 , science: 1.1 - slight edge
Certainly it has. Having converted to automatic transmission recently, shifting is one less thing to keep in the back of your mind (even if it was second nature to me, after many years of driving stick). With the kickdown button, you don't even have to worry about getting enough power in emergency situations ("have I downshifted low enough?").

Even so, the stick driving reflexes only get dulled temporarily - within five minutes of driving stick, you're back up to speed again (pardon the pun).
A cross-platform UI toolkit with a stable history of commercially support seems to be the most reliable foundation to build on, for sure!
> additional layer of confidentiality and authentication

and additional layers of attack surfaces
What I basically want, and have been wanting for years, is to run Linux on my phone, and run Android apps (∗) inside a sandbox (that works on both my phone and my desktop computer). But I guess it is too much to ask.

(∗) for the occasional banking/railway app
estonia id card question: can ANYONE create a website that uses the card to authenticate? Or is it a estonia whitelist of services only?
If so, then we shall deduct from USSR & China a calculated ammount that came from decades and decades of economic growth they had then, no? It's funny how when praising the status quo some people don't see how they get to ideological mumbling REALLY VERY FAST, yet are the same ones who want to accuse others of 'ideology'(as in "I don't have that, my point of view is objective"). I don't judge tho, getting to understand these matters take a lot of time, 'boring knowledge' like history, investigation and reflecting, I think people should spend more time honestly looking into and trying to understand what this is all about, I bet if you did you'd surprise yourself many times over and see how deep this stuff goes. Facebook-facts based stuff just doesn't do it.
I have gastroesophogeal reflux disorder, and used to regularly get food randomly “come up” and get stuck in my throat making it hard to breathe.

My doctor quite literally “prescribed” a can of Pepsi: the carbonation and acidity did the trick! Now I keep a bottle of soda water in the fridge for all meals :)
Shortening the architectural feedback loop
If my account was occasionally fomenting international crises, perhaps it’d be justified.
Azure Power Automation: How to reduce costs and increase efficiency
The evidence we have for Neanderthal development is subject to precisely the same limitations to the evidence we have on the development of other hominids.

If you can't meet & talk to humans from 80,000 and 60,000 years ago, are you able to say any change happened 70,000 years ago?
I don't think these are necessarily incompatible theories.

First, any theories about this period (the paleo revolution and/or dispersal era in a lot of theories) are very speculative and prone to change. We just don't have that much information. So, the margins are necessarily huge.

So, both these bottleneck narratives are probably over-literal reading of the data we have, at least stated in simple forms. Either way, they point to a single small seed population. There could have been many times more people (neanderthals and sapiens) at the time and later, and they just passed on far fewer genes to 100ky later.

Yuval Harari touches on the question you raise. Sapiens vs neanderthal (and others), and at one point do human behavioural characteristics (or more precisely their consequences) emerge as different. His take is (roughly):

[1] "anatomically modern" sapiens existed for 100ky+ before these behaviours emerge. [2]Findings do not imply a big cognitive or behavioural gap between sapiens and earlier subspecies in this period. [3] there appear to be botlenecks in our lineage, dating to this period [4] The "paleo-revolution" happened in some form, and he believes it was primarily linguistic [5] Our language abilities allow flexible, large scale cooperation that is unrivaled in our clade, and did not widely exist in the lower paleolithic even in sapiens [6] he spends a lot of time on the nature of those linguistic tools. In a nutshell, advanced language allows symbolism, necessary for human-level culture. Trade. Chiefs. Tribes. Gods. Money.

All that could have happened in a single cliffside cove. That seems possible.

His argument/theory is attractive, but these things are far from set in stone. New findings will force all theories to adapt. Some will become unlikely.
Golang led me to this popular lightweight C library: https://github.com/andlabs/libui
I've seen bigger bridges burned.
> Capitalism is the system of protecting the rights of the individual to engage in the free exchange of goods and services.

If they can afford it. Capitalism is actually the system of stealing value from your labour in order to make a profit.

> The extent of human flourishing is the extent to which human societies adopt capitalism.

I guess that explains why two of the world superpowers in recent times are/were communist (USSR, China)

> Even when it is adopted in small degrees, the result is a dramatic uplifting of billions of people out of poverty.

That must explain why China is lifting more people out of poverty than any other country.

> Capitalism is good and we would all be better off if we had more of it.

It's better than fuedalism, but I'd rather live in a society focused on helping each other, than in one focused on exploiting others as much as I can to maximize my capital.

> Collectivism is the ideology that’s holds that your moral sanction for living comes from the group; only the leaders of that group, whether through a connection to god or the tribe, have access to the true nature of the world, and so are justified in any brutality they see fit.

If that's what you think it is, then yeah. That's pretty shitty. But don't you think it's better when people work together and help each other, rather than thinking only of themselves? You sound like someone who drank way to much of the Ayn Rand Cool Aid.
Just like you forgot to list the counter-argument examples of remote teams being better.

But seriously... I would expect there to be examples of both - Good remote teams. Good office teams. Bad remote teams. Bad office teams.

And every shade in between.

I'd, personally, prefer a mix? Couple days in the office... couple days remote. Time to "schmooze" with the team. Time to be in a quiet place to concentrate.

Why does it have to be one or the other? Anyone that claims one extreme is better or worse generally misses the truth: The best option is generally somewhere in the middle of the extremes.
I'm going to disagree here. It's entirely possible to work effectively with others via mostly-asynchronous communication. Open source projects, as you point out, can be a pretty good example of this. I'd further argue that for some (I suspect many...) people work much better when they can have long stints of focus without fear of interruptions.

Two-minute responses on Slack absolutely is a model that can work, and perhaps it's the easiest transition for people who've been working in a "teamy"/open-plan on-site setup. But I'm also convinced that it's not the only viable setup.
I'd say it's Utopia (even though I see what happened in 1917 with good eyes), it would mean the obliteration of a system already too stablished to let it happen (Capitalism), both cannot coexist (or whoever tries it would be casted out just like Cuba was with its socialism).

What we need is having companies aim for more than profit by the end of their fiscal year. As already pointed out here on HN many times, whenever you get VC money, where your business leads is where the money set you to. Product oriented initiatives instead of project oriented ones were a good start, having people own part of it gives them a sense or purpose and let them mature it while maturing themselves. What I really hate about Capitalism is the fact about BigCo or BigVC acquiring SmallCO or pushing it out of business being the standard.
They wanted to basically create more heartland at the cost of coasts.

Problem being, in XXI century nobody wants the heartland. Nobody wants "land" to settle on anymore. Land is a liability where farmers who demand subsidies and channel them to Monsanto live. Everybody want coast to settle near. So it's not so much geoengineering as geoterrorism.
This could be a good stepping stone towards creating DIY batteries that have a useful level of power storage. Seems to tick a lot of boxes; cheap, abundant materials, non-toxic. Whilst it's not likely to be a good fit for all cases, it could help the growth of off-grid energy solutions, as well as being an interesting science project.
GraphQL at massive scale: GraphQL as the glue in a microservice architecture
Eminent domain is not theft. You are compensated at market value for your loss. The market value is not whatever you decide to hold up billion dollar government works. Eminent domain is government theft in the same way the hot coffee lawsuit was legalized grift.
This isn't constructive and simply served to derail the toptic at hand into a bikeshedding session where the shed is the economic system.
>The alternative is that Microsoft has complete control over what software can run on any Windows PC

The alternative is to add gpg keys of the software vendors that you trust. i.e., Every linux distro.
Azure Functions Now Support Java
While I have nothing against MBAs, this is a typical example of what people call MBAish / corporate BS and why managerial profiles have gained a bad reputation here. It looks smart on the surface but scrutiny exposes non-sense.

>Conversations around whiteboards between stakeholders creates value.

Why ? Are whiteboards magic ?

>Pair programming makes for lower defects and more reliable scheduling

Putting aside the fact that the benefits of pair programming as less consensual than what you seem to suggest, it can be done much more conveniently in a remote setup with a screenshare and a headset than by sharing a desk.

>Software is a design delivery operation.

So ?

>There was recent article on MS office space redesign to create more value.

Here we have the business case reference, always good to include one. The substantial remark is that once again this doesn't prove anything, the first reason being that "value" is extremely vague.

>Productivity is not per-keystroke

The art of looking like you are siding with the people you want to control while it is actually the opposite. If we go the bottom of the reasoning : value is not per keystroke, we therefore need to put employees in a room because their true value must be monitored to be appreciated. "Please understand, I really want to be able to appreciate your true value". Sounds a bit hypocrite to me.

>Personal productivity is almost a misnomer

One more slogan.

>I have been paid extra to kill projects that never should have started.

While I am the first to advocate careful planning and writing code last, as an entrepreneur, I consider it a crime to sabotage projects, because anyone who has ever created something, or started a project or a venture understands that creativity is almost Holy. Beyond the technical deliverables, projects trigger group (and market) dynamics and institutional learning that may be hard to reproduce later in time. For this reason, doers do not sabotage or kill projects, they rectify them. Sure there can be pure follies that need to be stopped ASAP to stop diverting valuable resources of the company, but my overall impression is that you have a more liberal approach to assessing what must be killed.

I respect arguments from both sides, but this comment is really representative of the crap filling most companies.
My favorite story about Buffett: I used to think Berkshire Hathaway was just a douchey name he chose to sound posh, like Stratton Oakmont -- but that's not the case. Before Buffett bought it, Berkshire Hathaway was a textile company he'd invested in. He wasn't fond of their CEO, so he bought the whole company just to fire him.

To this day, Buffett regrets his display of petty rage and wishes he'd taken the money he used to spite Berkshire Hathaway's CEO and invested in insurance companies instead. As filthy rich as he is, he could have been even richer (about $200 billion richer), and that bothers him.
Yes; see the 5th-last paragraph of http://archive.vector.org.uk/art10501320 for a concrete answer to this. (Getting to said paragraph by way of all the paragraphs before it is, of course, highly recommended.)

Yes, I'm mad that the subject of the above URL is still, to quote the article, "dark."
"Vomitorium" doesn't mean what you think it means.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomitorium

Unless you were using it in a doubly jokey sense, while being aware of its actual meaning.
Communism isn't real Communism
Python Package Spoofing Attack
https://polygon.io - real-time stock data APIs