skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought I recalled reading in the past that babies actually can't see very far in the newborn stages. The fact that the areola and nipple are super high contrast to the surrounding skin and whose dimensions are optimally situated for a babies focal length is a mark of that. Scent and sound play large roles in the early stages. Our baby would respond to her siblings voices since she's heard and played with them since in utero. It would make sense that the most capable sense would develop more utility. I recall reading a story where a musician was said to have dived into a new body of work to study some cello concerto or something he's never been exposed to or learned before. But as he dived into it he found it all so strangely familiar. He brought that up to his mother of this strange dejavu like experience and she had then told him that when he was in the womb she was vigorously mastering that piece herself.
I always figured it was because there were thousands of different types of antibodies generated against an immunological challenge (e.g. vaccine).

The antibody simply finds a conserved binding site and it works. Therefore, they don't have to be the same.

As a result, resistance doesn't form as the bacteria or virus would need to develop resistance to thousands of different antibodies, not just one.
On the front page:

"Hire a programming mentor and learn how to do everything he knows."

Might be worth being a little more inclusive here.
Our strategy is to save the take-home for after the in person interview, and to pay you for the time (up to the limit we expect), then a follow up to talk about the work.

I'm about to start applying to new positions and it sounds like I won't get the same courtesy, but only you can decide if your enthusiasm for the position matches the opportunity cost of the interview process.
That's pretty good reason if that's true but setting that expectation would be useful. I've also never had that happen to me.
I am an advocate for autonomous cars, but I have to wonder if tech behemoths aren't forgetting a huge portion of people live outside of cities. It's important to note that rural people will be needing and buying new non-autonomous cars for decades yet and I don't know that there is actually a way to integrate autonomy into rural driving habits.
> One concrete improvement that Slack offers over IRC is that you get the history of a public channel from before you joined it in your normal client.

At work, we used to communicate via Jabber/XMPP. When we connected with our client to a group chat, the server would send the discussion history to the client, so we could see messages that were sent to the group chat even when we weren't connected.

We now use Slack, and I've tried both the XMPP and IRC gateways. One thing I noticed about the XMPP gateway is that whenever I reconnected, it would repeatedly send me the last message I sent to someone or a channel. Neither gateway will replay the messages that were sent to channels while my client was not connected.
Not sure why the parent comment was flagged, but for context op was suggesting investing in cryptocurrencies instead of 401k. My suggestion is to have a 'risky' part of your portfolio to play with.
I haven't stated anything that contradicts what you said
I know quite some people who already do that: Aggressively delete messenger applications from their phones, being hardly reachable.

However, I don't think the world already reached "peak internet". The author probably did. IoT everywhere is still a way to go, from my feelings.
isn't debugging a bunch of small executables annoying?

How do you debug/trace the flow of execution between them easily?

You can't even get a good stack trace inter-executable, can you?
> well, so far, zero.

It should've been obvious that I was talking about workers in the general sense, not at your company.
Show HN: Customer Analytics for your Websites
OMG: this guy is 100% right about JIRA.

About SLACK; well, it can be used responsibly, if you set ground rules. Honestly, I've never used it within a team, but across teams. So I never had the problems he's describing. I can see how it would be abused that way. But you have the senior leaders set ground rules on usage. (doesn't solve the search problems).

Chat is a tool. It can be used responsibly to be helpful, or it can be misused to fuck shit up. Just like any tool.
So, first of all, I'm sympathetic to this concern. I don't think all risks are equal. We're humans, not statistical robots, so we fear some things more than other things and that matters.

But it is worth remembering that you're still far, far less safe in your car. In the United States 40,200 people died in automobile-related accidents last year. [0] It's not like it's just a little bit less safe to drive. It's orders of magnitude less safe. How many people died on public transit last year? 20? Is it even 20?

Again, I understand why people accept that risk, while not accepting the risk of violent crime, but the numbers are what they are.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/business/highway-traffic-...
So were is the feature for DRY business logic like centralized validation? There was a post not too long ago about Bitcoin like currency that only validated on the front end. Where is the language or framework that solves this? To this day Java doesn’t. I don’t think that even Node really does.

I guess WebForms if they passed to POCOs that errored in a certain way.
Just ask how long are you going to wait until a doctor is available to see you, particularly if it's a specialist. Or how long are you going to wait for a surgery.
Automatically Run JavaScript each time you're on a website (Chrome)
Bluray rips are always the best quality sure. But it can take up to a year for a show to come out on BD.

And then there are the Netflix Original shows that don't even get physical release.
> Briefly stated, the universality hypothesis claims that all humans communicate six basic internal emotional states (happy, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sad) [...]

What the fuck. It's either "happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sadness" or "happy, surprised, afraid, disgusted, angry, and sad". I can't help but feel that there is something very wrong with a mind that would mix up the pattern like they did. It's very difficult for me to take the paper seriously after this. I would forgive it if all the authors were Chinese, but most of the names are western enough.
Really? I have my grandfathers and fathers vinyl records. They still play just fine. I'll give them to my daughter. Probably still going to play just fine. That's not going to change because Chess Records is out of business or Universal decided to change the EULA when it bought Motown.
I don't understand why people put up with all the bullshit that goes into tech hiring these days. I mean are companies that offer "market rates," putting people through this? No wonder they can't find anyone good.
Similar experience - I've flirted with the idea from time to time using Docker, but it added more overhead than really felt justified.
Chat is many things, but “asynchronous” is not often one of them.
A take-home coding challenge will bias your pool of applicants towards relatively junior overachievers who are barely skilled enough to complete your challenge.

More senior and skilled people will decline to participate, because they know they can get a better return using the time otherwise spent on the coding challenge to network for more and easier opportunities.

So now you've done a great job of raising the floor of your interviews for little direct cost, but you've also lowered the ceiling.
My site http://goalkicker.com/ (Free Programming Books) was featured front page on Reddit and HN last month; 2TB used within 24 hours, 150,000 unique IP addresses. No issues with hosting/downtime nor any noticeable effect on performance nginx + php

Source:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16186329 and
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7rgz78/a_lot_o...
Boy, it's a good thing we don't speak a language with strict grammatical gender, or you'd be all kinds of pissed off
How about neither. Should be: talk to the guy, talk about prior work. If you think they fit, hire them. If they end up being bad, fire them.
We are at my org, but my only exposure is cross-team / cross-division chatter. I collaborate with my team across offices through an old Jabber client. This isn't ideal, but pulling it away from a browser window allows you to disconnect, set DND status, that sort of thing.

Zulip's focus on streams & discussion topics (over people-groups) is terrifically handy for tuning into large-scale group chatter, looking at things that are interesting to you and sharing conversations with others. Project/task management via Slack or any similar tools just seems bonkers to me.
Already sounds like a bad situation.
There's a lot of contempt for take-home coding tests in this thread. They aren't a perfect solution by any means (1), but much closer to an engineer's real responsibilities than a whiteboard session.

For this reason and this reason alone, I will continue to advocate for take-home coding challenges.

(1) IMHO, the best practical solution is a pair-programming interview using a real bug or feature the company has already solved.
My personal experience is that the people willing to answer the questions on slack are also the ones who take those answers and put them in documentation so they don't have to keep answering the same questions.

My experience is also that those who don't bother to be responsive to questions aren't pained enough to write the documentation. Further, due to the blindness of expertise, they document the wrong things.

It's precisely the pain of interruption that leads to empathy and good documentation. My team, as one who sources multiple teams, does a significant amount of work in documentation precisely because we know the pain points.

I had a pain point recently when some behavior changed that broke a consumer. I could track to the change, but I couldn't tell why because this person didn't make a meaningful git commit. They didn't create a changelog that explained neither the technical changes nor the product rationale. So, off to slack, and waiting because someone was "too busy" to do any of this.

I have an idea that teams should have a "slack on call" person who rotates daily to interface with other teams. This means that one person is impacted every couple of days. It sort-of works in practice.
They're all meaningless.
Pretty much every childhood is traumatic. I'm honestly surprised that society is as functional as it is.
Yes, apartment-renting market in cities like Copenhagen, Stockholm or even Berlin is nothing like e.g. NYC. Tenants having much more rights leads to much fewer people willing to let in a tenant.
My last interview was with a big 4 and every single one of my interviewers was from a different country (China, India, somewhere in Eastern Europe). I bring that up only because I know they grew up there and didn't study in the US, so they probably weren't as privileged as me or you.

I wouldn't read too much about class into it. Prestige (of college, other places you've worked) is definitely important for getting the interviews, but it's at best only a proxy for wealth, and it doesn't help you navigate the interviews themselves IMO.

I'm not really sure how exactly you think SES/class plays into big 4 interviews, honestly. At my interviews my interviewers were mostly wearing jacket+tshirt+jeans, most of the other interviewers were wearing about the same thing, and I wore sweater+collared shirt+khakis, which was also fine (I got the job). The only time SES came up is when I brought up how my background coming from a more rural/poorer area could help me provide unique perspectives about users and how they might interpret the products that I contribute to.
In my experience, it's chat that drives the documentation.
World Leaders Gathered at a Secretive Meeting to Decide the Fate of AI
I am still horrified and astonished at the extent of which this lawsuit has gone on. So many resources with a over the top armed raid on a non-US citizen that's never even been in the US, over copyright violations? It's frightening how this has gone on.
That is an excuse. One of my older coworkers grew up in rural Pennsylvania and took a train to school. The train would stop at small depots for one or two kids.

Even today you see that. Take the Amtrak from Albany to NYC, there are a few stops at primarily Metro North stations that pick up a few dozen people a day.

The difference is building new and the cost associated with it. Costs to build track are astronomical because urban sprawl makes condemnation expensive and really only practical for government. You can’t have a small depot with the conductor dropping a stool out... you need at grade platforms with ADA compliant ramps or lifts. Bigger stations need elevators, etc.

Once you build it, you need to staff it, and that also gets expensive, especially since intermediate distance trips are always cheaper via car (by dollars) or plane (by time).

Trains won’t get practical until they can share interstate rights of way and we stop airline subsidy. Without the high margin long haul trips, you can’t afford to pickup school kids.
Or, it accumulates so much cruft that it's hard to find the valuable information. I think there's room for documentation librarians, whether by role or job title, but it's hard to justify the expense in smaller organizations.
Yes as far as I know that's a pretty good reason to use noise cancelling earphones. You could still turn the volume up too high though if you didn't care about it.
Not bad but was hard to get into as the ordering seemed off. I think start with something provocative to get the readers attention as the first sentence which will force them to read to the end
Average Wealthfront account is 44k according to their form ADV, far less than the 420k threshold you gave. It seems reasonable to guess that the account sizes follow a Pareto distribution so probably more (potentially much more) than 50% of accounts are below 44k. So for the majority, (potentially the vast majority) of their customers TLH makes their service a net positive.

Of course that assumes users with small account sizes actually have enough losses to harvest, but that seems likely when there is a market downturn like last week.
Exactly. "Solid (derived from "social linked data") is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Linked Data principles. Solid is modular and extensible and it relies as much as possible on existing W3C standards and protocols." That sounds like a pitch from some ICO. The site has the buzzwords. It's got the neckbeards. What it doesn't have is a convincing use case. It comes across as some really complicated scheme for address book synchronization.

They have three sample applications, yet all you can click on is somebody's blog entry. Clicking on the "publishing" app gets you a screenshot of the abstract of someone's paper. It's a single page web site, like all the cool kids have now. Clicking on the top menu items just scrolls the page.

It has MIT and Bernars-Lee behind it, so it can't be totally bogus. If those names weren't on this, I'd assume it was from someone either clueless or crooked.

There's a decent description of Solid on Github.[1] From there, you can see the real problem. It's only useful if the big players adopt it. Which they won't, because it breaks their walled gardens.

This looks like is another try at Bernars-Lee's "semantic web" - hammer as much content as possible into standard formats so it can be machine processed. This is an old idea, and tends to break down once you get beyond contact lists and library catalogs.

There have been major efforts to make that work in the business sector, where it's called "electronic data interchange", and parties want to exchange purchase orders, invoices, and bills of lading.[2] It's worth looking at that area to see how hard this is for even simple-seeming problems like that. And they have cooperation - buyer, seller, and shipper all want that data to flow smoothly between the parties. Trying to do this in today's world of competing closed web empires is much tougher.

The medical data records people have it even worse, I hear.

[1] https://github.com/solid/solid-tutorial-intro

[2] https://www.edibasics.com/what-is-edi/
> autehntication ... autentication ...

That’s why you don’t roll your own authentication.
I personally am happy with subscription based applications in the App Store. I feel more confident that Apple will manage my credit card information better than unknown application developer.
If they're "outliers", their success can be explained by chance. With many people tossing coins, some will do very well by the laws of probability.

The other problem is you're measuring success in hindsight, not from the beginning. (You could restate it as if from the beginning if you had the full list of initial hedge funds - including those that no longer exist).

The point is that you can't predict which funds will be successful.

Buffett beats the market - but he does it by understanding the businesses behind their stocks, their value and prospects, compared with their present price. He buys value for money, and generally holds it for the long term. He isn't an active trader, which to him is speculation.
No. Talk to them, get a feel, if they are a fit, hire them for a 3 month contract. If they aren't any good, don't hire them. If they are really bad, cut the contract short.

You will never know what someone is capable of in a few hours. People who think that works are just fooling themselves and turning away good talent.
4. Inconvenient. Many people don’t work in central business districts.

When I worked downtown, the bus was a no brainer. Working in a different location, I would spend $10 less a week to have a 80 minute commute vs 10 minute drive.
Quibbling about the Fields Medal mentoring claim: Schwartz -> Grothendieck -> Deligne is a counterexample.
Hi Ecesena! Done, see above :)
Being able to draw flowcharts to explain complex things to non-tech people.
"Public transportation is for those who can not afford a car."

There's a first-mover disadvantage here. In cities where this isn't true, the bus is a much better experience. Take a bus in St. Louis and then take one in Seattle and see for yourself. The experiences won't even be recognizable as belonging to the same category of activity.
More than that really:

For those who don't understand why this is important: In NSF and DOE funded projects, you are increasingly being told to use supercomputing centers, which effectively all install global GPFS and Lustre file systems to the HPC computers, usually fronted by Slurm, but maybe Torque, LSF, GridEngine, or HTCondor.

There are two Container runtimes that (mostly) work for HPC. Shifter, which is just Docker + image patching (and no layers) + some other unhelpful things like mounting in your home directory. Shifter came from NERSC who sort of gave it to Cray but still maintain it, and Singularity, which came from LBNL, which actually runs NERSC. NERSC thinks their Shifter is going to win, and they won't even, in fact, install Singularity on their clusters (they say it's for security reasons). Outside of NERSC, there is a tiny bit of traction of Shifter, but not much. Cray is pushing it hard.

Singularity is inferior in many ways to Docker. The most glaring being you can't use it with Kubernetes easily (if at all). It exports a large image. In the grid, those aren't that big of a problem. When you pair it with CVMFS, you get a nice way to cache and distribute containers (with the CVMFS cache) and a bunch of other benefits that are relatively nice. The Kubernetes thing is still a big issue, because it means you can't provide a secure way of making something like JupyterHub+Jupyterlab available with your mounted GPFS file systems (though you can sort of get away with it by exporting GPFS through NFS with root squashing, but that's not a great or complete solution).

The recommendations I give to projects are start with Docker, export to Singularity. Don't give your scientists Singularity containers for their Macs, lord knows how crappy that experience is on a Mac.

The situation sucks. If Docker was willing to do something about it, Singularity would die tomorrow.
Isn't this basically the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy? There are how many thousands of hedge funds? Of course some of them will beat the market. (And some will not beat the market, and all of them will charge fees far greater than an index fund.)

If most of them don't beat an index fund and there's no way to tell winning funds from losing funds in advance, then the smart money is to never invest in a hedge fund.
A quick Google for `PT_DENY_ATTACH` and dtrace should solve that
I had some blog posts on the front page a couple years ago. My blog is an unmodified WordPress install on the smallest Linode (at the time, that was 512MB RAM). No caching plugins or CDN, every page was served live from the database. Got >20K visits over the course of a few hours, 800+ active concurrent visits according to live web stats. It didn't cause any problems, load wasn't even high. All you need is a sane nginx/apache configuration.
Trogdor HTML5 Canvas Game
I have fought the “zero feedback” policies at companies going back ~12 years now. I think it’s terrible but I always lose.

But here is why. For every personal story you have of working with a dev that can’t program, your recruiting staff has 3 of bad/lawyer invoking instances of dealing with crazy candidates. They are being honest with you when they tell you any other policy is too expensive.
I can't imagine that being a good idea -- people form friendships in the office, or they just need to have a private conversation -- it seems like it would be weird and draconian to forbid that kind of thing because something important might be in a private chat.
>More senior and skilled people will decline to participate, because they know they can get a better return using the time otherwise spent on the coding challenge to network for more and easier opportunities.

Absolutely this. No top would put up with this unless the company is paying an ungodly sum of money.
Fair. But I meant that as an example - by research I was thinking of looking in depth at the drug and where it is in the pipeline, what it treats / the market the drug might enter, how promising its research looks, how similar drugs/analogues faired in FDA trials, etc. I wouldn't suggest someone with a poor background in chemistry or pharmaceuticals to try doing that - I think if you're looking at riskier companies, you should mostly only invest in what you know.
Patent reform is 40 years overdue.
yes but (at least in the US), your credit score affects stuff other than borrowing. often landlords will perform a credit check before approving your application; even employers will sometimes check an applicant's credit.

also keep in mind we are talking bad credit and all your assets seized by creditors. i'm not saying a bad credit score is literal hell on earth, but if you have no money and no credit you are gonna have a really bad time for a while.
Note that in some jurisdictions, the candidates cannot take that pay without reporting it to their existing employers.
Show HN: A Book Published with MkDocs
This is why we use a timer on our take home exercise.

You are only supposed to spend 6 hours on it, we give a 24 hours timer so you are not too pressured for time (you can take breaks, have diner, a walk, etc) .

So far it works pretty well.

I have not yet seen any applicant writing tests. Just delivering the project with the requested features and acceptable code (no memory leaks, crashes, unreadable mess, etc) is more than enough to go to the next step.

If you demonstrate enough proficiency during this step, we will probably skip most tech questions and focus on fit in the next step.
The Economy Is Full of Cryptocurrency and Collective Delusion
Especially for something as throw away as a take home coding challenge.