skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My intuition was that taxes would be paid mostly near the deadline. I ran the numbers [0] based on IRS numbers to check this intuition. While it is a matter of degree, and it is definitely less pronounced than I initially thought, the last week sees roughly double the number of filers than the minimum week, with another peak in early February.

I'm not aware of a comparable comodity market where there would be a seasonal, forced sell-off to actually speak to the effects. I am, however, convinced that this at least presents an opportunity for adverse behaviors which could make this an untenable policy.

It also doesn't speak to that there are 8 months for the markets to prepare for exploit this period.

[0] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/2018-and-prior-year-filing-seas...

Results (2017):

Week : Filers (Millions)

January 27 : 8.3

February 3 : 11.1

February 10 : 11.4

February 17 : 9.6

February 24 : 8.9

March 3	: 8.1

March 10 : 7.6

March 17 : 7.2

March 24 : 6.9

March 31 : 7.5

April 7	: 8.9

April 14 : 13.1

April 21 : 13.9
This is why I love the EFF. The EFF and ACLU give me hope that all is not lost. RIP JPB.
"One possibility is that we have a shortage of programmers. If that’s the case, you’d expect more programmers to enter the field, bringing down compensation."

This is true. I was a mechanical engineer professionally. I moved into software engineering, and the increase in compensation was a dominant factor. I know several other non-CS engineers that have made the same move. While it's not driving down compensation per-say, the difference in demand between disciplines is startling.
One of the co-authors here is Herman Kahn, the nuclear strategist. He wrote On Thermonuclear War in 1960, which made him one of the models for Dr. Strangelove - some of the lines in the movie are direct quotes from that book. Later he became a utopian (or dystopian) futurist - when he wrote a book called The Coming Boom (which title provoked ironic comment, given his earlier book).

A biography appeared several years ago, The Worlds of Herman Kahn by Sharon Ghamari Tabrizi. She concludes that Kahn was a sort of performer, a monologist working in a then-popular genre called "sick comedy".
I have tried to get into Machine Learning/Deep Learning a few times, but I found it difficult to get motivated because I feel like I don't have any immediate use cases in my own personal or professional life to which I can apply them.

Even areas in which my company can potentially benefit from Machine Learning, we don't have access to vast troves of data to use as training sets. So our brainstorming sessions have gone nowhere.
I have computers built in the mid-80s through 90s that I can connect to securely over an IP network. The idea that it can't be done is the party-line of companies that don't want to invest in doing it. If that's you're business model, fine, but be up front that you're going to screw your customer every couple of years.
Ah, I meant forbidding them in the sense that the culture of the organization would discourage people from talking about work related things in a "work context" via ad-hoc messages, not that people literally or practically wouldn't be allowed to message each other. I agree, that would be draconian.
Can you explain by what you mean w.r.t. "NSF and DOE funded projects, you are increasingly being told to use supercomputing centers"?
> You will never know what someone is capable of in a few hours.

I guess the goal is to fine tune your interviewing process based on how past candidates turned out.
This is the best way to invest if your don't want to put any effort or time learning/researching. Set it and forget it.
Pretty impressive. Any chance of tying it to IRSSI or making an IRC gateway like bitlbee? I connect to almost all those services through bitlbee already and it works pretty well. Add Naver Line support as well and I'm sold..
I got my last 2 jobs after take home challenges (and I am a senior engineer).

The last take home was a 6 hours exercise. I did not really see it at an huge opportunity cost.

I would have trained 10 times that for a whiteboard entirely unrelated to my day to day job.
Jane,

It's not a reflection on your or the article, it's more of a reflection of how silly tech interviews are these days.
Mathematical skill can be trainable without a huge difference in male/female representation implying women are unable to add two and two, your original bar for sucking at math.

There are many, many obviously trainable skills where the best men are very obviously superior to the best women, sports and athletics providing endless examples. I would be very happy just to finish a marathon but the Irish men’s world record is almost ten minutes faster than the woman’s world record.
Our architecture is a hub and spoke. Each executable maps data from an external source to a common domain model stored in Mongo we use a central api as the hub that guarantees a consistent write model and validates the model based on MSs data annotation attributes. We create a corellation Id that tracks it between input and output (another executable). We use Serilog for structured logging. The hub Also publishes an event when the model changes.
In my view successful take home assignments have 2 objective measures of if they are likely to be successful:

- did every dev at the company pass it at some point? (If so you should know fairly accurately how long it takes)

- does it replace the majority of the interview time? (If not you probably don’t actually get why it’s important)
>Time suggestions are usualy completely off the mark.

This is why you put a timer on the take home, it is better for everybody involved.
fun fact - before 2001, the US stockmarket traded in sixteenths not decimals
I'd bet dollars to doughnuts the people doing this are collecting zero data to analyze to see if this new process improves or hurts the number of good candidates they actually hire.

The irony of it is putting processes like this is actually turning away good talent, but they wouldn't know, because they aren't doing any analysis; they just read an article somewhere.
Note on new MacOS builds you will likely have to boot into recovery and run:

csrutil enable --without dtrace

Otherwise you'll get a permissions error due to recent MacOS code signing protection... unless you copy the program you want to analyze to /tmp as a work around.
By that theory, you should diversify away from those that are not going to be "superstocks" (in the post, Dell grew 550x and pushed up the entire index). For example, HP or Exxon or UPS will probably do okay, but will not outperform the rest of S&P by a huge margin. Therefore, they will only weigh down your big earners.
Annual public transport deaths in the US are around 2-300. And the number of passenger miles is vastly smaller than cars, so you can’t just compare the raw numbers.
"Work X hours for free" isn't limited to take-home assignments. I've been part of interviews that span multiple days and many hours.

Here is the breakdown of the worst one I've been part of:

* Initial phone screening with HR (~1 hr)
* Technical interview over phone (~1-2 hr)
* In person technical interview (~8 hr)

I kid you not, I had to take an entire day off work to be part of a grueling in-person interview where I met multiple teams.

This is also not taking into account the amount of time I had to exchange emails.

I would take a take-home assignment in the comfort of my own home, spanning 16 hours instead of an all-day in person interview.
With Gaza in Financial Crisis, Fears That ‘an Explosion’s Coming‘
Are you saying almost all organisation don't need to solve the problem of consistent deployment artifacts and easily reproducible testing/dev environment? Because these are some of the problems containers can solve. (not the only problems, and they're not the only solution - but they can be a solution to those specific cases)
I will add a formal section of the book as well.
I think somehow the idea that you should keep your main branch buildable/shippable at all times (a good thing imo) evolved into, since it is shippable, it should be shipped automatically (which is, in my opinion, really suspect)

I'm in the same boat though, I don't get the point of CD for most applications other than to prove that you can do it (but other than impressing other engineers with your teams apparent discipline: who cares?)
To whomever flagged this when I posted it earlier, kindly explain your reasoning.
I’m not dogmatically opposed to chat, or helping people, or anything like that, and I’ve seen much the same dynamic at play. My problem is more with the culture that arises when conversations move from email to Slack, when interrupting people becomes the preferred mechanism over RTFM, and when I can’t do a goddamn thing without a chat app pinging me because someone @here’d a channel I’m in with something I can’t help with.

Basically, I miss long-form written communication. Slack and PowerPoint are tools that destroy that.
At Kyso.io we provide a ready-made docker image (with all the popular data science and machine learning libraries) in the Jupyter environment. With our GUI it's super simple to start up projects with one click. Use our terminal to easily install additional packages.
There’s a Global Race to Control Batteries–and China Is Winning
I don’t think we’re at peak internet. So far, being on the internet tends to distract one from the surrounding world: you have to turn your attention from the environment around you to your phone, and some people are resisting that. But with augmented reality gradually taking off, I think we’ll see more of people’s everyday lives as they walk around being somehow integrated with networking.
Most of those investopedia inflation theories were debunked by George Reisman in the book "Capitalism". There's an awful lot of garbage circulating around as to what inflation is and what causes it.

The most ridiculous was Gerald Ford's WIP (Whip Inflation Now) campaign in the 70's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whip_inflation_now

Now, banks do create money when they make loans. But this is not inflationary as the loans are made against collateral, i.e. it is matched against value. And when the loan is repaid, the money is destroyed.

When banks make loans that have no collateral and are not paid back, it is inflationary. Guess who does that? The government! Most of what the government says about inflation is propaganda, because (like Gerald Ford) they want to blame anything and everything but government policy.

It's as much propaganda as people blaming "the speculators" for increasing housing prices.
Were you inspired by any of the Wolfenstein 3D code when you were doing this? The approach sounds very similar to what I've read about in Fabien Sanglard's work on analyzing the Wolf3D code - Carmack used some similar tricks there, from what I recall.
Talking Technology: Nick Rockwell and Charity Majors
How useful are these "Why we moved to ..." blog posts?
Why competitive advantages die
I only agree so far as the take-home challenge has no time restrictions.

I would choose a take-home coding challenge over any white boarding challenges.
Yes. And also, yes.
Uh, so that's terrible added to terrible, but it doesn't really address what I just said!

If I was the mean person at IBM that buys startups and makes them "right", it's a lot more work to fix terrible added to terrible than plain terrible. And my last startup got bought by IBM, so I've experienced that pain personally.
in the US, it's forever.
That might work for you, but there are a ton of applicants who are competent but do not have a great github profile. If you were hiring someone would you ignore all candidates who have an empty github? If so, what happens if you never find someone with a good profile? These are the problems we deal with when hiring.

Furthermore, for entry level positions -- candidates right out of college -- how do you measure competency?
Find Children PivotTables of Parent Table and Parse Pivot Cached Record Using Java
>You could probably make this comparison: For someone who, for whatever reason, doesn't want to spend time learning the underlying technology, they will end up with a better solution if they use Vue.

Or Wix or Wordpress even.

But for someone who has taken the trouble to develop an in-depth knowledge of, and facility with, the underlying technologies (HTML, CSS and JS), front end development is not that difficult or mysterious. And for them, these frameworks make the process needlessly complex rather than simpler.
Chat is absolutely asynchronous. It supports synchronous discussion, but I specifically like chat because I can ignore it until I dedicate a few minutes to look through the notifications.
I found that a bit of scripting will make a wiki a bit more maintainable. Replace pages that are out of date with a tag of some sort (e.g. #outdated). Have a script spider the wiki from the home page and send out an email with all the reachable pages with tags. Either fix the page or make sure it’s no longer reachable.
> 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.

No, they cannot be. I meant outlier in the sense of a probability distribution with e.g. standard deviations, not to imply randomness. I’ll start by quoting what I wrote the last time this topic came up on HN:

“Virtu only lost money trading one day out of 1278 trading days between 2009 and 2014. In the most uncharitable analysis (1278/2; or the lost day happened in the middle), they had a 0.5^639 chance of doing that.

Maybe you disagree with 0.5 per day. Let's make it 0.9!

...But that's still 5.7 x 10^-30. How many firms do we need to exist for this to emerge by chance?”

Draw up a probability space for me and actually quantify what you’re asserting. What is an event? Is it a single trade? A trading day? A trading year? How many of these events are there, total, in that timespan? Of those, how many win? Can you map each of these events to a boolean function, such as a coin toss, or are the chances more nuanced? This is before we even get to the issue of quantifying risk as a metric.

How about we make the event a trading year; how many funds would need to exist to explain hedge funds like RenTech or Baupost? Moreover, can you explain three decades of extraordinary returns in a single fund as an outcome consistent with a uniform distribution across all eligible hedge funds?

This armchair probability analysis turns up every so often on HN, but to be blunt, the onus is on the analysis to actually make it empirical. You can’t just say “well, they’re doing this by chance, we can expect some of these to eventually emerge because statistics and coin tosses” without formally proving that there are actually sufficiently many hedge funds and criteria to satisfy that claim.

> 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.

This is false. Buffett is, by his own admission, an active investor. He picks stocks - what is your definition of an “active investor” if not someone who makes active decisions about how to invest? His letter, “The Superinvestors of Graham and Doddsville”, specifically outlines his investing and describes it as an active strategy.[1] In fact, the way you’ve described his work is an investment thesis consistent with modern trading strategies. At their core, statistical arbitrage and high frequency methods seek to identify price inefficiencies just as Buffett does, but on much smaller timescales. It’s a difference of degree, not category.

______________________

1. https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/rtfiles/cbs/hermes/Buffett1984...
This sale happened 10 years ago so this didn't happen in office.

Was Russia planting the seed in 2008 to have a puppers in the white house? Yeah, I don't think so.
Not bad as hello world, but so many things wrong if serious project, starting from existence of ENS and reverse-registrar, not using smart contract but regular transactions, not using web3 api, etc.
You can certainly do analysis on the hires you make, but it's pretty hard to analyze the hires you didn't make. Very few will come back and reinterview.
Behind Artificial Intelligence Lurk Oddball Low-Paid Tasks
For some businesses, they aren't hiring a ton of developers, so doing an analysis on 2-5 data points isn't going to yield anything significant.
Positioned as a tool for collaboration and productivity, how can Slack legitimately be that when it is designed for online, synchronous communication?

Is it really collaboration when members in a channel do not have a chance to prepare or struggle to participate at that pace?

What is productive about Slack? Perhaps you get questions answered through the tool, but you do not produce through Slack. I think of meetings as productive when progress is made on a problem or a decision is arrived at. How does Slack facilitate that better than scheduled meetings?

I have generally stopped using Slack. If a conversation takes longer than three minutes to conduct on Slack, in real/video/phone life please. There is an illusion that work is getting done faster on Slack; the opposite is true, work is slower and of poorer quality.
America Needs a Nationalized 5G Network
How is this different from Kenton's sandstorm?
Are there any truly remote software companies?
Do you guys know any companies which are truly remote? Let me explain the context below and what I mean by truly remote.

Lately I have been trying to find remote work from India as an iOS/Android engineer who has worked on frameworks and apps with multi-million user base. Also I have no problem at all getting interview calls for full time on site jobs. Have even interviewed with Facebook recently with them offering to relocate me to US. So I am not one of those guys who works at one of these outsourcing firms. Basically skill or resume is not an issue here.

The trouble is most "remote" companies have a condition of either US only or 4 hour overlap without timeshift.

Now given these constraints its seems to be super hard to get even an interview from such "remote" companies. I expected it to be a lot easier to at least get an interview with the trend of remote work rising and rightly so as it makes perfect sense for the software engineering roles.

Have you guys found any companies which don't enforce limits on timezone or place for remote work?
Most race car brake cooling air ducts are made of silicone and rated to at most 20psi (125kPa). Brake cooling ducts are powered primarily through ram air effect, and cost a few bucks a foot.

Not sure what OP is referring to, but if they're talking about a replacement to the 10-12cm high-temp diameter silicone air hose that typically gets routed to just front of brake rotors (and rated to 230C sustained, 260C intermittent), those measurements are MUCH higher than anything I've seen on genuine, real race cars, including WEC prototypes.

Now, the initial ducting may be made of a composite (including carbon fiber), which obviously can be tremendously strong, but the last bit of it is usually silicone.
If you like this idea, maybe you'll like https://remotestorage.io/.
While this might be true, most developers (in my locale at least) fill their GitHub with little projects meant to fit this exact purpose. I would 100% consider someone with some semblance of a GitHub over someone who submitted a well done takehome with no GitHub. That's why I don't bother with them. I would rather see that you are at least trying to work on yourself as a developer outside of interviews and work. It shows initiative, dedication and a host of other great attributes that I just don't see from a takehome. I'm not saying there aren't great coders without GitHub accounts, but I would for sure be asking why not. I think a better use of time is to do "production" code on a whiteboard. FizzBuzz in person, if done properly, can tell you way more than any take home. Start with basic FizzBuzz or any other basic interview question and make them write it functionally and tesably and mock out some sample tests. In person, this will tell you a ton about the candidate and isn't super stressful for anyone because it's a well known baseline interview question. It also makes the interviewee feel like the company is investing as much time in the interview process as they are.
Can you really justify my contractor rates though? My time isn't cheap, and I don't work until the down payment has cleared.

All a take home test does is eliminate your strongest candidates, since they generally won't bother. It has to be a truly extraordinary position before anyone with significant experience will waste their time trying to compete in this market. Keep in mind my opportunity cost while job seeking is networking. Every minute I waste on someone's takehome is time I could be tayloring my resume to another position or emailing with prospective employers, which makes them all the more expensive to waste time on.
Great post. Hits exactly the sore point of working in today's environment.
> Continuous Integration: “a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily,” says Martin Fowler. It generally involves running automated tests that run every time a patch is merged (“integrated”) into the repository’s main branch of code.

I don't think it's about integrated patches into one piece of software, but rather about integrating the patched software into the entire software system in which it lives. So if you have three pieces of software (A, B & C) which are deployed together, they'll all live in the same repo (because multiple repos are almost always a mistake); each will have its own unit tests (because each piece of software is a unit); and then you'll have integration tests which test how well they play with one another, particularly when other folks are changing different parts of A, B & C at the same time.

Fowler's article[0] reads like it could go both ways. I guess if you see any system of multiple processes as a single piece of software then it's much the same thing.

[0] https://martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html
And what of people who don't want to leave existing full time employment for a three month contract that might turn into a job if things work out well? Similarly, I doubt most people would be willing to move to a city for a temporary contract.
Getting the data into PostgreSQL is a problem in nearly any setup. You can't really copy PostgreSQL's actual data directory around. Subtle differences in configuration (I don't know what they are) will probably cause PostgreSQL to consider the database corrupted and lock up. So you have to export a portable version of the database and spend time loading it back in.

The exception is if I make a complete image of the machine, including PostgreSQL and its data, using AWS or VirtualBox or something.

If there's a way to package up a self-contained, non-root copy of PostgreSQL with data already in it (like you can do with SQLite), I would love to know about it.

And yet I won't give up on PostgreSQL; despite the awkwardness of setting it up, it really is the best database out of many that I've tried.
I have found it useful for some purposes to install lubuntu-desktop and tigervnc in a docker container. Leads to enormous images, but it runs GUI applications via a VNC viewer like remmina.
Failed how? Seems to be thriving for many use cases. I’m a fan lisps and Clojure especially but it didn’t scale to large teams and problems the way Scala does
This looks promising as hell!