skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I took it to mean that most developers in this current market do not need to know implementation perfect algorithms and data structures like RB trees, depth first search, A*, quicksort, etc. Rather your time is better spent on learning the advantages and disadvantages on the structures and algorithms, and you get more benefit from understanding the implementation. For example, merge sort is dividing a list up into sublists until you hit single element lists and recombine them into a single sorted list. That, in my opinion, is more important than a picture perfect implementation on a white board.
A female relative was considering a career change, but even though the salary and perks sounded nice, the work itself seemed meaningless to her.

Another friend did make the jump, mostly for the money and career opportunities and she's struggling and feeling a bit demotivated. The CS theory is quite hard, and it's not something she's especially interested in.

These anecdotes don't prove anything, but I've been thinking for a while if the mental toll of this profession is really worth it.

We say that the others didn't make it into the industry, but what if the others are clever enough to avoid having to spend all day in front of a computer working on very abstract things that aren't really understood by most of the people in their lives, including their managers and a significant number of their colleagues.

Having to spend their free time studying just to keep up with the latest fashion, doing overtime, going through the interview gauntlet every damn time, getting shafted by incompetent business leaders and managers.

Programmers are kind of the punching bag of the software industry.
Next time I find myself in a whiteboard interview, I'm thinking of tying a blindfold around my head, throwing out some profound-sounding Knuth quote, and then drawing some illegible scrawl all over the board. The challenge will be in keeping a straight face.
How is this different from WiFi Calling?
- According to wikipedia, the launch mass of the Falcon Heavy is about 26 tons for a geostationnary launch, which is quite a lot and definitely enough for ISS like launches. I guess either the launch mass is way lower for leaving earth's orbit, or either they just wanted to prove they could ship in something of significant mass without having to pay for all the required fuel.

- For Roadster's orbit, most of the time it will be fine, however some have predicted that it will end up crashing on Venus in a few million years [0]. And that makes me wonder whether the Roadster has been properly disinfected (I very much doubt so).

Also, for one of your original questions, the car is completely alone on its orbit, not enclosed in anything. From what I understand [1] the last booster separated itself from the car before burning during re-entry. You can see clear and beautiful pictures of the car around Earth [2]. Edit : I was wrong, the car is still attached to the last booster. See [3]

[0]: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/15/orbital_calculation...

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/space-oddity...

[2]: https://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/falco...

[3]: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/25016/what-all-is-...
First off DNA does not just sit around on it's own. You get computation from all the things wrapping around DNA. Making a the specific sequence less important than generally assumed.

Anyway, location is almost meaningless. It's the actual sequence that's important and the genome project did not provide a full sequence of an actual human genome. So again, useless on it's own with a completely arbitrary end date for 'success' that again did not actually mark the accomplishment of anything.

Worse, to be useful as a map you need to use much faster sequencing techniques to verify in what way some specific population is different from the average sequence. And then correlate that population with some difference to try and find out what that does. But, once you can do that you can do the entire sequence more cheaply.

At best it provided funding for biotech, at worst it was 100% political in both motivation and execution.

PS: ITER is more than 30 year old design at this point, we have several designs that should be vastly cheaper that are simply less verified. What ITER tests is not about cheap it's about verifying what's going on when you get more power from fusion than you get from external heating. That's critical for any form of sustained magnetic confinement. It also let's you test things like Tritium breeding that again required for D-T fusion at scale as we simply don't have enough Tritium to use it as fuel at scale but we have plenty of Lithium and Deuterium. It also tests remote handling of the containment vessel which is again required for any useful design etc. And to do all that and more you want to take the lowest risk path not just high risk high reward.
That's fine, but you can't have it both ways which is what a lot of the complaints around whiteboarding are.

Either you accept that it's the industry standard and the gateway to a big paycheck and a prestigious CV, or you don't participate.
This is off topic, but I make heavy use of “Reader Mode” in mobile Safari, as well as the embedded “Mercury Reader” in the “Reeder” app. These both do a great job of cutting out the junk on annoying sites, and I’d recommend investigating whether similar utilities exist for your platform of choice.
For sure, I'm not arguing that some whiteboard interview questions aren't crazy, i realize there are.

But also I'm not sure how common it is to have interview questions such as "delete a node from a balanced tree" where they actually expect you to get that right vs just see if you get the basic idea. I've never run into it. Perhaps many people on hackernews work in silicon valley and that is more common there.
http://www.google.com/ipv6/statistics.html

Looks like it's growing rather steadily.
Proof of stake for ethereum:

https://blockonomi.com/ethereum-casper/
> /home/elon_musk/cancer_prognosis

> /home/elon_musk/tesla_bankruptcy_docs
Agreed; telemetry is valuable, and I have no problem with it... provided there is an option to turn it off.
The problem with silencing tactics currently in use that doesn't seem to be understood by those using them is that there is no such tactic that works in the voting booth. As long as we have secret ballots, the Shy Tory Effect is going continue to catch the censorship crowd off guard. I doubt this is going to be kept on simmer because we're already past that point. To continue the analogy, the pot will eventually boil over but eventually run out of water.
Seems such a waste. Launches are expensive. There isn't something useful to put into heliocentric orbit for which the higher risk of a new rocket is worth the tradeoff for a free launch?
In that case it would be helpful if news articles described what the company actually did. Maybe they don't understand themselves but any speed claim is useless without knowledge about the underlying technology.
Your First Ten minutes of analyzing data with Pandas
Quite a lot of major ISP's went all in on NAT64 and had no problems facing people screaming "you broke my Skype."
I think it is well-known that men as a group have more degrees and education in STEM fields, have higher numbers in STEM careers, and perform better in the subjects according to testing measures. As you say, it is also well-known that we view women as better adjusted socially. And as you say, it can be taboo to make this point. I think when making this point, the important thing to realize or clarify is that it doesn't have to be this way! There is no reason to think that women will necessarily not take to mathematics or that men will necessarily be socially stunted. We can create better environments for children so that both issues can improve. I think part of the taboo about making your point stems from a fear of a biological-determinism argument about math ability. Which may not always be the case.
Not accounting for position on the surface of the earth could introduce as much as 0.45 degrees of error in the apparent position for an object 500000 miles away. This is same as the apparent diameter of the moon for a reference.
I mean its not like webpages know when tabs aren't active so they can suspend mining when you're not actively reading the content, right?

And its definitely not true that browsers can actively manage the resources available to inactive tabs, right?

Just because the current set of options doesn't respect these, that is not a reason to discard the idea entirely.
Terraforming Stack Overflow Enterprise in AWS
What makes you think it's the same people accepting the status quo and whining? :)
And related to that, how many towers currently have the bandwidth capacity at their base to support this new throughput at scale? All this may do is shift the bottleneck from between handset & tower, to the tower's own infrastructure.

Mobile vendors won't mind because your phone will say "5G" in the status bar and they can charge more. But in reality your phone to web-site performance (particularly outside of artificial benchmarks) may not improve substantially.
Old cpus had a simpler arch (68000 ancestor or something like that), often with two registers A,B serving as accumulator,next pair for reduce/fold like processes. To me it's clearly a reflection of mathematical structures, which are also the root of FP.

With time register sets grew, ISA grew, this got muddied by usage.
I also think there are way too many projects in this space and most of them are very obvious money grabs. Ultimately only a few projects will survive and gain mainstream adoption.

I am really on the face regarding bitcoin though: it is the grandfather of all those crypto projects and massively moves the market, but I don't quite understand how it could ever replace a currency given its very limited supply and astronomical unit economic price: it was not supposed to be a store of value like gold when it started.

Ultimately, I think a few projects with much higher coins in circulation and faster transaction times will end up becoming more valuable due to greater usability.

It's a shame it feels like REQ is a bit late to the game, but they do have ambitious plans, one of them is to enable cross-currency transactions (including fiat). No-one has yet gained the first mover advantage in this space so the jury is still out.
Unsecured server exposed thousands of FedEx customer records
What Apple, and Microsoft before them, are discovering is the tools and processes we use to create software simply doesn't scale. We're simply reaching the limits of what these giant software teams are able to produce and keep running. We can discuss solutions, but currently not everybody even agrees we have a problem. That's the first step we need to take.
Sure, I am a RIPE member and am leasing out IPv4 (and IPv6) address space, ASN registrations, etc.

Everyone is able to sign up with RIPE and get a /22, thats around 1000 IP addresses. For years the RIRs want to tell us that IP addresses run out but I am still able, today, to pay some bucks and get IPv4 addresses without issues. The issue was that exactly those RIRs handed out IPv4 addresses years ago like there is no tomorrow and now they want us to switch to a broken protocol because they made a huge mistake. I won't deny that we are months (around 2 years) away from the RIPE actually running out of IPs.

Part of my job leasing out IPv4 space is also monitoring different sources, like Spamhaus, if my client or client of clients send spam with my IPs. What I can tell you is that with IPv4 already this is messy but if I think about IPv6 this is impossible to track or control and a complete nightmare. Also, for example if you operate a mail server that only runs IPv6 and send emails to gmail they will outright block you or just send it to the spam folder. Please note that this is only one of many examples.

Apart from that, if I look at the implementation of cloud providers like DO, Linode, OVH, Scaleway, etc. this is all a big joke. Also, IPv6 routes from some tier 1 upstream to others are down for days without anyone noticing it, because most people want IPv6, but no one is actually using it. It's like having a todo list and IPv6 is done but how it's been implemented doesn't matter at all.

You should also be careful with statistics, as a lot of scammers switched to IPv6 so I would not be surprised if a lot of the "IPv6 market share" is from scammers.
The first part of the article where the author explains how time-consuming it is to study algorithms can really be applied to any field of study. The fact that the author spends much time learning algorithm doesn't mean that he's "dumb" as he humbly presents himself, it just means that he's just getting started. It's like trying to pick up guitar and when you realize that it really is hard and takes time you decide after one month that you're not a talented guitar player.

Then there the second part where the author considers algorithmic knowledge as useless (or not so much useless at best) because the tools available to a programmer already implement any relevant algorithm.

There's some ironic parallel between this way of thinking and algorithmic proficiency, actually. Many algorithms work by leveraging data structures whose understanding of internal working isn't needed. For example, one way to efficiently merge N sorted list into one big sorted list is to use a priority queue. Do you need to know how a priority queue is implemented to find this solution? Not at all. You just need to know the interface it offers, and the complexity of each method. Finding the k-th smallest element in a list can be done using a heap. Do you need to know how a heap is implemented to find this solution? Not at all. You just need to know what a heap does.

Really, studying algorithms is like studying the C++ standard library, except that instead of knowing about classes and methods as your toolbox, you know data structures (and common patterns) as your toolbox. Of course any curious mind will then go deeper and actually read about how those things are implemented, building an even better understanding of the foundations, and solving even deeper problems with it.

While being an interesting parallel, this doesn't really answers the author's questioning about: what's the point? Which brings us to what the author forgot to address in his article: white board test. The title of article sets the scene with someone wanting to find a job in one of those big tech company hiring people who can pass the whiteboard tests, but then who somehow... forget about it and decides to abandon this endeavor? Well, fair enough, but to be perfectly honest, while Google & Cie engineers certainly aren't spinning up algorithms on a daily basis like mad computer scientists, the engineering level there is still quite high. So there's definitely some basis in wanting to pass the whiteboard interview, mostly working with intelligent people.
Security check firm that cleared Edward Snowden agrees $30m fraud settlement
Sure, these are two good sources for thst.

In depth: http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/feb.7.03.pdf

Light: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/science/fusion-power-plan...

In short it was originally Cold War politics to get some international cooperation going around energy. Over time it morphed into a pissing/$$$ contest between nations involved.
It is indeed an impressive feat, especially compared with racing drone pilots that usually fly with around 0.5 to 1 ms delay between our video transmitters and receivers on the 5.8Ghz band (the cameras however adds a delay of 20-30 ms, but that is unrelated in this comparison).
Every time there's a discussion about IPv6, a suggestion like that appears, without fail. Paraphrasing the classic spamsolutions.txt, "Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work."

"Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once": every single system which wanted to talk to an AWS host would have to implement that IPv4 extension.

"Many server administrators cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential clients": for anyone with a non-upgraded system, the server would be unreachable.

Specifically, your plan fails to account for:

- Lack of centrally controlling authority for networking

- Huge existing software investment in IPv4

- Popularity of NAT and other middleboxes

- Users who don't update their operating system ever

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

- Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

- It will work for a while and then we'll get stuck with it

- It's an ugly hack

"Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work."

(I apologize for choosing your comment for this, but this idea of applying the spamsolutions.txt format to the inevitable "extended IPv4" proposals has been in my head for a long time. Someone with more networking experience should be able to present an even more complete list of "extended IPv4 objections".)
Want to Become a Data Scientist? Read This First
My opinion is that CSS bloat is way more harmful than bloat in any other language. I do indeed prefer to start from a blank state every time, or take a small template and eagerly cut everything that is not immediately useful out of it.

That said, I see the value of a CSS "library" for a large team that has to agree on both a template and terminology.
>: Mass adoption of IPv6 is blocked by the ugliness/inconvenience of the IPv6 address format, hence "end-users" (developers) don't like adopting IPv6. As long as this UX issue does not get solved, IPv6 adoption is only going to happen on an individual level when any given business' significant income stream is at immediate risk of being disrupted.

it's a 128 bit number. no matter how you encode it, the ux is going to suck.
"Sir, please type this into your browser to get to the router web interface: 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334. I repeat 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334."

"Server IP address could not be found."

5 minutes later...

"Now could you please tell me the IPs of all connected devices?"

Customer hangs up and cancels his subscription.
Docker hub automated builds is down
people build physical machines all the time that get patented and make products, etc.
I wrote a tool to enable this, and promote responsible use:

https://github.com/trey-jones/xmrwasp#a-word-about-responsib...

So I guess I'm clearly in favor of it. In general I would prefer opt-in mining to advertising. If you are interested in why, I'll be happy to discuss. I think my thoughts are laid out in the README.

I also made a simple demo page here:

https://www.xmrwasp.com

It won't mine unless you ask it to. The point of the demo is to check out what impact various degrees of mining have on your other activities. The default is VERY low with a single thread and 50% throttle.

I'm not sure if this is a polarizing topic, or if I'm not thinking clearly about it because I've gotten on the boat, drunk the kool-aid, or whatever.
I've been in the business for ~20 years and there are very few cases I can recall where it really mattered what the underlying sorting algorithm was, and no cases where the actual details of the algorithm's implementation mattered. Not saying these cases never come up--I am saying they are exceedingly rare [EDIT: and often company-specific], and making them general candidate interview questions might be a bit of a waste of time.

Present a candidate with a simple system with three levels of middleware API and have them plumb a newly exposed low-level value up through all three levels to the high-level API. This is unfortunately 75% of professional software development.
Maybe not. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2016/10...

I'd think China, Russia, or Iran would be your best bets if you were seeking countries unlikely to cooperate with US intelligence services.
You’d just need an extended public key that gives unique addresses to buyers and a price API to provide rate conversions. Your private key can be offline or on a hard wallet. Also see btcpayserver for an open source bitpay clone that does what you are thinking and more
Only when airlines cooperate with agreements. The booking numbers are only unique within a system and if you fly on several airlines it's not uncommon to have different booking numbers for each airline. Their systems are often (not always) able to print all tickets in one go but I often had to get a new ticket at a stopover because of system issues.

Airports have contracts with each airline flying anyway so they can adapt their systems. Since aviation is a for-profit business (at least in theory), there's more money to do this than for tax funded public transport.
I've never done any fuzzing personally, but wouldn't this be discoverable internally during testing?

I would think that they would attempt sending all possible characters, especially because they've had issues with this in the past.
In addition to the GDPR concerns mentioned in sibling posts, this type of collection is likely covered by Article 5.3 of the EU ePrivacy Directive, which requires consent for storing or reading information from end-users' devices (also known as the "cookie rule").[0] The Dutch Data Protection Authority recently applied this rule to Microsoft's collection of telemetry data through Windows 10.[1] Notably, this rule is not limited to personal data; it applies to all "information."

[0] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:020...
[1] https://www.autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl/sites/default/file...
I regularly get less than 1 Mbps download on Verizon's LTE, so I have almost no hope for 5G to help this issue.
And if a crash report for Firefox/Iceweasel/Chromium/Brave is sent, that contains a memory dump including your username?

Seems like enough to make the connection, if someone got ahold of all the data.
> Also working for "Big N" could give you access to very interesting projects

Maybe. The people I know who leave the big companies almost always do so because the work ends up becoming somewhat wrote -- there is a lot of boring infrastructure to be maintained at big tech company du jour.
We've done so much learning about good UX, backwards compatibility and smooth upgrade paths in the years since IPv6 was first thought of and specified that I suggest there is a group of people out there (or on here) who can sensibly come up with an "IPv4.1" draft that can represent a smooth upgrade path from where we are right now, towards an extensible internet addressing format/protocol. It would have at least the following properties:

- IPv4-formatted addresses would continue to work as today
- address space can be extended by adding bits to the existing IPv4 format, and 0 bits do not need to be typed out etc (in mathematical notation there's also no need to write 0001.200 if we just mean 1.2)

(It feels like there should be a couple more fundamental properties to be stated here, but I can't think of any more right now.)
At home, I get IPv6, but I get assigned a different network every 24 hours, so it not that useful to, say, access my home server remotely. It works smoothly, though.

At work, we had some problems with Windows' Network Location Awareness where a domain controller thought it was on a public/non-trusted network unless IPv6 was turned off in the network settings. So we actually had at least a little pressure not to enable v6. :-|
Sputtering of the metal in the reactor due to fast neutrons, leading to embrittlement, large amounts of neutron activated waste, and an unreasonable maintenance schedule. Lost energy due to said neutrons. Plus all of what has been said before me by DennisP.