skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Who said anything about the best interest of consumers? They're doing this because it's in the best interest of their shareholders.
[Apple] Pie in the Sky for Cloud platform. Clever name, looks like clever tech.
This seemed pretty apropos today because of yesterday's post of a Denver Post's article:

Studies are increasingly clear: Uber, Lyft congest cities

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16462374

> https://www.denverpost.com/2018/02/25/uber-lyft-congest-citi...
This is really taking it to an extreme. Just because you don't fight back against some entry test doesn't mean you won't fight the important things.

> I don't know about you, but I would not want to hire someone who can take any task and complete with minimal issues.

Sorry, I don't want to work with a bunch of pedants. You can have them.
sure, and there should definitely be help for this situation, but what fraction of low income parents is this really?
JUnit 5.1.0 released
Alright fair, I intended my meaning to be "HackerRank type of assessments - limited time, basic, etc."
Everybody is exhausted
This tells me that author was never involved in recruiting people. He may be smart (even exceptionally so) but that can only be validated through a direct interview. However since a lot of people (and I mean A LOT) cheat in their CV and even GitHub portfolios, getting upset over "show us that you can do anything" minimal bar test is something I'd rather not get in my mailbox. It's polite and well worded, that's true, but shows that he doesn't understand the realities recruiters are facing. I'd respond to his mail explaining why these tests are mandatory but inevitably I'd have to treat him like a child that faces the world for the very first time. I guess he should ask himself: do you want to be treated exceptionally throughout the recruitment process? If you think you're that unique, you're probably wrong (and that level of detachment from reality isn't looking good).
One simple method that is often good enough is k-nearest neighbors. Basically computing the k most similar training values to a test value and then averaging their outputs to get a prediction.
I thought this was going to be an article about being conciliatory...which I'm really good at.
There are very, very many comments here accusing HackerRank and/or puzzle/algorithm problems in general of being poor tests for how good a programmer someone is, or that people who use such problems just want "robot" workers to churn out meaningless code.

These comments are completely missing the point. HackerRank's value is as a screening process. The point of such problems in the early phases of an interview is not to find out how good a programmer you are, but how bad a programmer you are.

There are an ASTOUNDING number of candidates for programming jobs who can barely code. FizzBuzz eliminates a lot of them, but sometimes you need something just a bit more difficult. That's where HackerRank comes in.

When talking to people that are "professional programmers actively seeking work" I find that the majority of them can't do simple tasks. "Simple" isn't meant in an arrogant way, either; examples include reversing an array (with no space constraint), iterating a dictionary/map (regardless of understanding map implementation, a lot of people don't understand that iteration order isn't predictable), and basic use of nested lists/non-scalar data structures. Those aren't esoterica that "nobody uses" on a daily basis, they're bread and butter of programming work.

These people have hobby projects/OSS work, it's just . . . not sufficient, in many cases, to indicate basic competence on the job. I don't know why that doesn't correlate. I don't think most of these people are lying and publishing work that isn't theirs. It might be that they have a very long time to write the stuff in their GitHubs or whatever and can't do basic things in a hurry otherwise. It might be something else. Regardless, they turn out to be unqualified when tested on the basics.

If you find the problems insultingly easy, choke it down and consider it equivalent to the question of "are you comfortable being asked to show up to work on time?"--patronizing, but an easy box to check, and not meant for you.

There are companies that rely entirely on very hard/complex algorithms problems for interviewing, with the full knowledge of what they're testing for and why they're using those tests. I'm not talking about those companies; there are good and bad reasons for doing that. I'm talking about simple coding challenges presented early on in the candidate's process.

There are also companies that get confused as to what they're using the HackerRank-equivalent tests for, and give really hard problems (or, worse, puzzle problems that block all progress and rely on some sort of "gotcha" trivia knowledge to even approach), but evaluate candidates' performance as if those problems were FizzBuzz++ basic competence screenings. That's a mistake, but also not what I'm talking about here.
Apple runs absolutely ludicrous amounts of its own storage. The idea that they use GCP for 100% of anything is insane.

Saying they “use GCP for iCloud” sounds intentionally misleading... there’s a missing qualifier there. But I guess “uses GCP for some stuff in iCloud” isn’t nearly as click-worthy I guess.
> The same reasons would apply elsewhere, they're not USA-specific, so they don't explain why it's not possible to do the same thing that's successfully done elsewhere.

I 've never seen a chart with prices for hernia in the lobby , anywhere that I've lived( I am not from USA).

Where has it been successfully done?
well, we can play Quake 1 across it...
It's an extension to re-frame that we built. It addresses some of the (subjective) shortcomings of re-frame, mainly the over-reliance on keywords. We'll be open-sourcing it soon.
A bad mark on your credit isn't the end of the story for that debt. You should check out if you can still pay it and get the mark off.
It's understandable.

With ads revenue decreasing and print editions fading out there is no other way to keep thing profitable.

The alternative is to drown in clickbait galore with zero content.
Ask HN: I'm writing a book about white-collar drug use, including tech sector
Hi HN. I’m a journalist who wrote ‘The Lawyer, The Addict’, a story that ran in the New York Times in July. The story was about my ex-husband, Peter, who was a high-flying powerful partner in Wilson Sonsini (the prestigious, Palo Alto-based law firm) and who died in July 2015, a drug addict. Almost everyone in his life missed the signs. The story wound up with enormous traction and was the 55th most read story in the entire paper in 2017. It also generated several threads of commentary on HN, including https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776864, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14931209 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14777919.

I’m now writing a book based on that story for Random House. Although it is about what happened to Peter, the broader story is about the problem of substance use (and often abuse) in white-collar professions, where the users are well-off, well-educated, working long hours, often with all the outward trappings of success.

What can you tell me about drug use as a professional or in your profession?

I know there is drug use in law, finance, medicine and technology, and am hoping that some of you will be open to discussing with me what you see and what you've experienced in your profession and professional environment. I’d like to use some of your comments in the book and will not know or need to know your names, so I hope you’ll feel comfortable being as candid as possible. I’m not here to make judgements, all I’m looking for is the truth about what’s going on.

I'm interested in whatever you can tell me about drugs you are using or observe being used in
your field: which drugs, what effects you see, any stories you have, any details you can share. Thanks.
In truth, you should just avoid metaprogramming for this purpose. All it takes is somebody to come along after you and say "why the hell did they change the delimiters" and switch them all back to the default.

Just store user input somewhere safe and inject it at runtime rather than trying to fiddle with the Vue template. If you strictly isolate the executable code and user input, this is never a problem.
But you might also be really bad at it.
Is there anything like this but for credit cards rather than accounts/passwords?
> Unfortunately, you will likely have to go to religious services and pretend to care about religion enough to get the help you need, because that is who America has designated as their community support system.

Ouch, that's kind of an uncalled for jab at religion.

Why don't atheists band together and form communities to show the religious how it's done...?
I'm pretty sure almost all fighter jets are like that - the more unstable it is the more responsive it is when turning, since responsiveness and stability are kind of opposites when it comes to aerodynamics.
Is there an estimate on the magnitude of the maximum total bandwidth achievable with a LEO satellite, both for a smartphone client and for a fixed home antenna?

How far would it be to 4G and gigabit fiber respectively?
One the one hand, I agree about the mismatch between hackerrank and engineering skill. On the other, I also suspect there are many engineers who can code amazing personal projects who lack the motivation/communication to handle the kinds of maintenance tickets you'd likely see in a mediocre codebase for a noname b2b (or whatever the job is).

I tried to build my own coding test that is based on refactoring based on changing requirements: https://alexrohde.com/public/zennish/index.html#/challenges
I think in reality it's more nuanced than that: the number of people who use computers who can fix a kernel bug is relatively small, and the process of getting a bug accepted, patched, and shipped is not trivial. I would not want to bet on a bug which Linus disagrees with getting patched faster than, say, a report on some company's enterprise support agreement.

(disclaimer: I've been running Linux and other open-source OSes for over two decades. I like OSS but it's not perfect and staffing for projects is an under-solved problems.)
> just a low-investment screen

Low-investment on the part of the employer. They still expect me to spend 90 minutes on proving I have seen a REPL before, which is time I, frankly, don't have. I'm happy to answer/talk about things that relate to my job, but working on puzzles that just happen to be solved more easily by programming has exactly nothing to do with it.

> the candidate is asking for a completely custom treatment

What's next? Having to actually look at someone's CV? That's insanity.
> And the hip hinging is sprinkled throughout sports. Weightlifters use it when they do what's called a deadlift.

Now, I'm by no means an expert, but I can confirm this. Powerlifters generally try to perform deadlifts with a "neutral" spine. This doesn't exactly mean "straight"—you can consult a good coach for details—but it's pretty close. Here's a pretty typical demonstration which is good enough to visualize it, though other coaches may differ in the details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AObAU-EcYE

As I understand it, the idea is to distribute the weight evenly around the spinal disc, and to avoid putting too much pressure on the front edge of the disc by curving the spine forward.

A similar effect can be achieved by keeping the back closer to upright and lifting with the legs, as seen in several squat variations.

Of course, the other things that may help are having enough muscle and not carrying too much abdominal weight. Anecdotally, weak spinal stabilizer muscles seem to contribute to some people's back pain.
I would interpret that as a server-side render being improperly sanitized since obviously data from the server is being wrongfully executed.

So that means either the server has to properly escape data or take additional steps to isolate data and code.
It all depends on how you use it. If something I make produces an error, or unexpected output, the first thing I do after the usual "stop and think" phase is google it. More often than not, that search will give me at least half a page of Stackoverflow pages - many of them completely irrelevant to my specific problem of course - but looking at the code can jog something in my mind that I wouldn't have thought of myself. It helps to look at somewhat related code. At least in my opinion.
45 person office, hiring developers gradually and continually. But what I wrote also applied when I was at a 6 kiloperson firm and we hired a hundred developers a year.

Some tests will seem impossible to complete in the alotted time. Often that's intentional. It saves time for the candidates and gives a better spread of scores (very few will get 100% in some test batteries). But it can be disheartening. For these initial online tests I try to give enough time that most people won't really run out of time unless they get stuck.
This was NPR version of clickbait.
I refer to myself as a recovering software engineer/programmer. Never really out of the addiction, but not in the weeds anymore.
My daughter is almost 5 and she picked up Scratch Jr in ten minutes. I am writing my suggestions mostly from the context of a younger child.

I approached it this way, I bought a book on Scratch Jr so I could get up to speed on it. I walked her through a few of the basics, and then I just let her take over after that.

One other programming related activity we have done is the Learning Resources Code & Go Robot Mouse Activity. She has a lot of fun with this as you have a small mouse you program with simple directions to navigate a maze to find the cheese. It uses a set of cards to help then grasp the steps needed. I switch to not using the cards after a while. We now just step the mouse through the maze manually adding steps as we go.

One other activity to consider is the robot turtles board game. This teaches some basic logic concepts needed in programming.

For an older child, I did help my nephew to learn programming in Python when he was a freshman in high school. I took the approach of having him type in games from the free Python book. I have always though this was a good approach for older kids to get the familiar with the syntax.

Something else I would consider would be a robot that can be programmer with Scratch. While I have not done this yet, I think for kid seeing the physical results of programming via a robot is a powerful way to capture interest.
New Maps Reveal Global Fishing's 'Vast Scope of Exploitation of the Ocean'
Interviews are a 2 way street. Candidates have as much right to evaluate the companies that are trying to hire them as the opposite.

Not the OP but, absolutely I want a personalised interview! I want the company I'm working for to care about the people they hire -- not to efficiently fill empty seats. Yes, normally that means I tend to work for startups. I'm happy with that.

It's fair to say that you want to be able to evaluate potential employees cheaply before you invest a full interview. It's also fair for people to offer ways to do that evaluation rather than running through someone's maze. Neither side needs to accept the other's offer, but there's no need for either side to take it badly.

A "no" is quite a good result if the company would otherwise be wasting the candidate's time.
Can you provide any reference or evidence to support these statements?
Just for other would be developers who are too young to know.

Don't use a bad seat for 15 years and don't sit funny and not for long periods. Also find ways to stretch your leg muscles from the calf up every couple of days (A good 30 mins). Almost every time I had a major back outage stemmed from my left leg muscles which pull on your lower back when tight.

A great invention would be a seat/table which started at 0 degrees and over the course of the day moves to 45 degree recline so that weight is constantly redistributed to different parts of the skeleton.
>Engineering is about constructing new things

Engineering is about solving problems under constraints. ML is a tool in the tool box to use against problems when the constraints are appropriate, similar to just about any algorithm
> getting upset over "show us that you can do anything" minimal bar test is something I'd rather not get in my mailbox

A minimal bar test shouldn't take 90 minutes. If you want a test like that, ask a FizzBuzz question, which is solvable in ten seconds and will be just as good a discriminator. Asking people to basically solve riddles isn't productive.
oflannabhra's comment elsewhere in this thread gives a source:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465498
Check out the demos by Gamalon: https://gamalon.com/technology/

(I have no affiliation to Gamalon)
I'm assuming you mean "Health and Safety" and not one of the many other meanings for that set of letters. On the other side of the pond, where this article originated, H&S isn't really a thing. The closest thing we have over here (and I'm only guessing here) would be OSHA and as a "office worker" I can say they really haven't been a significant part of the my day to day. Might be different in a labor oriented profession though.
I just wish they'd fix this bug with incorrect restored window states. Eg, when monitor layouts changed maximized windows are windowed, but they still think they are maximized. It requires clicking the maximize button twice to fix it.

Been there since Windows 98, at least.
Or maybe the other one was posted first and collected a lot of upvotes despite being factually wrong. I responded to a question once simply because the one being upvoted was so factually inconsistent and impossible. My answer has been upvoted a lot, but not as much as the other due to it being live longer.
So did things like being rejected for coverage due to "unexplained weight loss" when I was dating and trying to get into better shape and had lost a whopping 5 pounds over a few months (as noted in the application).

From my more cynical older viewpoint, I was never going to get decent coverage on the private market and that was simply a viable reason to present for rejection.
Ok, fair point. A data-use guarantee would only reassure me if I didn't expect outright lying, and that's more faith than I have at the moment.
Lightweight portal system for React. Mega seeds included
Every fortune 50 company has a similar system at this point; you tie it in with your enterprise architecture platform so you can go directly from design to infrastructure using tested patterns.

Pretty much table stakes in large enterprise at this point; and as usual IBM / SAP / Oracle / SoftwareAG cabal have bought up everything that matters.
Men form more egalitarian views on gender after serving with women in bootcamp
What's at Stake in the Microsoft Supreme Court Case
From a post right above:

> From Apple’s actual iCloud security document:

>> The encrypted chunks of the file are stored, without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as S3 and Google Cloud Platform.
Not really surprising. Plus it has to be a lot cheaper then Apple building their own.
See the difference there is that you don't need shallow feel-bad articles about climate change. There's hard science there; it's incontrovertible.

In contrast, neurotically wringing our figurative hands about imagined problems like the link between vaccines and autism, the link between video games and school shootings, or disintegration of traditional values in modern times; all without hard science backing it up; will continue to fail to convince all but the most blinded.

And whether the problem is "new" or a few decades old is really irrelevant.

Why should we think it's not tens of thousands of years old?
I can only speak for where I currently work. Our phone screens take 45 minutes on average rather than 90. If you don't have 45 minutes for a coding phone screen, then you also don't have 45 minutes for anything else you just mentioned, so I actually find your response fairly disingenuous. In fact, you don't have time to interview with any company in any capacity at all.

We actually take great care in examining resumes and CVs before proceeding with a coding screen. We've had plenty of senior developers fail the most basic questions (think FizzBuzz), which is why we conduct these screens.
Tech takes over: New York is the sector's second city
https://www.khronos.org/registry/OpenGL-Refpages/es3.0/html/...
I find it weird that anyone would find this nsfw, however, also after reading the linked article in a child comment of this thread, I am wondering in how many places this would be frowned upon. Most people I know played at least one of the Wolfensteins and enjoyed it; it is not like this is some collected memorabilia you are looking to buy on ebay; it’s tongue in cheek game.
Why are you looking for jobs if you are too busy to spend 90 minutes of effort on applying for that job?

Maybe the whole point of the test is not how well you do, but how you react to being asked to do something you feel is beneath you...
Aren't Amazon and Apple direct competitors as well? (tablets, streaming music, streaming video, home automation, voice commands)
Depends on the network. The current satellite internet systems all use satellites parked in a geosynchronous orbit. This means that ping times are measured in the hundreds of milliseconds in most cases.

The satellite network that Musk is talking about uses a very large web of satellites in low Earth orbit, which would mean ping times of less than 100 milliseconds.
I actually interviewed for the O365 team and yes, they said they don't trust Azure at all and host everything they can on their own private cloud. Didn't hear anything about S3 but they really didn't trust Azure, wouldn't be surprised.
the REPL is one of those things I felt like I needed at first after using one, but after using them for years I've found i prefer them less; To me there was a disconnect from the code I ran in the repl to the code that had to be written.. and once I became more familiar with a language the less i needed to test those small things in repl. Thats not to say repl isnt useful.. I just don't attribute it to me 'moving faster' as much anymore
I think hiring dedicated servers or VPS is a nice middle ground between self hosting and all out "cloud" cough lock-in. The cloud services do the failover and auto scaling for you, but often when something goes down it turns out they didn't even have any backups and all your data will be lost unless you actually backed it up yourself.
It was nice having a license free library of art assets even if they were overused. There are websites that offer that these days but as some of the commentators pointed out, that requires legal to sign off on in some businesses or those sites could be hosting stolen images.
What age range are we talking about? For most kids aged 6-12 writing code is too abstract to start with. For my kids, I started making really simple projects with a Makey Makey. After that, I taught them the basics with Scratch, since there are tons of fun tutorials for kids. Right now, I'm building a Raspberry Pi-powered robot with my 10yo (basically it's a poor man's Lego Mindstorm).

The key is fun. The focus is much more on 'building something together' than 'I'll learn you how to code'. I'm pretty sure that if I were to press them into learning how to code it will only put them off. Sometimes we go for weeks without building on the robot, and all of the sudden she will ask me to work on it with her again.
I think your approach would work if there was a shortage of jobs; there is exactly opposite situation right now and HR should adapt or they would end up with a very narrow dissection of what is available. You are often asking accomplished individuals to waste their time on badly compensated job proposals, just because it makes your life easier. No wonder so many programmers think recruiters in this industry are a joke and try to actively avoid them.