skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
India is an interesting place at the moment and the pressure to succeed is immense (often to the detriment of personal wellbeing). So much so that cheating schemes are commonly devised by large groups of people, and the ingenuity involved is often quite remarkable and creative.

I've personally hired a number of people in my Delhi office from the local IIT, and these are a few things I've noticed amongst new grads: parrot fashion learning is rife across the board. Despite being smart, they often struggle to think on their feet. It's as if they want a fully defined a problem domain, AND want to solve problems only within that defined domain, much like an exam! Anything outside of their comfort zone is met with a rather damp response equating to "we haven't covered that in class yet". In business (and even development), that attitude is not a good one to have.

What's funny, however, is that if you walk past an Indian shanty town, you will find examples of (often illegal) innovation at every corner, from stolen electricty to rigged water meters etc - usually concocted by people with little education. The innovative mindset exists in the heart of Indian society, but the education system somehow seems to restrict it by making people believe that the path to success is narrow and the same for everyone. Hence the competition.

I feel the education system needs to encourage free thinking more than rote learning. I believe it would allow students to enjoy their subjects, rather than just looking at them as a stepping stone to success. Perhaps if students approached their studies with a sense of wonder and excitement, rather than competetive aggression, their mental state would be significantly better during their years of education.
> That was a second red-flag for me - I've always worked extremely hard to establish a staging environment which reliably reproduces the production environment, so that great confidence could be had that if the released code passed the unit tests, system tests and some final manual tests in the staging environment, that it would be very unlikely that serious/obvious issues would only happen in production

I don't get why this is a red-flag though. Unless everywhere I've worked is highly flawed. Unforeseen production issues are a given, no? Like how do you actually mimic your IaaS?
Then why don’t they need to disclose the subset? Who decides what the library of safe ingredients are?
Digitalocean saves the day, URL's will be fully functional in 10 minutes!
Check for a gas leak
Promote safe use of clean scooters
I wonder if this could be "done" or managed in some way using a sitemap or via google's site search admin (I forget its exact name). Using robots to disallow old versions seems like an awfully big hammer.
Didn't Google have messaging figured out with Google Talk? Everyone was on Gmail all day (as many still are) and people actually used it.

Then they let it wither, came out with Hangouts, and it's been a downhill train wreck from there.

Google Talk had the potential of being one of the biggest messengers in the world...they own Gmail and Android (!!!!!). Are you kidding me? There's really no good reason for them NOT to be in a hugely dominant position here.

But instead they screwed it up & left a gaping hole in the marketplace.
When interacting with a Java library, I use scala.collection.JavaConversions to convert any Java structures to the equivalent Scala collection. Once I'm done operating on the collection (map, filter, etc.), I convert it back to Java.
They aren't. You're looking for "hebbian learning". Very different from neural networks.

In 50 years people will laugh about how poorly these things were named. Just like we now laugh about what symbol we chose for a source of electrons in a circuit : "+". Whoops.
That's another message that may or may not be lost, if it is checked at all.

I've got my lesson about SMS reliability few years ago: I've bought a bus ticket via SMS, it was never delivered, but I got charged for it and the operator claimed that it was sent, when disputed. Except I've never received it, and couldn't ride the bus without it.
Ask HN: Engineers, what is your opinion on Oak Ridge National Laboratory?
I am a research data scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and I am trying to get some insights into what the level of awareness/perception that the software engineering community has about ORNL and the national lab system in general. Particularly when it comes to applying for jobs.

The national labs are well known within the science community, through post-docs and the standard academic channels, but it seems to me that when it comes to software engineering that awareness (or interest?) is much lower (with possible exception in HPC). This difference manifests itself in the hiring process. For research-based science positions there are tons of qualified applicants, however for software engineering openings, it’s a struggle to get even a hand full of reasonably qualified people to apply.

What I am trying to figure out, is why that is the case?

We do a ton of cool, globally impactful work using all the latest technologies and have thousands of smart people from all over the world (~5,000 employees). In a blind resume, I would think ORNL would be somewhat of an attractive place for a software engineer to work.

I would love to get everyone's thoughts/experiences on this. Some prompting questions I have, feel free to answer all or none…

If you have ever thought about applying to software engineering position at ORNL (or another national lab) and didn’t apply, what was your reasoning?
Have you even heard of ORNL? Or know where it is?
Did you know that ORNL hires non-research track software engineers that don't have to write research papers?
Did you know that ORNL's computing and engineering positions aren't limited to just Super Computing (Titan/Summit)?
Did you know that ORNL builds and deploys software to partner platforms?
Did you know that the national labs are not on the GS pay scale?
Did you know that ORNL encourages and rewards developing and releasing open source software?

Any feedback would be helpful.

Thanks!
Because they have an ass-covering-oriented legal team who will say "the user was unable to legally agree to the terms" thefore we (PayPal) will be vulnerable if they were to do something fraudulent.
No, GTalk was XMPP-compatible and federated, Hangouts was siloed.

So non-google XMPP users could speak to GTalk users, but not Hangouts users.
Based on relativity photons do not experience time. They “hit” something the instant they are created - even if we perceive them to have existed for billions of (light) years.
Intel has been integrating the GPU into the CPU for a while now, so that's not really a fair comparison. If you dominate the CPU market, then clearly you can slap a low-end GPU on the die and sell it cheaper than a GTX 1080.
i am interested to know about usage characteristics for running a Pub (bandwidth, storage, CPU) to be able to gauge what it will cost me to host one myself.

curious to know about your experience with that.

also is there a way to set rate limits?
Yes hyumans make mistakes. And those mistakes have, and should have consequences.

When the likely result is to get someone killed, there should be serious consequences for the people, regardless of whether it was 'people' or 'process' that you put at the top of the fault chain.

That is the way it works in the real world. Small bits of inattention can lead to death. We don't say that 'it was just a small thing' when someone is texting while driving and crashes and injures/kills people, even tho it was just a a few seconds lapse of attention.

This source, and/or his family back home are now likely on a NK hit list. The employer has now had it's credibility for confidentiality destroyed for a decade. This lapse should have consequences.

(And if you don't like the potential consequences, either make sure you play the game right, or don't play the game.)
Docker Certified Associate Exam Tips
> The malleability of space and time mean that two events occurring far apart might even happen in one order when viewed by one observer, and in the opposite order when viewed by another.

Why doesn't this break the rules of causality? I found this answer on Quora (https://www.quora.com/Is-chronological-order-of-events-prese...) but I don't understand it.
Surely, companies will be able to use regular POS systems, as this becomes more and more legal? And the more legal it becomes, the less market this company has...
What are you thinking of for New Hampshire? I'm assuming adobe or similar for Arizona.
9 GHz Barrier Falls Hard
Detailed web performance data of homepages for Apple, GitHub, CNN, Techcrunch
Sometimes carriers will send a "delivered" even though it only made it as far as a cell tower (and not an actual phone)
That's what I want, too. The thing is, that's so very much not what the carriers want. They don't want to be a commodity (like corn or bacon): one provider of a commodity is very much the same as every other, which means that there's a race to the bottom on price. What the providers want is to differentiate themselves from their competition, in order to add friction to switching and thus help sustain higher prices.

The thing is, with general-purpose computing devices in our pockets we can run just about anything. We don't need special carrier features, and in fact those are anti-features: why would I want something I can only use with those of my friends on the same carrier?

Ultimately, of course, this also applies to OSes: why would I use something Android- or iOS-specific when I could use something universal instead? Right now, there are plenty of iPhone users using iCloud services which lock out their Android-using friends & family, but over time social pressure will lead the to find more platform-neutral ways to share.

The web is eating the world, and that means being in the ISP or OS space is a losing game (in the long term: in the short term, of course, there's plenty of profit to be had).
I dont understand you
I totally agree. The terms and conditions, or some offering of them, should be available in the same way that quick start or full guides are - in a form that adds to the usability of the service. E.g. "when you upload a photo, ____ owns the photo, for _____ period, and may do a, b, c, and d with it"
Wow, bold claim. India's GDP per capita for 2017 is $7,200, ranked 156th in the world. I'd say they're not far away from being poor. Source: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
So, if I make a mistake that puts you and your family on a hit list of a murderous dictatorship, you'd be cool with it?
How to Design Your Load Testing Scenarios
Show HN: Home for blockchain content, Lets learn together and thrive
I’d say it’s wrong. What’s the point of having your feelings hurt when you could just work with someone who’s trying to improve things? If you agree things need to be improved then it is plainly irrational. Having feelings about your code (in the small or in the large) is a mistake.
And yet I’m constantly surprised by people knowing nothing of set theory. Occasionally someone who doesn’t know logic (evidenced by nasty, over-complicated Boolean logic)

Or my current favorite: a very senior and very optimistic person who apparently doesn’t believe in decidability, the halting problem, or NP completeness.
That time was in December
("Yeah, I've made millions out of this web service, who cares that I store customer credit card details in plain text").

The European Union. If you have any of their residents in that database, then you have about 3 weeks to fix that...
The wheels certainly can be locked to each other, that's how standard kid tricycles work - all it means that in turns some slipping/friction is inevitable.
Also I was ran out of room in the original post, but wanted to add even just commenting, "I've never heard of ORNL" is probably the most insightful of all :)
(Compared to Java, C or C++ there's all the usual ML-family goodness - first-class functions, algebraic data types with pattern matching, type inference).

Scala has a for/yield construct similar to Haskell's "do notation", which is the perfect way to work with async code - it strikes the right balance of avoiding an unreadable callback pyramid of doom, but still your async yield points visible (the difference between <- and = is about as concise as it gets, but still very visible). And having HKT and allowing you to express concepts like monads means that a whole library ecosystem can build up of standard operatons operations (e.g. traverse, cataM) that work on async futures and also on other contextual/effecty types (e.g. audit logging, database transactions). That's the big advantage it has over Rust and most other competitors, and it particularly shows in things like Kafka/Akka that need to work with async a lot, but also in large programming projects generally. (What it shows up as in practice is that you can do everything in "plain old code" - all the things that need reflection/interceptors/macros/metaclasses/agents/... in other languages are just libraries in Scala - and that makes development so much easier and bugs so much rarer)

Haskell has all that - the trouble with Haskell is that "there's no way to get to there from here". I was able to go from writing Java on Friday to writing Scala on Monday - not great Scala, but working Scala, and I was just as productive as I was in Java. I couldn't've done that with Haskell.
Code ability != leadership.

Being alpha geek and able to code well doesn't correlate at all with the kind of management and people skills required to run a team. There's a ton of Daily WTF as examples of team "leaders" who are great coders but cannot communicate at all.

The standard MBA solution for this situation is the "surgeon model" used by medical teams. The tech lead makes all the technical decisions, but there's a team leader or manager who makes all the leadership decisions, and does the "people stuff".

That "people stuff" totally includes firing team members who the technical lead doesn't like, for whatever reason.
An example of real-world Haskell use: https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula

SimulaVR is a 3D window manager (under active development) for VR Linux Desktop.
There is a Bollywood movie that excels on this subject and delves deeper into the culture that creates an environment favorable to such outcomes.

Name = "3 Idiots"
https://np.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/34l7vo/ma_posti...
Totally shilling right now, but I got a physical set of the playing cards [1] that she designed for Windows 3.0 Solitaire, and I swear that it's one of my favorite novelty purchases.

[1] https://www.areaware.com/products/solitaire-cards?variant=14...
I don't think it is. Redhat and centos are very common server platforms.

Maybe in startup world it is but older companies have been deploying own apps with rpms for a while. You can download RPM for multiple paid software apps today.

I am very surprised when I want to install an app and don't see it to be honest.

When I use RPM for my own apps I think of it as a self contained blob of data that has everything required to run an application . Basically a tarball on steroids which let's you version, upgrade and list dependencies.

For example of you are doing a django app it's a decent way to not depend on pip and/or the external world to deploy your software and achieve immutable builds.
>stupid gimmick like anti-suicide ceiling fan

Yep. It matters less apparently if millions of people wander around feeling suicidal as long as they don't actually commit suicide. For what? So we can pick candidates for the professions more efficiently.
Exactly.

And on top of all that, you're lucky if the teachers even look at the homework they assigned.

My kid's teacher doesn't bother -- she emails photos of the answer sheets to the parents because I guess we are supposed to review the homework too?

Maybe this isn't obvious... but if I wanted to homeschool my kid, I would homeschool my kid.
Except Facebook itself is a major ad delivery vector. Not actually going on FB means fewer ad impressions.
I like the Whatsapp solution. Why does it have to be stored on cloud? Web interface with Whatsapp Web (via phone) works well.
I miss google talk so much. Stupid fast and very clean UI.
You really have no idea what you're talking about. Boolean logic - as a theoretical topic in itself and as it forms the basis for the circuitry of modern computing devices - is about as well-studied a topic as you can find.
SB-827 failed, but there’s still no good alternative to building more housing
Right. Embracing the open standards - like they did previously (e.g. with GTalk), and then suddenly..."oh look, we've improved the standard, and we're not publishing our extended version. It's so much greater, but only works with this one client, made by us - what a coincidence."

Gee, I wonder where I saw this pattern before...nope, it's not like they're going to exterminate their Official Blessed Client once they tire of it, 18 months from now.
I remember signing up for a course in mass transfer that we joked would have been better titled bubble science. It seemed so obvious at first, but as we progressed, the math and concepts became more vast and inscrutable to me, and by the end I'd learned so much about something outwardly so simple that I felt that I'd barely scratched the surface of the topic. But that's not really an unusual outcome for learning, right?

Pursuing a technical education is tricky because those interested often have an elevated baseline knowledge and want to jump ahead without relearning fundamentals, but it's often those fundamentals that cause growth to suffer later on. Realizing that you're actually struggling with algebra while you're taking mv calc is a big eye opener, and realizing that you get the basics and applications of certain implementations of certain technologies in the first two weeks of a course can feel redundant and insulting, but that's because it's hard to gauge or trust that there's more to things beyond the limits of our understanding, not because the material is unworthy.

Overcoming that is humbling, and that can put people eager to get a start on making money because they're already slightly better at something than the population at large at odds with the goals of higher learning, but it's a necessary part of our growth and perspective.

People who grew up being told how smart or special they are can have a harder time with this, and I know it was pretty embarrassing for me when I realized early in my adulthood I was much closer to the "kid who's good with computers" category than an actual "IT professional", despite being able to successfully complete contracts and make money from what I was doing. Those experiences helped me re-evaluate my approach and get out of the "I'm already awesome, why would I need to do more" mindset. Had I not realized that, I might have stubbornly stalled out thinking I didn't need anyone else while the world passed me by.
India is not Sub Saharan Africa poor but has ~20% of their population living in poverty which they define as something like 50 cents a day.

This is a bit of a numbers/definition game.

I don't know if there's an official definition of poor but if over half of the population lacks indoor plumbing and makes only a few dollars a day, I'd say most people in the 1st world would call it a poor country.
Is anyone offering insurance based on monitoring your grocery bill?

For example, people who choose to drink soda, alcohol, excess sugar, etc. could be grouped together.

I do think there are some insurance providers for vegans, but that may just be marketing.
Yes, but with an important caveat: Getting ACID transactions to work correctly across multiple machines is the really hard part. FDB is providing a KV store (across multiple machines) kind of like RocksDB does (on one machine), but it's also solving that really hard problem for you. That puts it in kind of a different league.
Agree that monads don't compose.

I am not the OP, and not a Haskell programer, but my understanding is that Monad Transformers exist because Monads don't compose, and when you want monadic effects to compose, you use Monad Transformers (the other option is a go crazy writing every combination and ordering of effects you want by hand).

I got this impression from the papers I have read, particularly this one [1]

Monad transformers offer an additional benefit to monadic
programming: by providing a library of different monads and
types and functions for combining these monads, it is possible
to create custom monads simply by composing the necessary monad
transformers. For example, if you need a monad with state and
error handling, just take the StateT and ErrorT monad transformers
and combine them.

Notice the last line of the snippet I posted above. What am I missing?

[1]: Monad Transformers Step by Step https://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/scravy/realworldhaskell/materia...
There is one thing I'm curious about. Imagine Facebook's terms stated: "We will scrape any and all information we possibly can from you. We will use it in any and all ways we see fit. You agree to never sue us for anything whatsoever. We also have the right to do whatever we want to your account for any reason we want. We can also add or remove anything from these terms at any time and for any reason we like without telling you, and with immediate effect." That is probably a fairly reasonable cliff notes of their actual terms. Would this actually deter anybody from using their software?

In other words, are companies piling on the legalese to protect themselves or to deceive users? Maybe I'm overly cynical but I think even those terms would not really stop any meaningful number of people from signing up.
"Terrorism" by foreigners in the US is incredibly rare. Mass shootings are roughly weekly. https://www.abc15.com/news/data/mass-shootings-in-the-us-whe...
Tesla Subcontractor's Broken Jaw Triggered First of Two Probes
Live streaming a new SaaS product
Fair enough. I do think this is a step in the right direction. I know on the slack there are plenty of people who want to make Go into a language you can use for Data Analysis/Science. It might just take a little more time for it to happen since it is relatively new to Go.
That was just an example. I think they can last pretty much indefinitely with maintenance. I know we have wood frame houses built in the 1700s and 1800s that still stand in New England and other places.
I can't watch TV without seeing either a "Make Google do it" ad for Google Assistant or an ad for the Google Pixel or Chromebook. Google runs a metric ----ton of ads for their products.

Now mind you, nobody buys those products. But they definitely market them.
going live in 48 mins... should be fun!

am also the founder of Fomo:
https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/fomo-05b996966c
> Are the people at the job nice?

Yes, they seem patient/polite and I can tell they want me to stay, but I don't know them personally and this work is remote.

> Do you have freedom to work as you please?

Yes and no.

> Do you have the time to take the code in a better direction?

This is something that I'm currently annoyed with, when I was implementing a feature and working with a coworker, we had to re-use code from another function and instead of just making some changes to the function, he asked me to duplicate the function (~650 LoC).

I suggested to just make some changes to the existing function and re-use that one, but my coworker didn't want to go that route and suggested I just duplicate the function and so I did, I'm pissed that I can't make my own choices and instead I have to follow his orders.

My boss acknowledged that the project is in a bad state and sometimes I feel they are testing my patience, he mentioned they plan to rewrite the project in another language so I can tell they have common sense, but I get the feeling this other programmer I'm currently working with is happy with the state of the project and is holding things back.
I Can’t Do Math in Prose