skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even recently, I've gone to job interview type situations and the interviewer has literally asked me "Do you understand what Object Oriented Programming is? Can you write good quality Object Oriented code?"

This despite that my best known essay is titled "Object Oriented Programming Is An Expensive Disaster Which Must End" a fact the interviewer should know if they'd looked at my resume or spent 10 seconds looking up my name on Google. Wikipedia now lists me as one of the critics of OOP -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming

I'm lucky in that my position is comfortable, so I can laugh off stuff like that, and either educate the person I'm talking to, or end things quickly by explaining that there is probably some kind of cultural mismatch.

But it shows a remarkable laziness on the part of the people who, in theory, want to learn more about me.
I cannot agree enough. I'm okay with most of the interviewing practices out there, but there has to be some kind of balance between the company's needs and mine.

One of the most mind-boggling interviewing processes I've been through went like this:

1. Write a program that satisfies the given requirements. Be sure to use the specified design pattern they explicitly requested. Include a suite of unit tests and instructions for building and running the program. Do this within one week.

2. Phone call with the team to discuss your program. Explain why you did certain things in a certain way. Discuss the design patterns you used, especially the one they requested.

3. A "coffee meeting" with some of the team members to discuss the cultural fit. They described their culture and the environment, and also talked about what I looked for in a job, my motivations and what I would do in certain hypothetical situations.

4. Full day of on-site interviews.

The reason I call it mind-boggling is because this process wasn't outlined beforehand, so that last step came as a total surprise; at that point, I had assumed they had enough information to decide. When I explained that I couldn't accommodate them within a week at least due to my current job, their proposed solution was to instead do two half-day interview rounds after normal working hours. This is where I decided to politely drop them, not so much because they wanted to make me go through an interview loop after a full day's work, but because they were going to make their employees do that, too. I was already concerned about the adversarial nature of their work culture -- anyone can nominate anyone else to be fired because "they don't belong there" -- and this just convinced me that I wouldn't fit in there.

The moral of the story is: your interview practices send a very strong message about your company. Be careful what that message is.
Of course I don't disagree. So true. I meant in the context of the interview / hiring process, short of hiring them on and thinking about it through the lens of a probationary period.
Facebook's fake news challenge
The problem with the upvote/downvote system is that it's too simplistic. If you have an opinion that goes against the status quo, a lot of people will downvote your comment simply because they disagree with what you said on some emotional level.

Of course, past a certain number of downvotes, you post will be buried, so you have basically an echo chamber.
I don't think that is correct. My understanding from using fdb for years in production was that sqlite was the storage engine.
> Is it time to consider whether companies who's primary business is the collection, summation, synthesis, and re purposing of information should be defacto illegal?

You mean IBM/SAP/Oracle?
For sure, its something I've thought about too, but at the end of the day you need to do something to get from the many down to the one. Gut intuition gets used at some level and I prefer that to be way down the line after we've gathered a lot of data about a candidate. Take home tests also serve as a standardization measurement. Everyone does the same test so we can at least compare candidates to each other on that level. If they don't do the test then its pretty tough to compare them.

At some point you need to ask the applicant to do something to prove their worth and interest in the company. Take home tests are only one filter for that and I'm honestly open to others.
My understanding of hbase (which could be wrong) is that writes of a particular key always go to the region master first, so if you read from the master you always get the latest value of a key. The tricky part is that when the region master goes offline another one needs to take its place, and you can get inconsistency or unavailability depending on how it is set up.

I’d like to see a deep dive of how foundationdb handles this. It has to trade-off consistency for availability at some point and it would be nice to know exactly where.
What happened to allowing the industry to regulate itself?
It's wrong if the company benefits in any way from your interview/probationary period. (Probationary periods are just wrong period IMHO.) Interviewing is a huge burden to most companies, so if your interview questions are entirely synthetic, it's ONLY a cost to the company to interview you, which they should naturally want to minimize on their own. But you know what's even more expensive than interviewing? Dealing with bad hires. So I think a company is within its rights to do it what takes to ensure a quality hire. But they should not gain any benefit from this process - doing so is crossing a line - other than potentially being able to hire you, or failing that, at least make a good impression on you.
iCloud is an umbrella term for several different systems.
I'm not sure its just the recruiting side. We're seeing some concerning positions in the market:

1. Expectation of long work hours (Frequent and short deadlines due to agile)

2. Micromanagment being the standard (agile)

3. Terrible environments (open desk/office)

4. Removal of vacation time (unlimited PTO means you have no vacation days)
How Netflix does failovers in 7 minutes
If I want a junior person, I place an ad for a junior person. We do quite well with those.

If I want somebody with 5 years of experience, it's because I need someone who has already got familiarity with the tools and can apply good judgement.

I have had both positions open simultaneously on occasion, and discovered the same people applying for both. Some of them were even qualified for the junior position.
Show HN: Introducing MonkeyLearn integration with Zendesk
Try with two curious toddlers running around throwing the bits everywhere.
Isn't this a symptom of a site growing to reflect the broader population? When communities are small, they typically cater to a niche audience, who invites their friends who are directly or tangentially related to that niche.

Once the site grows beyond those 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree connections, you get exposed to those 4th, 5th and 6th degree connections that might have some values and opinions that are shocking to you because they don't run in your orbit.

I feel bad that the author contributes his time to making a world a worse place. I see Reddit as giving more visibility to the world. It's true there's some crazy stuff from some loud people, but my guess is if it was quantified it would still be a small percentage of actual content on Reddit. But just like in life, a rare shocking event dominates our consciousness much more than persistent normal events.
True, yes. Although in this case, I am referring to perhaps a software engineer (who you already know to be good since he is there and in the company and on the team) who would personally vouch for someone else's skills. At least in a case like that, I have trust that their vouching for someone else is legit.

But this tends to be rare in practice, of course, because the pool of potential people being hired is very large.
This is correct. DDLs are (still) auto committed, but they now cannot fail in an intermediate state. Discussing full transactional DDL should also take into account DDL being Replicated and on Online Schema changes (perhaps more important for Web-scale). Then it starts to become complicated supporting full transactional DDL (at the same time). But transactional DDL is absolutely a desired feature. Geir
I agree that developers(and pretty much everyone) tend to over value their own time and therefor over emphasize the importance of technical debt. Even in code there is a pay off. It's recovered every time something is fixed or a new feature is added a little fast. It's extremely hard to calculate, though.
You're in the schoolyard, shooting hoops. From time to time somebody throws the ball over the fence, and somebody has to run to retrieve it. You get annoyed, but move on. Then the new kid, nerdy, scrawny, with no friends, throws the ball over the fence. You beat him up. Why him? Well, somebody has to be first. Why not him?
> Overall it's just an issue of popularity bringing out the worst in people.

I don't really agree, it's the issue of aggregating everything relevant to a subject, which makes the popularity relevant.

BBS were not aggregated by subject. They're aggregated by the BBS itself. For a given game, there may be 10 BBS. That's how it was before. You'd go to the BBS with the community style you prefer. You have a choice.

Now, you're just stuck with one subreddit/Discord server/etc., which just reduces the quality of it all. And given the poor organizational ability of those services, it becomes entirely driven by a mix of popularity and posting speed.

[also no skin in the game for the BBS owner, as there is no BBS owner. No BBS competition]

It's the same with most "social apps", yes, because discussion shouldn't occur on "social apps", it should occur on private moderated spaces.
Speaking as the original author of this monstrosity of a build system, please be careful before offering praise here. To be clear, there is a top-level, non-recursive Makefile that uses the second expansion feature of GNU make, translating Visual Studio project files into generated Makefile inputs that are transformed into targets to power the build.

Although it starts by running `make`, it's about as in-house as a thing can be.
Honestly, keeping someone around who is under par is bad for morale because your other teammates have to make up for the difference. It is hard though, but it's business and if you aren't up for it, you probably shouldn't be in that position.
Note that this is how Reddit is fundamentally supposed to work - there's a reason that founders get full control over rules and banning.
I used to use duplicacy, but switched to Duplicati:
https://www.duplicati.com/

Works in mono in all OS's, ive used it on mac, linux and windows. Supports GPG (public) and AES (secret) key encryption, all the cloud backends, etc.
Provides a Web UI.

Its also LGPL so no concerns about commercial licensing ala Duplicacy.
> If someone died during the incident, given that the pilot is not a doctor with the medical authority to decide who’s alive and who isn’t

In many states (not sure how it applies to a plane in air), doctors are certainly not the only people to determine or legally declare death.

In my state EMTs and Paramedics can call death legally in many (relatively obvious) circumstances:

- rigor mortis

- livor mortis

- decapitation

- incineration

- decomposition

- body position incompatible with life

- evisceration of brain or heart

In those settings, while most would also include the attendance of a medical examiner or coroner, a physician does not have to "pronounce death".

Similarly, in resuscitation scenarios, we can discuss with a physician ECG rhythm/s found, length of resuscitation, circumstance, interventions attempted, and the physician can delegate to us the ability to discontinue resuscitation and call the time of death at that point.
I mean, programmers also don't go through a medical school equivalent or residency. We don't take boards. I'm married to a doctor and we were together through her time in medical school and residency. If I had to choose between skill checks in the interviewing process and the 8 grueling years of hell that was med school and residency, I will take option 1 without a second of consideration.
Not unique to reddit. Once a forum comment has been accepted as right, it will always be the top post. Child comments only ever see fewer views. The correction will never be as popular.
reddit cannot be customized.

You can subscribe to X subforums. and only ever see those same X subforums.

But you can NOT see "All" excluding only things racist subforums for example. So it is either your little bubble, or the full blown promoted/paid xenophobic posts.
Yes, google "penney ante"
How to Make a Fruit Fly Orgasm
I did that with the google phone screen. It didn't help that the interview really took a "well that's interesting" approach and basically killed the interview.
> Semple's feud with Kapoor is similarly gimmicky. He described his Pinkest Pink (and the ban on selling it to Kapoor) as "like a piece of performance art".

Yes. Kapoor eventually got his hands on some of the Pink, and he published a photo of him sticking his middle finger in the pigment.

Semple then created a new pigment called Diamond Dust which contains pieces of broken glass. The whole purpose of Diamond Dust was "I dare you to stick your finger in this!".
People are challenging this "undocumented" claim

Here's a lot of users talking about how it happened to /r/canada

https://www.reddit.com/r/onguardforthee/comments/7z1wap/forg...

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7z706y/whats_...

My suspicion is that whatever entity is behind massive twitter troll farms of far-right content (as well as inflammatory far-left content) is also doing everything it can to stir the shitpot over at reddit. /r/conspiracy is another one "lost" to the far-right. I even catch whiffs of it in the bay area subreddits sometimes.

I'd say the same for /r/shitredditsays but for the far-left, except it's been that way for as long as I can remember (LONG before any of the bot farm stuff).
Why would the kidnappers be cryptoinvestors? Most likely they are a regular gang that happens to know what Bitcoins are.
Amazon Shareholder Letter (2017)
Last month I was kicked from twitter, since I was trying to be more productive I didn't trigger the reset process.

I did spend less time refreshing some timeline. But

1) I did miss some of my "audience" (feels like an audience more than friends, but I'm twisted)

2) I'm now way less aware of lots of news. Two days ago was the first time in years that I thought to myself "what ? I didn't know that" about an event. Not sure if this is bad or good, but it's an important difference.
Well, perhaps. I don't want to suggest "licensing" because that's kind of a naughty word around here but man, it sure would be nice if something like that could take the extreme repetition and time wasting of "technical screens" out of the interview process completely.
People don't remember just how good it used to be. I used to lock my luggage securely, carry a knife on my person, and walk with my friends/family to the gate. Nobody asked pointless yes/no questions about the history of my luggage. When the airport wasn't busy, they might not bother to have the security station open at all, and just waved everyone through. A couple times, we drove to the airport an hour or two before the flight and bought tickets at the check-in counter (it was a very early flight that was never full), and this didn't arouse any suspicion. You didn't need to get out government ID for anything, since tickets weren't locked to the purchaser.

"TSA pre-check" sounds like it eliminates one inconvenience of flying in the USA in 2018, but not the other 34. I can't imagine what it might take to make me want to get on an airplane again.
That's a lot of bad words to express "people I don't like have a social life."
The problem with your friend's situation is not a bad interview process, it's that they're being taken advantage of, and for some reason not improving their own situation, in a market where a good candidate is calling the shots on the terms of their employment.
If you've been coding for 30 years and you get too nervous to write fizzbuzz when talking to people, that doesn't mean they should hire you, that means you either have personal life problems going on or you need to see a psychologist
Totally, by the time we have a phone interview I'm pretty seriously considering that candidate and I want to get to know their personality better to see if they're a good fit, so whatever I can do to shrink that pool in a way that's fair to everyone is necessary.
I use Zoho Desk for tracking support tickets. It’s free up to I think 25 users. I deal with the emailed to me case by opening a ticket and copy/pasting the email into it.
lmao. it’s like space invaders. title make it sounds like doom. I think this is actually harmless despite disliking theranos.
I think it's fascinating to see distributed social networks from a tech perspective. From what I've seen so far they exacerbate the problems that Facebook has been seeing so much backlash against.

1. The whole Cambridge Analytica issue was caused by APIs that are too open. For distributed systems there are more ways to exploit the APIs and gather data on users.

2. There is a clear issue with Facebook's accountability in these areas. Distributed systems are typically open source, they run on multiple servers by different owners, this leads to zero accountability.

3. GDPR compliance about deleting data is almost impossible in a distributed system.

4. Some of the problems with Facebook are more about usability and clarifying how things work to users. For instance the scandal with people giving away access to their private messages. Open source software and distributed software tends to be much harder to use.

5. Any future concern/issue will be much harder to resolve if there are thousands of different instance running decentralized social networks.

6. Using AI to detect abusive content or spot fake news is much harder if you only have a subset of the data. So it becomes harder to address those concerns in a distributed setting.

So while I think this stuff is awesome from a tech perspective, in many ways it just makes these problems harder to solve.
From what I understand that shouldn't happen as writes are written to a WAL on HDFS (been a while since I've used it).

From my memory writes within a row are atomic. It seems to pass Jepsen as well [1].

1. https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/yokota.blog/2015/09/30/call-m...
Fair enough, I stand corrected. Superficially it seems like a more pleasant experience than dealing with gn/ninja as an end user.
I hate to be that person, but when I hear "ACID transactions in a distributed database", I hear Citus/Spanner/CockroachDB.

I'm positive that Citus & Spanner are quite different from FoundationDB, but I have no idea how. Googling didn't help much.

Can someone provide an overview of the differences?
I kinda think if the balance can be maintained instead of reaching a tipping point that the interactions between those bigots etc. and the rest of us may actually ward off their bigotry. A bigot having a conversation with a non-bigot in a context that doesn't start off adversarial is probably the best context we can get for people to slowly drop their bigotry.

Sure, it can go the other way too, and that's scary.

I was pretty much in the sunlight-best-disinfectant camp until I heard https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/25/546127444/epis...

Now, I dunno. Clearly we can't expect independent well-meaning anti-racists to be as effective as extremely carefully crafted propaganda appealing to baser tribalist instincts. It's already uphill battle to get people to be open-minded. Those who argue for reinforcing people's existing biases have it easier.

But if there's any chance of getting the bigots to change their views, it seems it will be in respectful conversation with others, which Reddit at least is capable of, though I guess it doesn't seem the trend, unfortunately…
As a foreigner, i am massively puzzled by how people seem to want to place all this on some left-right axis when both "sides" seems to have a massive problem of authoritarianism and groupthink.
Given how close 'duplicacy' sounds to 'duplicity', and that they have the exact same purpose (backup tool), I'm surprised they haven't been sued yet. Particularly since there is a paid license cost:

https://duplicacy.com/buy.html
Imagine a nurse that failed to properly take vitals during an interview
Often times in health care, particularly insurance, reference is made to "how many belly buttons", which handles pregnancies and the like (no belly button until birth).
It's a difficult statement to agree with when the subreddits usually considered best-in-class are very heavily moderated.

Though of course some of the worst shit-shows are also heavily moderated.

At the end of the day, heavy moderation is not unlike absolute monarchy, it's a high-risk high-reward management system.
For me the video part of the process involved recording a video about 6 minutes long where I had to answer 5 questions to camera and send that video in, there wasn't a video conference part (at least not for me).
After that was a telephone interview, I didn't get any further than that.
[Praise]

[Explain]

[Shameless plug]

I approve.

just kidding. UI looks great. Does this go in the Intercom direction?
IT fixes peoples computers. Software Developers don't do that. We aren't Network Admins, we don't know how to set up or fix AD and we don't manage hardware. IT is a different field. I write software to process data and mostly I don't interact with hardware or troubleshooting arbitrary software directly. If I am offering support I am a level above IT. I understand that IT needs to be done but it is a very different job and should be treated that way.
I would put security experts and networking experts in the "technically-skilled" category. However, my experience of most people who have something like "IT security" in their job title, is that they're just the guy who updates a spreadsheet that has a list of security policies in it, and they send emails out to people who have breached one of those policies. Admin.
Licensing probably could work in this industry but it would be a tough nut to implement. For starters, as others have mentioned, with so much change happening, re-licensing would probably be needed, and of course that's a huge cost, a pain, and overhead as well. But then again, as I think about potential solutions, I am kind of coming up dry. Really need to mull on this some more.
>You must log in to continue.

Can somebody post what the actual problem is?
It isn't an alternative to Facebook unless my grandma can use it, and she couldn't set this up for herself.

The idea that centralized storage is the problem masks the actual concern. There is nothing inherently wrong with centrally stored data. There is a problem is when it is locked down by a 3rd party, and/or you don't control how it is used.
The [follow up](http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/2018-April/057672.ht...) message suggests that Google already internally using a non-JSPN-RPC transport layer.
Likely this, but perhaps something else...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunil_Tripathi#Misidentificati...
The Electronics Cooling System 400M Years in the Making
You're right, but this is the same catch-22 for getting started in any nontrivial field. How do I get experience if getting a job requires experience?

Having an MSc / PhD in the field doesn't resolve this. HR departments use grad degrees as first-pass filters, and thereby miss self-taught people who are genuinely competent.

We try to solve for this by easing people into jobs with internships and work terms first. The community is a key part of that since it supports them if they get stuck on an implementation problem. And of course we're incentivized to make sure members perform well in the internship phase, since we make money when they're hired full time.