skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I absolute agree with you.

I have no idea where the idea that having someone come on site for 6+ hours wasting a dozen peoples time became the norm as opposed to talking to someone for 1 or 2 hours and truly speaking with them to understand what they know.

You're completely right, if you can't talk shop and not know when someone is bullshitting you shouldn't be the one interviewing.

How would this even fly in other industries? Are you telling me that someone can bluff their way discussing the intricacies of surgery to other surgeons without looking like a moron? Or discussing particle physics with a researcher and stand on equal footing? I honestly want to hear a conversation where a liar with no programming skills is able to convince a Senior level Software Engineer that they are on equal skill sets.

The best interview experience I had, where I eventually worked for the company, was having an hour conversation with the Engineering Manager who I would be working under then being ask basic programming Qs based on our conversation we had. Everyone in the company was interviewed the same way. IMO the resulting team was very professional and skilled on various levels from various backgrounds. I actually felt like a human at that job and not a person hired because of x thing.

I'll never forget I had an interview where they asked me a question about finding anagrams. At that moment in my life, I've never heard of an anagram or knew what it was. The Interviewer then explaining what it was to me made me feel very humiliated. I completely bombed every question because I had the audacity to not know about this thing where the interviewers knew about thing therefore I should know thing as well. I immediately understood how cultural biases can effect candidates getting jobs. I can only imagine how worst it is for people not from traditional backgrounds in this industry.
Interesting. I'm gonna try this and see.
How our heartbeat shapes our thinking [video]
Publications that could not exist without API data
Ask HN: How complex is your Postgres setup?
Heya,

I was looking for some articles on postgres and there seems to be a lot of opinions on the matter.

I've mostly used with a single master or a master and a replica, and behind pgbouncer.

However the architecture can have a lot of different parts, it seems that companies like 2ndquadrant offer a range of solutions.

I also read a lot of horror stories about automating things like failover or using master to master replication.

How complex is your postgres setup? Any gotchas / tools that you like / dislike / have came across?

Cheers
That's not a fair characterization. Thomas for example, while i don't always agree with him, does try to do real research on the history of these issues/subjects. He's also not exactly "inexpert".
It's not bullshit attempts to rationalize an ideology (like say, Gorusch, AFAICT :P).

If he's wrong about history, and you can show it, he's generally been willing to change his view.

As mentioned, they also definitely rely on experts for this (and are often experts themselves), and cite the expert historical analysis they rely upon.
Alan Jacobs recently wrote a similar type of post (spoiler: he deleted all the social media apps, allowed communications apps, and replaced the deleted ones with "environmental" apps) http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2018/04/back-to-ipho...
This launcher is great, thanks for sharing.
If the US military had to pay a staggering $100/IP per year it wouldn't even show up in a detailed audit. It's an utterly inconsequential amount compared to the military budget.

It's not a price thing, it's a "why should we" thing.
How could they consider this an even remotely inclusive way to build a workplace?
Obviously the US has some structural issues, otherwise it wouldn't have these persistent failures. All I'm doing is pushing back against the simplistic "but the US is so big compared to all those tiny countries".

If you want to talk about density or uniform distribution... Why is Australian public transit so much better than American public transit?

America's governmental structure isn't unique either. There are other countries with the same kind of federalism.

And similar rebuttals can be made for virtually all other explanations.

I guess what I'm really getting at is that in the real world there are no easy solutions or explanations to problems despite the penchant in places like HN and Reddit to try to reduce explanations to a single paragraph. America's problems are likely due to a complex interaction between federalism, its geographic size, its traditional wariness of cities, its first mover advantage turning into obsolete infrastructure, and many other factors besides. But it is hard to know that the relative importance of any of those things actually is.

If you say Belgium can make its own policy, you are almost certainly making an off the cuff comment. There are dozens, possibly hundreds, of Europe-wide rules and regulations on transit that limit what Belgium can do. Belgium has to work across borders just like Massachusetts does. From Directive 95/19 on safety certification to Directive 2005/47 on the working conditions of workers on services that happen to cross a border. Since 2007 every European railway undertaking
is able to off er rail freight services on every line
in every EU country.

It is a mistake to paint a picture where Belgium has unlimited unilateral decision making powers.
Unfortunately your list of rivers means its largely China and India's problem. Not a lot we can do other than pressure them.
I could've written this exact post myself as I'm going through the process right now. So thank you for taking time to share and building the hound! Kudos.

As for the presently en Vogue hiring process for senior tech roles, I'd put a deserved blame on companies like Google, where this bookish and silly way of hiring was first codified by the founders and early employees who were fresh grads/drop outs from schools - and that's all they knew about how to judge who's better in class. And as more and more of people who went through that process leave and start their own companies, they follow the same process - thinking that's the best of breed way to hire.

As for age discrimination - it's very much alive and well - specifically in the SF Bay area. Which is a shame.
https://twitter.com/pourmecoffee/status/988966825110073344
Illegal cash still has to be laundered before it can be safely used. The more of it, the harder it is.
Consider that when Trumpet Winsock was a third-party IP add-on for Windows 3.1, classic MacOS already had IP support built-in.

Ironically around that time Microsoft was selling Xenix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix) which did support it.
It's not, though, any more than dependency injection is "declaring global variables".
It seems like your reasoning and the reasoning of the author could be applied to any statistic testing the reliability of a hypothesis, not simply p values. Further, you could mitigate this problem if you knew the prior probability, sure. But how do you expect a bad hypothesis generator to be good at knowing the prior probability. The usual standard is "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." The less likely a hypothesis, the stronger the evidence, measured as p-values or otherwise.

But the thing is the public and the scientific community has to be the one who are going to judge the extraordinariness of a claim. If an experimenter were to wrap their results in their own belief in the likelihood of the hypothesis, the observer wouldn't be able to judge anything. So it seems like experimenters reporting p-values is as good a process as any. It's just the readers of results need to be critical and not assume .05 is a "gold standard" in all cases.
Unfortunately, unemployment is sticky[1]. That might be your entire problem.

When I'm hiring software people, I get three types of applications:

1) Self-taught, usually working in startups and small companies; often a little bit older

2) CS grads, usually working at larger companies

3) Totally unqualified (non-technical applying for technical role, etc.)

It sounds like you're in bucket #2. As an employer, I'm naturally going to wonder why you've been unable to find a job in a good market. Hiring (like venture capital, dating, and all other human selection processes) is highly social. We tend to want the people who are in high demand.

What makes my job hard is that a lot of the CVs in each bucket are very, very similar. My job becomes finding ways to narrow the applications down from hundreds to, hopefully, less than 10. But how do I do that?

You eventually start finding excuses to exclude someone: got an unrelated Master's degree, went to a lesser-known school for undergrad, etc. These are usually really bad filters, but unless you start using software to do this process for you, there isn't much choice. You can't interview 100 people for every role[2].

If I had to guess from my own experience, I'd guess that your biggest problem (by far) is the gap in your resume. If you can find a way to retroactively fill it (adding volunteering, descriptions of contract work, etc.) then you'll be much better off.

My other guess is that many companies are getting more reluctant to hire self-taught people. There are enough CS grads that you just don't need to hire self-taught people anymore (if you don't want to), and if that person turns out to suck, you can cover your ass by saying, "Well, they had the degree..."

If you've been burned out by doing Github projects, I think you should think about whether a career change makes sense. You could also try to become a freelancer. If you need to build up your portfolio, you can try to do work for free for non-profits until people want to hire you.

I hope that helps! Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. Your family knows you best and is probably right that seeking to learn and practice social skills could help.

1. https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/07/labour-...

2. I know there are startups created to solve this exact issue, but I despise the idea of whiteboard-style interviews (even the online ones that work more like homework or a standardized test)
> banning motorbikes from city centers

Dirty thing people miss about motorbikes. Better mileage, but not as much as you would think, in return for a lot more emissions. That said I'm lead to understand that electric motorcycles and bicycles have become very common in China.
What makes you a staunch carnivore, if I may ask?
Ok :- ) It's related to the vision & goals: helping people to find ideas & solutions to problems in society. And then it needs to be affordable for people in developing countries too (because maybe that's where there're most problems to solve?).
The day I held a 100-year-old book
Postgres Window (function) Magic – Bruce Momjian  PostgresOpen 2017
> , but I don't think it's much more "robust" than, say, Linux,

It is much more robust than Linux. If Linux kernel has a segfault and crashes, it takes everything with it when it panics. If one of the million Erlang processes which has an isolated heap crashes, it can probably safely restart (maybe with a few other ones it is linked with).
I've had a mixed history with Redux. It always felt like a ton of overhead to maintain on top of React. However I recently started using Rekit (http://rekit.js.org/) which is a web-based IDE specifically for React+Redux and I'm loving it. All the patterns the IDE defaults to (and in some cases enforces/automates) are ones that I had to learn painfully (and repeatedly) in other contexts. Now when I need a new action I get the paired reducer, top level reducer tie-in, tests, all for free. It's great! Try it out on your next project!
It could go up 20,000% one day and down 50% the next and the headlines would read "STOCK CRATERS".
Does it matter to businesses or consumers in China?
This appears to be running on Linux.
> Do we shut down the open source project? Do we make the algorithms illegal and have a repeat of the fight of whether or not mathematics and programming is free speech?

Actually, it's quite simple. The SEC and IRS could go after the exchanges. If BTC can't be converted to US Dollars BTC is worthless on its face.

BTC only has value if it can be exchanged to another currency.
I use this to stop videos (although some sites have still found ways around it by making a "click to read" that plays the video.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoplaystopper/ej...
It's not that other frameworks are so awesome at it, either. But other frameworks (e.g. Apple's frameworks such as Cocoa/UIKit, Core Data, etc.) typically don't provide the kind of strict state-machine purity that Redux promotes. These things are just easier to wire together imperatively, because data changes don't necessarily have to be broadcast and "reduced" the way that Redux forces you to. So some of these problems are self-inflicted.
Why do you assume that inclusivity is a goal for them?

I absolutely believe it should be, but for the vast majority of human history, in the vast majority of civilizations, inclusivity was not a goal. It's certainly not universal now.
> Linux is robust and fault tolerant by design.

How is Linux fault tolerant. Say a kernel driver starts overwriting kernel memory how do the rest of the kernel subsystems isolate that fault and keep going without crashing?
To be perfectly honest, I did (and still do) oscillate on how I see that choice. Is it:

1) A clever if superficial name,

2) A dumb name because it's too obvious,

3) A clever name because it's satirizing the dumb choice of an obvious name,

4) A dumb name because the satire is also transparent...

Basically it only works on odd "Yomi layers" (see http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/7-spies-of-the-mind).

The rest of the book perfectly straddles the "haha-only-serious" line so I guess it's in keeping.
You're making this argument as if the whole FB/Cambridge Analytica thing hadn't happened. There is power in these systems and when they're affecting our governmental structures we have a vested interest in regulating them.

This is perfectly analogous to the real world where e.g. pollution has tangible negative externalities. It will always be the case that when responsive governments exist, and a thing comes into existence that people perceive as a threat, people will leverage the government to mitigate that threat.

If your home were perched on a cliff above a school playground, to use a contrived example, the townspeople would have a keen interest in the integrity of your home including the kitchen and bathroom.
Shameless self plug (founder here)...

We just launched RealCrowd University - http://www.realcrowduniversity.com - which is our crash course on real estate education.

We do a podcast on the fundamentals of real estate and this is the best of those episodes plus a bunch of other educational content we've put together.

Let us know your thoughts! If there's anything specific you'd want us to cover shoot me a note.
Ask HN: Volunteer work as an inexperienced engineer
I have a Bachelor in Energy engineering with less than a year of experience and would like to do some volunteer work. Not having a small extra project at work to do some good, more traveling through Russia and work on orphanages.

But it I can't find much in this area and whatever I find is for people with more experience. But it seems a bit strange to me that there is basically nothing for people like me. Because it feels like I have a small window now where I don't have a girlfriend, family or a house and can dedicate a year to do some good and travel. Because if I don't do it in a few years then I'm fairly certain that it won't happen at all.

So I'm looking for advice on where to look to be able to find something like that, where I can use my engineering education to do some good. Getting paid enough for a new pair of clothes when needed and getting food/room taken care of.

Any suggestion is appreciated.

P.S
I can't reply while at work so it might take some time between posts.
Presumably they don't care.
I’m more likely to click a Bloomberg link than most traditional news sources on HN. I believe the video can be scrolled past without interacting with it.
Normally it wouldn't be, but in cases where the submission is otherwise good and the community is having a good discussion, we sometimes post a comment and leave it at that.
Sweden's population density is less than the US but they have better transit.

The US's urbanization rate is 82% which is higher than Canada, Norway, Spain, France, Greece, Taiwan, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Portugal, Ireland, and 150 other countries.

The US doesn't have much of its population distributed outside of urban areas compared to most countries. The US actually has few people outside of urban areas compared to most countries.
Gender equality is not nearly as big an issue in Asia compared to the west.

My experience is in Japan, but I could summarise a common opinion as "Men and women are different and should be treated differently".

Recently, when asking for a recommendation for a tax credit accountant, I was asked if I would prefer a man or a woman. The question was very matter of fact and not thought of as unusual.

To make things clear: I think this is nonsense and should be called out when it comes up.
Thanks for the link. Well, all state transition mechanics benefit from the strict, pure serializability that Redux offers.

In this case, it was a component that not only autocompletes a location, but also offered to geolocate the user (via the browser's geolocation API) and supported a few other features that meant it was several competing concerns wrapped into a single UI. Those can get hairy if you don't do a Redux-type state machine.
It was only last night that I was thinking, assuming the eventuality of the emergence of a self-sustaining super-intelligance (doesn't matter whether it takes form a hybrid long living cyborg race or not ), what justifications would it have to keep around the human race besides the kind of empathy that drives humans to conservation for things whose absence would not affect the ecology? (IOW, is the only way a hypothetical superior lifeform will consider letting human exist be based on the the existence of empathy in the lifeform? Or is there any other rational reason that necessitates keeping us around?)... (IyOW, purely logical, uncaring children of the elite who'd have the benefits of longevity research as well as superior intellect may consider rodent conservation more important than human conservation... aka There possibly are things more interesting than people)
I think their KPIs are all to do with actual commercial performance rather than niceness or virtue signalling.
I keep trying out Julia every year or so. And it has come a long way. Gone are the days of crashes, missing documentation, and terrible error messages.

And yet, for my particular area (audio signal processing), Julia is just objectively worse than Python in expressivity, library support, and even speed.

But I'll keep trying. Maybe next year.
The argument against anything else is that they all turn the court into a policy making body in various forms, instead of trying to stay as objective about interpretation as they can.

Whether that's good or bad depends on your view.
JSX is a paper-thin XML-like DSL on top of regular Javascript.

This:

<Component prop="value" />

directly translates to this:

React.createElement(Component, {prop: "value"}, null);

You can skip JSX entirely, and use functions only. If that's too verbose for you, some people alias `React.createElement` to `h` à la Hyperscript[1] and that becomes

h(Component, {prop: "value"}, null)

That's why, unlike the not-really-HTML-not-really-javascript templates of Vue and Angular, JSX is not markup. It's 99% plain old Javascript, 1% paper-thin DSL.

[1] https://github.com/hyperhype/hyperscript
I feel like this could be built fairly easily.
> What if there's no tax level that the small store can afford that prevents a mega-corp like B&N from buying out their property?

Be bookstore owner. Set the value to be twice as much as comparable neighbor property. Get bought by B&N. Buy property next to you, move your books, pocket the difference.

> I get that making $15m for my house would make me rich, but this is our first home as a family and all our memories are here.

Price it accordingly. :)

Yes, the whole idea is that the tax is much lower (1% maybe) than the value of the land.

Also, some regulations might be added, that eg. a person who got forcefully bought-out, has a year or two to move out, just to make it less convenient to use it "aggressively", while allowing wise long-term investments.
Any recommendations on things you spend money on that save time? Besides the obvious like maids etc.
You have nothing to lose by waiting. And Facebook has been as shady as they possibly could be with GDPR (the Facial recognition opt-in dialog is a prime example of that. What a farce).
So, pure curiosity: Node is amazingly excellent at IO. Its like the one thing it does really well. Its traditionally pretty bad at computationally heavy tasks, but it still beats BEAM there.

What do you use BEAM for? Is rock solid supervision really its biggest boon?

And if that's the case, how does it compete with the proliferation of easy to use tech like Kubernetes that, more or less, solve the supervision problem in a simpler, easier to scale, and more abstractable way?

There are parts of Elixir I really quite enjoy, but I've long felt that BEAM is holding it back as much as it benefits it, similar to how the JVM is both a boon and a "modern curse" to Java. The 90s dream of having these VMs executing platform independent bytecode seems dated in the face of infinitely customizable VMs on cloud hardware. And process supervision at the application level also seems dated in the face of modern devops HTTP-level liveness and containerization.
Nice. A quick suggestion: would you allow users to select there time zones and then show the schedule based on a user's timezone?
Jewel Osco Customer Service Survey Sweepstakes 2018
The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island
It's not that cheap, having recently gone through the process of looking at a hardware refresh of one our devices, anything that runs Linux ended up too expensive as it really needs something with a MMU and more RAM. Not to mention boot times are an issue. Real Time is trickier, also if low power is a issue, then it's really a bad idea.

Rust is kind of interesting in this space, but a little bleeding edge, will likely look at adopting it later.

Ended up picking an Cortex-M3 and using FreeRTOS. With a C / Lua mix. Not because I particularly prefer them, but it requires the least compromises. Also writing robust embedded C code is pretty well understood with many common patterns. Still, it requires being more diligent and disciplined than many other languages.
Россияне Выучили Новые Слова: VPN И Прокси Серверы, Что Это? – Hype World
American startups are at least more tacit about it. Young, attractive women are heavily favored as recruiters and office managers. Honestly, as a new tech worker, I don't really mind. It is refreshing.
Its crazy. The Light2 is almost perfect, but its almost too minimal. I still want basics like an ereader, timers, and email.

Its a shame that eink hasn't really hit the mobile market yet.
I'm still waiting for Amazon Masticate and Amazon Excrete.
This shows a great wisdom.

The Chinese culture is an ancient culture and we have a lot to learn from them, if we can see beyond our arrogance.
the financial industry and poor people who happen to live in nyc are very, very, very disparate things.

when you're the global headquarters for a globally important industries, you're in a separate world from the problems around you. which is probably best. note how the bay area housing crisis, although caused by tech firms, is pretty handily ignored by people who helped cause it.

not all politics is local.
Whereas the West sees male domination in tech as a problem and intervenes, China caters. Which approach will end up being more productive? Does it matter?