skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My friend graduated from CS in Berkeley, but it was apparent when working with him that he was not really cut out for being a programmer. I suggested him to go for a PM interview with a large SV company and he got it, and now is doing really well. His other skills - communication, organization, strategy, research, and persistence, just work really well in the role he is in currently.

CS is a particular kind of smart that not everyone is. And you don't have to be smart in that way in order to be successful.

The CS degree is really valuable regardless of how difficult or frustrating you feel about doing CS. It's objectively one of the most valuable and versatile degrees out there. Non tech roles in the space (PM, design, BD, tech sales are all strong industries) are all very good roles that would love to see a CS degree.

I personally think of CS as "paying your dues". You suffer a bit and feel bad about yourself, but you've become an objectively more valuable person because of it, simply because you can program.
Like many on this thread I think it's entirely possible you're not giving yourself enough credit.

I've been working as a software engineer at companies that don't ask riddles for about 8 years, and I've been on both sides of the technical interview many times. As the interview-ee, there's exactly one interview I actually left feeling like I'd nailed it, but several others from which I received offers, some of which turned into perfectly fine jobs. As the interview-er, I've learned that I'm looking for a multitude of factors, of which technical proficiency isn't even the most important. In other words, while there is a technical bar to pass, it's usually lower than the interviewee thinks it is.

I doubt we live in the same metro area, and even if we do my current employer is not hiring. I'd be happy to run a fake, no pressure ~20-30 minute phone-screen with you, and then offer feedback. jmkimmel at gmail
Your post came at a good time for me. I've been working as a programmer / engineer for the better part of two decades now. I'm self-taught, have plenty of code in production at several (small/medium) companies doing millions a year in business. I have recently started interviewing again, and it's exactly as you state it: 40-50 hours a week working, and another 20 or so on Leetcode. It's exhausting to put in all this work knowing that much of it is unlikely to be needed outside of the interview setting. A couple of the recruiters have even said as much (Literally that the interview prep material is unrelated to the day to day work for the position). Glad to see I'm not alone in this.
I'm not sure I have all the answers you need, but I do have some suggestions. I've worked as a programmer for 6 years now in a number of different roles and found that the experience can be quite different in different places. Not all programming roles are the same. Some roles will be quite gast paced and stressful while others will not.

Also don't necessarily get discouraged if you have a bad experience in one place. My first programming job didn't work out and the manager told me I wasn't suitable for programming. However my next employer was very happy with my work (and the pay was better too).

If you are going to stick with development find a niche that suits you. For example, don't ignore legacy technology. Many companies still have legacy code bases written in Delphi and cobol.

There aren't as many developers on the market for these roles and it can be less competitive.

Also consider suplimenting your CS degree with other skills. Or consider roles that are not purely programming roles.

On the other hand if you want to leave programming there are still options for you. There's more to computer science than programing.

There are tech support roles, QA testing, penetration testing, DBA for example.
> accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis.

I'm guessing he believed Buddhism to be a monumental waste of time.
I'm going to need a variation of Rockstar with more brooding darkness and satanic references for system programming.

I.e. closer to metal.
I feel like you're looking for a hole to poke. It seems pretty obvious that R&D funding is still good even when existing technologies are good-enough-to-deploy-in-mass.

Ford got past the R&D stage for the Model-T a long time ago, but they continue to pour money into R&D to make better cars. The same happens for energy technology. We have clean energy systems that can compete with fossil fuels today, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep seeking new innovations that make them even better.
> what are the use cases for a lossy image with an alpha channel?

Basically any image that's not flat and has a shape cut out of it (you can do this with CSS nowadays, but an alpha channel is cleaner and part of the image, allowing sharing/reuse). I personally would have loved it for old oval portraits for Wikipedia where I'd be able to make the background transparent. Currently, you have to use PNG which isn't lossy and doesn't lend itself to photographs.
My sister bought a new car in 2014. She used one of the services that shops your requirements to dealers within your area. The night before her scheduled test drive with the dealer who had the best price and didn't seem sleazy, a friend of hers told her to check with a fleet broker. Within a few hours, the fleet broker sent her a price that was about $100 less than the dealer's.

I went to the dealership with her, we both drove the car and made sure it would fit in her driveway (steep with sharp angles, a recipe for ripping off front trim). On the way back to the dealership I asked how long the paperwork would take. The salesman (actually the sales manager) said it takes a couple hours because of 'state requirements'.

She asked him to match the fleet broker's price, he said it had to be a scam and refused so we drove away. On the way to lunch, she called the fleet broker and had her insurance agent send him proof of insurance (she already had financing arranged). As we sat down to eat, the fleet broker called back and asked when she wanted the car delivered. She got it delivered 2 days later and spent less than 5 minutes doing the paperwork.

I have always fantasized that the next time I buy a new car, I'll figure out a reasonable price and take a cashier's check for that amount to the dealer. I imagine telling them that I want to be on my way out the door with the keys in my hand in 15 minutes or I will leave. But really, why waste time on that when I can just call a fleet broker?
I think the article could be a warning to anyone who starts a company, regardless of their gender:

"Fear of doubt meant Holmes fired all doubters, thus guaranteeing the failure of Theranos."

If a CEO is so insecure that they can't tolerate employees' doubts about the direction of the company, they probably shouldn't be leading a company. And if investors tolerate a CEO firing anyone who doesn't blindly follow the agenda, the investors aren't exercising enough due diligence.
There are always project management and product/program management roles. Having a CS background can be really advantageous without all the coding.

However, it sounds like you may be dealing with some mental health issues if you’re dealing with PTSD-like stress trying to do programming challenges. Please consider finding counseling at some point on your journey as this could be affecting more than just your enjoyment of programming
> Currently not open source, but am trying to figure out how to set a license that encourages people to tinker with the code, but not to clone a copy and sell it.

By definition, any such license wouldn't be open source. However, as others have mentioned, putting it under a copyleft license would make it unlikely that others would do so, since they wouldn't be able to distribute their version without providing source under the same license themselves.
>Data is often full of errors and the bigger the set the more errors there are likely to be

Strange thing to say, what they say next is better

>no prior hypothesis

If you are trying to measure some distribution more samples gives you a more precise result. You have to be trying to fit the right model though, so you are accurate [0].

>The idea that big data will enable more control of behaviour may be a lot of hype

Overall I think its true. Just because there are some correlations in data, doesn't mean there is actually any causation [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision
[1] http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
your time also has value. Spending a whole day to get a lower cost might not save as much money as it seems
Shedding light on the code of what women want in a man
Sourceforge was briefly free software, proprietary, unpopular and then now kinda-free but nobody trusts them.
I was off the F-line at 15 St PPW. The commute into Manhattan was not usually too bad. The commute home was terrible (my stop was 23rd St and the trains were usually quite full by the time they got to me).

Life is about trade offs. We did our best to make Brooklyn home for our family and didn’t expect to leave. There were some incredible highs. There were also some very challenging lows.

We spent a lot of time in Prospect Park and were very blessed to live within walking distance. I would frequently meet the family in the park for picnic dinners on the way home from work (in the spring / summer). But as a counter example, I now live 5 miles from a massive state park. Yesterday we spent the morning swimming in the lake and the evening hiking to a waterfall (where we then climbed down the rock wall for a dip). It’s a very paddle friendly park as well and we plan on buying kayaks and paddle boards for next season (we only just moved here in February).

The best part of all of that is that it was just a normal Saturday. No pre-planning required. When we got home and realized my son had left his life jacket at the lake, I made dinner while my wife circled back for it (okay, I ordered pizza from my phone...).

I will say, we miss Seamless. Like a lot.

I’m on the fence about cities being more inclusive than towns. As a family we’re very active in church and community service so YMMV, but I find no shortage of opportunities to work, play, worship, and serve with people of varying backgrounds. There are certainly fewer types of communities (Jews and Muslims are underrepresented in the south). But I’m not completely sold that’s the same as inclusivity. My experience in the city was that bias exists in humanity no matter how many people you cram into a square mile. It can take different forms in the city, but it certainly isn’t absent.
"So why the the lack of interest from "high growth" HN crowd?"

I can't speak for the "crowd", but personally I've lost more money in solar stocks than any other sector I can think of. And I didn't even get burned by gambling on specific stocks like SunEdison, just by a broad solar ETF.

Just because something is the wave of the future doesn't mean it's a good investment. If you invested in the solar ETF called TAN[1] back when it came out ten years ago, it's down over 90%. It just keeps shrinking and shrinking, although it has bounced around a little.

Why should producing a commodity efficiently be lucrative from a profitability standpoint? Competitive markets should reduce the profit of a safe activity anyone can do to almost zero. And investors who are willing to invest without regard to profits should reduce investment returns to zero or below.

[1]https://www.nyse.com/quote/ARCX:TAN
At work we use an aws lambda job to push all uploaded images into BPG format. It's a damn nice format. Works with mobile perfectly: light weight and renders pretty quick.
Must all solutions be software?

How'sa about a desolder-the-chip mitigation? Or a hammer-and-sharp-punch mitigation?
“Permanent survival of the species” is not a goal.

When in the current climate I worry about the life my 8 year old son will have and that of my future grandchildren, I couldn’t give a damn about any permanent survival of the species plan that people like Musk might have.

I am also not convinced that technological advancement couldn’t have happened with hunting-gathering societies. At the very least people would have had more time, whereas right now I worry we might not survive another century.

Also, fun fact: life on Mars would be much worse and much more expensive than anywhere on Earth. Fixing Earth to ensure our survival for another 1000 years is more doable than colonizing Mars in any meaningful way. And yes, we should colonize Mars, but we are unable to fix problems in our own back yard and the clock is ticking.
> - Even more variety of fresh, healthy fruits, vegetables, and meats than before (especially in winter)

You have more variety, but not of more “fresh” foods. The only fresh food you can eat will always be local, so the variety only went up for foods transported from elsewhere… but fresh food in general is getting harder to acquire in Western society. Most people don’t eat fresh food at all so this point is just wrong. In traditional villages people are not afraid to eat vegetables with bugs and dirt on them -- that's what it means to eat fresh, and they don't need pesticides or preservatives.

> - Lives that are incredibly richer (all of reading, writing, culture, and art)

Our culture is richer, but I'm not sure if the life of the average person is. You do have access to an absolute wealth of rich cultural material, but the majority of people do not utilize it. I’ve lived in traditional villages* and people there have surprisingly rich cultures, even if it was not mass-produced and massively-available, vapid nonsense. Also, contact with nature is more meaningful than most modern time-wasting activities like working in an office, commuting, or checking social media.

*Agricultural societies, but I suspect pre-agricultural cultures were also very rich.

- Vastly lower mortality

Not sure what the data says about mortality rates. As far as health goes, most people in Western society are incredibly unhealthy. The amount of obese people in America is frankly revolting, not to mention the epidemics of hormone imbalances, digestive issues, awful posture, awful skin, etc. and the medicine/supplement regimens of pills that people have become dependent on to function or live, etc. The means to live more healthily are available, but the average person is not healthier than people with traditional lifestyles. We are weaker, more useless and have poorer sex lives.

> (fell from a tree and seriously injured yourself? Thanks to modern medicine, you're not dead)

Thanks to modern medicine, you’re not dead, but you’re bankrupt due to medical fees and addicted to painkillers and your gut flora is destroyed by antibiotics. The modern diet has little gut-promoting effect so you have to buy probiotic pills now. Etc.
Deserialisation Vulnerabilities
> spending 30 seconds minutes googling the definition of "ENOENT" before calling someone else over is blindly persevering

It's not blindly persevering. It is, however, giving up an opportunity to learn from and interact with a colleague. Whatever you were working on related to the query might have additional context filled in or expanded upon through conversation. Some of my most productive and unexpected insights came up as a result of such banter.

When you ask "what does this mean," you're asking for a definition. You're also communicating the problem and hinting at your angle of attack. Possible valuable and unexpected responses include "you're approaching it wrong" or "why are you working on that problem when X looks more lucrative"
Just to be evenhanded, the article is touting wind and solar, not really coal and gas.
> problem solving at an architectural level

That's a problem for people who haven't done internships and have just graduated. Architecture skills and knowing how things are/should be designed come from experience, which a lot of people don't have.

On the other hand, algorithms + data structure knowledge and how they're applied do not really require experience, just knowing fundamentals well.

So your method is definitely good for experienced people but not for new grads/interns. And these are methods the industry employs anyway — big companies do stress more on system design for industry hires, less so for new grads + interns.
A lot of great advice in these responses, advice applicable to anyone feeling stressed at performing the duties (perceived or otherwise) of their role/vocation.

I echo those who emphasize taking steps to avoid stressing out, and also those who advise considering other roles where your degree could come in handy.

Also, roles that have nothing to do with tech. Something excites you; take a swing at it.
The question you pose is one which increasingly keeps me awake at night, and I'm deeply afraid that every solution is bad.

In areas like, say, environmental policy, we take it as a given that "individual people just need to do better" is a figleaf and a distraction from the real problem, that we'd only end up in disaster if we tried to base policy on it, and that coordinated action is the only thing that can truly fix the issue.

But when it comes to the problem of "fake news", I can't think of any solution that doesn't resemble censorship or unaccountable arbitration of what counts as "real" information. And I don't want either.

For a while, we were able to avoid this dilemma by pretending it didn't exist and that the marketplace of ideas would ensure that bad ideas would just sink out of existence, but it's getting harder to take that seriously: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/forum/real-talk-about-fake-ne.... To me it's looking more and more like an unregulated marketplace of ideas ends up like any other unregulated marketplace: unfair and very dangerous.

Meaning we will have to buckle down and face the hard choice of which is the greater evil, rather than pretending there's one good solution with no downsides.
Seems like the liar's dividend only applies to instances where there was a single source for the recording.

Thanks to people mindlessly recording everything, all the time maybe this will just work itself out naturally.
I heartily recommend [splain][0] to anyone debugging non-trivial implicits. It is a scalac compiler plugin that, among other things, will swap out the horribly unhelpful "implicit not found" or "diverging implicit expansion" messages for an indented and annotated representation of the search tree that the compiler went through before giving up.

`-Xlog-implicits` is good to use every now and then, but it quickly becomes unreadable for any decent sized project.

[0]: https://github.com/tek/splain
> Which vague term?

"the same", as in "is it the same ship?".
He's not a normal person. He's the CEO and face of a multi-billion dollar company. It comes with the territory to be held to a higher standard. He did the right thing with the apology. That doesn't mean he didn't screw up. We are allowed to talk about when people screw up, especially if they're the CEO and face of a multi-billion dollar company. At the very least, it's an opportunity for us to dissect and learn. At the very worst, it can affect investment decisions and people's livelihoods.
I’ll read the whole article when the paywall comes down or someone else publishes it again.

Either way, I’m highly suspicious of articles like this considering the personal gain some individuals stand to win.
Maybe I'm confused. The blog makes a big deal out of the fact that the neural network can be hard coded. How is this relevant? I thought the whole point of the paper is whether our standard training process can learn the weights, not whether it's easy to create a NN with perfect weights if we already know those weights.
> I experience PTSD like symptoms from the constant barrage of negative thoughts the difficulty and stress of doing these problems are causing me.

There's a book called How to Keep People From Pushing Your Buttons by Albert Ellis (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01DRXBJS8), who pioneered an early form of CBT (cognitive behavior therapy).

I would strongly recommend it as thoughtful reading material with the purpose of getting out of this negative loop so that programming isn't so stressful.
My Ivy Bridge laptop uses twice the power as my Apollo Lake laptop.

Literally 2x.
You are not alone. As the founder of garage script I've come across a few students who got a CS degree and couldn't find a job. The problem might not actually be your ability to solve algorithm, but rather your inability to communicate. For the students who came to me with similar situations, I had them lead coding sessions at our local library to help them get more comfortable with talking to strangers and they now all have a full time job. From my work experience as a tech lead, I've hired many people who didnt do well with algorithm questions but they were able to listen to my suggestions and get to an answer.

Maybe start a Meetup group and work through problems with other people?
> By "object," I just mean "a thing in the world." We can talk in particulars: a candle, a ship, whatever.

That is still a vague definition. Are you talking about the set of matter (atoms, etc.) in their certain relative positions and interactions? Are you talking about the general usefulness?

Defining object in this sense (as in the object "ship of Theseus") will solve the problem of SoT.
So much of tech support is hand-holding and telling the user everything is going to be ok.
The raw batteries yes. But didn't Tesla develop a lot of technology to manage charge/discharge, temperature, etc? Or was all that from Panasonic too?
I just want to let you know that I code just for hobby, super simplistic projects like notes app, javascrtipt utilities, personal blog on Jekyll etc, gitlab @ davchana, I absolutely love Gitlab, and have been using it since almost two years.
Before it I always had to find a free hosting, with lot of shaddy banner ads or unreliable systems. Gitlab.com free edition has everything I wish for, & occassionally I read & wander in gitlab.com issues repo just to see & be amazed on new improvements being made. Being a completely remote company is a cherry on top.. Great Work!!
Maybe its a WSJ make good for shorts.
A distributed OS made for programmers.
The Rockstar programming language specification
I think you underestimate how common imposter syndrome is. It may be that the OP just isn't good at programming. But it may also be imposter syndrome. Having the degree suggests that they did something and gained some skills. So it isn't unlikely that the OP is selling themselves short. Plus it is better to encourage people than put them down. Most people can learn most skills, but some people require less time to learn some skills. That's really the only difference. And there's no clear evidence into which camp OP is in, but it's unlikely that they can't learn the skills.
I'm the maker of VoiceTube. Hope you love it!
It is common to push suppliers for price reductions on existing and future agreements. But I have never heard of partial refunds on past sales.

Yes. The terms under which "New GM" took over the supplier contracts of "Old GM" come close. But that was a bankruptcy; the stockholders lost everything and the management lost their jobs.

Tesla doesn't buy enough to bully many suppliers like that. If you sell Tesla bolts or tires or coils of aluminum, Tesla is a minor part of your business. Only if your business is making some custom part for Tesla can this work. Tesla does much of their custom stuff in-house, so there probably aren't many suppliers whose main customer is Tesla.
QR codes have a maximum size of 7,089 numerical digits - not enough to transmit a program or song. I'd be hoping to move about 5 MB.
The episode mentioned at the start of the article is "Game Changers". It's season 5, episode 3.
Donald Trump threatens war against Iran in all caps on Twitter