skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The number one reason companies cite for not sending feedback is legal risk. Interestingly, I don’t think this is true. Companies put themselves at legal risk if they are rejecting candidates for illegitimate reasons, like race, gender, or a disability. If they send feedback which tells candidates, truthfully, that they were rejected because they didn’t get very far on the coding project, then if anything a company reduces their legal risk: they have a transparent track record of evaluating candidates based only on their skills.

Ah, but have you considered what would happen when you give this "transparent skills-based feedback" to 90% of your rejected candidates, but then a couple of them get rejected for reasons you don't want to specify, or could potentially be interpreted (by an aggressive litigation attorney) as illegal discrimination?

Some candidates get rejected because "nobody enjoyed talking to him", "he seemed weird", "alienated the interviewers", etc.

Are you going to write any of that in your transparent rejection letter?
Libraries are far from fading into obscurity.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/21/millennials-...
I'd care more if a candidate understands MVCC and transaction isolation levels. (which surprisingly few do)
Well, I mean... you just described Economics 101 basically.
> Driving automation is orders of magnitude more expensive

Only if you pretend it didn't take decades of gradual improvement to make the iPhone possible, and ignore the epic manufacturing cost of the components. Basically only if you ignore everything that has / does go into smartphones. It took hundreds of billions of dollars of investment into the underlying iPhone components and their near ancestors, to make the iPhone possible.

What's the total cost of the specific driving automation segment so far? A fraction of all the money plowed just into semiconductor fabrication development and construction over the last ~25 years so we could have smartphones at all. Then move on to the investment into storage, software, glass, communication chips, security, glass, etc.

It'd be equivalent to pretending that we're going to leap from Tesla's hands-free to full automation without anything inbetween. The iPhone didn't materialize out of nowhere.
What industry are you in? I have never seen project management done well in enterprise companies.
a) RAID5 can fault precisely one drive without data loss. Two overlapping errors (e.g. two errors in one stripe) and you're up shit creek without a paddle. This is the generic definition for RAID5, not an implementation detail.

b) What makes you think RAID6 doesn't also incur this? The only difference is that RAID6 also includes a Q parity block in each stripe, so the only thing you get saved from is if you don't need to read the parity on the stripes, you save 1/(N+P-1) IOs per drive.

RAID6 is still going to need to recompute ~2/(N+P) parities (one P, and one Q) for rebuilding a drive over (N+P) stripes; and reconstruct the data for the rest (depending on how P and Q are implemented, they could interweave which they use for reconstructions, but AIUI it's generally more expensive to recompute from Q than P, and R than P or Q, in many instances of this math).

c) Many RAID systems can rebuild starting from the starts of the respective disks and streaming along (or, in recent ZFS's case, coalescing the IOs to be in sequential order groups and issuing them), though certainly not all of them.

The logic "usually" goes that RAID5/RAID6 rebuilds are dangerous because they involve reading all the bits, so to speak, so if you don't have an equivalent of scheduled patrol reads to be sure bits at rest that haven't been read by users haven't gone south, you'll first discover this...during a rebuild, and with RAID5, you're SOL.
My experience with trying this for a year at a previous startup which shall remain nameless is that no matter how I approached candidate qualification, work-sample or interview or ritual chicken sacrifice, I'd still have the same problem of clients rejecting candidates by default. Recruiters mostly all work on your "second" model. So why add crappy tech qualification to your problems? Do at least that right!
The Hyper.link #2 – 50 links/10 topics
I actually like the concept of inserting the images in between the "LIBRARY" bookends. I agree that the narrow slab san-serif typeface is mildly inappropriate for a library, but it's passable assuming the intent is for the brand to feel bolder and more modern. My biggest complaint is the omission of a logomark. The old logomark was boring and uninspired, and I think Pentagram not doing a logomark was a huge missed opportunity. They had the chance to create a truly iconic logomark for an iconic institution, and instead said "Eh, logotype is enough." It is definitely not enough.
Since they are using this strategy, translation of idioms is terrible. I have switched translate.
You can collect more data with an app.
Lets, for the sake of argument, say you could solve the housing crisis instantly. Suddenly, homes in major cities drop to $100,000, thanks to some hypothetical government backed program.

The part of the problem that nobody ever seems able to solve, is what you do for existing owners who are locked into a 30 year mortgage on their $1,000,000+ property. You would effectively be wiping out their life savings. There would need to be some way of appeasing the existing owner base, before you can ever solve the housing crisis.
Most engineering interviewees fail to advance because of cultural/personality/communication issues and not technical competence. The amount of people I've washed out of the interview process because they've gone on some rant about windows vs linux, political ideology or just came off as unable to communicate in general.

This is also the hardest to communicate as it is something inherent to the candidate. It's not personal, but it gets personal at this point.
I can understand where you are coming from, and I often follow a rather similar approach where I will implement things myself if the alternative is depending on some unwieldy beast of a dependency.

(I did write my own Servlet engine for a project once, and it was faster than Jetty, and had better GC characteristics at the time, but in the end I ditched it for Jetty as I didn't want to maintain a complete HTTP implementation - that wasn't key to the project. The extra performance and the dependencies I got rid of were just not worth the extra effort).

However the reason I always chose to use JUnit was because I wanted the unit tests to be familiar to other developers since this is often where people go to understand how a piece of code works. In a sense it was a part of Java at the time. And I chose Maven for similar reasons. Plus the fact that Maven wasn't something you could really escape from in Java. Sooner or later it rears its head and I thought I would cause less pain if I just accepted that.

I like the idea behind Maven: convention over configuration, but I've never been a fan of how that idea has been executed. It could have been better if someone more experienced (and obsessive) had designed it way back when.

I still think Gradle is worse than Maven though. I'm not a fan of scriptable build systems, they should be declarative (and most of the time when people think they need to script things they just haven't bothered to learn how to use the tools). And even if you use Gradle, you can't really escape dealing with Maven.

(I ditched Java a couple of years back, so I haven't done Java for a while. I'm not overly fond of Oracle, so I had promised myself that I would stop using Java as soon as I found a replacement language that suited me. It took a few years, but I eventually found a different language I liked even better: Go)
It's not just Germany that has lower tech wages. I've looked at moving back home to the UK many times so that I can spend more time with my family, but can't reconcile the fact that I'd have to take a 75-80% pay cut to stay in this industry. Compared to North America, software engineers are paid pittance in the UK... now that you've brought my attention to the fact it's the same in Germany, it begs me to ask the question - is this the same in all of Europe?
Rlwrap
I think mip-mapping is the standard approach to handle that scenario.
This is ridiculous. Any app that's in use is going to take up space in a tabstrip or other context-switching ui. If you want it to be its own window that's exceedingly easy to accomplish.
Is a bootcamp grad much different than a university grad?

While in school, I read blogs claiming that the majority of CS grads can't code. I got the hint this may be true in one of my 3rd-year classes where we had to work in groups of 2 or 3 over the course of the semester to write a program that was essentially like an alpha version of SimCity. At the last day of class, we had to present our work. Half the groups didn't complete the project, and one group only had a blank window with a Help button that presented a wall of text. Then, during my senior project, in my group of six, two of them admitted to not knowing how to code, with one of them saying they didn't even want to code, they just became a CS major because they heard CS majors have low unemployment and good salaries.

I've digressed a bit, but...

When I finished my degree, I didn't have a software engineering internship under my belt, so I made sure to list personal projects on my resume. I think the presence of projects done on my own time for my own enjoyment and learning was a key factor in landing my first job.

So no, I don't think there's anything offensive about rejecting a candidate if a bootcamp is all they have to show.
IBM and Australia Partner to Use Blockchain for Data Security
The thing is you still reduced arrogance to technical correctness. However, what I was trying to get at was, what about cases where the technical correctness is just fine? If it's their attitude or hygiene or something else that you don't like, how do you tell them that?

I was trying to get at the same thing you just said, which is that, like you, most people would become uncomfortable providing feedback on at least some of these. Meaning that you would have to turn away these candidates without any concrete feedback. Now how do you imagine they'll react when they realize most people do get feedback but they didn't? Is their reaction (which might result in bad publicity) a risk you and your company really want to take? For what gain?
10 ways you can help BuzzFeed keep running, you wont believe the 9th one.
I was amazed / impressed to read that some of the pneumatic tube systems in cities were operating for over 100 years. That's a long time for any given technology.
I'm kind of bothered by the choice of direct SQL versus ORM. I'd prefer something in between that assists with SQL but doesn't try to completely hide you from the RDBMS: helper API's. I know many developers "hate" the RDBMS (perhaps because it's unfamiliar), but shifting the burden from potentially tricky RDBMS's to potentially tricky ORM's is not problem solving, just problem shifting. But maybe the ORM debate is another topic in itself.
Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation
I could be mistaken but I believe there are rules in place for public and private companies, as well as non profits, regarding director independence and employees are not considered "independent directors". This came, I believe, as a result of the Enron scandal. Surely this has some role in why employees are not on boards.

Here is a link to a Nasdaq policy on the matter[1].

[1] https://www.sec.gov/rules/sro/34-47516.htm
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17851108
Our dystopian future where we will be forced fed cookies in order for accurate optimization.
This is an excellent exposition of the topic with nice animations. I look forward to more of these.

How long does it take to work through the textbooks ?
Self driving cars don't kill people. Programmers that program self driving cars kill people.
We've been doing it since 2011, though we saw significant improvements when we switched to 7.x. Memory and CPU usage dropped by ~50% at that time. We did have occasionally memory leaks back on 5.6 (usually around shared libraries like libxml) but haven't had any issues whatsoever since 7.

I didn't try too much daemonization around ~2005, though Schlossnagle's "Advanced PHP Programming" (2004) did have a whole chapter on daemonizing and the pcntl functions that made it possible.
http://archive.is/77hdf
The former president of my country (Uruguay) was a terrorist (or "freedom fighter"), and so is the current vice-president. So, does every national at my country have to say "Yes"?
This is the biggest US/Europe cultural difference I've noticed. I can't speak for every country in Europe or every industry, but for every job in Europe I've personally applied for, I got a rejection letter if I wasn't offered the job. Sometimes just a minimal notification, but always something. Not in America though...

The best is for European academic jobs. Often there's a schedule up front for when they'll make a decision, usually a 2-stage thing like: we will shortlist candidates by Sept 15, interview in the following 3-4 weeks, and make a hiring decision by Oct 15. So if you didn't get shortlisted, you get informed early and don't have to wonder whether your resume is still under consideration or what. American universities, though, leave you guessing what their schedule is, may take months to get back to you even if they're interested, and usually don't send a rejection letter if they aren't.
CoQA: Large-Scale Dataset for Building Conversational Question Answering Systems
When did Women's Studies become the Underwater Basket Weaving of the 21st century? Can we go back to a useless major that isn't derogatory?
Not many public companies are structured like this, and for a while it was a requirement of some exchanges that one share be one vote. I know that people on Hacker News (high concentration of founders) like the idea of a public listing without one share one vote, but I think it is better for companies in the long run to have their board seats elected by the shareholders. It may seem good now to have Mark Zuckerberg to have total control of FB, but will it seem like a good idea for his children to have more control than the actual owners? This is the kind of trouble companies like Viacom have gotten into by giving their founders too much control.
Ask HN: An event thrown by a competitor will you go?
What kind of competitor event would you attend? Apart from the usual free food and booze, would you be interested in getting together with different engineers to talk about the technology you all are working on or would you be worried about NDAs, etc.?
Personally, I think the most growth I had in software engineering was when I had my code reviewed by others, and I participated in reviews of other's code.

You learn a lot from other people by looking through their code, and you learn ways to improve your code by having people with more experience review your code.

Maybe find someone who is familiar with the language/application you are interested in and is willing to review your code.
Yes, I did restate a particular subset of Economics 101 which your comment seemed to have left out-of-sight and out-of-mind.
Hard to care about the specific content of rejection emails when the average applicant will get hundreds of them before landing a position. It's like getting mad at the rain in Seattle winter. Though I do admit, the more effusive they seem to be about turning me down, the more offended I am as a professional. Then I forget about it 5 seconds later and move on to my next applications.
World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in New York Times Since 1995
Stop being obtuse. People have to find the software they want first and then download the DMG from somewhere which usually involves ignoring a billion fake "DOWNLOAD NOW" buttons. The App Store is a trusted platform with literally one click find an app and one click to install.

You're being purposely disingenuous.
That's exactly what doxxing is.(Paraphrasing here) "This guy was really shitty in my job interview. Here's their LinkedIn page."

Seemed pretty cut and dry to me. What about it disqualified it as a not-doxxing situation?
I don't know if I should laugh or cry
That's not what I am suggesting at all. I am suggesting we need more small spaces, like SROs (I have already linked to the Wikipedia article on that in a different comment).

In the 1950s, most new homes were around 1200 square feet and held about 4.5 people. Today, the typical new home is over 2400 square feet and holds about 3.5 people (IIRC).

I see zero reason why 2400 square foot homes would lose any value whatsoever if we built more small homes so people who can't afford a house that big can still afford a place of their own.
Spearmint – Open-source black-box optimization
Yeah well, one of the many reasons I generally avoid HN.
PHP being stateless is a good thing, as well as real classes, real interfaces and type hinting.

Sadly, PHP developers still use bad coding practices. For example, one of the popular PHP OOP frameworks, Symfony, makes things like HTTP Request or logged user a global variable by storing it in DI container. What about incapsulation and concern separation? The code breaks if you run it from CLI. PHP should not copy bad ideas like this from Ruby.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17831943

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17835871
I'll agree that what layers a map ought to show is a subjective matter.

But if you have two maps and they both have a shared subset of layers, you can (for that subset) objectively evaluate which map more accurately represents the real world, eg: has more objects than the other map, and/or has objects marked more accurately.

And what I'm saying is that for the layers that they have in common, I think OSM wins hands down.
"Can't understand their accent" _is_ discriminatory. Please don't ever recommend against a candidate for that.

Companies are definitely taking the easy way out. The reality is that most of them don't have a good hiring process, aren't consistent about hiring decisions, and tend to choose based on factors that have nothing to do with the job they're hiring for.
Please excuse my ignorance but I'm just really curious because it's been a few times that I have seen comments on HackerNews by people the were homeless at some point. How does this happen in the US?

In my mind if you have the interest to read HackerNews you would have the skills to get a decent job that would get you off the street. I'm clearly unaware of the obstacles that prevent that and would like to learn more.

I live in South Africa and the inequality here is horrendous but most of that is due to a disparity of education. There is a shortage of skilled workers so in my mind someone with HN interests wouldn't struggle to find enough work to avoid homelessness.
Our stats were within 5% of IPSec, so that's definitely an implementation issue.
Which one has more chances into resulting the version variable not being overwritten.
var const_version = 0.5; or const version = 0.5;

Guidelines, good/bad practices and patterns are merely suggestions, enforcement is king.
hi http://www.kraken-php.com/build/img/index/logo-php-adbac7823...
There are already state licensed cannabis growers in Las Vegas.
This is one of my favorite videos of his. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYhAKxOlfXQ All movement and actuation is powered by a single motor. The timing is synchronized through gearing and linkages. I am in awe whenever I watch it.
What unusual thing was happening as of recently, is that legacy processes up to 90nm began "coming back back from the dead," because the bleeding edge became so "congested" by very few behemoth consumers with exclusive deals with fabs: GPUs, top tier phone SoCs, and high end network switch chips.

On my memory, 65nm was the last process on which a "cookie cutter SoC" was still a good business. But with more opportunities coming up in "niche microcontroller" market today, thanks to boom in "smart things," a generic cheap low power process might too become a viable business again.

GloFo might have just noticed that, and are trying to capitalise by being first in the new niche: tier 1 fab service on cost optimised legacy process.

They were already the biggest fab for companies to whom always getting the best process is not raison d'etre, who can't afford gigantic MOQs of last gen processes.

So they were picking up whomever TSMC was losing due to MOQs, and lack of first class treatment. TSMC was too greedy putting so much focus on work with tier 1 superplayers.

Question thought, what will this mean for their no. 1 customer...? Though they announced them moving to TSMC, their 7nm might still not materialise for quite some time, and they still have to make their low end chip tapeouts somewhere.
I do quite like common lisp, but:

> In Common Lisp you can certainly choose to panic on or ignore errors, but there’s a better way to work. When an error is signaled in Common Lisp, it doesn’t unwind the stack. The Lisp process will pause execution at that point and open a window in your editor showing you the stack trace. Your warrior’s sword is hovering over the monster, waiting for you. At this point you can communicate with the running process at the REPL to see what’s going on. You can examine variables in the stack, or even run any arbitrary code you want.

This doesn't seem like something that's particularly difficult to do with c/gdb.
> Too many boards are out of touch with what goes on in the company.

Do you have examples of this?
I think your point that the actual companies have to judge culture fit is critical. TripleByte's interview is about as purely technical as you can get. Their promise to client companies is that the candidates who pass are technically sound to a baseline level. That leaves the companies to judge cultural fit, which is where all of that legal liability seeps in.

I've done the TripleByte interview before. Even got an offer through them (though I didn't take it). Their interview is almost entirely about fundamental skills plus a bit about your ability to communicate. There's very little in that interview where you could come up with lawsuit material.

All of that said, I think their technical interview is a pretty good one. Their interview feedback was accurate, and it definitely felt both more rigorous and more fair than the vast majority of the first rounds I've done.
How a Serial Entrepreneur Turned a Problem into a Profitable Business
That’s why I said it’s unfortunate. I intended to capture the logic of why things are what they are.

And as much as it’s great to help someone out with some feedback, it’s not so great to risk the livelihood of your employees—you know, the people who actually depend on you to provide for their families—and the survival of your company for it. Sometimes doing the right thing requires you to have some perspective and be cold. This is one of those situations.
I'm kind of sad that someone would downvote this without really asking why I might think Python isn't suitable for serious software development.

The main reason is that it isn't a language that is nice to users. It shifts the entire burden of setting up an environment to run the Python application in. Which means that installing software tends to be a messy affair at the best of times, and a complete mystery to most non-programmers.

The difference between a good professional software developer and someone who is a just hack, is empathy with the user. Having an obvious way to package applications allows developers to be nice to their users. Python never provided that, so rather than producing nice binaries (or something akin to Jar files) it just dumps the problem of assembling the bits in the user's lap. That's a dick move.
This seems shady. I think the gist I took away was, they will protect my stem cells that were painfully extracted from my bone marrow as long as I work for them. If I quit or get fired, they dump my cells. There is no guarantee the cells will even be useful for anything.