skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disclaimer: I only took a quick glance at the material, not a deep dive. So feel free to discount my criticism as severely as you like. Or whack me with a clue-bat, if needed.

1. In the fuzzing chapter author seems to be showing how to create a fuzzer in Python. OK, so that is great if you want to learn the basics of creating a fuzzer. HOWEVER... there is a great Python module called "hypothesis" that is well developed, well maintained, and 100% production ready. If your goal is to do fuzzed testing of Python, I urge you to check out hypothesis. It integrates nicely with drivers like unittest, and does automatic test case reduction. In other words, if it discovers a failing case, it does a pretty darn decent job of trimming the failing case down to the minimal inputs necessary to provoke the failure. In fact, I urge you to check out hypothesis, period. You might be surprised at how much your current testing leaves out.

2. The first chapter on testing talks about the basics of doing a unit test and writing a test driver. Again, test drivers that are well maintained and have a lot of mileage on them already exist for Python. But more over, the author seems to focus on tactical testing. Unit testing is good, yes, but there is a difference between "testing" and "validation". Testing is tactical. Validation is strategic. I didn't see anything there about analyzing the product test space, and how to make judgment calls about how to decide what to test and how to measure coverage in a way that ensures that your customers will be well-served. For most real products, the entirety of the test space is intractably large, so it is very important to know how to target tests that tickle edge and corner cases, because just throwing random crap at the SUT, while necessary, is unlikely to sensitize the interesting test points. (Imagine each test case as throwing darts at a dart board: You want as many darts to land on the line between the rings as land cleanly within the rings.)
Hey, creator here! I built this a few years ago on a whim, and am surprised how well it still works. Thanks for sharing again :)

(Psst, if you're an engineer and like dev tools, I'm hiring! https://readme.io/careers)
So, in summary, these organizations are struggling with two related factors: 1) How do you predict the future? 2) How do you do that at scale?

In regards to 2) many of these educational places have decided for the past few decades that test criteria makes some sense. However, they have recently discovered that the testing metrics have been gamed. Therefore, as the metrics have become the goals unto themselves, their ability to accomplish 1) has been diminished to the point of uselessness. They are back at square one (or at least they were in 2014 when the article was written).

We all know that you really can't predict the future, that black swan events override all the metrics you could ever come up with. So, the article is talking about 'grit' as a metric that they could use instead, as it seems to predict the future a bit better than the SAT. Of course, we all know that the 'grit' metric will be gamed as well. There's a neuron firing somewhere in my head that is saying: Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, but I think it's a bit more base than that. The issue is that these higher ed places would LOVE to really dig deep into a person, but they've not the time or money to do that at scale.

I think, that like in many militaries and corporations, the issue is not the selection process, but the construction process. Given the right resources and support, you can actually turn lead into gold. It's that these institutions need to support, mentor, and trust their students. However, that is very expensive and takes a long timeline to measure if it works at all. Let alone what to fix or improve upon. Inherently, it does not scale either. It's messy, personal, and complex. It's real and not well reflected in charts and tables, hence the bureaucrats dislike it as it has a null/negative effect on their careers.

Some good examples of such a process that actually does produce results are the Free Democratic Schools [0] though they tend to be very liberal arts focused. Specifically, I'd love to call out Deep Springs College [1] as a prime example. St. John's College [2] is also structured well in the 'nurture' aspect.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_democratic_schools#Uni...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Springs_College

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John%27s_College_(Annapoli...
They failed because they're mediocre to abysmal ideas that are implemented probably just well enough to scratch the itch of a hobbyist, before outing themselves as flops in the real world. And any that are actually good ideas with a poor interface need to be rewritten anyways, either to improve the UI or scale with growth/success. So beyond "the idea" of the app (which might have value in some cases), the majority are actually worth less than nothing, they're the proven failures. It's like shopping for a formula one racecar in a junk yard, and thinking "wow, some of these even have wheels!"

You can disagree, no point in flogging a dead horse (or app). :)
SnakeAI – Training a Neural Network to Play Snake
Follow the (PAC) Money
What every US state says about taking ballot selfies
I happen to like “middle-men” — when it improves my experience and saves time. I don’t want to go to the refinery to buy gas any more than I want to spend a day driving to a dozen farms to pick up my weekly groceries. Middle-men are bad when they add no value. For example, subscriptions in the App Store — I love that because I can go to one place and cancel anything instantly without having to go through The NY Times or Angie’s List style phone “retention” representatives. For the business, it’s a win as well, I am more likely to subscribe to something when there is less onboarding and offboarding friction. With the App Store, I can, for example, change my credit card seamlessly for all of my subscriptions rather than trying to both remember and track down individual vendors. I also don’t trust some <random vendor> with my payment, or even contact information. That’s worth value to me. I would love it if I could use Apple Pay for everything, such as utility payments or insurance payments. Dealing with MetLife for example, is a nightmare. To set up automatic credit card payments, you have to fill out a 2-page paper form and mail or fax it to them.
Thank you, I appreciate the links very much.
Good point. I miss Twitter's API.
That doesn't make any sense. Life insurance isn't cheaper if you promise to spend it on cryonic storage. It's just a part of your estate, and there are better things you can do with that.
We can do dynamic networking — the routing tables for the hardware is reloadable at runtime — but it's sufficiently difficult to do the routing computations that we only do that when the simulation is stopped at the moment. (We actually usually use the machine to compute its own routing tables; that's the fastest approach since it is a massively parallel problem.)

However, the effective network can route dynamically (by faking things on top of an initially-zero-weight all-to-all connection pattern between two neuron populations). One of our PhD students is working on this, and on the types of dynamic online learning that this enables, modelling the dynamic generation and removal of synapses that occurs in biological neurons. We also support tuning of connection weights in response to the history of synaptic activity via Spike Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP), and have done for a few years (using earlier generations of the hardware config).
That was how my friend group used to employ Dodgeball, back before Google acquired it and sucked all the utility out. It was really magical, getting a constant stream of ambient, no-pressure invitations to random gatherings of friends.
> "there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots."

First time ever hearing this. What an interesting expression
This is what is taught in our schools. Grievance studies. If someone can take offense by reading between the lines and constructing a strawman, you must conclude that offense was intentional and attack the offender. Benefit of doubt, presumption of innocence is gone.
This idea that putting aside the amount of parental leave candidates took when evaluating them for promotion is somehow "punishing" people who didn't take leave seems like a real stretch to me.

I don't think it'd be difficult to let people enjoy the benefits the company has agreed to provide without punishing them, indeed, this strikes me as the only reasonable way for the company to behave. Ideally, as time goes on, all employees with avail themselves of the full suite of benefits making this discrimination againts those who use their benefits will become moot.
I'm curious how this plays out in the long term.

Apple seems very aggressive about blocking 3rd party code from running on their hardware.

I think the goal of the T2 is to block Hackintosh and also to block hardware upgrades.

At some point Apple is going to lock this down. They have a history of doing so and giving them the benefit of the doubt is probably a bad call.
> I'm not even sure whether he considers himself an atheist or agnostic.

Presumably he wouldn't cite the convergence towards atheism as an example of convergence to the truth if he'd consider it mistaken. So that assumption is safe, I'd think.
What's "really going on" is the media taking notice of one of its own being butchered by the Saudis.

As you correctly observed, there is no political will in the US/UK/SA bloc to draw attention to Saudi-borne atrocities. This percolates down to major news platforms, contingent upon an implicit truce between Saudi Arabia and the media class. This was frustrated (although likely not severed) by the Khashoggi affair.

To address your larger concern - I am sympathetic to the argument that the most 'advanced' nation-states are no less complicit in 'barbaric' acts, war crimes, systemic violence, etc etc than those which more often receive scrutiny.

Even in this light, the Saudi example is exceptional: it's an explicitly anti-democratic hereditary autocracy with a medieval justice system having no concept of codification (other than deference to the Quran and Hadith) or legal precedent (rulings are inconsistent and case-by-case). Essentially any investment capital or financial dealings with the SA, the state, is directly debited to or from the Saudi royal family.

This is different from China and even Russia, for which one could make also the case that the state is insufficiently democratic, has arcane/draconian laws, etc etc, and that the money is likely to be siphoned off to oligarchs or state accessories. In fact, to your point, business with these countries _is_ often criticized - some would say to not a great enough degree. But drawing an equivalence on the basis of questionable state actions alone is, well, equivocating in this case.
The Future of Front End Dev
I think what surprises a lot of people is that Google would take a premier product like Gmail and make it slower and less user-friendly.

Even when you try to use the "basic HTML", they decided to not provide a lot of simple features such as basic view customizations (e.g. standard, compact, relaxed). I'm guessing that was done to make sure people use the new UI - so it's use the slow UI or too bad for you.

Not sure much will change in terms of the new UI since people are more wedded to their email addresses than say their choice of search engine or maps.

When I worked with them back in the day, there was a certain "take it or leave it" attitude at times from some senior people about some decisions in products.

This was not all the people and I'm not speaking about the present leadership who I don't know, just that it was the case because back in the mid/late 2000s with my experiences and people I knew via working relationships.
Ooh! Actually, you can do this already with Slack by choosing "Direct message, mentions & keywords" under settings. Not exactly the same, but it helps.
Let's also not forget that literal billions have been spent convincing people to reject evolution, climate change. It's a lot of marketing disguised in all sorts of different ways that has completely disrupted the public's support of scientific work.
I'm not sure it has to be so difficult. It took me about an hour to come up with a scheme for creating long, unique, and random looking passwords that are very easy to remember.

Basically I have a prefix of length 7 which is two words, where some of the letters get converted to numbers, and then I use shift to make them into special characters.

Then for each website I append a different word that has some meaning for me, and convert the letters to numbers. Then I add a special character at the end.

A typical password might look like

P!^^w)r$M19175r?

Which is very easy for me to remember and type, reasonably long, and certainly not on any lists of most commonly used passwords.

Ways you could improve this method would be to have different prefixes for different industries (banking, social media, etc).
Consortium for Space Genetics
People get killed every day making similar assumptions with automobile safety. The ability for a person to "get it" is not a good indicator of their susceptibility to harm.
Some people enjoy doing more. I work at work, then I work at home on side projects. This does not have to mean I am dying from overwork. It is the same for exercise, am I trying to impress people or get attention? I don't think so, I'm pretty sure I just like doing pull ups. By all means, do what makes you happy, if you want to check out after 40 hours, that is fine. However, don't project your attitude to work on other people. It can be perfectly healthy and enjoyable to work your ass off.
Anecdotally, plenty of my friends have 16gb phones still, and often are deleting and reinstalling apps like instagram/snapchat/anything you can dispense for a few days to free up storage to actually use the device. Want to record a 2 minute video? Better delete an app or else recording will abruptly cease. While I still had a 16gb phone, it got to the point where I wasn't reliably getting emails pushed to the device because it was always full, yet I had only a small handful of apps.

This isn't 2010 where everyone wants the top 25 apps, and could actually install them since they weren't hitting 100mb each. Inflation of app sizes and continued premiums on useful storage amounts from Apple has been forcing people to cut the fat and keep only the most essential apps installed. Even if you had a large iCloud account for your photos or texts to reside off your device, you still need local storage for apps.
The LM383 Story
That's definitely a thing, and you're right, it doesn't add much entropy (people choose from a few numbers, a few special characters, not that many substitutions). Four extra characters that are truly random (even just out of 26 letters) is way better. However, that's not the alternative I'm worried about. I'm worried about people using phrases that will be in the first few thousand entries in a phrase dictionary.
The Israelis, presumably the best at this game, killed a waiter in front of his pregnant wife in Norway in a case of mistaken identity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillehammer_affair), got caught, and the consequences weren't that bad even with Norway being a NATO member...
So the guardian is already preparing for a follow-up of the election? If the party it is supporting fails, they'll be able to say 'hey we tried to warn you but you didn't listen' and if the party wins, they'll say 'Because of our courageous act of journalism, the enemy (replace by the target-of-the-day) did not act/was thwarted'
But when a fund is doing as well as SoftBank is, it would be very odd for an LP to veto an investment.
At risk of sounding ignorant but has anyone fuzzed something like APIs before?
Would love to get some anecdotes from fuzzing more abstracted systems.
KAY:+Who+really+won+the+Munk+Debate+on+populism+–+and+why
B2B project MVP
Hello! I'm creating digital-out-of-home advertising solution with social services (wayfinding, wifi hotspot). It's standalone digital kiosk (smth like Link NYC or CIVIQ). We have two hypothesis' - traditional OOH ad does not attract attention; and second - advertisers need analytics.
It's very pricey project, so working lean we need to create an MVP. I think that it would be tablet in taxis. It'll help us to validate two hypothesis cheap. But I can be wrong, so I need an advice from you guys. What MVP I have to create for this B2B project?
After interviewers are trained, they will perform at least two "shadow" interviews where they tag along an experienced interviewer and they want the interviewer conduct the interview and then are asked to write up an interview report. After they finish writing the report, they can see what the experienced interviewer wrote up, so they can understand how the writeup should be done.

Afterwards, the new interviewer has to do a non-trivial number of interviews before they are considered "calibrated". When an interviewer is uncalibrated, their score won't be given much weight, and the hiring committee can see how their interview reports and scores compare against more experienced interviewers. This also gives an opportunity for the hiring committee to send interview feedback (e.g., you're asking a banned question; the coding question is too simple, so it's not providing enough of a useful signal; don't ask "trick questions" which again don't provide much useful signal whether or not the candidate can answer it correctly, etc.)

So there is certainly ways in which interviewers do get suggestions for improvement. And it doesn't have to be _that_ expensive. It's just a matter of making sure you don't have more than one uncalibrated interviewer per panel.
Would the algorithmic runtime of this be O(N)?
Red is a colour, but not all colours are red.

That doesn't mean that red isn't a colour because there are colours that are not red.
I agree:

> We don’t yet know the clear understanding of the case

this is clearly bullshit, we know what happened and regardless of authority chains it was still a normal function of the backwards Kingdom come fully to light.

But at the same time controlling $45 billion dollars of someone's money will make you choose your words carefully.
as someone working on a saas product its extremely helpful to be able to point to that giant list of other companies that have moved past the naive and wrong "free speech" approach to these people.
Yet another problem with apps. Every time I download a new one I start getting pointless notifications and I have to go to the Apps Manager (which on Android is O[n] slow) to turn them off.
Increases the suffering of who exactly, and by what measure?
The Rich People's Computer? (1999)
That's exactly why I would rather trust code from random SO answers than from the ad network.
I'm afraid that without some systemic-level changes, donating less time to work and more towards infrastructure maintenance would only be giving free gifts to corporations and small entrepreneurs alike, who will be happy to put the improved infrastructure to use in making more money for themselves.

We need a way for improving things where, when a community improves its own space, the gains don't immediately get privatized.
What do you mean by nuclear? If you think polonium, it's lethality is not linked to it's radioactivity, it's purely chemical.
I will admit that it's not quite equivalent, but there was a learning curve that happened when hotels switched from metallic keys to magnetic keycards. I don't think that it's absurd.

I guess a more direct example would be an employer trusting you with the combination of a safe. You would need to remember the combination which presumably would be changed periodically.

The point I think I'm trying to make is that it's rare for a business to leave the responsibility on the consumer to secure the property of that business whether it's access to a server, a hotel room, or a safe.
> You didn't literally say those words

True.

> but that's the only reasonable conclusion based on your statement

False.
> and it had to be implemented quickly (hence the lack of typechecker and other advanced features)

Since then there has been more than enough time to implement optional static types.

In fact, the EcmaScript 4 proposal had those, before it was trashed in 2007 or so and the TC39 started EcmaScript 5 from scratch.
Hi, author here. I saw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18380293 so thought I'd share an older blog post on a similar topic.
You don't think there's the slightest bit of difference between production code written at even very dysfunctional organizations with mediocre developers, and random answers on StackOverflow?

And you've only been here for a few weeks so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but calling something "unintentionally...hilarious" is usually taken as just another way of calling someone an idiot. I'd suggest you try to find ways to make your point without deriding those who don't share your view, especially on something so inconsequential.
I do not believe there is any data to back up this assertion. Indeed, it's exactly this kind of discrimination that people are looking to combat.

Looking around my office there is a person here who's about a year younger than me but I don't think it's a given that this one year difference makes them somehow less experienced than myself. We're both adults in our forties with many years of experience each, quibbling over a year hear and there strikes me as pointless and counter productive. There are other, more important, differences between us.
This is reasonable logic at face value, but it fails to account for the fact that many segments of society disagree on what is and is not inflicting suffering on society. Plenty of States seem to think that BLM inflicts suffering, and have attempted to curb it with "Blue Lives Matter" legislation. Some people think that abortion is suffering tantamount to murder. A few have even been willing to commit acts of violence in an attempt to curb it - it's not far fetched to think that many would try and censor pro-choice speech. Saying that we should tolerate speech, except for bad speech is not supporting free speech. Who knows when the censor will decide that your views inflict suffering?

If we don't trust a democracy to enact reasonable censorship (outside of narrow cases like issuing credible snd specific threats, breaching classified secrets, etc.) then why should we trust private corporations accountable to no one but their shareholders?
It was built in 2013! https://github.com/gkoberger/stacksort/commits/master?after=...
Do you seriously not know what the scientific method is?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=scientific+method
It may be easier than maps - which I am not sure about. But the attempt at maps will most likely have dampened their lust for a similar endeavor.
Comfort is not a programming paradigm.

Just because only might need a bit more boilerplate for currying or partial applications, doesn't prevent writing FP libraries in modern Java.
Manage global state with React hooks