skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find the move to take home tests extremely unfair. Anyone with dependents will typically need to block out most of a day of a weekend, or risk doing it in intervals through their week.

Got a decent CV? Good luck trying to juggle applying for more than 2 interesting opportunities at once.

We mostly hire full stack web devs. IMO It's impossible to really test the abilities of each candidate across the changing landscape of front end, back end, DB & devops tech within an interview process that doesn't use a vast amount of time for everyone.

Instead, we don't whiteboard or code at all in our process at the moment, and try and get it all done in a face to face hour or two by:

* Taking their experience at face value. Examples: If they have been coding for a couple of years, don't waste everyone's time with fizzbuzz. Assume they will be able to adapt to our source control system, if they have been using a different one.

* Insisting on real world examples when asking competency questions.

* Asking generic questions about code, such as "What is clean code?", "what should you take into account for password security for a web app?", and looking for their ability to communicate as much as their actual answer.

* Looking for areas of strength and weakness to compare across candidates, rather than trying to catch them out.

* Scoring highly for enthusiasm, flexibility and a willingness to learn over pure technical knowledge.

I appreciate this approach wouldn't work for all organisations but we've done really well out of it.
Show HN: Free AI-based online writing editor
Seattle still has trolley buses, but has been getting rid of them as NG and EV buses are more flexible. Getting off track with overhead lines is annoying, and they got rid of bus overhead lines in the downtown tunnel when light rail went in (electric being previously necessary for ventilation).
New fx 8.0 release features including Interactive Digger, Arrow Keys navigation
Just sign-up for Textly, upload your document or start typing right away and get your writing fixed, receive instant feedback with AI and ML fueled corrections and recommendations.

Textly is also fueling education and business processes, has a built-in library of text templates for different tasks, and features a secret mode for working on sensitive information.
The symptomatic static of the algorithmic match
Trolleybusses are electric, they just get their electricity from overhead wires, similar to a railway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus
It's more like, given a good job market and low barriers to entry, the percentage of candidates who are not qualified will greatly outnumber the good candidates. Good programmers might be looking for work for any number of legitimate reasons, even in a hot market. Doubly so if you are offering a premium on compensation or otherwise trying to make yourself more attractive to applicants (which four hours of take home is the opposite of). The signal to noise ratio is just lower the less attractive you make applying to your company.
Cookie Is a Template-Based File Generator for Linux
Given the likelihood of coincidences like that actually happening, you'd surely end up finding lots and lots of pairs of completely unrelated people that look remarkably similar, with no way of knowing if any of them are actually the same person.
The Perfectionism Puzzle
In theory there shouldn’t be any, assuming it’s limited to an hour, both in description and in reality.

In practice there’s a pervasive phenomenon called asymmetry of effort. The hiring manager may crib a task set either from a perfunctory google search or their own body part. The sum total of time spent on their part is often five minutes, including coming up with the problem and their review of your code.

This follows no industry standard, and I can count multiple experiences where they were too inept to “grade” the homework assignment, thinking it didn’t work when it did, or that the problem set was impossible.

The reason senior engineers in particular turn down homeworks is because they’ve been burned by them before, and the average hiring engineer tends to know less than they do (but as the hiring manager, can’t assess it, mistaking competence for arrogance or ineptitude).

When a company is not willing to invest the same amount of time to interview as they ask of the candidate, it’s a strong signal of how serious they are as a quality employer.

When job hunting as a senior, hearing about take homes (esp. early stage ones) is the young person’s dating equivalent of considering a relationship with someone divorced twice and a felony. You just get conditioned to pass up kissing frogs.
Nvidia Uses Artificial Intelligence to Render Virtual Worlds in Real Time
Sounds like someone hasn't been keeping up with recent bitcoin tech and is merely repeating lines from Dec 2017.
> And it looks as though the Blockchain economy is here to stay, where many of our transactions will be processed on the blockchain and use cryptocurrency for daily transactions. Indeed, while the world maybe forever be indebted to Satoshi Nakamoto for giving us a viable cryptocurrency, bitcoin may cease to exist.

Huh? Does anyone seriously use cryptocurrencies for daily purchases right now?

It seems to me like cryptocurrencies are entirely useless (except maybe for illegal things and ransomware) and the entire space will be dead after it's done crashing. Ultimately, Satoshi Nakamoto may have accomplished nothing but caused untold misery for thousands of bankrupted people, redistributed money like a lottery, and burned the rest in electricity.
this article is misinformed. there is no single mining profitability threshold and some miners will mine at a loss. some miners are profitable at a very low price.
That makes it sound like they're betting the company on "deep learning" ("Alpha").
Happy to have found "antidisestablishmentarianism" in there!
I like the following points touched:

1. Can you review code?

2. Can you work with product on requirements for X?

3. Can you design a system?

4. Walk me through the process to debug situation Y.

That's it.
Funny this is being posted as I just started to use specter for extracting entities from XML documents we receive. I never used it before but now I see the value of:

- paths as data

- navigators as transducers

First I started using plain clojure code, then played with using xml-in [1], then created my own transducers and channels to build a dataflow-like pipeline manually, and finally started using specter because I wanted paths to be a data structure I can use to build the pipeline programmatically instead of manually. For that I needed a way for paths to become tranducers (which specter traverse-all does [2]), and I also needed paths to be a sequence of literals or "interned" elements [3] such as keywords or symbols, but not functions created on the fly. That way I can create a tree from a sequence of paths, using something similar to this SO answer [4], and build the pipeline.
I'm almost there, I should end up in a situation where I can specify a list of paths to extract from an XML document, and the dataflow pipeline needed will be built automatically, with an input channel for the parsed XML, and output channels for each given path. If you use clojure.data.xml instead of clojure.xml, my hope is to have a one pass XML parsing of larger-than-RAM XML docs.

[1] https://github.com/tolitius/xml-in

[2] https://github.com/nathanmarz/specter/wiki/List-of-Macros#tr...

[3] http://www.yourdictionary.com/interning

[4] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49515858/clojure-convert...
I didn’t notice the double negative until I reread the original statement, but I did parse the sentence correctly first time.
Google Showing Query Performance inside SERP
Modern Monetary Theory argues that income tax (and alll other direct taxes) are unnecessary because the government can riase fund via fist money and its indirect taxation via inflation.

This is effectively a tax on the entire economy and challenges every sector or segment to grow price (including labor wages!) or lose value.
This year also marks the 15th anniversary of QEMU.
Not really. I've never needed to research a job beyond a bit of Linkedin/glassdoor stalking and reading of corporate guff.

I've never had a full day interview for a company I'd actually want to work for (based on what I've learned while grinding through the interviews) so I'm beginning to take requests for those (along with requests for advance coding exercises) as a recruiting smell.
One of your side hustles is currently making 6 figures in revenue, but you're saying you haven't hit "escape velocity yet?" I'm curious if your goals are more ambitious, or perhaps 6 figures of _revenue_ isn't necessarily profitable enough to sustain you?

>But I said that about 2018, and 2017 too.
Rings so true for me as well, unfortunately! This tweet from Justin Jackson has been making it's rounds the last couple of days, maybe it will be encouraging to you: https://twitter.com/mijustin/status/1068773791952584704
char theLetterC = 2["ABC"];

Wait, what? And I thought I was good with pointers...

Edit: I think I got it, is it this?:

"ABC" + 2 == 2["ABC"] == *(2 + "ABC")

Right?
>We don't need to move lettuce production into buildings, mines or submarine farms.

Food crops in general absolutely, some like lettuce could actually benefit from being done indoors though as you could limit exposure to things like E. coli compared to traditionally grown lettuce.

Growing in a largely enclosed system also allows you to prevent runoff, use the least amount of water possible, control all environmental variables etc BUT unless we suddenly develop fusion today and magically start bringing hundreds of fusion plants online a year, using the sun is always going to be more efficient than grow lights.
Ooh. Interesting connection! You have to wonder if that wasn’t in the back of someone’s mind during the restructure.
It cannot be done in a backwards compatible way with today’s language features.
log charts are misleading because by changing the base and the vertical axis you can make a huge decline look like a blip. but seeing 80% of your money gone is anything but a blip. also there is no guarantee bitcoin will continue to have exponential returns.
Was expecting something a bit more profound.
For those joining late, looks like everything went to plan this time: https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/12/03/soyuz-crew-enjoys-prob...
Not OP, but i imagine it would face political pressure in the US. Farms take up more land than penthouse apartments, but likely have less ability to pay. You could pass the costs on to customers, but then you're advantaging food imports, which has national security implications.
Why do you aspire to write "portable" code which you are referring to as code that conforms to the ISO C standard when most widely used compilers do not? What you are suggesting is extremely impractical, it is a matter between theory and practice. Conforming to the standard when the compiler itself does not is impractical. On top of that, these compilers are available on most platforms, and yours seem to be such an edge case that it is negligible, and you can make the necessary adjustments when and if it ever comes to that. It is likely that it will not. If it does, it is just a matter of one or two ifdefs. Personally I write code that conforms to the compiler, because in reality, from a practical point of view, that is all that really matters.
Describe what the job entails, ask me if I believe I can do it, and then hire me if I agree. Fire me later if I was wrong.
So, if this is a deal breaker, what is your ideal interview scenario?
They are but they need more infrastructure than battery vehicles.
Seattle has this before for their downtown bus tunnel. Always annoying when the unfurling went wrong, but it was very workable. They got rid of it when light rail went in, and now run clean low emission buses in the tunnel instead (hybrid, natural gas) to avoid ventilation issues.
I think you're confusing the terms "simulator" with "emulator".

Both ideas have their place place though and I'd definitely be interested to see your project (if it ever matures) too
Ice Age 'Unicorn' May Have Lived Alongside Modern Humans
It's 2018. Does anybody outside of a tiny community really care? I was rooting for Rich in 2015, but I had to let it go.
Why racist? Russia has interests and an agenda it pursues. The west including the US and UK have interests and an agenda they pursue. Conflict is all-but-inevitable. Choosing a side is not racist; it's rational. You can, of course, choose to support the other side because you think the West irredeemably evil and that Isis or Russia or China are morally superior. Many have taken that path. Most people, though, choose their communities, their families, their friends, and their country.
Sure, it starts at the pop'n'mom shops. /s
The problem is class based components have to be written very carefully to remain testable, and the average developer is not that careful. It's basically a foot cannon, and the worst react spaghetti I've seen has always been a result of huge classes that manage way too much state. I believe that making it a convention for developers to break up their components into small, pure functions will raise the quality of most react applications. Recompose has made this possible for a while, but most react devs aren't familiar with it, and baking it into the framework should make that approach less exotic. Of course, you will still be able to write huge functions that manage too much state, but I think classes encourage this more than functions.
Very well. Point taken.
US cities with lots of hills still have trolley bus routes (San Francisco, Seattle, even LA has a few routes). Switzerland has them because of the hills as well (eg Lausanne). Electric + rubber has really great torque for climbing hills. Even replacing trolley buses with a tram requires the use of rubber tires instead (eg Laussane’s newer metro).
So, if enough miners drop out, wouldn’t that encourage some nefarious group to try and hijack Bitcoin by having more than 50% of the miners?

In an odd way, it seems that possible situation might keep the number of miners higher than it would otherwise be.
So what interview process tasks are acceptable to you in order to gauge your ability?
That’s the easy part - don’t apply blindly.

I’ve always gone through local recruiters that have relationships with the hiring manager. They know the salary range, the interview process, and where other candidates fail because they get feedback from both the candidate and the hiring manager.
While the numbers sound outrageous, they seem to be at least roughly the same as reported elsewhere.

"The average price for a Shanghai plate soared to 75,000 yuan ($12,000) at the city’s license plate auction over the weekend, roughly equal to the retail price of a brand new, fully loaded Geely MK-II sedan." [0]

"Over at a new 1,700-household community in Xuhui district ostentatiously named East Manhattan, its 500 parking spaces cost 1 million yuan each." [1]

[0] http://www.theurbancountry.com/2013/02/shanghai-license-plat...

[1] http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/963391.shtml
>Do you have all of your net worth tied up in Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft stock? If not, then your hard stance on the matter is pretty empty.

That's a pretty naive view to how markets work. You can easily come up with scenarios where FAANG companies end up wrecking the scene for both startups and themselves. Stifle innovation long enough through a combination of acquisitions and lobbying government officials for big tech company legislation (e.g. this EU copyright bill, GDPR, obscure data compliance specs, etc) to ensure that nothing too disruptive can really take hold. Then just bloat like all uncompetitive companies while failing to meaningfully grow revenue for 30 years and you have a recipe for underperforming the rest of the market.
One answer to this is to have your raw "source" data stored as flat as possible (Datascript, RDF, ...). Then you generate nested structures (you could call these "views") as much as you want from this data. That way, you don't have to write to nested data, because that's the pain point imo.
Technically, they did pay tax as the owners of the slaves would have been obliged in some states to pay certain fees based on outputs. (And a lot of times even on the inputs.)

No one ever evades taxes. As horrible as this may sound, that kind of included blacks.
Google sets up $25M fund for AI research to address socioeconomic problems
Sadly (or luckily?) with hooks they aren't stateless anymore.
IKEA and Xiaomi announced a strategic partnership
Microsoft Also Wants to Use Neural Networks to Design Neural Networks
> also there is no guarantee bitcoin will continue to have exponential returns

which is true of any investment vehicle. You can only look at past performance and future market factors to make predictions, but even with the safest investment methods there is no guarantee.
Judging by these tests Google safe browsing (as Chrome in these tests) is more than enough for malware blocking https://malwaretips.com/threads/updated-24-11-2018-browser-e...
The source for F-Bird the boot sector game (day 1) is here: https://github.com/nanochess/fbird and it's an incredible bit of engineering. 3 unused bytes too :-)
Yeah, that is not going to work. It's prohibitively expensive to hire and then fire a candidate. You have to convince me you're fit for the job. Either through referrals, or something equivalent - and no, I'm not a trying to show how smart I am by having you recite a RB-tree implementation with a correct remove. That wouldn't show me anything about how you can do the job, just that you studies RB trees...
Except that API kills one of the main use cases - live blocking annoying stuff that's already on the page. Apple's gimped API, as far as I can tell, offers no way with the user to interact with the plugin.

Meaning that if the blocker misses something (and it will), I have no way to deal with it.

This "privacy" canard is just Apple being Apple and punishing users in the name of full control. The #1 and #2 most used adblockers by everyone have no legitimate privacy concerns.
Dutch court rejects man’s request to be 20 years younger
I don't see anyone mentioning the ability to store about:config settings in a user.js file.

Unless you have some reason not to use it, it's much easier than changing about:config on each computer, you just copy over the user.js file.

Here's a hardened option (no affiliation): https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js

And a relaxed version: https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js/tree/relaxed
Apache Flink 1.7 released
The optics are not typically the biggest issue. It's much more that film was very slow and grainy. We've been able to make good lenses for at least 100 years and probably longer.
How to Learn FASTER (slides, Ukrainian Israeli Innovation Summit 2018)
I don't think your paraphrase version is any easier to parse than the original. However I have taken your advice onboard and tweaked my original comment.
I also balked at it, but for the opposite reason. Everyone should be able to sit down to a terminal, make a change to a repository, and commit it.

I mean even if you don't know the command (or they are using a different version control system then you are used to) you can always check the help or man page. It's still a trivial task.
Why not just go and tell everybody you work for "FooBar Solutions" one town over? They don't have a website? Well we are early stage, just gathering money, so no time yet for a website. And you should have most people off your back.

Having experienced something like this with my last SO, I feel you though, OP. It's something that can stay on your mind constantly and is very worrisome at times. Hope you hid your tracks for good or he lost interest.
Everything you wrote is based on the idea of OP not already having been hired

Way too many assumptions to decide if anybody is right or wrong

Someone already hired doesnt get to imagine how their work for hire becomes something they own
Playtika acquires Berlin-based games studio Wooga for over €100M
> I always wonder how developing countries who sell food to developed countries will get reliable markets.

They'll stop growing specialty stuff for export and start growing a more diverse range of crops and sell them domestically which will lower food prices and should benefit their economies in the long run.

The US exports 40% of the corn it grows, uses another 20% for ethanol production but we import 40% of our fruits and 20-something percent of our vegetables. We also exports absurd amounts of other grains. If we grew most of our crops for domestic use and stopped importing tropical and out of season fruits and vegetables, we'd have much more sustainable farming practices, less waste, considerably smaller carbon emissions from all the importing and exporting, etc.

Go to your grocery, you'll see mounds and mounds of bizarre looking alien pods which are allegedly fruit and vegetables from far off lands. I can't possibly imagine they sell even 50% of what the stores receive because most people simply have no idea what it is or how to prepare it.

Hell, I have problem finding sweet peppers that are molded and/or aren't wilted leathery looking things when I go to the grocery each week. Week after week, store after store, without fail. That's waste and none of it is grown domestically (mostly Mexico although occasionally the stores near me will have stuff from South America).
How I Wrote a Modern C++ Library in Rust
“640K is more memory than anyone will ever need.”

However, I would like the redundant bandwidth and computing power to be used to implement HDR first. It’s a more perceptible and immediate improvement than 8k.
> I woke up ... and took 450 milligrams of bupropion, 50 milligrams of Lamictal, 5 milligrams of aripiprazole, and 200 milligrams of modafinil ... few hours later, I took 20 milligrams of Adderall. Only then was I able to write this paragraph.

We all have bad days, but if this psychiatric cocktail is a daily routine caused by the job stresses the author should fix him/herself first before advising others, especially prospective students. Sorry, it sounds harsh. But the author should consider taking some of his/her own medicine and switch employers or careers. Even if it makes one a bit poorer, it is better long term. And if that helps it would make for a more informative future post.
Asynchronous stack traces: why await beats Promise#then()
Yep electric buses running around Schiphol airport area since last year in the Netherlands. They are great!
Yeah me too.

What did people find interesting about this to upvote it to the front page?

It seems only relevant to this persons friends / former colleagues from ~4 years ago.
React started with class components, because of state, I guess.

Later they added function components because they are more concise and tell readers that this component is a simple mapping from props to virtual DOM elements.

With hooks, a recent addition to React, they seem to move away from class components. Hooks enable you to use state and do things when a component is mounted in the DOM or removed from it inside of function components.
no whiteboard
I found this interesting because, this is a man who's left his job and went a little bit 'dark' because of a mentally-ill former colleague who got obsessed with him - how many women are out there who left jobs because of creeps or stalkers, and then went 'dark'?
Exactly. The high cost, inflexibility, and maintenance requirements of overhead wires all make them unattractive for new installations.

Battery electric buses, on the other hand, can operate anywhere that diesel buses can, and a fault with one bus or one section of wire will not break the whole route.

Many cities also consider overhead wires to be visually unattractive. Birmingham's new tram network is being built to use overhead wires on suburban tracks, but switch to battery power in the city centre to avoid having to install overhead wires there.