skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't hire employees. If you must, hire remote or part-time. (There's a whole ecosystem in Silicon Valley of folks and/or apps who are willing to be your part-time lawyer, part-time accountant, part-time admin for a much lower fee than a full-timer, and then they work maybe 1 week/year for you and have 50 other clients.)

Most of the tiny startups that actually make it start with an initial product built entirely by the founding team. Once you've got something people like, use, and ideally pay for, then you seek investment and get your $3M or so, which pays for an initial team of ~5-10 employees for a year. By then you'll have many more customers, which justifies a higher valuation and more investment, and so on. And you'll often have actual revenue to extend your runway further.

The track record of companies with entirely non-technical founders that take $3M and try to hire a bunch of engineers to build the product is pretty abysmal. I can't think of a single company that this has worked out for - it's mostly just dumb money being thrown at dumb startups because it worked out for other people, without realizing everything that went on behind the public facade to make it work out.
Android also had an issue where an app could deceive a user by requesting the permission to manage WiFi (CHANGE_WIFI_STATE) which is considered non-dangerous ("normal") [1] and is granted automatically without any prompts [2]:

> If your app lists normal permissions in its manifest (that is, permissions that don't pose much risk to the user's privacy or the device's operation), the system automatically grants those permissions to your app.

But the app could use it to determine user's location (by scanning for WiFI access points identifiers) without any notification. So the user wouldn't realise that the app now knows their location.

You can see it in the docs [3]:

> Android 8.0 and Android 8.1:

> A successful call to WifiManager.getScanResults() requires any one of the following permissions:

> CHANGE_WIFI_STATE

So this issue was fixed only on Android 9, and had been working for years. Any application could secretly determine your location. That's the state of privacy protection on Android. It is difficult to believe that Google developers who are very smart people couldn't foresee it for years.

I googled a little and found a confirmation that this method was working: [4]

[1] https://developer.android.com/reference/android/Manifest.per...

[2] https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/permissions/overv...

[3] https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/connectivity/wifi...

[4] https://blog.trustlook.com/2015/06/02/how-apps-tracking-your...
I wonder the effectiveness of the MS hiring process every time I use a Microsoft product. Teaching interviewees how to test their software locally for at least 10 mins before deploying it to hundreds of millions of people would be huge.
Free 2-Day Shipping with Amazon Prime Members
I highly recommend reading the book “Where Wizards Stay Up Late”, which covers much of the history that this article touches upon. Great book.

https://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832...
Probably not much. As someone who has worked phone support, usually people get super jaded not because of the wages, but because some significant percentage of support calls are people being nasty right off the bat. It takes one bad call to kill your mood.
Hillary and Biden know you just drink little Haitian kid blood and that keeps you young. It's true.
Replace “broadband” with everything from education and healthcare, through infrastructure and a dozen other words, and you’re still right. I don’t understand it either.
Slack has many competitors. You can replace it.

Does MS Office have real competitors? Google Docs is very casual compared to MS Office. LibreOffice needs a lot of work.

My money was on Corel Office for Linux (with solid products like Wordperfect and Quattro Pro), but Microsoft bought a large share of Corel and it was mysteriously discontinued.
Agreed; C, Forth & Lisp are all acquired tastes.
Which is fine, one size never fits all.

Just wanted to mention some alternatives to LuaJIT, since I don't think it's a viable way forward for languages of this scale.

Likewise!
Link for the curious like me: https://pavlok.com/

It's a wristband that gives you electric shocks.

I realize I've actually used one before, while playtesting a VR game which used this to give "damage taken" feedback. I was pretty bad dodging hits despite the motivation.
Modula-2 comes to my mind. :)
Ice house found under London street
Not really surprising, it's the entitled, angry, nasty people who are most likely to call. The rest of us have realized that calling rarely produces results anyway and only bother to do it when there are no alternatives.
New York City police will fly an
I can't imagine any H1B's doing the needful passing any of this.
Throway for obv. reasons.

Google, Facebook, Netflix, Linkedin, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft etc. typically^H^H^H often pay $400-500k for someone with that much experience who can be a team lead.

If you can be a more senior architect-type person, or a manager who manages managers, 7 figures can be within reach (though not easy).

This is why you're losing coders to Silicon Valley. If you want a big house, then yeah, that will be $2M and you might be better off making $150k in the midwest. If you're happy with a two bedroom apartment for $4k-$5k/mo, there is no place better.
The issue with that is that if my CV is incredibly specialized in one area that happens to match the job I’m going for (eg compilers), why test my knowledge in designing things like a distributed system and in how great I do dynamic programming (that is not useful in my area)??? It feels like there is no verification at all of what my CV claims, nor does it give me a chance to show off the skills I’ve been working on for them last 20 years, both of which are very relevant to the job. Instead, I’m tested on what I knew when I graduated with my BS, and that’s it; it’s like my PhD was a waste.
I looked over the Linux questions, and they were pretty bad:

Q.1: What is the core of Linux Operating System?
Shell

Kernel

Command

Script

Terminal

I mean... If they asked me about that at an interview, that'd be a huge red flag. I wouldn't consider this list when studying for interviews... It is sad for me how many stars and forks this list has. Hopefully, it's much better for other languages/topics.
I was about to say "warning, these are the kind of talks that will revive COBOL.. "
The tension between freedom of association vs freedom of speech.

I'm strongly in the "my house, my rules" camp. Don't like my moderation? Fine, host your own party.

Some argue that today's large services have a greater responsibility. Because they serve a public good. In some cases approaching a public utility. So perhaps freedom of speech concerns outweigh "house rules" (freedom of association).

Per the paradox of tolerance, I have zero sympathy for the agitators (trolls), regardless of flavor, so am the wrong person to adjudicate.

I point out the (widespread) contradiction, because the other rights are often ignored.
If you answered like that, I'd ask if you can start tomorrow.
Russ Cox articles do have that simple and defined quality of old days.
My methodology is something of a corollary: the secret of successfully delivering an (admittedly simple) sw product is to minimize the connectivity of the delivery network. The principle is simple: for small projects, the drag introduced by elements of broken communication outweighs the potential benefits of adding working nodes.

So if we need to "build a web app", the ideal setup is to find someone who's an ok designer, ok coder, ok devops, and ok at asking customers what the hell they need the thing to do (PM?). If that fails, the next-ideal setup is 2 people working independently on aspects as far as possible from each other.
Deliver what, though?

If you provided each garage programmer with a full waterfall aerospace grade up front specification, you'd have a lot more success than if you just gave them some vague post it notes. It would also ensure they produced almost identical results.

But the upfront spec is expensive, and in itself hard to produce - the premise of most methodologies is that iteration with real software and real customers is actually the most effective way of producing a viable spec.

I don't think I've worked with more than one or two people who would fail to deliver with a clear spec.
I use yEd for nicely organized diagrams (state diagrams, data flow, process models), Dia for information-rich structured diagrams (UML or network schemas), graphwiz for autogenerated diagrams and Inkscape to make final touches to any of those.
It's easy to underestimate the importance of actually deploying those first long-distance internet links, at substantial expense. Links within a campus weren't compelling enough to invent things like email to make use of them, because you could just walk over to the other guy's office. But high-speed (for the time) links between campuses made people want to use them for real work.
There sure were a lot of google and facebook products on that list. I wonder what the success rate of google/facebook in-house created products is vs the market as a whole.

Also, another interesting question: what is the start up success rate in recent years vs years of past? My intuition based on all the stuff I've been reading over the last 10 years tells me that the success rate of start ups is decreasing, especially for software only startups (ones that are just innovating "bits rather than atoms" - avc.com quote.): it just seems overly saturated, or perhaps most of everything that can be done with the current opportunities has been done.
I've been taking Elysium Basis for a little over a year. I've noticed no effects, secondary or otherwise. I looked really hard at their research about (likely) effectiveness, and it did seem to check out.

But it is around $50/month so I'm not sure if I will continue to take it forever. Elysium is mostly a marketing company, so hopefully they will have competition and the price will drop if more research proves NAD's effectiveness when taken by humans long-term.
The sad part is that the generic generalist interview will have nothing to do with X, and if you need someone great at X-ing, might yield painful false negatives or even worse, false positives (since you can’t hire specifically for X).
As much support as there has been built into processors and compilers to get better performance out of the simple machine model of C, I must wonder if a new low level language aimed at exposing things like SIMD, large caches, SMT, and all to the programmer might catch on.
"Release It" is an awesome book. I contributed a couple FindBug Java checkers to warn about some of the problems the book describes.

The case you mention above might have been prevented by using checked Java exceptions. Our programming languages and tools could be doing a lot more to catch these problems at compile time or make them impossible by language or API design.
Cannot these restrictions be lifted if you write that the user agrees to sharing all of their data for any purposes somewhere between the lines of a 20-page Privacy Policy?
Old C compilers would first parse declarations, then allocate space on the local stack (usually by subtracting the number of bytes needed from the stack pointer), and go on to compile code, knowing that - from that point on - there's a well defined stack structure (and very often in those days, even a constant offset from the "frame pointer" or "base pointer" which would be copied from the stack pointer at that point)

Introducing additional variables later, means that if you emit code "as you go", you'll be less efficient - which makes no difference today, but was a big thing in the days C was designed; Most compilers back then were single pass, emit-as-you-go. There are relatively simple ways to deal with that even under the single-pass constraint, but in those days and the common compiler construction techniques prevalent at the time, it was considered harder.

There was always an issue of fixups with scope-exiting control transfer like break and goto - however, they are simpler, and don't harm emit-as-you-go compilation to the same extent.
Python3 fixed issues with standard. In C++17 and any upcoming C++ standard you can still use all three of: NULL, 0 and nullptr just to name one issue.

This has nothing to do with vendor refusing to upgrade.
Read up on Yucca Mountain. It was a reasonable proposal for storage.
Verizon and Disney reach a deal to avoid Fios blackout
Umlauts of Berlin, part 3: Ö
I never liked the idea of using DNS services for filtering web content.

For one, it seems like the wrong tool for the job. Filtered content can simply switch to identifying content by IP address instead of DNS, correct? Or change DNS constantly.

And for two, of course there are concerns with handing someone your DNS queries in return for filtering...
FE webdev on iPad Pro (2018)
Ask HN: Do you have to be the most knowledgeable dev to be a great tech lead?
Black Bar for Larry Roberts
Whenever the black bar appears on HN there is a flurry of questions about what it is and why it's there. If the (admittedly forlorn) hope that people might search for "black" or "bar" before posting the question, I thought I'd put in this comment that the black bar appears to mark the passing of someone significant in the tech or hacker community.

In this case, Larry Roberts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18791540
Or, he has over a long time tricked himself into thinking in that language style and otherwise has trouble (or at least no desire for) expressing himself otherwise.

I might be taking bait here. I guess I take umbradge at the post I am replying to because it has insults in it, which is not so pleasant. Maybe it's just the hypocrisy, as its language is also verbose. To paraphrase:

> The writing style of this article strikes a tone that seems overly eager to place an eloquent vocabulary on display.

"This article uses too many big words"

> You could sum up the sentiment with an anaology to paraphrase the concept: “defensive programming is no replacement for accomplished programming skill” (to borrow a concept comparable to investing)

"You could sum up his article as: 'following best practices won't replace programming skill'"

You might argue that paraphrasing like I have detracts meaning but I'm sure the original author of the article would say that too.
Clickable:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18791540
2018 Was the Year of the Smart City Skeptic
Many of the extraction companies will eventually go bankrupt and liquidate, leaving toxic waste sites behind. Then the government ( funded by taxpayers) will have to step in and clean up the mess.
The problem is that exceptional isn’t a binary quality, exceptional at google is going to be another level than exceptional at some obscure contracting firm.
For the power-users out there there is a solution, install Xposed[0] on your device (root and custom recovery required of course) and then XPrivacyLua[1] which provides fine controls allowing you to hide identifiers (ad IDs etc), tracking, activity, applications installed, network info, analytics and much more for each app. Best part is it sends fake data to make sure apps don't crash or complain.

[0]: https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=3034811

[1]: https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacyLua
> And we have 30+ years of user behavior of computer users and almost 10 years of mobile user behavior with Android to know that most users aren’t going to give “extra scrutiny” to those applications and are just going to click “allow”.

A much better example is the massive XCodeGhost infection on the app store. Apple relies entirely on users for figuring out if things are misbehaving, while Android also has automated detection and the third party security ecosystem, as I pointed out in the comment you replied to.

> And even if “security researchers” do find an issue with an Android app, how does that information get disseminated to users?

By having the app removed from the store. Which Apple is unable to do because it doesn't allow third party security researchers to scrutinize its app store. This resulted in the massive XCodeGhost infection, which Apple couldn't fully remove from their store for weeks after.

> Even if Google decides to close the hole, Android doesn’t exactly have a great track record of getting updates to users.

The whole point is that it's not a hole. It's an app abusing an API. The correct thing to do is to simply remove the app from the store, which is exactly what happens.
Be happy, charisma will come naturally if you are happy
I see the website loading speeds are affected, but I think it is worth it. This is a good stop-gap for anyone who have not setup a pi-hole just yet but at do not want to install an app or an extension in its stead.

Prior to this, I was running Intra [0] on my Android phone to route all DNS traffic to cloudflare-dns and had been pretty happy to use it in tandem with PrivacyBadger, uMatrix, and uBlockOrigin on Firefox.

Someone suggested using AdAway [1] on rooted devices and another app that does a similar trick of running a local VPN on Android through user supplied hosts file. Great alternative.

[0] https://getintra.org/

[1] https://adaway.org/
Re: #1 the original statistics presented show that in the US, there's a stronger correlation between individual income and parental income than in most OECD countries. You've claimed this is "measuring the wrong thing" but it isn't clear to me why you think that, or what we should be measuring instead.

Re: #3 The real inequality of opportunity isn't in secondary education, it's in primary (K-12) education. I went to a public highschool in a well-off suburb that had high participation in AP programs and sent the overwhelming majority of the student body to college. A couple of miles away in the city, the high school struggled to retrain accreditation.
Fair enough. I’ve worked mostly in the US Northeast and while I’ve worked in companies across a wide range of sizes my observations are probably flavored by a lot of big firms who have been partners and clients. I would have said 5-10 years was more the norm among people I work with but then I probably tend to disproportionately work with people who are more senior in their organizations.
I've interviewed and been interviewing for over a decade. I have had the displeasure of interviewing many people who have very impressive resumes yet when asked how they would judge their skillset in an area, and being told from them that they would say "expert", being shown exactly the opposite when it came time to answer some questions in that area.

One data point... Senior engineer that founded the local java user group and wrote a published book on the java language. Couldn't code a simple reverse string algorithm, nor explain whether, after with help devising an answer, the method was thread-safe.

Another data point... A self-described expert in SQL with it all over their resume. Couldn't write a simple join, inner outer or other.

Weed-out questions exist because our industry is flooded with people who don't know, nor care to know, their craft. And there are plenty of employers who continue to hire these people, and promote them. I interviewed numerous "architects" (with development experience all over their resume) who couldn't come up with a naive solution, let alone the optimal, to a very simple problem. Want to fix the interview process in our industry? Figure out a way to weed out the liars? I'm all for it. I would rather not have to do basic algorithm questions, but that's the current environment.
Was the affront that it was too easy? Believe it or not, it weeds out candidates.
> The only upside of taking the opposite side of the Rust tradeoff is compile time.

Not so, there are a few specialized domains where having tracing GC easily available is genuinely useful. (Pretty much anything having to do with general graphs - the sort of stuff you'd traditionally use LISP for!) Go is a great fit for these use cases.
The Continuing Cult of Glenn Gould, Deserved or Not (2007)
As the comment you're replying to pointed out, it's exactly the same as on iOS. In both cases, rogue publishers get banned.
Tipping repair people is absolutely not customary. See https://www.realsimple.com/work-life/money/money-etiquette/t... for an example of a tipping guide.

In general, you tip restaurant waiters, delivery, taxis, hotel concierges/housekeeping/bellhops, valet parking and coat check, bartenders, and spa/hair services. Things like cable installation or plumbers are not customarily tipped.
Why does decentralization matter?
Do not know the cost point of TAMR. Aware that it is expensive. There are a couple of tools that come to mind, metacat (as someone pointed out), wherehows (linkedin), apache atlas (not sure who contributed). The issue is also to look at not just RDBMS but also RDF, Graph and then abstract it through a semantic layer.
DDG is unusable from keyboard alone. Whenever battery in my mouse runs out, I have to switch to something else. It's one of those web apps where designers disabled focus outlines, because they don't find them pretty.
Interesting. The Times interviewed him in May of this year for his own obituary.

"He recalled that one of his youthful experiments produced a chlorine gas byproduct, 'which put me in the hospital under an oxygen tent because I sniffed it to see what was happening,' he said in an interview for this obituary in May."
The Googles of this world don't fizzbuzz you, they want you to implement (close to optimal solutions!) and use tries and heaps & co. during whiteboard interviews. Neither of which I've ever had to implement in 10+ years.
Sure, there are a lot of compilers for C, but my point is that I'm happy enough writing GCC C; a large chunk of the nonstandard GCC stuff actually works across other compilers (like clang and Intel), and my point was that I'm happy enough, at least for the work that I do in C occasionally, to limit myself to compilers that support the GCC extensions.

Yes, the world isn't composed of FOSS UNIX clones entirely, but GCC works on a lot of platforms now that aren't Unix. MinGW has typically worked fine for me on Windows (not even counting Cygwin or WSL). I don't do systems programming, so I don't know how much (if at all) GCC is used on stuff like micro-controllers.

I suppose I didn't make my argument clear enough, but as I said, if you view GCC C as its own language, I don't view that as different than using rustc.
I have not used it, I have heard of it. Have you used it, would love to get your ideas / thoughts on it.