skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is true up to a point, but only up to a point. After all, there are lots of mass market essential services that work much, much, better than cable (or the airlines), and as a result aren't as universally hated.

In most US cities the power only goes out when lightning hits something or there's a freak heat wave and everyone turns their A/C on at once (or when there are genuine shortages, like in the old CA rolling brownouts). When the power does go out, the power company typically doesn't lie to you. The same was largely true of landline telephone services back in the day, and, in all honesty, is remarkably true of modern cellphone services (although there's a ton of crookedness about price, for the most part they seem to actually supply services they say they do).

In a way, it's actually egalitarian: for the most part cellphone companies, water utilities, etc., when they do abuse their customers, limit their abuses to money stuff and hence pretty much only abuse the poor. (This is less true about airlines but not completely untrue, witness first class and high frequent flier statuses). It's refreshingly fair that with cable companies in this country you can't get decent service at any price; hedge fund managers and janitors have basically the same terrible experience.

Maybe that's part of why there's so much anger at the cable companies, actually, because so many people who they mistreat aren't used to being mistreated by everyone else. And why so many of the customers are badly behaved.
Your browsing history does, though.

Imagine what kind of structure would be visualized after being lost in Wikipedia for a few hours. It'd be neat to see it clustered by time, and you can jump back and forth to different parts of your history graph.
Too bad it works by creating a local VPN - I'm already using "Block This!" to block ads on my device which also works via a VPN, so you can't use both at the same time.
I asked a candidate to implement an algorithm that reverses a string. I don't see that as a complicated problem. It's literally a for loop, and based on how they choose to implement it you can ask about implications of append vs. prepend, etc.

I didn't ask them to implement dijkstra's algorithm, or even something as "hard" as breadth-first or depth-first search (which I feel any senior that deals with trees should be able to do).

It's a marker of this... Can the candidate solve a basic problem? Once they solve it, can they explain their solution? Do they understand the memory/time tradeoffs they chose? Do they know whether the code they wrote is thread-safe? If you don't feel a senior engineer should be able to answer those questions, to a very basic problem, how do you expect them to tackle something more complex?
The repository name is "awesome-interview-questions". So far, of the 3 lists I've looked at, [1] was a page where someone apparently deleted random swathes of text in the middle of the content and utterly unusable as a result, and [2] and [3] were both full of grammatically poor questions that ask about minutiae of C++, get it wrong, and don't realize that C++11 exists.

I think it's supposed to be a list of good questions to ask, but it's actually a compilation of lists that people sent the author with very little to no curation actually done.

[1] http://placement.freshersworld.com/power-preparation/technic...

[2] https://pangara.com/blog/cplusplus-interview-questions

[3] http://a4academics.com/interview-questions/57-c-plus-plus/41...

Edit: Just opened up a Java list for #4... and it said that LinkedList was usually better performance over ArrayList. That is not correct; ArrayList is usually better (because of cache locality). So I'm now 4 for 4 on bad lists out of this site.
How Google Maps calculates the shortest distance
Assuming you only read the title of the post I can understand your reply, but I would suggest a cursory glance at articles before replying.

The noise complaints are coming from people under the flight path, not from within the cabin.
Thanks for posting this, I was wondering today what advice I'd give my younger self. Reading this, it turns out I'm still the intended audience for a high school address :)
Of course part of knowing the rules is when not to follow them ironically. You don't use rior shield walls against cannon or machinegun fire or try to take cover against angry mobs.

It is a principle of art as well at very least of when to break the rules - it should be done for a reason and awareness of how it may backfire instead of "just because".
The Top Marketing Articles of 2018: A Summary
On a related note, one of the main characters in House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is based heavily on Kevin Carter, in case you wanted to read a fictional, psychological-horror take on some of these issues.
Ha! I had not actually considered that an ink that is hard to get out of paper might be hard to get out of your skin as well!
Apple has a policy that apps (and their SDKs) must comply with IDFA, so if a user doesn't want to be tracked across the apps they use they can go to settings -> privacy -> advertising to turn off the tracking.
This looks like JS, and JS does not look like C/C++/Java
the presence of such a chain is the real root cause, rather than the unhandled sql exception.

This is really interesting and something which bugs me about root cause analysis and it's a neat coincidence that this has been quoted relative to an aviation incident.

In aviation, incidents and accidents are investigated with the understanding that there is never a single cause of an accident. It's known as the swiss cheese model. All the holes in the swiss cheese have to line up for something to go wrong. Even in a seemingly simple "pilot error" accident, there are years of initial and recurrent training factors, ergonomic and human factors and so on which all lead to the event. It's exceedingly rare for a single "root cause" to be the whole story.

Medicine is starting to adopt techniques learned from aviation like checklists, crew resource management and no-blame, swiss-cheese accident investigations. I am hopeful that the software industry will take similar lessons over the next decade or so.
Hmm, indeed. This is the only blog post on the site and the landing page looks like a placeholder for the time being.

Maybe this is his way of getting free feedback? Hmm!
Will you compensate them for this task? Even if they are not hired?
Classist sneering aside, your theory that truck-driving hillbillies will buy Teslas is absurd. What they're going to buy is trucks. Which are currently being pioneered by add-on makers:

https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1115487_xl-hybrids-adds...

And which will be made by Toyota in volume:

https://www.equipmentworld.com/toyota-to-offer-electric-powe...

Moreover, even if you were right, that Tesla's real innovation is marketing electric vehicles to non-Prius audiences, there's no particular reason to think he had to spend $15 billion of other people's money building (and rebuilding) factories to conduct some marketing experiments. It would have been much easier to go the add-on/rebuild route, which has been going on in the auto world for decades. Or he could have just done a design/marketing partnership with some carmaker. It would have cost far less and achieved just as much.

The reason he didn't is his enormous vanity. I think it would have been much better to spend $1-5 billion on an approach like that so we could spend another $10-14 billion on other long-term, longshot projects.
It was very PKDick’ish.
The other comment about the title straight up said "Terrible headline" instead of being more friendly and constructive by saying "a better title would be..."
I'd honestly rather have the "bulletproof tenure" that doctors then acquire after they get through the hazing. Getting laid off every time a spreadsheet jockey in accounting makes a bad projection, is pretty disruptive. (as are the times when a competitor buys your employer just to shut them down, and etc: plenty of scenarios where you lose a job due to no fault of your own are rather the rule than the exception) - Most competent engineers can always get another job. But in that process, you end up with a different commute, or even having to relocate, deal with setbacks in financial plans, and etc. The instability some of us experience is kind of not worth the other perks. And after 20+ years, it's kind of annoying to have to apply as if I'm fresh out of school when I have a solid work record on my resume, verifiable by contacting my former co-workers and managers I've provide as references.
> phone companies didn't believe in packet switching.

Sure didn't. It's a terrible way to treat voice calls, and as far as the phone company was concerned, voice was the only thing.

Data could ride a voice-grade connection just fine, but voice suffered badly when "statistically multiplexed", a term used (oft derisively) to refer to packetization.

This is still true, by the way. Radio studios still use ISDN links to other studios, because they have fixed latency and incredibly low jitter.

Customers have gotten used to the latency of digital mobile phones, but some of us still remember the truly simultaneous conversation of a landline or analog cellphone. (I remember the rollout of digital, and the... and the con.... go ahead.... no, you go ahead... okay, the confusion as people were just learning to converse with a delay on the line.) It just turned out that cheaper capacity was more important.

ATM was always a dead-end, though. I think a lot of people knew that even as it was being deployed. If you're packetizing anyway, you might as well throw QoS right out the window and embrace nondeterminism wholeheartedly. It's cheaper, and that writing was already on the wall. Quality had been the mantra for the first hundred years of the Bell system, but deregulation and competition allowed the almighty dollar to prevail over every other concern. Enjoy the jitter!
> I also didn’t get the objective of choosing. Was it to try and get the highest game rating? Was it to try and help him with his psychological issues?

The objective of a Choose Your Own Adventure book isn't to reach a particular ending, but rather to experience all of the divergent paths.

> I thought choosing dead ends that forced repeating storyline to be tedious.

They 100% accurately captured the experience of reading a CYOA novel. Nobody who reaches a "dead" end stops reading. You go back to the last untaken path and try again.
Here's an example of that: when I built a house, we had the following characteristics:

1 A geotechnical exclusion zone at the front of the house whose exact location was unknown.
2 Three strange angles (one for solar access, two marking out the block size) making measurement tricky thus tricky locating the exclusion zone.
3 A brick house base and a steel frame to go on top. There was 5 centimetre tolerance for the location of the steel beams.

Get #1 wrong, and start building all over again.
Get #3 wrong, and it's time to re-fabricate the frame.

Could have been costly. Went well but took a lot of care, attention and coordinating across 5 groups of contractors.

As a side note, one of my occasional hobbies is performing super-sketchy surveying methodology. It turned out that my extermely non professional, totally un-certifiable methodology was within 10cm of the actual exclusion zone (whose length is around 10 metres from the front of the block of land).
> "Users sign up via the Airnoise website. With a free account, users can file up to 15 complaints a month; for $5 a month, they can file unlimited complaints."

Commercialized NIMBY, that's damn clever.
The only exception I can think of is being acquired. Which does not trigger the regular interview rounds.
> One thing though is that the very ease diminishes how much attention the officials actually pay.

The point isn't to get aviation officials to care. You want to build up a body of complaints to give your congressional rep something to make noise about. This has been an ongoing fight in Boston.
The first two paragraphs of the article are a straw man. I think most of us were biting our tongues at that point.

The thesis of the rest of the article contradicts the initial premise.

Your scenario of ramdomly digging holes are a perfect example of what the author is explaining: “Critically, convex payoffs benefit from uncertainty and disorder.“
>I have a very low opinion of STP.

That's not a very radical opinion in network engineering circles. No one ever liked it due to it's non forwarding links for loop prevention but it was good enough to work until we discovered it's successor.
In a properly functioning regulatory environment, an independent third party would establish a noise sensor monitoring network around the airport and use that data as feedback to stakeholders (officials, aircraft operators, private citizens around the airport). Failing that, you have angry citizens who push the button hard, and officials who (as you mentioned) don't care, which will probably end up with press (ie this article) and possibly a citizen caring enough to run against disinterested officials.
But "how to be happy" is an even harder question.
> The exception would be if "the guy" is brought in as a contractor (which these days should probably be your goal)

Could you elaborate on that? Do you mean being a contractor should be your goal as "the guy" or the hirer?
From my side (hiring) it's rough too. All candidates seem prepared for this stupid game. Then I'm like, hey, show me some hobby code of some thing you shipped. Let's talk about your bugs, how you ship? Why you pick that stack? Watching a candidate click through their own buggy stuff teaches me so much, so fast about the person.

My experience is that candidates are ready for trivia and sample/theory but are not ready to brag about their own cool shit. Talk about how great you are and what you learned, defend your choice, evaluate where to improve. That's what we do every day. we only use the white board for drawing arch-pictures/diagrams, and the occasional dickbutt.

In fact, that's my new (and only) whiteboard question.
You can take this one step further. After manually flagging when you hear a plane, generate the next complaint automatically.
I humbly disagree on that point.

a = b[i++]

is certainly unambiguous to the compiler, but unlike the other example it should be unambiguous to the reader as well, assuming the reader is reasonably familiar with C. i++ yields the unmodified value of i, and as a side effect causes i to be incremented. There are no other references to i within the expression, so it doesn't matter when i is incremented. It's a common idiom for stepping through the elements of an array.

If you're going to be reading C code, you have to be familiar with certain idioms that might be unfamiliar to someone who doesn't know C.

I would certainly reject any compiler for which these:

a = b[i++];
a = b[i]; i++;
a = b[i]; i = i + 1;

are not equivalent, since the language requires them to be. But I find the first more readable.
If you're optimizing for money, early startups would be the last place I'd look. I'm well aware that I'm making ~60% of a big 4 salary (tc) assuming my options are useless.

Additionally I doubt I'm learning as much technically than if I were to work at a big 4and be exposed to much smarter people.

The benefits of startups tend to incur huge tradeoffs.
wait, call me dumb or whatever, but what this tool use for? I can't think of any usage, any examples?
It's commercialized equal protection under law.
The amount of data it collects and files hopefully makes it harder to dismiss. It is using the same ADS-B data as flightradar and similar sites, so it's able to report detailed information- exact time, what aircraft passed overhead, how far away, what altitude and ground speed. At a lot of airports, there are requirements for climb-out paths (in terms of position and altitude) for noise abatement, and if operators aren't observing existing rules, these detailed reports can have a lot of force.
2 out of the 3 Facebook ones were acquisitions. It seems Zuck is the new 800 pound gorilla, when he sees a threat to Facebook he buys them: WhatsApp, Instagram, the 2 companies there. And I guess if you own it, you're free to shut the whole thing down...
I think the tuition fee is reasonable. It’s the interest. Let’s define the problem. Basically, usary.
I used to live directly west of DFW (Euless). I heard the jets maybe 3 or 4 times from inside my apartment; I heard them much more often outside, but it was never disturbing to the point I would have complained.

Two things help DFW: 1. It has a huge amount of land. 2. The main landing/takeoff pattern is North/South and there are roads and businesses to the North and South and not houses.

Now I live right near the landing pattern of ABIA - Austin, but way north. The only thing that bugs me is that the planes directly overfly the office and I've watched too many crash videos. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLPA0Dhi1VXQDGbkXwjDUzQ/vid...
> If your network isn't properly configured these things can happen easily.

Absolutely true. However, if you are an ISP, then not correctly configuring your network is... unimpressive.
Apologies; I appear to have made my point in an overly indirect manner. Luckily your response here allows me to clarify myself concisely:

Have you ever considered that that sort of ethical reasoning might in fact be pointing out a classic problem with society as we know it? (Insofar as, the legitimacy of today's centralized authorities rests upon social-contract theory, which as you have clearly shown, is baseless.)
Converted my house from slow, intermittent apple wifi system to google wifi. Night and day better. Apple makes consumer products, google makes hi-tech "cloud" services.
Lens into wrapped newtypes
It's a neat idea, but it's not clear from the article what these complaints accomplish. Are the airport administrators held accountable in any way? Are they required to respond to the complaints? Maintain a low threshold? It seems like this could just be a placebo button.
Has there ever been any other sort of equal protection? (Serious question.)
(expecting a lot of hate...)

Microsoft Visio.

It's as flexible as possible without sacrificing too much usability; you can create any sort of diagrams I can think of, from simple flowcharts to complex sequence diagrams or process illustrations.

The main caveat is it's a commercial tool. I have it available at work as most of my clients (to the point there's usually a preference for it).

That said, on many specific cases I use other tools, like plantUML for generating more in depth sequence diagrams, and I prefer to stick to simple PowerPoint figures if I'm doing something that is very abstract - mainly because of its broad adoption; Most people will have a PowerPoint compatible tool installed at their computer and thus readily able to collaborate with me.
I don't think that's fair to say. Billions of people unlock their phone or log in to their computers every morning and everything works, pretty much all of the time.
> Thirteen years after graduating, she still owes more than $8,000.

Paying off $13K+interest in 13 years with a $9/hour job is not bad really. There are some people in better situations that still don't pay of their debt.
> The "yellow jacket" protests were a response to tax increases on fuel as part of the government's strategy to reduce emissions

It's a bit more complicated than that. The protests came because the gas taxes, along with several other changes by the Macron administration, basically all hit the poorest in the country without really impacting the wealthiest.

The goal isn't to stop policies that reduce carbon emissions, its to make sure we don't put the burden of fixing environmental problems first and foremost on the poor when we have people with plenty of resources who are barely getting touched by the costs of the cure even as they carry an outsized share of the blame for the disease.
The Limited Red Society: Why You Should Try to Stay on Green When Refactoring
Would be really great if articles behind paywalls weren't being featured
Cyberattack Disrupts Printing of Major Newspapers
It is a fair question I suppose. I watched the incident at the time and I felt Taleb was being a misogynist yes. However I am not prepared to go trawling through the bile again to find specific quotes.

I acknowledge that there is a chance I am remembering it incorrectly. Lots of people who joined in his appalling baiting were certainly openly misogynist in their language, and maybe I am accusing him of being guilty-by-association. However perhaps joint-enterprise is a fair stick to beat him with, he certainly and very deliberately tries to get his fan club to wade in on social media. Maybe people who do this bear some responsibility for what their followers inevitably say?

The further complication is that Dame Professor Mary Beard is an outspoken feminist, and this has caused her to receive more than her fair share of misogynist abuse both on social and mainstream media (incidentally her book Women and Power is very readable and I see now in paper-back). Therefore it could be that I was showing my prejudice in assuming that a man attacking Mary Beard was automatically misogynist. Then I think to myself that a man who has no credentials at all in that field attacking a renowned person in that field (from one of the worlds great institutions) in such a vile way must have some special reason to do so.

I guess the final thing is that he did indeed accuse her of having "used feminist cover" (Damn I said I wasn't going to look up quotes). What he seemed to be saying is that she was trying to be exempt from criticism because she was a feminist. I would actually say that that was very misogynist thing to say. It reminds me of the people who try and perpetuate racial slurs an say things like, 'you can't even criticise them for (insert racist trope) for fear of being called racist'.

What is worse, is I came out thinking that he was wrong, and badly wrong at that, but was trying to bully his view to the forefront. But as you can see from reading what I wrote, I am not a scholar of the humanities at all. It is still my personal opinion that he is a misogynist bully, and his ego is so big that it compromises his objectivity.

> Did Pagliucci simply not quote what you're referring to?

Before I finally posted I read the article you linked, I think you have missed this bit

"It isn’t because of the not-so-subtle sexist undertone (not just of Taleb’s, but of many of his Twitter-based supporters)"

So indeed Pagliucci does mention it.

BTW, I predicted the financial crisis of 2008 too. I say that as it seems to be Taleb's main claim to fame. I was wrong about what the trigger would be, but what I identified as a potential cause certainly helped it spread (mind you I could have changed that around when I wrote my book). But then so did my dad, and a plumber I remember talking to at the time. I heard mainstream radio shows about it. In fact it only seemed to be people who were in the financial game who couldn't see it. So what? We could just have easily been wrong.
I don't see how that follows neccessary - the majority of people aren't able to perform calculus but that doesn't mean there is something wrong with it.

Granted it is a matter of where it is expected to be applied and by who. Expecting an artillery gunner to do advanced math calculations from the back lines is fine if not ideal compared to computerization. Expecting a grunt under fire to do so to use his rifle is not no mattet how accurate it would wind up.
Your point is taken, but I think you're being overly pedantic.

A parabolic arc with a larger height enables a longer period of weightlessness. You're welcome to debate whether it's good value for money, but the article's statement isn't wrong -- Xcor's spacecraft can (EDIT: theoretically) provide 90 seconds of weightlessness because of the height to which it travels. You can't replicate the same experience on the vomit comet; its service ceiling and maximum speed aren't high enough.