skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
New college grads today aren't prepared to do anything more complex than watch the green lights. If we automate out all of the entry-level work, that means we have to train workers to a higher level before they enter the work force, which is clearly untenable with today's college tuition (at least in the US).
I thought there were 'host' hacks and 'germ-line' hacks.

Could someone with actual knowledge fill this in? Am I right? Or am I very wrong?
Only changes to the gamete cells (sperm and eggs) will move on to the next generation.

You can change the DNA of specific cells. A change in you skin cell's DNA will not propagate to your bone cells. The skin cell has instructions to make a bone cell, but skin cells do not make use of that part of the code.
How do we solve it at the root without having aspirational figures for young people to look up to? Representation is important for creating role models, otherwise young minorities get the message that a particular field isn't accessible to them.
> can still make a quite good career with only knowing one of them.

I think this is (at least partially) a side effect of the pedagogy of computer science in schools changing throughout the decades. When I was in school, just about the entire program stressed OOP, with very little focus on imperative/procedural programming. Newly minted programmers fresh out of school don't have the exposure/mindset to jump straight into one of these (C maybe being an exception). The old guard that called these languages home are a dying breed, and the salaries paid to program in them these days bears that out the scarcity that results.
They've used the "sales letter" approach for a while. The reason is probably that it's very effective. Rubs some people the wrong way, but results are results.
I assume it has to do with which side the reflective coating is on? If it's on the room-facing face there is no gap. If it's on the backing (wall-side face) there is a gap as thick as the glass.
If your first contact with a potential hire is asking them asinine pointless riddles meant to try to imbalance them you are going into the process with an adversarial relationship.

Which is probably the root problem. Almost all tech hiring is carried out like a war between companies that want results and candidates who don't want to be treated like shit.
> Solving a problem with simple constraints is something that happens all the time.

I disagree. My experience has been that these problems are exceptionally rare.

They're so uncommon that programmers get excited when presented with such a problem. It feels like "real programming" as opposed to fixing bugs, writing prototypes, or writing business logic.

> I'd expect an engineer with years of experience to have the strategies in a sort of unconscious memory, like a rock guitarist who plays the right chord progressions without knowing what they're called

This is fantasy. You're comparing the average programmer to musical savants? What?

You happen to have memorized a bunch of algorithms for traversing data structures. That's great, but nothing about that is "unconscious memory". The fallacy is expecting everyone else to have memorized the same thing you have memorized.

> If you don't know how to approach that, you could just "look it up", but how would you even know what to look up?

Google for "tree traversal" and spend 10 minutes researching common algorithms. Pick one that fits. Spend 20-30 minutes writing it (hopefully with some tests). Worst case you've spent an hour.

Someone who memorized the algorithm could probably write it (with tests) in half the time. And that's okay because how often are you doing tree traversal? And even if you're doing tree traversal all the time then you'll have memorized all these techniques in 1 month anyway.
I don't want to hold up whiteboard interviews focus on algorithms as the be all, end all. They're a poor proxy for day-to-day skills: the hard stuff is organizational, knowing all the things that can go wrong, and technical design that's both flexible to changing conditions and easy to work with. None of those are really amendable to probing in a 45 minute interview, or even several hours of pair programming.

But it's about friction: I want my coworkers to be focused on the genuinely hard problems, not spending a day writing a BFS. The current interview process does manage to probe that.

Going a bit deeper, the whiteboard interview process is a good proxy for ability to prepare over the medium term (a month or three of consistent studying should give you as good a chance as anyone to get into a generalist position at a prestige company) and of IQ. The latter is controversial and most organizations can't test for it directly (owing to legal concerns), but a relatively high IQ is a core requirement of technical roles, and whiteboards provide a solid proxy for that when coupled with the opportunity to prepare for them beforehand.

That said, I'd always go for someone who has the ability to deliver on complicated, large projects over someone great at whiteboards or who has a high paper IQ. It's just that it's pretty much impossible to evaluate for that in a way that works on a general application pool.
Top biotech VCs in 2018
Because there are dozens of processes in the background doing that for me.
If you are getting paid to solve business problems, then why not have them solve simple version of business problems?

My interviewing process for developers is giving them a skeleton of a class with corresponding unit tests that they have to make pass.

Then they get another set of unit tests that they have to make pass without breaking the first set.

The code models a simplified version of real world types of problems we had.
That’s shitty on the company then. Senior engineers work way more efficiently if they have a junior working under them to crank out busywork. The junior then knows exactly how to succeed in a senior level position from working intimately with the senior engineer.
I've read this README and linked pages, but my lack of experience with these topics still prevents me from having a clear picture:

Would it be possible to port this for the Atmel (now Microchip) AVR32 architecture? I'm writing some code for the UC3C family and next thing to do is write code to present a configuration page over an Ethernet port. I'm not using a RTOS so my plan was to use lwIP directly, altough switching to FreeRTOS would also be an option (as I'm currently writing code for other boards and I've not really started writing any code for this specific, Ethernet-enabled board).

Would appreciate any pointers of how to do this. Never had to implement TCP/IP and HTTP before on a MCU, so it was a relief discovering that there are already made and free to use implementations of these stacks :)

I'm also exploring alternative OSes such as Mongoose mentioned here. It seems there is a lot of options. Having support for OTA updates could save a lot of work too, because that's another planned feature.
I don't see "less people" as an upcoming IT problem, as most places I look are getting more IT people, as more parts of their business become dependent on computers. I haven't seen any evidence of that changing, and believe it or not, the average business still has plenty of migration to digital means left ahead of them. (Where I work, manual punch card time clocks are still used.)
Why DeepMind's recent AlphaFold protein folding model breakthrough is important
Hopefully someone else can answer this, but I think Google will limit the response UDP packet size to either 512 bytes or the size of the request.

So, yes, I think padding it could work. (EDNS does have a padding type)
It's very easy. Ask people about themselves, and follow up with more questions. Ask about things you are genuinely curious about. I've found in 95% of discussions this will do it, and perhaps the other 5% are not worth having.
Race used by statistics and government is of course a simplification, so if you have to do it, you kinda need to embrace the simplicity of it.
Personally I think the term caucasian works well.

Jewish has of course a historic racial component, but practically (again, the simplicity) is more like an identity such as "hispanic". So if you are white hispanic, you're white. If you are jewish, you are white. If you're a black hispanic, you tick the box for black.
What about calling for the big tech companies to move to a blind hiring system?

You wouldn't see a candidate's face, name, hear their real voice, know their educational background, what economic class they're from.

You would conduct interviews over chat and voice (maybe use voice morphing software), which seems entirely plausible these days.

If anything, it would probably improve the hiring of qualified people. Interviewers can penalize candidates for all kinds of irrelevant things, not just sex and gender.

This would largely eliminate the very toxic problem of "diversity hires" that serve to perpetuate stereotypes. It would truly level the playing field.
A great portfolio is a huge plus (and I've hired people purely based on their open source contributions, usually remote), but as mentioned elsewhere your previous code tells me very little about what you're like to work with day-to-day. We usually do something like "here's our mobile app, let's start the process of building it in React - walk me through the process as you go".

We all know devs who write beautiful code but are impossible to work with ;-)
I could see that being popular even if it didn't work.
There are probably hundreds of thousands of people who could do most of our jobs adequately. The idea that hiring a diverse staff inherently means hiring an unqualified staff is laughable. It just takes a little more effort because the first qualified candidate to come across your desk is statistically (at least in our profession) more likely to be a straight white male. The qualified minority candidates exist if you put in a little work to find them.
I haven't. Thanks for the pointer!
Michael from MongoDB here again. MongoDB Community is still free to view, download, modify, etc. The SSPL change affects no-one besides those offering the licensed software (MongoDB) as a public service.
HAProxy 1.9.2 Adds GRPC Support
I think the problem is many people who choose liberal arts majors do it with the mindset of "this is an easy major, I'll be able to graduate with a high GPA and minimum effort". In STEM even if you pick the easiest classes, it won't be as easy. Those are the "lemons" of liberal arts degree holders. They aren't cut for college level difficulty but still want the signaling of it.

And one problem is that universities seem ok with this, There's a ton of discussions here about how those people should not go to college, or go to community college etc. One could argue that it's not the university's fault, that the students, should make reasonable adult choices.

For those who go into the field to truly learn, they can indeed get a ton of very useful knowledge, but I'd argue they're a minority, and they'll have a harder time to succeed due to all the "lemons".
At least in my case I'd like to think I absorbed the habit of recognizing sub-optimal traversals of data (for example, yesterday I was writing a parallel iterator and made the intentional choice to "waste" effort duplicating the map result than having to synchronize threads on mutable boundaries) but I don't remember all the buzz word jenga that was in my data structures class in uni.
third!
The article is just pushing an agenda - don't expect any fact checking there.
> I guess critics will exist no matter what, but it really doesn't jive with my philosophy of "be good to eachother."

I think it can be both - a finer art not mentioned here is the strong negative review that acknowledges what the creator was attempting and maybe includes a silver lining. Showing humanity while criticizing is maybe even more important.

Sometimes negative aspects come from deeper macro level societal problems though, manifesting at the individual level of the creator who then puts them into a piece of mass media thus fueling the macro problem. Criticism focusing on this is incredibly important and IMO is in exact support of "be good to eachother".

Again though, that doesn't mean hang the creator out to try and show your own writing chops doing it. It means show your ability to deeply understand the context and the piece by drilling down into the nuance of what made it bad, and maybe even adding some suggestions of how to improve it for future pieces of the same type or genre or even the exact piece.
I use Enterprise Architect at work. If you have money its worth it.
I was curious so I tried "!g ddg" and duckduckgo.com was the second result on page 2, whether I was in private mode (in Pale Moon) or not.
Documentation as practical empathy
wait. why is it "bad engineering" to try to solve the problem downstream?

the company itself knows as well as or better than anyone upstream what its own jobs require. the company itself is in a good position to train/educate a person (of any particular group) to do that job.

upstream educational institutions can promote diversity and graduate people all day long -- but you still need a company to actually hire those people.
That's probably what we will do. Rightly or wrongly, the new tool will probably accelerate it because I'm sure we'll be getting support queries from needlessly worried customers. Sometimes that kind of effort is good, but in this case I have sad feelings about that result, because the impetus is misguided. I totally predict that any future EDNS rev will not use a trial-and-fallback kind of negotiation, making all of this work pointless.
A high extinction threat for wild coffee species, implications for the sector
I believe the "baby boomer" cohort in the US owns the majority of the wealth, probably just because of the age and size of it. They have the voting and economic power to control society. They should be careful not to create a large angry cohort of young people as they head off to retirement, leave the power centers, but still draw on the resources of others. So far they have done a poor job of that. Maybe universal surveillance, AI, and robot soldiers can prevent the younger generations from clawing back some of the wealth extracted from them, who knows.
The first comment on that page says otherwise. Apparently, there are workarounds.
Sorry (even as i am tempted to do this quiz), but ...

<paranoia mode on>

Is this sponsored by (the defunct) Cambridge Analytica or some similar entity ?

Isn't this exactly how many of those companies operate ?
This is an interesting read! Does this scale to League or other games, especially ones that have strong EAC protection?
That was a Release Notes joke.
>If he wants to become more muscular, morbidly obese, or ten feet tall, that's his right.

Not necessarily. We as a society have come up with many activities which seem, on their surface, to only harm the individual, but are illegal. This shares many concerns with drug use, gambling, etc.

Killing yourself harms others, and society has a vested interest in the population being healthy and productive. If you harm yourself an ER has to treat you regardless of whether or not you can foot the bill. Perhaps most importantly, you can procreate and pass on defective generic material.

This is far from an issue which only concerns the individual in question.
Yep! Talk to Kefu Chai at RedHat. He's using Seastar to rebuild Ceph. Here's his presentation from Scylla Summit 2018 back last October:

https://www.scylladb.com/tech-talk/redhat-on-rebuilding-the-...
I thought this was going to be about how our shoestring, bubblegum, and tape made cloud applications become self aware and kill themselves out of shame and disgust...
As somebody who's just incapable of acknowledging group-identity diversity is a thing worth respecting (though, I find individual diversity beautiful and fascinating) This was something of a rollercoaster:

Oh wow, a woman headed react? That's cool.

Oh wait, a trans-woman... so that's socio-cultural diversity though not biological diversity - still born a white male.

Unless transgenderism isn't a choice but part of somebody's biological nature, then it is biological diversity, right?

erm, is being biologically predisposed to not liking chocolate also biological diversity? Wow, how much biological diversity goes unnoticed by diversity advocates? Maybe fb is biologically diverse after all!?

Isn't it cool we're all unique individuals with unique interests, although fb has mostly people who all share an interest in tech. True diversity would be to get people not interested in tech at fb.
Sure, the easy answer is to save up a few grand (when you don't have money to begin with) to move into an area where there are job little opportunities. That's easy, even easier if you have a partner or a family.

The #1 reason why in-demand markets are that way is jobs. Moving out of these areas is not an easy answer.
If you don't lump them under "white", you'll see they are over-represented on higher positions of the media, tech, government, justice, etc. so it's in their own best interest to be lumped with whites.
First Open-Source Multi-Signature Wallet for Stellar Released
Türkçe Dublaj Film izle
I wish I could tell DDG that I don't give a shit about Python 2.7. Stop linking me to the Python 2 doc! I haven't used Python 2 in five years!
Why do you believe that? The cost of medical care is proportional to the cost of treatment, not the cost incurred while performing the injurious act. I can down a cheap bottle of aspirin and rack up a large medical bill. I don't see the correlation.
Show HN: A PWA for checking products' nutritional values by scanning its barcode
Definitely a tough issue. I understand why they have those rules for shelters, but it also seems like it reinforces the position these people find themselves in. I don't think we can realistically expect all homeless people to get themselves clean prior to getting in to a shelter. It seems like some sort of shelter must come first, and then the substance abuse needs to be addressed with a support system.

I also don't think that is the only issue with shelter usage. In Denver, a common complaint I hear is that they choose the street over the shelter because they feel both their physical safety and their personal belongings are more secure on the street. I also try to think about this from my own perspective and if I was in that situation, I'd rather find a "place of my own" on the street over a shelter shared by tons of people (unless it was really cold out).
Huh. Tim Cook never took LSD? Maybe that’s why Apple has gone so downhill under his reign.
I am a bit confused about the versions they say are safe. I'm running Bind 9.11 and their tester says there are no issues, and it supports all the necessary EDNS behaviour.

I think the point is that those versions mentioned will remove support for the bad behaviour, but it's not clear what you do need to do to prepare. I guess the only steps you can take are to run the tests and update to the latest version available.
I've been using TablePlus as well. I like that it has true native UI and the redis support is handy.
>“I want to spend my time at a place willing to push further on diversity and inclusion. One where it’s not OK to write on Workplace that white privilege doesn’t exist.”

As a person of color, I would be very happy if it became policy to never use the phrase “white privilege” inside a workplace.

First of all it is making a blanket statement about an entire group of people. Saying <race> <attribute> is problematic as a principle.

Second, this too close for comfort to “white supremacy” for me. Both phrases describe white people as having a superiority to other races through the virtue of their whiteness.

Third, the phrase alienates people and makes them defensive. Most people can agree that having an environment where everyone can achieve their best is important. However, when you use words that cast people and their families as the villains and imply that they are not as deserving of what they earned as other people, then you turn them into your enemies.

I understand the phrase is trying to emphasize the historic and ongoing injustices against people of color. However, I think Trevor Noah’s phrase “black tax” is much more useful. This puts the focus on removing barriers and disadvantages, rather than on trying to remove someone’s “privilege”.
Looks like it was written in Nim. They will likely have a getting started guide:

https://nim-lang.org/
Automating Customer Support Using NLP and Deep Learning
I've thought about doing this at work, but it's hard to figure out how to make it attractive to my company. If I ask to hire a junior dev for the primary purpose of training them, it seems likely that I could get them full time for 50% of my salary. They're going to be a little bit productive, but they're also going to take up a lot of my time. At best, I think you end up with 150% of the labor costs for the exact same amount of work being done. That's a really hard sell to the business side of the company.
Its incredibly frustrating to be in a room with someone who will pop whatever random trivia they want at you and watch you struggle against artificial constraints to appease them.

I'm loathing the potential need to ever eventually interview for a tech position because even on trivial things like Error trait impls in Rust I end up opening 3+ pages of documentation to verify I knew what I was doing at least, or often figure out better solutions with methods not on my brains hot path of solving the problem.

Theres nothing pleasant about having your tools taken away from you and then being looked down at when you are like a fish out of water. The OP even talks about it when describing the drain of technical interviews - nobody wants to be judged upon at their worst by strangers. Its humiliating.
I am all for self-experimentation, however, when it exposes risk to humanity, I think we should tread carefully. In the long run, will these genes or other self-experiments be introduced into the global genome with unintended consequences?
> he could end up sick and reliant on others...

He could also get that way from driving a car, being thrown from a horse, or any number of activities that are a personal choice.

Maybe a bunch of people try this and end up with terrible side effects. Researchers will still be interested in the results if they know what a person did to themself. And then maybe some of them will have good results and then we'll all know. It's a mixed bag and probably a very tiny percent of the population. I say let em go for it.
You are a worthwhile and valuable person. That can be hard to remember when you want to shrink into the walls, but it is worth remembering.

Yes, good conversation skills should be learned. Yes, they can be learned.

Like most skills, it requires practice. You can hire a couch, if you want. I recommend improv comedy classes if you want a fast way to get over awkwardness and learn how to move dialogs along. But mostly getting better at talking to people involves talking and listening to a lot of people.
Where is the SSL and crypto implementation in this project?