skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm often skeptical of these claims. In the SF Bay Area I can understand why this might be the case, since there are a lot more big tech companies shelling out huge salaries, but the Seattle area only really has two big ones: Amazon and Microsoft.

A little back of the napkin math: I'm going to guess that the number of engineers Amazon has in Seattle will be roughly equal to what they were advertising for their second HQ, around 50k. According to Wikipedia the population of the Seattle metro area is about 3.8 million, so the Amazon engineers represent just 1.3% of that - and those engineers haven't come in a huge wave, they've been trickling in over the near 25 years that Amazon has been in business. A major metro area should be able to handle that kind of shock.

There's something more at play than just well-paid tech workers pushing up the housing prices. A combination of low interest rates and restrictive housing rules would have a much bigger impact.
Here's my source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HarmCausedByDrugsTable.sv...
100%! Whatever happened to progressive enhancement?
I can only speak for myself, but when I got one of these tests 6 years ago, I never got such an impression. They've updated my results several times since and I never feel hoodwinked as if I had been previously deceived; I'm always just curious to see what the latest estimates are.

> I assume from this that 23andMe is reporting the results to this level of accuracy (a tenth of a percent). For the sister who got 2.6% they are strongly implying a certainty that she has a small amount of French and German ancestry rather than what actually seems to be the case which is a small chance of some French and German ancestry.

You picked out the single biggest discrepancy they report in this article, and yet even that doesn't seem to indicate an actual inconsistency to me. I would tend to interpret those results to mean that for one twin, they felt sufficiently confident to call a portion of their DNA "French and German", while in the other it fell below that confidence threshold so it got thrown into the "Broadly European" share.

This process already pretty much precludes objective perfection just based on what they're reporting. What does it mean for your ancestry to come 2.6% come from France? During what time period? What if it's on the border in one of those regions that switched hands several times? These are subjective decisions they have to make but it doesn't invalidate the whole test because occasionally you have enough evidence to call portion of your DNA "French and German" and sometimes you have to fallback to just calling it "Broadly European".
RocksDB is a fork of LevelDB, which was [in]famous for its ease of corrupting data. Did Facebook ever do anything to ensure data wouldn't corrupt, or is that still a common thing operationally? (You find it more at larger scales)

Here's an example of how data corruption can suck, with (example) Riak and LevelDB. The leveldb data would corrupt often, which would leave you in a predicament. Say you had 10 nodes with a 3 node replication factor, and the whole cluster is humming away at a decent clip. Now one node's leveldb corrupts, and you have to rebuild it. If you have a huge fuckoff dataset, this can take a while. Now another node goes down. Now only 1 node has the data you need, and 2 nodes are down - so now 8 nodes are doing the work of 10, and if you have any more failures, your data might be gone. Now add replication, which will suck performance and bandwidth away from the regular work. And because it would corrupt so easily & often, there needed to be hash trees to quickly identify what data was corrupt, and then you needed to fix it and rebuild your hash trees. This would also suck away performance. Finally, you can't just add new nodes while rebuilding, because the extra load makes the cluster fall over. And the more nodes, the higher the likelihood of failures.
Yes. The person to whom I was responding was not speaking rationally, unfortunately.

Could you parse this sentence for me please? "That always sparks the idea of true laziness in the person saying this."
In my experience (as a civil then software engineer with a MS in CS in ML/Big Data) "real" engineering is much more prescriptive than software.

When you're designing a real-world engineering project, the entire specifications are defined legally (through national, state and local laws) and technically in manuals/books. Many engineering specifications will describe the work done to a T before you even need to think about it i.e. "water main shall be constructed of 12'' coated DIP at depth no less than 2 ft". A lot of the challenges are managerial and logistical.

All of this is on purpose. "Traditional" engineering disciplines are more mature and have the constraint of being safe for the general public. There isn't much room at all to creatively deviate from what's already specified.

I've found software design to be a lot more technically demanding in regards to designing and building things. There's a lot less precedent, more moving parts and many different ways to do one thing.
Any unsolicited email is automatically spam, even if the end recipient found value in it and did end up buying the product?
What do you mean by using it in build system?
I don't understand this response. The model of the GP comment appears to be that:

- The atmosphere has a certain level of carbon-14, and living things stay at the atmospheric level by virtue of the various processes by which they interact with the atmosphere.

- When they stop living, they also stop exchanging carbon with the atmosphere, and their carbon-14 levels change due to radioactive decay over time.

- But here, an environment was sealed off from the atmosphere while some organisms remained alive inside it. If we perform radiocarbon dating on such an organism, will we get the date at which the organism died (and stopped exchanging carbon with anything) or the date at which the environment was sealed (and everything stopped exchanging carbon with the atmosphere)?

Your comment isn't responsive to this question. To answer it, we'd need to know why the atmosphere itself has constant levels of carbon-14 instead of decaying like everything else, and whether the sealed environment would have behaved more like the atmosphere or like something else.
One of the benefits of living in a semi-rural area btw is that you can easily participate in changing this situation. During the Spring, Summer, and Fall months I can go and pick up fruits and veggies from a local grower -- just show up on their property during regular business hours, go and pick it yourself if you feel like or just pick up one of the boxes they've prearranged. I can get meat from a good local ranch too. I don't think there's any nearby dairy though.

Mega-agribusiness is one of the consequences of increasing urban living. To support really large, dense cities, everything has to be scaled way up. A dairy farm is no longer producing for the 100,000 people in a 20 mile radius, it's producing for millions, and the waste it creates scales up too.

In an ideal world, these mega-producers would be less harmful to the environment than the equivalent number of small producers, because there would be some benefit from economies of scale. But in this world, the mega-producers largely see regulation and environmental caretaking to be cost centers and they pursue the cheapest solutions, which usually involve hiding the problem or paying somebody off or buying themselves some legislation. Smaller producers meanwhile have a harder time getting away with that.
First thing (before the problem you're trying to address): There is a "do not call" registry. For reasons that I do not understand, (most) spammers respect it for our home phone, but not for cell phones. That thing needs to have teeth in it - like, sending-people-to-jail kinds of teeth. It's a travesty that spammers can just run all over that registry.

If that were in place, then the answer would be "put your number on the do not call list". But for whatever reason, that fix doesn't currently work.

On, then, to the problem you're trying to address. It needs to become illegal and/or technologically impossible to spoof caller ID to a number that you don't own. That is, if you're Apple, and you want all your outgoing calls to present as your main number, that's fine, because you own that number. But masquerading as a number you don't own? No way. It needs to be either impossible or illegal, preferably both.

But what about someone who's, for example, a whistleblower, and can't give out their number without blowing their identity? They could still block the number, but not change it. The caller ID shows up as "Unavailable" or "Blocked" (I just had one of those while making this comment, in fact.) The recipient can then decide to reject that call simply because of the lack of caller ID (as I in fact did).
thanks - this was helpful.
Bad analogy... The drug you're thinking of might be dopamine released by your brain, but not a third-party drug like alcohol or caffeine, like everyone else is talking about.
It seems like the machine itself could implement some safety checks, like if a motor is commanded to go outside of its range of motion you trigger a stop with an error code and let the operator sort it out.

Or go even more oldschool and have physical safeties on the machine that trip if your cutting tool attempts to exit the work area. I mean these aren't cheap machines, it seems like they could be engineered to be just a bit safer and error resistant.
I use inkscape at work in part of a large-ish application.

We chose to use inkscape for part of an image generation toolkit because of the great command line options and the easy to modify source files.

As for the UI, ever since .91 they have fixed my biggest concern, and I'm really happy for the team. Rarely feel the pain and need to reach for illustrator on a windows machine!
I really dislike the fact that you need to study for weeks with specific questions that really have no hold in real life.

I've been doing this for 16+ years and I have never asked the type of questions you encounter in these books. Not even once.
> If it’s of any use: I was interviewing for my second job out of college with about two and a half years of experience without any particularly notable internships or employers on my resume; I went to a very small school that had zero known software companies at their “career fair”; I started preparing in late April and started applying in June/July; and, lastly, a few months in, my job is everything I could have possibly dreamed of.

Wow, that’s amazing! Congratulations to the author because this demonstrates they have genuine talent.

In contrast, I’ve been a programmer for 10+ years, and I cannot pass the technical interviews in the companies mentioned above. At first, I thought the reason behind my failures was a lack of formal education in Computer Science, so I started reading more books. Then I thought, maybe it’s the fact that I spend more of my “productive” hours in my job just doing lumberjack web development, so I started participating in competitive programming (LeetCode, Code Golf, HackerRank, Code Wars, among many others).

Finally, I realized my brain needs more time than the average programmer to find patterns in this type of problems.

I gave up on my goal to land a job in one of these big corporations.

However, I don’t feel bad about giving up, in fact, thanks to all these books and competitive coding exercises, I was able to find two of the most exciting jobs I ever thought I would have, for 4+ years I worked in the software security industry doing Malware Research and building infrastructure tools for other security researchers. Most recently, I entered the game industry, and finally, I can use my algorithms and data structures for non-trivial projects.

Interestingly, I’ve been recently getting more messages by recruiters who want me to work for some of these companies. I politely decline the invitations because I know I cannot pass the technical interviews, but I promptly refer to some of my colleagues because I can see my younger self reflected in them, and I want them to have the experience that I couldn’t have to work for one of these companies. Even if they work only for a few months, as many people burn out, having the company’s name in their resume will grant them dozens of new opportunities.
I find it shocking that Facebook would still be considered as a peer to these other companies in terms of desirability as an employer.

I would only accept a position at Facebook, which seems to be building a fundamentally destructive product while going out of its way to behave unethically in many dimensions, if it was an absolutely last resort to pay the medical bills of some dying loved one or something.

Why would anyone be willing to work there if they had offers from companies that make products that help people and don't treat society with contempt?

EDIT: for a good primer on this subject, read this essay by Matthew Yglesias called "The case against Facebook": https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17144748/c...
I did two onsites in one week on two different occasions, and it was killer. I would not recommend it. It didn't help that mine were in different cities (and two of them were 1.5 days long).
A mishmash of tech links from 2018
I am surrounded by chicken farms, and the farmers who own and operate them. Almost all of them are family owned farms who sell to Tyson.

I can say with confidence that they work hard and are very diligent in maintaining a high standard of quality.

It's a false sense of higher morality to claim "ethical reasons" for not buying those chicken. You aren't saving or improving the lives of any chickens when you do that.

And those chickens don't have it all that bad. I also raise my own chickens and they have a great life for a chicken but it's not idyllic. Chickens have always been low on the food chain and here where I live there are a lot of chicken eaters that are not human.

As for safe and organic feed, we all want that, even my neighbors who are chicken farmers. Right now that's still easier said than done. Costco's move may help lead/push us that direction and I commend them for leading on this issue.
>Yeah... it's indentured servitude

That phrase doesn't mean what you think it means. If you can declare bankruptcy, you can't be an indentured servant.
I'm into the FIRE stuff. I don't find being interested in your work and having access to early retirement as mutually exclusive.

Having the ability to retire early is not really about retiring — it's about having optionality in your life to choose what you do with your time, whether that's what you work on, where you work, who you work for, or if you even work at all post the point of financial independence that divides "working life" from early retirement.

Primarily, it's the freedom. In other words, many people in this space are more interested in having the option available to them to take time off work and travel for extended periods, take sabbaticals, work on problems of personal interest that might generate no income, start a company for fun, etc. It's more realistic to achieve these goals after hitting a financial independence milestone, however one defines that goal relative to their spending requirements in "retirement".

Secondarily, it serves as "insurance" or a fall back to primary income should you choose to continue working in your current role or in a lower paying job but doing something you find personally fulfilling for other reasons, like a charity or non-profit. Maybe you want to work a blue collar job or two out of curiosity but that would be impractical or financial infeasible compared to an engineering salary. Maybe you want to work on open source full-time.

Tertiarily, there are unique tax optimization opportunities that emerge when you have established wealth but have no to little income in a given tax year.

One of the most popular blogs for learning more about this is Mad FIentist - https://www.madfientist.com/.
"After about a month of consistently practicing problems each day (maybe 2–3 hours/day, more on weekends)..."

I'm reading this as a guy with a wife, kids, full-time job, and rusty whiteboarding skills. My inability to make this kind of time investment makes me feel trapped at my current position.
It's a publicly traded company with a market cap of $3B. It's certainly not tiny.
The book is actually "Words at the Threshhold", not "on" the threshhold... https://www.amazon.com/Words-Threshold-What-Nearing-Death/dp...
Groceries are definitely making money on rotisserie chickens. They exist as a way to generate some incremental income at the deli counter by giving employees something to do in their down time.

They are high margin, but low volume. A fifty cent chicken, with a few cents worth of spices (mostly salt) and like three minutes of labor will sell for $5. Not including the additional revenue from sides and rolls.
There have been big waves as big distribution chains have started vertically integrating portions of the dairy industry.

https://www.dairyherd.com/article/dozens-more-farmers-lose-m...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna887941

It works for large scale operations, because they can use milk as a loss leader. That means they can squeeze producers for the lowest price possible, rendering margins so thin that you basically have to be a hyperoptimized producer to even be able to compete.

It's an example of large businesses creating value deserts, and unfortunately, the political/economic climate hasn't been terribly up to the task of doing anything to slow or stop it.

A value desert is the situation created where an actor corners and optimizes so much of an industry such that meaningful competition in that vertical becomes dead from the start. This puts the actor in an advantageous position since there is no rational reason to disrupt that vertical, which makes it easier to coast along as a major player.

Google/Alphabet has been used as an example of the phenomenon with regards to the digital advertising market. Wish I could find the citation, but I think I first heard of it from an NPR spot.
> Why would anyone be willing to work there if they had offers from companies that make products that help people and don't treat society with contempt?

I have someone who just went there. Because of money, basically.
I’m not comfortable with the idea that you should just take more of someone’s money just because someone thinks they don’t need it.

There’s nothing wrong with implementing a floor, either. We effectively have one today. If everyone above the floor, extending all the way to infinity, pays the same % it’s a stretch to call that a bracket.
I think that was "Adopting a process focus" on the list. (Which is something that works well for me too.)
>Fixing the DA clock-source

What do you mean? Are you claiming to be able to hear 50 ppm clock inaccuracy?
Cuban statistics cannot be trusted.

https://academic.oup.com/heapol/article/33/6/755/5035051

Key quote: “(...) evidence that physicians likely reclassified early neonatal deaths as late fetal deaths, thus deflating the infant mortality statistics and propping up life expectancy.“
Confessions of a former Facebook exec on the platform’s struggles with video
This works right up until someone makes you have to pass a qualifying exam. Ask Terry Tao - he failed his first time.
They treat their employees relatively well - and for many people, that is more important than the company's external /social behavior
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the guidelines. We're happy to unban accounts if you email hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll start using the site as intended.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Probably an equal mix of cash and people who don't have the same values or perspective as you?
I used to recommend LastPass but I had to stop recommending it based on their responses to issues including security issues. You can see some instances on the Mozilla bug tracker. It also has had a bad track record with security issues. There was an RCE on the browser extensions in 2017.
Max Planck Society Ends Elsevier Subscription (2018)
Surprised to see that too!
>> fundamentally destructive product

That's just, like, your opinion, a random HN reader. And the vast majority of FB users do not share it.
Sure - raise rates to 100% on wealthiest 5%. It still wont pay for what she wants.
It's because you're old, come on.
I'd just like to note this does not pass the golden rule. If every company spent hours to make "relevant" emails that got past spam filters and into all of our inboxes, then our inboxes would be full of "relevant" emails that we generally are not interested in and would be crowding out our actually important ones. We'd all be wasting much more of our precious time wading through marketing pitches to use our email.

To me this is the worst part about "growth hacking". If you are going to grow your business by being a higher scale spammer, ok, but just don't go bragging about it. You are stealing tons of people's attention and time for a very small percentage of them that will go on to be a customer. What percentage of people unsubscribe from the emails? What percent report it as spam? What percent send you angry responses because your sales tactic made their day a little worse? Those metrics seem to be missing from the story.

At least the person who knocks on my door to sell me something is wasting more of their own time than my time. By doing sales in this automated way, you are making a way to steal much more of their time than your time. The fact that you went slightly above the lowest common denominator doesn't make it right.

And again, sales is a dirty business and this is certainly not out of the ordinary. But have the decency not to brag about it. Nor brag about it so much that another "growth hacking" website re-publishes the story as a way to do their own growth hacking.
They have some really interesting projects going on. For example, they have recruited some top researchers in program analysis and compilers (among many other areas).
Many code-related security problems can be discovered externally without even seeing the code (simple examples: XSS attacks, SQL injection problems, etc.) Generic advice like "escape your inputs" can be provided. I am not saying this is valuable advice...
Buy more food with what money? Average wage is $18-20 a month from 2008 to 20015, as per some quick googling. Even if we trust the Cuban government's states wage, that's still $25 per month. Some make more on the black market, but for the most part the government rations dictates your diet. Apparently wages have risen after slightly more normalized relations with the US and greater tolerance of private enterprise on behalf of the Cuban administration, but it's still pretty poor.

I come from a family of Cuban immigrants, and have some distant relatives still in Cuba. Some of my family has visited over the last few years. It's a tacit understanding that the visiting relatives will bring money or valuables to sell on the black market to help pay for the feast that Cubans will inevitably throw for visiting relatives, because otherwise several months worth of income will be spent on food (which would only cost maybe a few days wages for the person coming from abroad).
It would be nice to know which offer the author decided to accept...
I was just reading this good one http://www.bigworldsmallpockets.com/is-airbnb-still-a-good-t...
> It seems incredible that people would want to use such a restrictive service when much more open ones exist, but the others routinely have their service degraded by the government so they aren't a viable option.

Do those other options actually exist within China? I thought they were blocked and that's why WeChat is dominate.
Sometimes those plastic gears are serving a purpose though. They can protect much more expensive parts by failing first when an error occurs.

So the operators gripe about replacing a stupid plastic gear so they replace it with a metal one, then gripe when they have to replace the blown out gearbox.