skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think these are all good questions. They're certainly things I mulled over when considering whether to take the job.

Regarding being fundamentally evil or not, I've worked around groups which were constitutionally amoral or immoral-- the mandate of the group was simply incompatible with common-sense notions of good and little effort was made to reconcile the two. Facebook does not seem to belong in that camp, but does belong in the grey wasteland of groups that are well paid to develop a peculiarly self-serving sense of ethics. The reason that's important is because amoral groups will simply not accept ethical arguments as valid arguments to make, while groups with peculiar ethics are responsive to them but sometimes their logical toolkit is filled with double-ended hammers and crescent screwdrivers. I've found that to be an important distinction in previous roles.

As you point out, there is an ethical hazard here. If I worked there for five years would I find their ethical blind spots so obvious? Is the environment corrosive in a spiritual sense? No idea, but early indications both during my interviews and speaking to current employees were mixed. It was definitely something that gave me pause.

In terms of whether you can actually have the requisite influence, I probably would have taken the job if I could have come to confidence on this. In the end I don't think I could have and I didn't take the role.

Of course, it's difficult to disentangle the compensation from the levelling, so I may just be lying to myself and saying that if they'd paid me more I would have pretended. To attempt to guard against that I asked friends and former colleagues who I thought knew both me and something about the dilemma and listened to their thoughts. It's not a perfect system but I think it yielded a set of thought experiments that were useful to me in making sure I didn't fall into that trap.
It happens all over the place all the time, if you don't stay late you're "not a team player". Of course your employer isn't going to say you're fired because you're a parent, unless their attorneys are bored. That doesn't make it any more moral to discriminate based on proxy metrics, like how much of your life you're willing to donate to an entity that cares about you only to the extent you're making them profit.
> But, do you really wanna waste you're precious calorie/sugar alotment for the day on a soda?

No, but 1 can (maybe 100-160 calories), isn’t close to most people’s daily calorie burn.

Sure it might push you over the limit, all other things being equal, and it doesn’t do you much good (aside from the water content), but it’s not going to kill you.
sctb is a moderator (kind of annoying that you have to google that) [1] and given their statement it indicates that "soliciting upvotes and booster comments" is disallowed/discouraged. Yet, that information is not part of the official HN guidelines [2] but is merely mentioned in the HN FAQ [3]. My point being, if telling your users about the HN post you created is disallowed, then why is it not part of the guidelines and merely hidden among the FAQ? Like I said, guidelines are to be read and followed, but I wouldn't expect from people to read the FAQ to find all the 'rules'.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
This is pretty fucking evil considering how bad sugar is to the body.
I have received a few of these as well (all displaying the same password). Because I use a unique, random password for every site, it was just a matter of finding it my password manager. In my case, it was an old one from a forum breech several years ago (not in any way related to porn).

It's clear that someone has made a business model out of this, and it doesn't matter what the password is actually from. For people that don't use unique passwords, they can't say if there is anything behind the threat.

Remember to always use unique passwords for every site!
It should calm the author to know being black makes him no more likely to be shot by the police: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evi...

But if he's worried about being shot regardless of skin color, things look less peachy (compared to other countries): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
GP and GGP are not saying there is an overt conspiracy especially among interviewers; they are attempting to point out that the interview process itself is discriminating.

I'm sure the people that perform interviews are not discriminating and I'm certain a number of bright, older, time-squeezed people make it through. But maybe I would imply conspiracy since I'd imagine the people at the upper levels, that designed the process, have at least noticed that it's biased in favor of young, recent graduates able to give extra time to the company.
> necessary to compete in the bay area housing market

I think there might be another solution to that problem then...
In the real world software architecture is rarely about “data structures”. Software architecture is about teasing out the needs of the customer - whether that be internal or external - and knowing how to design systems that are maintainable, scalable, fault tolerant, etc.
Looking at your comment history, you link to your website in almost every comment you write. Don't you think that's a bit excessive?
Are you sure about that? Steatosis is reversible if you give the liver time to recover, for example.
A private equity partner who makes $10,000,000 a year and pays 30% on it pays $3,000,000 to the government. A custodian who makes $50,000 a year and pays 30% on it pays $15,000, just 0.05% of what the investor does --- the investor pays 200x more than the custodian, simply for being more successful. By your logic, how could a flat 30% tax (really, a percentage tax set at any level) possibly not be "punitive"?
Hitman Runner Mark Fellows Convicted of Murder on GPS Watch Data
So the hiring procedure is to optimize for people who adhere to the advice of a specific training manual that's not actually mentioned in the job posting? You just have to want to work there so much that you find out about it? What is it about that kind of candidate that makes them desirable? Obsequiousness?
A decent 1 bedroom apartment in downtown Toronto will run you about $2500 CAD/mo.

A decent 1 bedroom apartment in San Francisco will run you about $3500 USD/mo. Or about $4700 CAD/mo.

So you make a good point.

If you can afford to own your home however that really makes the move worth it though, imho.
The Oracle v Google case was interesting at a corporate/technical level, but has less impact on average people than surveillance rulings.
This was back in 2010, now that same place to buy is around 8m, at its height it was 12m, i think it rents for 10k now.
From what I've heard from hiring managers, when you open a position and interview applicants without the use of headhunting, the majority of applicants are wildly under-qualified, even if they do have some relevant experience.

Also, I see no reason not to combine both a background check and a technical interview. You have no way of knowing what someone's actual contributions to a previous software project are, even with a background check; maybe they were about as productive as an observer even if they understood the project at a high enough level to explain it.
Would you choose one-hit-wonder over proven engineers (Jeff Dean, Sanjay, other ex SUN microsystems folks?) that lead high-profile projects?

I know that sounds rude... but one seems better to be a leader while others are better engineers would you agree?
Showboat: billionaire NFL team owner installs Imax cinema on superyacht
This is, like, the third time this month we’re seeing blah-blah-blah-sugar on the front page of HN.

I have a lot of fat friends, and I hate to say it, but I watched them over the years, and it wasn’t sugar that made them huge and unhealthy. It was indulgence, carelessness and zero motivation to exert will power.

And they were mostly really smart people. But they didn’t give a fuck. And I’m using past tense “were” because some of them lost that youthful glow as their circumstance became evident.

Sugar might cause some harm among the slower folk among us, but middling intelligence (or worse) is a hazard on its own, and changing the perception of sugar won’t fix stupid.

Obesity is a psychological side effect, just like hoarding. It’s not just one input, it’s a sustained habit of constant intake in general.
Snigl [0] traces the code before running it; simulating stack contents and inferring generic calls based on that information as far as possible, among other things.

It's not perfect, but it's the only way I've found that makes sense in combination with Forth-like stack semantics where function parameters are never specified explicitly. And that runs fast enough to make sense in an interpreted language. I also like that it's implemented as a transformation on VM code, which makes it flexible and easy to debug.

[0] https://gitlab.com/sifoo/snigl#tracing
Sure, but that's my point. So long as the interviewer is telling you what they'd actually like you to do, you should be able to just derive the algorithm you need to do it. At some point the algorithms become difficult enough (particularly if you add lots of constraints like efficiency) that it's pretty unreasonable to expect that in an interview though, and at that point it's a bad question.

Rather than memorizing a thousand algorithms, I generally focus on being able to solve problems simply, quickly, and elegantly, which will help in actually doing most jobs.
US Cartographers Inadvertently Created a House of Horrors in South Africa
GNU Octave: A high-level interactive language for numerical computations [pdf]
A Software Epiphany by the US Defense Community
4000 LOC a day, every day, for 3 months? I hope that's a lot of boiler plate!
>You can even safely consume a Soda if you're in a glycogen depleted state such as after a marathon

You “could” but that will also not help, and actually hurt, with the natural inflammation from running. If you ran the marathon in ketosis, you really wouldn’t be in a “glycogen depleted State” - even though that’s what ketosis generally is - because your body and brain are primarily running on ketones and internally producing all the minimal glucose the body/brain actually require.

In either case after a marathon your muscles will be catabolic, so protein is good, and of course water/electrolytes. But really it should be telling your example of using sugar responsibly is after running a marathon.
I just had the realization that I can’t remember ever paying for a console application (at least not since the 1980s and I can’t remember any in particular) and I can’t think of any that are currently for sale. Every command line tool I use, and I use a lot of them, is free software.

Maybe I’m just drawing a blank. I’d be curious to know if anyone pays for command line tools.
Images of the landscape of intensive cattle farming: https://mishkahenner.com/Feedlots
>> Secondly, is it a bad thing that we expect people that have more to pay more?

> Yes, very bad thing. You mess this up and millions of people die, you get this right and millions of people will emerge out of poverty. Please at least acknowledge that.

Please explain how increasing the percentage of income tax paid as income grows causes millions to die?
It's only in the tech industry that having a family isn't a regular, normal thing people do.

Maybe it being a choice with a negative association is more of a cover for the fact that most of us who choose this industry are extremely poor communicators and that an out-sized number of us _will not_ get married or have kids (and not by our own choice).

And I say that as someone without such attachments myself.

Or maybe we're okay with being exploited by employers who want us working extremely long hours for their benefit and the choice to keep the engineers away from the older, more normal folks with families is deliberate.

I would bet if you were to sample the average mid-career folks in non-tech groups at FAANGs, you would see normal (or even above average) numbers of people who have families and normal hours.
You are absolute right. I’m telling recruiters upfront that I will spend 0 time preparing and if it is a deal breaker - it is what it is.
these are pointless to guess. anyone can put up a domain name for large amounts of money and never get a buyer. it should be based on actual sold prices.
When I search for my name I get Usenet posts from 1991 :)
If you allow each user to try 200 million different passwords when they want to log in, you have bigger problems.
It seems to me that it would be in the best (financial) interests of big tobacco and pharma that vaping be outlawed entirely.

Failing that they would probably both find it in the their best interests to force companies who want to produce vape related products through a regulatory process so expensive that only massive companies such as Marlboro or Pfizer can afford to comply - can’t have the little guy taking a slice of their poison pie.

I think that if kids are going to try nicotine (and let’s face it - they are) better it be through a vape than a cigarette.

Anecdotally as a person who has sometimes smoked as many as 100+ cigarettes a day - I am finding vaping to be helpful in quitting the horrible cigarettes and if it were not offered as an alternative, would probably go back to smoking because none of the other cessation methods have been effective for me.

I know both smoking and vaping are far from ideal but the lesser of two evils is still better any way you slice it.

When you have something that is taking significant profits from big companies, one of the first ports of call for them is to whip up some hysteria along the lines of “think of the children” if applicable.

The rhetoric surrounding this appeals to something deep within human nature and it becomes trivial to demonise people who have a contrary point of view - in this case people who happen to be proponents of harm reduction and freedom of choice.
DNC says Russia tried to hack its servers again in November 2018
I’m a software developer first and foremost, I am a software architect second these days specializing in building stuff on top of AWS.

But I might try to do some algorithm type interview, but wouldn’t feel bad if I bombed it. In fact, the only algorithm type interview I have done in the last 10 years, they made me an offer but I declined it for another job that asked more architectural questions.

The way I see it, if I could write 65C02 and x86 assembly language programs in the 80s, I think I can handle the needs of your software as a service CRUD app.
Scalable, fault tolerant systems is a distributed systems problem, which is a harder form of data structures problem.
Bfs is just one of examples. I can ask you a question you will not be able to answer without knowing the answer. There is a reason it took researchers years to find those optimal solutions
Anyone used this before? If it supports arm it could be a handy system.
"can," "may," ...

1) My argument was simply that the limit on recodable codons is much higher than two, as it was claimed in the article. That's hard to argue with. I didn't say the result in every case would be neutral mutations.

2) The consequences of recoding the stop codons are also not neutral. For example, when Isaacs (eventually) did it, there were severe growth phenotypes in the resulting strain.

So I agree that "it's not that simple," which is frankly why I'm not hugely optimistic about this class of endeavors. But the point stands that there is no need in principle for a 4-base code.
The "selfish-lazy-greedy assholes" hypothesis doesn't do so well in the face of endocrinology.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15987666
> If we had that for engineers we wouldn't need to test their skills either.

I think we will, eventually. Other fields of engineering already do, of course. Software is new and not that many people have been killed by bad software (unlike bad buildings), but I think we'll get there.
> The degree of harm is correlated with the degree of use, just like cigarettes. If you smoke a handful of cigarettes a year, it probably won't affect you much at all. But if you use cigarettes multiple times a day for years, you'll do real harm to yourself. That's exactly true of Facebook.

That's also true of just about anything humans can consume. For example, sugar.
Khan Academy has multivariable calculus, differential equations and linear algebra --- with many exercises, solutions, and worked solutions (under the "hints" link after a problem), and gamification as a motivation aid.

The videos are above average, but seem about 5x too slow on the steps, then rushing through the interesting stuff almost too quick to catch: boredom punctuated by rewinding. Probably because it targets highschool kids.

BTW You may find you need to cover even earlier material anyway (I did), to refresh and fill gaps. You can cope with some gaps and hazy recall, until there are too many... and some gaps cannot be filled piecemeal (because you don't know you have a gap).
Yes but unless you are actually working on creating the system that other people implement, you are just using work made by others. You don’t need to know the ins and outs of various gossip protocols.
For what it's worth:

I pay for software when it has value to me, and your product does have value to me. I haven't used it much yet (see below), but I really like what it can offer.

I have paid for:

iOS: GoodReader, Working Copy, OmniFocus, Anki, and Scrivener (these are also among my more frequently used apps). I've paid for some games over the years but mostly board game ports to iPad (because carrying around boxes of games is a PITA). The rest of the apps on my iPhone (iPad isn't handy) are communication apps, media consumption apps (that I may pay a subscription for), or apps for a specific business (like a bank or airline). My iPad will be similar except it'll have the games.

macOS: I've paid for HeroLab, Scrivener, OmniFocus, YNAB4 (of the apps still on my laptop). I have also, in the past, paid for Parallels and some other things but they're not installed and I haven't missed them. I have also bought video games, but none presently installed. The rest of what I use is generally open source. I have Anki and would pay for it if the author sold it.

I would get more value from Polar Bookshelf if you had an iOS offering as that is where I do the bulk of my PDF reading (or Android, I do have a Kindle Fire I use for reading though less frequently). If it were available there, I'd happily pay for it. But I don't need cloud sync. I have sufficient cloud storage already and plenty of room to host the files I'd add to Polar (actually, most of what I'd add I actually have but haven't read in my Dropbox account already).
https://www.godaddy.com/garage/the-top-20-most-expensive-dom...
It's totally not what I believe, but that doesn't stop him from being probably my favourite artist of all time. :).
> I cannot spend hours and hours studying up on these algorithms, there are much more important things (real coding-related things) which I need to learn about, to the extent I have time to do that.

Are "real code-related things" really much more important if it only takes hours and hours to learn something that might get you an offer at one of these companies?

Perhaps those hours and hours are actually far more valuable 'financially' speaking than a lifetime of studying code that is valuable 'technically' speaking. I don't doubt that some of the big name companies use rarely-used algorithms with battle-tested solutions on purpose JUST to see if you prepared for battle. They look for non-technical smarts because they have no shortage of technically prodigious applicants.

At Google, with over 400 applicants for every position, they have no shortage of technically-competent engineers. They look for people who think way outside the box and try new things, sometimes resulting in industry defining inventiveness. It's ~10 times harder to get hired at Google than get into Harvard.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stanphelps/2014/08/05/cracking-...
Or get wired connection providers off the hook to provide fibre to the most remote, unprofitable, locations.
Tooling data in a G-Code data structure bootstrapped with G65 and M98 would support fixture models.

Certainly a chicken and egg problem though, my ideal future would have CAD files generated from single source of truth CNC files:)
I re-implemented (most of) TPLang (mentioned above) in pure JS , and called it openjscam [1]
And am working on open source software for CAM (as a hobby), just 2.5D gcode generators, using maker.js and openjscam [2].
And made opencamlib compile on Mac and Windows (and added basic Node.JS bindings) [3]

I am hoping more people will work on open source g-code generators so we have better alternatives to Fusion 360 / Solidworks for free

[1] http://github.com/makercam/openjscam
[2] http://github.com/makercam
[3] https://github.com/aewallin/opencamlib
> My nephew from the US came over and was shocked at the taste

Shocked -- because it was surprisingly superior?
> The cerebellum had been far too neglected in AI research.

Cerebellar Model Articulation Controller (CMAC) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellar_model_articulation_...

A Historical Review of Forty Years of Research on CMAC https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.02277.pdf
I'd wager most people already have a daily battle with their own waistline long before they are worried about longevity.

And there's much, much more to life than longevity, like day-to-day quality of life. If you focus on that, then longevity is just a bonus, even if it's true that you have no control over it.

You certainly have control over quality of life, though. And indulgence tends to hamstring that for short-term gain.

I'm in my 30s which is apparently when all the chickens start flocking home to roost from lifestyle decisions. It's sad to see a 35-year-old seat-ridden at the beach because of a smoking habit and obesity, winded from tossing a football around. Not sure my friend feels like that's the road to "enjoying the heck out of life".

Surely the key to life is getting to a point where you aren't dependent on vices like sweets and alcohol and food so that you can partake on your own terms, exercising total dominance over yourself.
Probably because it simply has the biggest userbase.