skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What does it mean for a company to be "fundamentally" evil or not? The "fix things on the inside" argument for going to working at a place that you think is harming people has always struck me as based upon a mostly unfalsifiable assumption: that the organization has the capacity to change and that you can actually bring about that change. This is especially unknowable until you've actually worked at an organization for a long enough period of time to understand all of its internal pathologies and the motivations and character of the people involved in them.

There's no reason to believe that as a job seeker you can have some insight for a given company into how impactful your actions may or may not have on the things they are doing that you consider harmful. An honest assessment I'd argue should assume your impact will be minimal if not zero given a large enough organization, unless you are coming in as a high level manager.

As such it's hard to not take it as a self-rationalization given the incentives to create cognitive dissonance on the part of job seekers in order to take a high paying job working on interesting technical problems despite the potential negative effects it has on others. This doesn't mean there aren't good reasons to go work at such a place, it just means that if you're telling yourself that you're able to look past any ethical concerns you might have since you think you can be an influencer towards correcting them, I think it's worth reflecting on if you're not actually going to be put into a real position of power to do so.

The challenge with Facebook specifically on this front is that power is extremely centralized onto one person, so even if you were joining Facebook as, say, a VP, it's hard to know in advance just how much influence you're going to have over the direction of the company before you've learned where the boundaries of that influence are.
I don't understand why this comment is being downvoted. This is undeniably true. Heck, the industry itself freely admits this. E.g.:

https://www.beefmagazine.com/beef-quality/consumers-not-scie...

https://www.unileverusa.com/news/press-releases/2017/hellman...
Wechat is pretty good if you're in China. You can use it to do everything (payments, taxi, tickets, transfer, calls, games) versus having tons of miscellaneous poor apps. Every store and even panhandlers accept Wechat. I'm in the middle of SF and every place is still on cash only or no mobile payments such that it's unreasonable to depend on mobile payments.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. The computer scientists who work on quantum computational complexity and post-quantum cryptography tend to be much more mathematical than the norm :)
> Leetcode Medium, Leetcode Hard, Cracking the Coding Interview ...

I feel like there is something wrong with the industry. Here is a person applying to do mobile development and they need to spend weeks and weeks drilling binary tree inversions and trapping rain water (https://leetcode.com/problems/trapping-rain-water/) etc.

I was interviewing at AWS and I don't think most of the people I talked to even looked at my resume and asked about the projects I worked on, happy customers etc. It was mostly palindromes, buckets of water and various trees, and parroting back Jeff's 14 leadership principles. Now obviously these companies are around and lots of smart people are working there and delivering great products but it just seems so strange.
Coordinates and distances are independent concepts. They are function from the space you are working with into the reals assigning each respectively each pair of elements a real number for each coordinate respectively one real number for the distance. You can for various reasons choose coordinates and distances in a way such that they have simple mathematical relationships but that is just an arbitrary choice. The classical law of gravity is only dependent on distances, which is a physical meaningful concept, but not on coordinates, which are not physically meaningful. In that sense distances are fundamental in a way in which coordinates are not and a distance of zero is a meaningful thing, namely two things are at the very same place.
I've been in a ton of debriefs at this point. I no longer feel bad about any rejection I've had from any big company. "Dice roll" is a perfect way to describe it. The number of things that someone will raise an arbitrary red flag over is endless and largely down to personal bias / mood of the interviewer.

I've seen people discredited for not setting up some large inheritance hierarchy for their whiteboard design question. What's "Doing it Right" for one person (me: avoid inheritance like the plague), is someone else's "this guy couldn't code his way out of a paper bag".
Have you ever been to the "job rumors" forums like econjobrumors and PSR? It's like HN on steroids. Polite because it's semiprofessional and everyone's pseudonymous but can get easily outed from details (I mean come on how many people have been in strategy consulting and done graduate work on symplectic manifolds?) but also everyone's mean and competitive.

HN is less toxic than PSJR because the field it covers is much larger and positive-sum; academic job rumor forums are much more fish-eat-fish.
> Companies need to admit that only trying to hire a single type of person is not going to work.

Why? It's not so clear to me that it's not working right now. These companies seem to be doing completely fine.

If hiring programmers who aren't good at programming puzzles is a competitive edge, I would expect to see other companies hiring these programmers and succeeding.

It seems more likely to me that there is (at most) a very marginal loss from hiring this way. It's not the fairest way to hire, it's not the most equitable way to hire but the evidence doesn't suggest to me that it's not working for these companies.
It started with a New York Times best-selling book a handful of years back, though.
Your cortisol levels rise so that would probably more than counter any small benefit from a higher heart rate.
A Markdown editor, my first WordPress plugin work
A New AI-Powered System Creates Impressive 3D Animations from Still Images
I've added different volume icons based on the current volume, shall hit production anytime!
The average Joe is going to get tracked then.
Most companies outside of the EU are never going to respect the GDPR.

If you want to "not get tracked" you have to take things into your own hands.
The most revealing thing in that video would be how bored I get from porn these days.
Classic granpa move.
All of those companies are problematic to a certain degree. Personally, whether I'd have an issue with working for one of those companies also depends on what I am working on. Let's say that one of those companies pays you to work on an open source project. Would that really be that bad ethically? What if you worked on Facebook's security team securing the users' data? Is that really worse than working for LinkedIn implementing some new dark pattern to get the users to receive more email spam? At the end of the day, you'll have to make compromises, unfortunately.
I want to use this tech on old history books.
Triggering Python from Node via Ajax
Congratulations on getting the offers.

I haven’t applied lately. Working in one of these big companies was a dream of my younger self. Nowadays, I prefer companies where I can work at my own pace. Moreover, while the salaries at these companies are exaggeratedly high, especially in San Francisco, I feel that my current compensation package is good enough to live a kind and peaceful life.
It's a design trade-off. TypeScript is close enough to JavaScript but adding the compiler step actually enables worthwhile changes to improve code safety. And Typescript can import JavaScript modules anyway, so really you just lose the ability to write both in the same file.
is there any other China? please don't promote CCP agenda by using this disgusting term
These two comments are fixed and will be available in a new version in a few minutes!
Cool, but the direct link needs to be confirmed in humans. I recently recall David Amaral, who has done a lot of the great post-mortem work on the hippocampus and amygdala, telling me that it used to be thought that left and right hippocampi were connected by axon projections in humans just like they were in rodents, but this proved not to be the case.
Facebook's only real "fault" is that the "wrong" person got elected president in the US. The rest is just a politically motivated pile-on with tenuous evidence IMO, which wouldn't even be a subject of "vast public discourse" if someone else won.

>> negative consequences of facebook use

Do those "academics" also research the positive consequences as well? I'm in touch with my high school and university friends to this day thanks to FB products. I value those friendships highly, but I now live on the other side of the globe, and I can't physically be there myself. My parents (and my wife's parents) are active users of WhatsApp and Instagram. My brother (who's also on the other side of the globe) communicates with me mostly via FB Messenger. I'd say my mental well-being benefits significantly from less isolation. I'd also say there are millions of other people like me, who can still easily keep in touch in spite of vast distances separating them from relatives and old friends.

Would alternatives exist if there was no FB? They likely would. But I don't have a problem with FB, as long as it's used moderately. I my view, however, it's a personal responsibility to moderate use. Part of being a functioning adult, so to speak.
Facebook is very clearly ethically bad from the top down. It's less clear with the others.
There really should be a way to "roll your own Patreon" for individuals. Whatever your individual viewpoints on each of the de-platforming incidents in the recent past, having them all be lumped into one service makes it easier to take down and disrupt the users of said service. I don't think Bitcoin is necessary yet given the amount of additional complexity for the average creator and average patron, just a separate web page that allows for recurring subscriptions.
The definition of an addictive drug is that users will pay anything, do anything for it; lie, beg, steal, and kill. TO a sensible person looking at it from the outside, it looks stupid and wasteful. To the drug addict, who do I kill for my next hit. All reasoning goes out the door.
The two of you are talking about different things. What forkandwait is talking about is the propensity for people with only an undergraduate education in math (or less) to not actually know what a worthwhile goal is. They usually either lack the mathematical maturity to intuit how difficult a particular problem is (whether it's tractable with available mathematics, whether it's tractable for their ability, etc); or they formulate problems which are "not even wrong."

Of course this is in the context of choosing research problems to strive towards in math. If you tasked yourself with solving an open problem in math, it's more likely than not that, without any collaboration, you'd have no idea how to even work towards the goal due to all the unknown unknowns. If your goal is something concrete that can be augmented with mathematics, then yes I agree that goal setting can be useful. It doesn't take a volume of missing domain knowledge to develop that kind of goal.
None of those are newsql other than MemSQL, which is an OLAP system that uses a custom rowstore format and parquet for columnstores.

In addition to CockroachDB there's also TiDB which runs on top of TiKV which uses RocksDB.
A lot of the credit for the Windows version should go to MSYS2. They provide all the libraries used here (including GTK).
Re-using passwords with a unique login would indeed be stupid because it would not only be weak against attackers but also have terrible ergonomics: it's usually much easier to regain access after forgetting the password than to regain access after forgetting the login. Source: I often forget both of them.

What I and many others do is reuse not a password, but reuse a password formula (in my case with slight but easily memorable variations depending on importance, or if forced by stupid password rules). If you saw a dozen of my email/password combinations in the clear you would be able to reverse engineer the rules and then guess combinations for arbitrary sites almost as good as me. It's a calculated risk, just like trusting a password manager is a calculated risk. Right now I consider password managers the better trade-off, but still only slightly better, by a margin small enough to make it not worthwhile to invest in a habit change. If the "formula" I happen to use was just a little harder to reverse engineer than it sadly is I would consider it strictly safer than password managers.
What do you think WW2 was exactly, if not a literal attempt to conquer it?

You're arguing with a straw man. Nobody claims the EU had to do anything, it can ban people who live there from buying British things if it wants. But the idea that this will cause food and medicine shortages is simply silly - the rest of the world manages to buy these things without being in the EU so why does this story keep being promoted?
Interestingly, I find that most employees and applicants in high tech accept this, that they've made their choice and will live with it.

It's the tech companies that seem bitter about accepting the consequences of their own hiring practices. They have hiring practices that, by their own admission, result in a very high rate of false negatives. This is their right, they have their reasons, but there are downsides. It means their processes are designed to make hiring hard. It creates a culture where developers are disinclined to pursue new jobs, as the transition costs (intense interview exam prep) are high, and the outcome is uncertain. I actually think these practices may cause talented people to leave the field, and may deter other talented people from entering the field in the first place.

Interestingly, these companies don't seem to accept their role in creating the "shortage" that they constantly decry.

(the solution, it appears, is for the government to grant tech companies power over who is allowed to come to the United States and the conditions under which they are allowed to remain here).
From what I can recall it is due to an overlong drought. This could be due to climate change or not.

There are arguments from both sides:
https://www.inverse.com/article/25318-aleppo-syria-conflict-...
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/41428

Also worth remembering that something as complex as the Syrian Civil war is bound to have multiple causes.
No, it's more of a don't-ask don't-tell policy. Workers provide fake social security numbers that the CAFO is under no obligation to thoroughly vet. The workers with fake SSNs will never be able to collect their benefits on those wages, either - they end up in the IRS's suspense file.

I know this because I married the daughter of the (Mexican) guy who started the Mexican immigrant labor pipeline at that CAFO, when they first were starting to get big and transitioning to large milking parlors.
>Result: Police cannot obtain 127 days' worth of cell-site location information about a criminal suspect without a warrant.

This was a weird one, because it seemed like they were cool with about 6 days of unwarranted cell-site data. What's so special about 6 days?

>Result: Workers that sign arbitration agreements are bound to them and can’t use the federal court system to adjudicate labor claims—making class-action lawsuits in such scenarios all but impossible.

Ouch. This one sucks.
I don't think it's the intention of democracy to vote until you think the result is good.
A drone maker with 14,000 employees is surprising.
After reading the man page for diff and the -e option, I found that they actually generate the diff hunks from the end of the file to the beginning in order to keep the start line numbers consistent. I wonder why the other diff formats decided to do it the other way around (from beginning to end)? Doing it from end to beginning actually makes it easier to apply individual hunks without having to regenerate the diff after applying one (assuming you start with a later hunk before applying earlier ones).
It was an RF tight triple wall secure engineering facility with no windows and power filtering. Vehicles and people searched on entry and exit. They knew very well of these risks a long time ago. To give you an idea, the building was designed in the 1950s where they even had dampers on the water pipes coming on site due to the use of typewriters historically.
I like this analogy and I'll steal it if you don't mind. (Assuming that customer value is the same as product use, with cigarettes being a brain dead obvious counterexample.)
Reddit it's pretty much unknown in Europe I'd you check statistics

Amazon it's also the last option i would be looking at when shopping for something online in Europe
That kind of concern is probably why FoundationDB built on and modified SQLite. Its reliability is already great.
I'm the same as you (wife+kids, full-time job and rusty whiteboarding skills), PLUS I lived in Canada, PLUS I have no CS degree. I landed a job at Uber's San Francisco office 1.5 year ago.

Here are a few of things to be aware of that may make you feel better:

- tech companies in the bay area have extremely high churn rates (2-4 yrs is not uncommon)

- unicorns often hire constantly and in high volume (e.g. Facebook increased head count by some 8k people last year alone), so the likelihood that all hires for all unicorns are all "cream of the crop" is far lower than most will admit.

- many companies here are willing to spend significantly more on hiring process than companies in other cities/countries: I've been flown in for on-sites from Toronto on multiple occasions and when I accepted my current role, I received a generous amount of money for moving expenses ($7500) for my family of 4, in addition to getting legal support for visa/immigration procedures. This makes physical location a much smaller hurdle than one might expect.

- not all roles have algorithm-centric interviews (e.g. in my experience, interviews for web-related roles tend to be much more about day-to-day experience), and even for more "traditional" roles, there may be variations in interviewers' expectations (this is exacerbated by the high churn rate from point 1)

- interviewing doesn't need to be that intensive or stressful. I only did a few passively over several years. An interview process typically starts w/ a 1 hour phone screen, so you don't necessarily have to commit to whole-day interview marathons right off the bat. In that one hour you often get a chance to ask more about the role and get a feel for yourself if it'd be a good fit (it often isn't!) Doing this kind of fishing every once in a blue moon is fairly manageable.
i mean if had to choose between no graph theory vs no ruby on rails...i would probably go with no ruby on rails
After my full day of interviewing at Google, when my recruiter asked what I was planning to do for the rest of the day I let him know I would probably just be sitting at the park with my dog looking at the trees.

I would bet that with time and repeated practice the process becomes less stressful and draining, but I have no intention of testing my hypothesis any time soon.
“Disruption is not isolated to the tech community.” Big tech is leaving ppl out
Openrsync – a clean-room implementation of rsync with a BSD (ISC) license
> Companies need to admit that only trying to hire a single type of person is not going to work.

Um.. have you looked at their stock? Investors would probly want them to continue coding puzzles if they knew about that.
> But I'm totally OK with the FDA's aggressive stance on e.g. Juul marketing to teenagers, because that seems to me to be all about getting somebody to start the habit when they're least likely to make wise decisions.

is there any evidence that juul is marketing to teenagers? genuinely asking, as I receive their promotional emails and they never strike me as targeting underage users.
Not to my knowledge, I think right now it's just iOS and Android.
Not to speak for GP, but a lot of people who "smoke" that much aren't really smoking it all. They're not like on a typical smoke break where they go outside expressly to consume a cig and go back to work. Some people just have a cig burning almost all of the time, but might actually only take 2 or 3 draws off of it and the rest just sits there burning. They tend to be self employed bc there is no way you could do that at a regular 9-5 job.

Anecdotally, I've had 2 experiences with people like that. One was a coder who was self employed and worked out of his house, and another was my auto mechanic before I moved. Both always had a cig burning sitting burning in an ashtray but only picked up and consumed maybe 25% of it while they were working.

In some places, cigs might cost $15/pack (your numbers), but I just passed by a Chevron gas station selling for $7 where I live (Portland, OR). The cost depends greatly on the local/state taxes and is not indicative of everywhere. A carton of Marlboros here (the most expensive brand) is around $60 ($6/pack). A quick scan of this table [1] shows rates by state. A cursory look shows a tax range of about 0.37% (Georgia) to 4.5% (DC), but those are only the state taxes and don't take into account other local taxes. I'm just pointing out your example of $30/day (I assume where you live) is quite different from $12/day where I live, and there are even cheaper places than where I live. Portland isn't exactly the boonies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_taxes_in_the_United_...
If milk was $10 USD, it would encourage people to eat in ways that are cheaper to produce. Cheaper to produce unsubsidized lines up reasonably well with good for the environment (more vegetarian and vegan foods). I'm always surprised that milk is cheaper than canned beans on a calories per dollar basis, given the cows, pasteurization, and refrigeration needed.
It seems that LeetCode and HackerRank have become the SAT and ACT of the SV Big Techs, and FAANG et al are becoming the workplace Ivy Leagues. If so then where are the Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, and local coding boot camps of the world?
Yup - agreed 100%.
At this point I've conducted dozens of screening interviews at a SV tech company, which is in the ballpark of the ones mentioned here. Interviewees choose the language they'd like to work in, and the questions are of the shape "given a list of data and a simple criterion, find an element of the list". This isn't exactly depth-first search: finding elements of collections that meet some criteria is, like, extremely common in day-to-day work.

It's really surprising to see how hard people fall down on even the simplest part of this exercise. People with lots of experience, people who work in big-name companies (including the ones mentioned here), you name it.

This experience has really caused me to soften my erstwhile stance of "tech hiring is broken and inhumane", because it really makes me suspect that no matter how simple or common the problem is, many people will fall all over themselves attempting to solve it. Even if the problem is nerves, how much can you really ease someone's nerves over a video chat?

This is basically the lesson of FizzBuzz.