skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
""estimate how many auto mechanics serve Portland" or "I shrink you to the size of a pea and throw you in a blender, how will you survive?""

Those are two very different questions - the second is so abstract it's essentially meaningless.

The first however - is not a bad question at all.

Note that it is not a 'brain teaser' with a specific answer a-la Microsoft's 'river crossing' type.

A similar question used in consulting is 'if Quebec separated from Canada, how would they divide the debt' although that is less mechanical.

The 'Portland mechanic' question is actually quite good, and I enjoy asking them.

The objective is simply to see how people might think creatively at arriving at an answer.

I once asked the infamous 'how man tennis balls on a 747' question - and the interviewee started calculating how many balls would fit in the area of various body parts, it was ridiculous.

You can tell a lot by how they answer such questions, and get a good grip on their common sense, however, that type of question might be more suited for business analysts.

They are good questions to just get a rough idea of how someone might think about ambiguous problems that need solving - of course, they could never be used in isolation.

FYI - these arbitrary data questions are quite valid for software. We don't expect people to write a perfect 'bubble sort' or know specifically how the various sorts work - rather - the questions just provide an opportunity for someone to work through a simple problem - and then code the solution.

A crazy number of people have trouble with basic things, it's important to weed them out. Smart, coherent people will shine in these scenarios and it will generally be clear.
Thanks for posting this, I have started working up some cloudformation scripts with the goal of getting spot instances into play for GPU nodes on AWS @ https://github.com/frankamp/fast-ai-aws-advanced not quite there yet, but using layering to get separation of concerns means a user can swap out for a bigger gpu temporarily without losing anything. Cheers.
I second the Andrew Ng Coursera course; I took it in 2011 when it was called "ML Class" (pre-Coursera) - yep, I was one of the beta testers!
Everything Should Have Dark Mode
To add to the ancedata pile, cancelling spotify was refreshingly easy and nice. A+ would resubscribe again, once they have homepod support.
So much this. I LOVE paypal as a user because of it. All my subscriptions go through it and if it isn't offered via paypal, I'll reconsider.

I love to see a list of all my subscriptions with the ability to unilaterally cancel my subscription at any time via PayPal... I never even contact the companies I 'unsubscribe' from... I simply remove their access to my paypal.
I don't understand what you're trying to say. US residents can't register their children for public school in Delta or Surrey. There is a school bus that goes from point Roberts to Blaine every day, with special permission to bypass the border checkpoint, which takes all of the Point Roberts high school students to the HS in Blaine.
As bad as this is, I'm OK if I don't have to call or fill out a form.
It's sad that that's the only way at this point. Maybe sites will start bragging about how easy it is to leave if it becomes taboo enough to make it hard to leave (akin to "100% money back guarantee if you don't like it!"). Until then, someone's gotta be the first to try the poison.
That had already occurred. This article was talking about a glut due to China dropping local installation subsidies. Demand dropped in China so all those panels were dumped on the international market.

The party being referred to was had by nonChinese developers, as they were getting panels cheaper than anticipated. That meant more profit for them.
You don't have this kind of problems in Paris. Nobody cares about the crossing lights here :)

It's pretty impressive, or scary, when you come from a country where people respect the crossing lights, but once you're accustomed to it, you just can't stand waiting for the green light if there is no car in sight (let's be honest, no car in 30m range is enough)
Yes, great point. Certainly some very insidious second order effects there.
A Brief Design History of the Modern Office Chair
Hulu used to do this, but they'd give a free month. All I had to do was remember to find the cancellation flow once a month and I got it for free for almost a year.
It really means very little that a patent was granted. They do not do an exhaustive search for prior art, or validation of relevance. Until it has been litigated no one really knows which patents can survive litigation.
You can't be "entitled" to a finite resource. It's a logical contradiction. Any rights you might have can only restrict others in preventing you from trying to obtain those things.

You don't have a right to a job, but I also don't have a right to try to prevent you from getting a job.

This is obvious in the phrase "pursuit of happiness". There's no right to happiness. You can't be restricted from pursuing happiness, but there can be no guarantee you'll get it.

Similarly, you can't be restricted from trying to get a job, but there can be no guarantee you'll get it.

So, no, no one is _entitled_ to income, a job or having others pay for their expenses. If there are no jobs, or no income, or no others to pay, how can you be entitled? That's the logical contradiction.

A right isn't something that forces someone else to do something. That's the definition of slavery. If you have the right to receive something from someone, then that someone is, at least in part, your slave.

But if you have the right to pursue your own ends, no one has a right to try to stop you. These rights are restrictions on what people can do to you, not things they are forced to do for you.

They can't just walk up and kill you for no reason. They can't just lock you up, or enslave you, for no reason. They can't stop you from doing what you want to do, for no reason.

And again, the only reason is if you, in turn, are infringing on the rights of others, and even then only in way that is governed by the rule of law.

See how that works?
If you're on mobile, there's an incognito mode (at least on Android).
Tick tock HipChat users – it’s time to move to the future-proof alternative
Ah, probably using playerpiano. Same idea, but I wanted it for bash.
I am 33, and I was breastfed until 2, carried around in a sling, didn’t spend much time on TV or screen games, etc. But my parents are an anthropologist and a schoolteacher, who both spent lots of time on family. (Note: I certainly have plenty of my own problems and wouldn’t claim to be any kind of human ideal role model.)

Your description more or less fits my parents (now ~70), though TV wasn’t anywhere near as pervasive during their childhood as a few decades later, and they spent tons of time outside as kids.

Whether “everyone” among my peers who were raised by screens turned out “fine” is debatable at best. Many of the kids of 2-parents-with-full-time-professional-jobs-and-not-much-time-for-family ended up with plenty of baggage and interpersonal problems. Not to mention chronic health problems caused by lifestyle, etc.

Of course, there has been plenty of shitty parenting (either coercive or neglectful) throughout history. New styles of shitty parenting are different than old ones, but it’s not clear they are “worse” per se.

* * *

From personal experience, the 2–3-year-olds I see who get more practice walking around town and running around on the playground (instead of being pushed in a little cart), playing with a wide variety of toys (instead of being kept away from the ones that say "age 3+"), engaging with adults (instead of handed over to a screen), working through their emotions with patient support (instead of having adults try to control their emotional responses), etc. are significantly ahead of their peers in strength, balance, agility, speed, hand-eye coordination, listening comprehension, speech, logical reasoning, emotional maturity, etc., even accounting for the inherent large variance of kids’ development. It’s not clear to me yet to what extent much school evens out those differences for older kids.

In my personal opinion, the biggest problems I see around town and on the playground are adults emotionally manipulating small kids and restricting their ability to direct their own attention, control their own actions, or deal with (minor) consequences. Some parents and nannies are real tyrants, and many others are pathologically overprotective.

Other stuff seems relatively minor. If parents need to feed their kids formula for whatever reason, or put them in daycare 9–5 out of financial necessity, or slather them in too much sunscreen, or dress them in gender-stereotyped clothes, or buy them too many commercialized movie-tie-in action figures, or give them too much candy at halloween, or don’t read to them for 2 hours per day, or .... I certainly won’t judge them.
That EULA is specifically for the ARM RealView compilation tools, which are proprietary AFAIK.

You don't need any EULA to use any of Mbed's stuff, it's all Apache licensed and can use any compiler.
Stupid shit like this is the reason I moved everything to my own Nextcloud instance. It's completely free, open source and surprisingly have a BETTER user interface than Dropbox. Rclone can sync to the WebDav interface.

https://nextcloud.org/

https://rclone.org/webdav/#nextcloud
This understanding is perfectly correct. Entitlements are not, and cannot be, rights.
Ah yes, blame the parents.

A 9% chargeback rate on payments identified from minors is an awful lot of careless parents. The real fraud rate would be a lot higher as plenty might write it off to experience come credit card bill. Quite often these things are remarkably difficult to cancel too (no idea if that applies to Facebook).

The fact is many of these ongoing payments, and the use of separate game currencies rather than simple $1.99 are deliberately unclear, even to fully clued up adults. That's rather the whole point of them.
Only for certain things. My experience is anything primarily offline, they collect: gyms, ISPs, gas companies, etc.

Anything primarily online? They don't. Netflix, hulu, most credit card subscriptions that are VC funded (I've done with with countless SAAS providers), etc. I've ghosted them with no repercussions on my credit score or collections calls.

Edit: I also use paypal and click the remove merchant authorization button from there; that might also trigger some kind of forced cancellation?
Outside of rare cases, the entire concept needs to be made illegal, along with forced arbitration.
I want this so bad. My hatred for the automobile grows every day.

If you really want to see more people walk, then do more walking yourself as a form of basic transit.

I've lived without a car for more than a decade. Everywhere I go, people start walking more. As more people start walking, crime goes down. (See Jane Jacobs: "Eyes on the street" is the key to urban safety. This means pedestrians on the street.) Air pollution goes down. Plant life greens up. Locals start having less financial stress.

I have had the passing fancy of starting a "Pedestrian Ambassador" program or something. But, eh, I have enough half-baked projects going nowhere that don't pay squat. My life gets better when locals walk more.

If you want to see more people walking, be the change you wish to see. And watch it go viral.
Well explained. Privacy.com gives the illusion of control in this regard (and I love the service) but to enable full user control like this you have to be untraceable after ghosting, which means signing up with a "fake" (I prefer "per-use") identity.

--amend yes it's (close to) fraud so be careful. Lots of things were illegal before they weren't; union strikes come to mind.
I finished the 2018 edition of the class two weeks ago but I am happy to go through the latest version now. The class was so thought provoking. I came up with a lot of good ideas for my thesis project while watching the videos.
"My expectation simply is that a solid candidate would be able to figure out anything on that list given a reasonable amount of time commensurate to their career level."

The point of the interview is to determine if they are in fact a 'solid candidate'!

Also, sometimes very experienced engineers have difficulty thinking, communicating and writing code coherently even if they can 'discuss' project issues in detail.

Here's a famous and interesting article on that [1]

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
There's no incentive to raise wages. At best it forces Americans to pay more for certain goods but the idea that that money goes to workers is indirect. These Chinese tariffs just increase the cost of Chinese goods so unless the US is second in cost, they cut into US profits but increase the profits of other global entities. In the case of steel, Russian imports are up.

It's not just John Q Public that sees increased prices either. Increasing steel costs hurt US manufacturing jobs that use steel. Because tariffs don't bring in any new money abroad, it's US companies that are footing the bill. The net gain to the US is zero or even less if there are less manufacturing jobs because of increased resource costs. Less manufacturing ripples back into less profit for steel.
If my child takes the money that I left on the desk, goes to the shop, buys candies and eats them...can I go to the bank and ask them to give back my crisp bills? Or maybe go to the candy store and whine there?
No, it definitely applies protections to the entire Apache licensed work. People can fork it and make changes, rename the project and they will retain their patent license as long as they abide by the terms of the license.
I'll take that flow any day over a company that makes you call or email to cancel.

Recently had a horrible experience with Full Contact. You can sign up with a couple clicks, but you need to email them to cancel. Then they'll sit on your request so you get billed for another month while they're processing it and then they'll kill your plan right away for the month you just paid for. Horrible!
The mixer probability maybe went from 1% to 2% but there must be 100s of other products they could show that have much higher probability. Maybe a mixing bowl or a cookbook?
> What is the difference between 'DevOps' and a system administrator?

That "DevOps" is supposed to be so easy that an ordinary full-stack developer can pick it up and there is no need for expensive senior system administrators and especially DBAs (="the cloud will handle it for us").

True: when one relies on cloud-provided databases (Amazon RDS), the need for a DBA goes down a bit, especially with a decent support contract from the cloud provider.

But the other part, like how to configure a machine for maximum throughput, how to properly implement failover networking, how to do OS upgrades (and especially with Docker containers, how to keep the stuff in the images updated!) and most importantly how to write a Docker image that does not "just work" but is performant, upgradeable and doesn't place stuff around everywhere totally ignoring LSB... this needs Linux administration experience.

tl;dr: companies label it "devops" to save money for Linux/DB Admins, but this gamble can really fuck up when you suddenly do need the skillset of a real admin.
IIRC there was at least one language that implemented CCRs natively in its syntax. I want to say it's Ada but I could be wrong. If anyone else knows about it please correct me.

To understand it better here's the solution to the producer/consumer problem (from wikipedia), using mutexes and semaphores:

mtx buffer_mutex;
sem fillCount = 0;
sem emptyCount = BUFFER_SIZE;

procedure producer()
{
while (true)
{
item = produceItem();
down(emptyCount);
down(buffer_mutex);
putItemIntoBuffer(item);
up(buffer_mutex);
up(fillCount);
}
}

procedure consumer()
{
while (true)
{
down(fillCount);
down(buffer_mutex);
item = removeItemFromBuffer();
up(buffer_mutex);
up(emptyCount);
consumeItem(item);
}
}

and the same problem solved using CCRs:

int avl = 0;

procedure producer()
{
while (true)
{
item = produceItem();
region R when (avl < BUFFER_SIZE)
{
putItemIntoBuffer(item);
avl++;
}
}
}

procedure consumer()
{
while (true)
{
region R when (avl > 0)
{
item = removeItemFromBuffer();
avl--;
}
consumeItem(item);
}
}

The most important thing about CCRs is that they are supposed to guarantee fairness, along with mutual exclusion. A well-designed solution uses two binary semaphore queues to achieve this.

If anyone wants to see what an implementation looks like here's a small C library I wrote a while ago, to use for some of my own personal projects, and to solve some homework for Uni https://github.com/Gikoskos/libccr
The alternative is that the code exists but it has no warning to indicate the code smell. TS is clearly preferable to that. Further, you're wrong to suggest that blocking the code from running on type errors is "the only reason" for it. TS offers very nice autocomplete support that you can't get without it as well as jump to definition and yes, warnings.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18946292
We should get a list going of companies doing it right. I recall quitting Basecamp in like 3 clicks and and thank you page.
> Continuity of government is kinda the #1 priority of government as everything else they do is subordinate to that.

Well, to be fair, anything that is considered "essential" for the government to do is not, by definition, shut down.

Obviously, there will be differing definitions of "essential", but the continuity is there.

That said, amending the appropriate legislation to prevent this nonsense from being necessary when branches of government are at a stand-off should be the desired goal.
Funny thing is, with proper use of touch typing you wouldn't need the top row: Esc is either Ctrl-[, or some map it to Caps Lock. And hardcore Vim users are definitely supposed to be deep in touch typing. So this ‘noise’ is actually just people making fun of Vim's idiosyncrasies in light of the touch bar thing.

Emacs, afaik, doesn't need the top row at all.
Canada Goose is the iPhone or top-price Samsung of the coat world, an OK product which retails for far more than it should because the price itself is part of the appeal for the indented customer group. If all you need is a coat which keeps you warm during cold winters you can get something for ⅒ of the price which is just as warm and lasts just as long (if not longer). The latter has the added benefit of not subjecting the wearer to the constant threat of being robbed of their affluence-signalling garment, something which is increasingly common in urban areas where gangs prey on those who wear expensive brands like Canada Goose [1].

I live in Sweden, it does tend to get cold here. I've been using the same jacket (a heavy black fleece-lined cordura/nylon work coat) for about 15 years now, it cost me 375 kr (around $45) back then. Nobody wants to rob me, the opposite is probably true as the thing does look a bit like a police or guard uniform jacket. Had I worn something like those Canada Goose products they would not have lasted more than a year or so, probably less given that I use it while logging etc.

[1] https://polisen.se/aktuellt/nyheter/2018/november/flera-pers... (Swedish police warns about increase in robbery of expensive brands)
It seems to be a dark pattern in the news/media industry. Even the otherwise enlightened Economist makes you CALL in order to cancel/change your subscription.

Going from a quick, precise and inexpensive communications channel to a slow, synchronous, error-prone and costly one is something that really annoys me.
Oh, heads up, you're in for a treat. Amazon will try to tack on a Prime subscription on every order you try to make from now on. They do this with a permanent full-page interstitial (not a pop-up) for ex-Prime users before the order confirmation page whose big green 'continue' button automatically one-click charges your account for a full year of Prime. You have to read down and click the tiny 'no, I don't want these benefits' blue text link in 8px font size to file your order without Prime.

I no longer shop from Amazon. The more we accept these kind of indignities, the more they will be forced on us. Let them starve, that's the most powerful message one can send.

Edit / More data points:

- One more trick up their sleeve: they will default to two-day paid shipping even when you have free shipping available, just so that you'll feel the pain (i.e. the 'worth') of Prime every time you have to pay attention in the last page, and check the right 'free shipping' radio box for every shipment in your order.

- For me, the last thing that broke the camel's back was that they were specifically sending shipments to arrive on the last day of the shipment window. As a real example, I ordered a display on Jan 7 to arrive between Jan 14 and Jan 18. They shipped it Jan 17. This is what made me notice this, and it made me look at my past orders. Turns out, they have been doing this consistently, for a while.

The purpose of a shipping window is to allow for some slack in the case shipment gets delayed, it is for shipment. If they shipped it a few days before the window, that would be fine. If they shipped it right at the beginning of the window, that would still (arguably) be fine. If you ship in a way that is aiming for as late as possible delivery, that's pretty obvious what you're trying to do.

If you're not a Prime customer, your orders might arrive as late as they can make it. They are likely doing this on purpose.
Ruth Chang has by far the best approach to decision-making I've ever heard. Her TED talk is linked below. The key take away is determining first: "What do I stand for". And, afterward putting all your focus and energy behind your decision. In the end, if you lose, you lose. On that score I find Jordan Peterson tremendously helpful, and also linked below.

https://www.ted.com/talks/ruth_chang_how_to_make_hard_choice...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP5ohTF4epE

About parenthood I might add this... our brains are wired to minimize the negative where our children are concerned. All manner of rationalizations, identification, and denial works in favor of maintaining the parental bond. Its more important to decide what you stand for, than it is walk in the path of those of us so afflicted by the bias of being parents. It is great. It is also brutally hard and in the end, one way or another, you have to let go.
Youtube has made significant efforts to not show ads on content that is deemed unsafe, so those videos generally aren't making any money.

You seem to be against people putting out content that don't align with your views, which is something completely different.
What PayPal should do is offer a “PayPal subscriptions” product where the terms require cancellability through PayPal. So NYt and others can’t offer PayPal unless they agree, and when a user cancels through PayPal, PP agrees to send an API call to NYT notifying them.
I guess my questions are:

What percentage of cars go on more than 2x 150 mile+ trips in a year? (Or 300 mile round trips that can be charged at turnaround point).

And the same question for 100/200 miles. I’m guessing 90%+ for personal cars.

And many of the exceptions are multicar households that could shift their long-drives to the other car.
Or a biscuit tin or other metal box. Or a fridge. Or a freezer.

Cars are very leaky Faraday cages. If they weren't, you wouldn't be able to use your phone inside one. Because of the glass apertures, they can only provide protection from very, very long radio wavelengths - MF, LF, and VLF, all much longer than FM/VHF/UHF/microwave.

They'll also (probably) protect you from direct lightning hits, because the discharge passes through the conductive skin and won't usually take a detour through any occupants.

Flare events won't affect your phone anyway. Deliberate EMP might, but EMP would quite likely to be a precursor to nuclear war, so keeping your phone working might not be your absolute top priority.