skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess I'd reply after some consideration that what I think is unreasonable about this question is just that I as a physicist know exactly how to answer it because I have received years of training in reasoning about things that I don't know and years of understanding error bars and orders of magnitude, so that I can say "well within a half-order it's this."

But I came to know a lot of professional mathematicians in that time, and they are people with very big minds, extraordinarily creative -- but several of them would potentially struggle on these sorts of questions (indeed some of them would struggle with arithmetic, having long since just unloaded that burden onto calculators and computers to free their brain for more interesting thoughts) simply because they're not used to reasoning about uncertainty. They are likely to simultaneously be very good hires, and to only give you the barest of lower bounds. "I mean, it's at least 30 because I can fit 30 in a carry-on. Oh, but there could be a hundred seats and a hundred carry-ons, so I guess it's at least 3000." "It's, uh, it's way more than that." "Right, I said 'at least'. I mean we could probably stuff at least two carry-ons in each seat, so that gets us towards a better lower bound of 9000 or 10,000?" "Yeah, uh, still much much more."

I know other folks who would make great junior or mid-level developers who never had any formal education and wouldn't be comfortable approaching this either from the "let me look up or estimate volumes and recall packing densities" or the "I can give you lower bounds based on the things I am absolutely sure about" approaches. They wouldn't necessarily know, for example, that one might just say "okay let me look up the size of a 747" in an interview, that such a thing is probably "within the rules" of what the question expects -- unless prompted, and even then.

Let me put this a different way, do you think that responses to that question could be improved if before the interview you walked a candidate through a similar problem for ten minutes? Because I would imagine it could be, but maybe you ask it in a way that already provides for that. The problem is that if people can do substantially better with a ten-minute nudge then you are actually just testing for who has already had the sort of life experience to give them that ten-minute nudge, and that doesn't seem like an "excellent question" to me.
Dual engine shutdown is incredibly dangerous, there's no situation (other than a commanded shutdown) where that should occur.

Regardless of cause, regardless of if the pilot activated the thrust reverser too early, this is an incredibly dangerous defect that Boeing (or Rolls Royce) needs to fix before more people are put in danger.

Let me phase it this way: Even when the engines are literally on fire, they don't automatically shutdown, because doing so is considered too dangerous (since the systems don't know the circumstances, and even an engine on fire can generate thrust, and it might be your only engine).

Even if the defect was DISCOVERED due to a pilot error, it is still a defect and a safety critical one at that.
Facebook has offices all over the world and employees testing with devices on home networks all over the world (not to mention developers giving builds to family and friends, potentially).

I would hardly expect Apple to be scrutinizing the install patterns of an enterprise app. Those resources would be better spent improving the App Store review process and TestFlight.
You don't think the data collection policies these companies have meaningfully enabled and/or contributed to the wealth gap?
A tough call. Your solution would disappoint a pilot who actually wanted to slow down ASAP more than Boeing's solution, and might contribute to a runway overrun.
Sure! But honestly, it will probably be cheaper for you to just buy it from Amazon for $8. Or, read it for free using Overdrive (if you have a Kindle/ereader).
You have no reasonable expectation of privacy when calling a prison.
Headline is accurate but misses the "revoked their Enterprise Certificate" which almost certainly affects other internal Facebook apps and testing.
To solve problems effectively, you shouldn't try and preconceive the solution. If you really want to solve the problem, you'll need to immerse yourself in the problem and field and figure out what are some causes of the problem that you can affect.

You've distilled the problem down to "money laundering, tax avoidance, and governmental complacency" but do other issues like zoning, foreign investment, lack of suitable space, etc contribute?

While it's possible to solve problems in fields that you don't work in, it's less common. If you want to affect real-estate prices on the West coast of Canada, you should dive into the real estate industry and most likely some obvious inefficiencies will pop out that can be solved.
I wasn't responding to those exact points but rather to the hagiography and idealization of Google as a place without forced attrition.

Google has great food and great perks, but it was one of my worst employment experiences of my entire professional career. Amazon, warts-and-all, was far better to me and for me.

And I haven't even mentioned the time in 2014 when the manager of Android Store recommendations asked to speak with me and so I showed up on the googleplex, only to have him walk me out of the building to the swamp behind the googleplex to tell me that yes I'm on some sort of blacklist and he would make an exception to bring me in if I were willing to work on these recommendations. Now this is really interesting and nearly industrial espionage because I was secretly working on Amazon product recommendations at the time and he should not have known I had any such experience because we had just won our first web lab. It all ended when I asked him if I could use GPUs for this and he said no.

So my point is just because they don't have forced attrition doesn't make them a great employer across the board because WTF was that about?
Why Root Cause Analysis Is Important for IT Ops (And How to Do It)
Weird, I can't find Skaven on their integration of either modarchive.org or modules.pl
WikiLeaks: Working with the Publisher That Changed the World
It's controversial, because "lowest performance on the team" doesn't mean "poor performance".
Hackers Just Stole Another $180K in Ether from Cryptopia Exchange
Vulcan's might do the logical thing, but Humans will fight back. MAD is one case where human emotion is both the cause and solution of a problem.
All the extra features interfering with my reading experience didn’t help, either. I just don’t read articles on Medium.
Yeah we take exception usually to that. With things like gerrymandering being common, the government doesn't really represent the people.
Something you wish you had or a process for something you do in your personal or professional life that's long and tedious would be good places to start.

Is there something you do a lot that feels clunkier than it should be? Is there a way you could automate a chunk of it? Maybe other people would like that automated also.

Another thing is, what is some data you wish you had access to or could record easily that keeps track of useful things about your activities or your life, something that you can't think of (or quickly google) some good solution for online? That might be a direction to go in. Like, for example, on a lark I spent some time aggregating reviewers Top 10 Board Game lists in various categories, and it triggered an idea that maybe there could be some software that facilitates this sort of data aggregation for various top 10 lists. I haven't done anything with that (and probably won't), but it's an idea I had.

I mainly focus my brain on coming up with game ideas and story ideas, so those aren't necessarily trying to come up with some website or service I can sell. I either look for some sort of constraint (Can I come up with a game that only exists in 1 dimension? Can I come up with a game that only has one type of component? Can I come up with a game that only uses 9 cards? I've designed games for all three of these in the past two years), or just pretty much anything I absorb, I try to think if I could make a game or story out of it, especially if my brain goes "oh that's interesting!" for whatever reason.

I'll think about it for awhile, and try to run with whatever I come up with, at least up to the prototype phase, and then get the idea in front of people, and if people seem to dig it (or even if they don't, if they gave me some good feedback or I still feel there's gotta be something there if I can find it) I'll develop the idea further.

Sometimes me trying to fix a bad idea generates other ideas as well. I've tried to improve a particular game design twice, and the mechanical fixes I came up I realized would work better as different games where the focus was on that mechanism, and I've since prototyped those as well.

You could probably do something like that for side projects as well.
> ... and because their product is not very good because of it.

Their revenues would suggest otherwise :)
> That's like saying "solve this coffee table".

If I can set down my mug on the coffee table, I'll consider the coffee table to be solved.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, I suppose.

Yes, compensation is vastly better as a software developer, _if_ you don't mind working on uninteresting rubbish in a stultifying business environment for your entire career, which is what the vast majority does. Even if you decide to value money over intellectual stimulation (I won't judge; having creature comforts is indeed comforting), there's no guarantee that compensation is going to stay that nice forever; people are literally flooding into software and that's bound to drive wages down at some point.

Personally, I'd give a lot to be in academia; I'm damned sick of the rat race.
No, I support China being able to spend an appreciable amount of time to crack each phone they have physical possession of, following a court order. I never suggested the ability for remote compromise (what Huawei is accused of), and my exact point is that we can create a cost to cracking each phone — in hashing power and time spent — if we compromise on the topic. No such cost exists now, because they achieve access via other means.

The combination of requiring physical possession and appreciable hashing time per crack is a two-layered response to mass-surveillance. That’s the whole basis of the compromise I’m proposing: calling their bluff, and enabling warrant cracks as political cover to shut down mass surveillance and cracking as unnecessary.
Kicking Facebook's apps off the appstore would include WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. It would be a bigger deal than logging into Facebook.com on safari.
>“Some days it was hard to swallow, like [when you target] a 16-year-old kid on Twitter,” she said. “But it’s an intelligence mission, you are an intelligence operative. I never made it personal.”

These people are so fucking revolting, honestly if every there was a basis for intolerance its toward the monsters who say shit like this. You know its wrong, you know you are working for evil, and you do it anyway.
The 787 does have an APU and a ram air turbine (RAT) as well as the batteries.
> Why are companies so bad at coming up with a system that keeps more competent people and eases out less competent people but that also doesn't hurt morale by being a dystopian nightmare?

All metrics-driven systems that try to collapse complex effects to a single metric without intelligent human supervision tend to produce dystopian or at least spectacularly unintended effects.

In this case, the problem is trying to have a single axis of competence. Quite apart from the range of technologies and circumstances people might find themselves in, there are also the interpersonal skills and meta-competences that matter.

Then there's the company context: were they supported or let down? By their managers or colleagues? Were they working on something that failed for unrelated reasons? Or on something that succeeded despite their involvement?

In many ways it's the same as the hiring problem, it's just less concentrated on a single day.

Competence is a transitive property: people are competent at things, not as a global property of their personality.
People putting in "110%" are also more likely to get either denied promotions (managers don't want to lose their most productive assets) or are driven out as major threats to their superiors.
That's a lot of walking. Most I ever got was ~66K in a day and that was from running a 50K.
Indeed, the primary criterion in dog food design is smell and consistency of output. #2 is cost — how can you tweak ingredients as to legally be allowed to label it “lamb dinner” at lowest cost
Is this that surprising? In my experience it's less prevalent/institutionalized in tech consulting, banking, etc. where the "up or out" philosophy is much more transparent e.g. if you aren't promoted in a certain window of time (say 2 years) to the next level then you're expected to leave.
Medium seems like people are on there to build their personal brand valuing quantity of posts over quality. Programming articles in particular are most disappointing. For programming there’s better open source platforms like dev.to or even better just host your blog and not be at the mercy of VCs
They will be, eventually. If you constantly fire the ones at the bottom, the only way to stay on top is to put more and more. Which means that at some point, your 110% is going to be the lowest ranked.
The Pitchforks Are Coming… for Us Plutocrats (2014)
That's true of Tor entrance nodes too. The key is to not let the first node in the chain know _what_ you're sending, and not let the last node in the chain know _who_ is sending it.
Not really if chan are problem perf wise then you use mutex, it doesn't have to be ugly.
> Besides, why is entertainment and relaxation always treated as somehow secondary/not necessary? I realize many people find purpose in being work bees, but some strive for a healthy work-life balance.

It's not that it's unnecessary, but it's easier to replace. I have my nephew at home for a week, and his mother didn't let him take his console with him. Uh oh. No entertainment then? Well, guess what, we played good old board and card games.

OTOH, not having tap water or flushable toilets would have been a much bigger PITA for him. (For both of us, to be honest).
Did supernovas kill off the monster shark Megalodon?
It's called private screenshots or something to that effect, basically it adds a button to the GUI above the app.
Be suspect of any centralized, closed service attempting to replace an open, working, eco-system of decentralized platforms.
How well does Algopix work for Ecommerce Market research?
Also, where is the map showing the location of this "Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility"? I used to love the old nytimes that had a little map for almost every story. It really was useful for putting events into a world view for me.
I’m guessing this will stop, unless Google has a special agreement in place.
I wonder if one could 3D-print such structures?
> if I were on a team with people significantly younger than myself, I would be shitting bricks.

I was noticeably older than most of the people in my team in Amazon, and I was never shitting bricks[1]. The ones not reaching performance targets were always crystal clear to _everyone_. If you can't spot the underachievers, maybe that's the time to worry.

Despite how detailed the Amazon interview process is, people slip through the gaps and you end up with someone who somehow can barely write functional code, let alone maintainable code. Or you find the person is capable of writing code, just maybe not today, or tomorrow. Is the day after good with you? There are much more interesting things to be doing on-line instead of writing code.

[1] I was reminiscing with a co-worker in the kitchen one lunchtime about the respective things we'd had to do to deal with the Y2K bug at the places we'd been working at. Another talented and very capable developer co-worker overheard us and commented "I'd never even touched a computer before, back then."
Ah, rockstars. If you get one without the craziness they're amazing. But the situation you've described is basically Stakhanovism with code rather than coal.
Don't want to ask anything inappropriate, but how much of your time did it end up being? I remember they had some some kind of value where they want "every hire to be better than the last one" or some platitude.

Seems like forced attrition is .. not ideal. Having some consistent way of assessing performance of engineers across teams, and then looking at the front end (hiring groups involved in creating the low performing teams) and on management (focus on who is accumulating higher numbers of low achievers) would be better.

But having seen excessively stable R&D organizations, I completely agree that not getting rid of low achievers is extremely toxic to a high performing team (product quality and morale).
"Apple tells TechCrunch that yesterday evening it revoked the Enterprise Certificate that allows Facebook to distribute the Research app without going through the App Store."

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/apple-bans-facebook-vpn/
So the bulletin says that activating the thrust reversers too soon can cause un-commanded high trust. Activating it too soon by itself does not cause a shutdown. But one monitor that could stop the engine would be the overspeed monitor. The un-commanded high thrust might have tripped the overspeed monitor on the turbines and shut both of them down. There are numerous other monitors on the engines that might also play a role. So determining root cause might still take a while still.
I’m not debating the worse case. I’m going by history of how the FBI acted in the 60s during the Civil Rights Area and how it currently acts with the “War on Terror” and the “War on Drugs”.

Having a government that is actively hostile to minorities - religious, race, nationality, or sexuality only takes a populist leader who speaks toward their prejudices....
Thanks for your clear reply. There's only one thing though from what you mentioned that is not vague or subjective:

> It is the one place where AI can have a really positive impact on the world.

Can you develop on this please?

Why do you think a social network (however efficient it may be with e.g. targeted ads) will have a bigger impact on its members versus e.g. AI in healthcare? or finance? or education? which will have a truly global impact.
With due respect, I think you misunderstand what a straw-man argument is. This is not a different point. This IS post purchase control of hardware.

Would you be ok with Tesla disabling cars because you were using illegal drugs in them? Now do you get it? I'm not defending facebook. I'm telling you this behavior from Apple is truly scary. Apple is not law/moral/societal enforcement "police".

This is the ONLY way to run internal apps. and it wasn't one cert btw. Google has a similar "research app", their certs have not been revoked. Maybe because apple relies on google more? Maybe because they generate revenue from their search and app placement deals? Hrrm?

My point is simple, arbitrary revokes, without process, are a scary thing. Specially when they are done POST purchase, and have real tangible effects.
Well, if corporate social responsibility is your central concern, why aren't you asking Apple to pay tax where the jobs are? The factories are in China, the workers are there, most of the parts are designed and made there, right?
I think software has existed in computer systems for 7 or 8 decades now - and the pitfalls are well understood.

I think the problem is one of simplicity vs complexity. New systems today rely on dozens - hundreds even - of packages and libraries - many of which are not written by the implementer. How can you ensure reliability in all these components?

This is why engineering from first principles - even in today's software development environment - is important. Unfortunately, the trends are in the other direction.
Neat idea but, alas, it failed at the first UX hurdle for me - I can't seem to type into the recipe link box. Which makes me think it's broken. I appreciate that pasting works but there's no indication it will.

Then it failed at the second hurdle of parsing https://www.highstreettv.com/pressure-king-pro-chicken-chori... - but that might be down to it being a UK recipe.
You used to be able to discretely order high quality low cost ink writing implements from a piece of land surrounded by water at "PenIsland".

Edit: I'm glad to see they're still up and working hard to service customers at: http://www.penisland.net (totally safe for work, trust me)
A plot to kill Kim Il Sung ended in mutiny and murder (2018)
Ubuntu 18.04 needs patching
If a well trained ai at scale to read the sticks and only the sticks fails, why would it be considered possible for humans to do it?
I support decentralization and do agree with you in principal (and I youtube-dl any video I care about), but in practice I've actually seen the breadth of content expand. You can even find clips of The Simpsons on there now. (of course there are the high-profile examples of political content being taken down)
Build part of the decentralised, permanent web
I think you should do whatever fascinates you, but if there's nothing then do nothing: A side project you don't enjoy is just a job - you won't finish it and chances are you won't learn from it
Moreover, don’t form a c Corp until someone else will pay you to do so in the form of a substantial 6+ figure investment.
It's dumb that I actually have to say this.... But chrome isn't actually killing URLs or even taking steps toward killing URLs, despite the clickbait story title.

Instead they're taking steps toward better identifying fraud. But nobody would read the story if that's all it said.
Much of the discussion of nuclear power on HN centers on the engineering view: nuclear doesn't have climate consequences and uses a very energy-dense fuel. No doubt true.

The "administrative" picture is not so rosy! Of course, the history of atomic energy in the US is replete with examples of lies told to the public to obtain "consent" - exhibit A, the Nevada Test Site and the "downwinders" [0]. These lies were told to citizens by the AEC, the predecessor agency of the NRC, which now regulates nuclear power in the US.

A review of a recent book [1] by a former member of the NRC indicates that, in the view of some, administrators rolling over for commercial operators of atomic plants remains standard operating procedure. This sounds very similar to the problem with the Challenger shuttle:

"The political infighting was particularly intense after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Jaczko visited Japan and grew impatient with the “litany of guarantees” from industry about American nuclear facilities. He tried to insist on new requirements to mitigate accidents triggered by natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and tsunamis. One internal NRC report drafted after Fukushima criticized the practice of relying on voluntary industry initiative to address safety concerns. Jaczko's descriptions of other commissioners' attempts to quash or edit the report provide a disturbing glimpse of the dynamic of trust and betrayal within the agency."

[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/american-ground-zero

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6424/237
Common electrical engineering interview topics
Can't wait to see how it goes. Hopefully better than how Grin and Beam have done for their recent launches; nobody seems to care about those. The team behind Zilliqa is extremely knowledgeable, and the platform comes with a few interesting innovations.
How to stop 'uninterruptible' process on Linux?