skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In interviews I like to try and get a reaction, and the best way to do that is to sit down with a coffee or two (or three) and just chat about their experience over the last few years, in a judgement-free zone - dev to dev.

In terms of an actual question, the only useful ones are ones that come from this chat, because it's where we have a back-and-forth conversation about tech decisions, what issues they had, what they had to overcome, and what decisions that particular dev made. My goal is to get a reaction, negative or positive, and dig into why that situation happened, what they did to overcome it, and what they'd do with hindsight.

Not only does it make an interview more interesting for all involved, it tells you more about the candidate than a quiz would. You learn what they do under pressure, what pisses them off, and what experience they have for the kind of work you do, because you've been using your experience against theirs in conversation. Sometimes, to make it fair, I tell them (without dropping client names) issues I've had recently, and I see if any of the solutions were raised by the team, or are ultimately the solution we went for.

I've had enough success with this approach that (when I did interviews) this was my approach:

1. A really basic take home test, probably in a language they don't use, just to see if they can write any code. Literally something that takes an hour to do. A favourite of mine was to get them to write an application in a given language to hit an endpoint, with a given code and their email address. When done correctly, an email is sent to our HR team, who then set up an interview. Based on our logs, you'd be surprised at how many candidates couldn't do this - by which I mean had clearly worked on the test, submitted something, and had failed to send a PUT request with the correct data.

2. A relaxed interview, like above, in neutral ground like a coffee shop. I use the walk from office to coffee shop to handle company questios, and the standard interview stuff,
Windows XP vs. Mac OS X (JANUARY 12, 2002)
The usage of Bitcoin for payments, core intended purpose remains challenged
And if you want to be really depressed, switch from tech to philosophy, and in particular the branch that is concerned with the nature of consciousness.
You can block the Netflix autoplay element of the page in ublock. Thus far it seems to have had no other effect.
Snake sex is every bit as peculiar as you would expect (2017)
This doesn't have anything to do with variables, it's simply adding an opacity value to hex-encoded colours. So `#ffff` (or `#ffffffff`) is the sames as `rgba(255, 255, 255, 1)`, and `#ffffff7f` would be `rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.5)`.

Until now, if you wanted to assign a colour with opacity, you had to use the `rgba()` format. Now you can just hex-encode it :)
>The suicide and assault rates, including school shootings and other mass shootings, has only increased over time, with more deaths every year.

Citation needed. A cursory look at Wikipedia for suicide rates suggests that they took a dip in the late 90s but otherwise are flat from the 80.

Violent crime has been trending down for decades.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States

https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...
Microsoft Releases Beta Version of AV1 Codec for Windows 10
I had pain everywhere. I thought it was normal.
Tech industry as discussed in HN is very different from "tech". I have struggled to define exactly what it means but the typical companies include Google, FB, Pinterest, Airbnb, Uber and the like. They don't necessarily have to be in Silicon Valley / Bay Area but they all share a certain commonality irrespective of what domain they operate on.
That's because the public sector doesn't build hardly anything anymore. They pay the private sector to build it.

There are tons of examples of the public sector doing major works throughout the history of the United States. Only now, during a time of incredible distrust in our capability to do public works, does it become expensive/impossible.
Social media in general is a tumor on society and a net-negative. I would be ashamed to say i work at a social media company.

This latest iteration dies and i hope nothing spawns from its ashes
Where do you live? And why isn't this the norm everywhere ?
That's what I cryptically meant by 'lots of things'. As an ex-abstractophile-nerd I used to think that information is information, whether it's on paper, lcd or e-ink.... I read GNU manuals in emacs or in terminal so I'm not craving for aesthetics or high res.

Turns out all mediums have subtle contexts that change the experience (at least personally [thus anecdotally]).

LCD: fatigue, luminosity, potential for distraction because you're using a machine, battery, other apps

Tablet: similar to above although maybe less so (bought a kindle 7, sadly the sub-HD resolution was another flaw)

e-ink: never tried, I wish I could but never did so far. I expect it to be a bit better than the rest

A book is dead. It requires nothing beside a bit of light. Maybe the physicality of pages make my brain focus differently, maybe touching, maybe the fact that it's dead and it won't move weirdly, change. The very high resolution helps.

All of this is super fluffy, but I value my opinion (I was surprised by it too) just enough to say it out loud. It doesn't imply you can't enjoy and learn efficiently with a digital machine but I'm sure it won't be the same as reading a book.
This. It's an apples to oranges comparison. People often write in Node for the speed that they can develop. Golang's current language design does not aim for development speed, although I think it's getting better/easier.

Feels similar to comparing C# to C.
Small online tools that everyone needs to use. Passwords that needs to change often because of security settings of those tools.

Yes I know other solutions are there. Like 1password and step by step I will get there. At the moment they are unwilling to move to a password managers.

A Firefox account with synced passwords is a huge step forward. Before that there was a excel file with all passwords. Or worse post-it’s.
The author is declaring one approach to REST as the "one true way." Actually, I think the author is correct, ie pointing to a HATEOAS style REST approach. But the REST standard is interpreted. The article calls all of the RESTful APIs that are fragile in one way or another "so-called-REST." I kind of agree with that assessment of quality, but at the same time, they aren't "so-called-REST." They are actual REST. We can all just wish those were "so-called-REST" and that there was some additional mechanism to enforce "real" REST. As it stands, accusations of "that's not really REST" amount to being "No True Scotsman" arguments.
We are on the same page! If the binaries are distributed over npm and work well in the npm ecosystem, them I'm all for it! My only reservations are about blindly writing things in compiled languages, or not using package managers at all because it's easier to distribute, which I don't think it is.

One of the really good things sass did with the rewrite in dart was make the default installable package include the dart VM along with it. So the install process is almost identical to any other JS package, which is why IMO they did such an amazing job with it
So we should accept malicious javascript , ad tracking and other unsavory hypermedia as well?
> What happened? A cascading series of failures of imagination; failures to invest in the future; paralyzed or ideologically blinkered or simply idiotic governance; and, perhaps most of all, cost disease

The same thing happened that is biting Italy and soon Germany: Politicians like to open new buildings/roads/..., but the maintenance budget is often enough forgotten at best and ignored at worst.

And to make matters even worse: with most infrastructure, continuous maintenance over 30-40 years is cheap compared to the inevitable outright rebuild neccessary after the same timespan without any maintenance.
I'm a happy user of https://simplenote.com/, if it helps.
It seems that we need per webpage/domain/tab limits on bandwidth, cpu and memory usage.
As a side-side note, I do understand how journalists may want a career as writers and US articles tend to have pointless details/descriptions, but this is IMHO way too much:

>Khan was casually dressed in a dark peacoat, black button-up shirt, gray pants, and sneakers. Shurboff’s attire was more businesslike: a light blue dress shirt, gray sports jacket, black trousers, and brand-new leather shoes.
IBM and University of Chicago Collaborate to Advance Quantum Computing
Anecdotally, the hardest part for me when I deleted FB entirely was the first two weeks. The amount of times I was itching to check an update, see what was liked or browse some new posts was shocking to me. Get through the first two weeks and you realize how much of an addiction this can be.

Replace _deleted_FB_ above with any other addiction and similarities appear.
The sarcasm wasn't helpful and wasn't in good taste. In addition to what my sibling commenters have said, going to a doctor because you suspect you might be depressed or have any other concerns about your mental health doesn't automatically lead to being told you need to go on medication. Personally, I've known a few people who didn't talk to their doctors about their depression for a long time precisely because they didn't want to go on medication (or because they couldn't for family/cultural reasons). Because of that, they missed out on things like talk therapy which probably could have helped them.
I would've written:

<iter> = ( f(i) for i in <gen>)

where f() is some function of i.
I'm broke entrepreneur so I built service for other broke entrepreneurs
Each week I send a list of 5 to 10 business apps & software from whom I've managed to get my newsletter subscribers an extended free trial period. Generally the trial is 2x longer and it's free to join my mailing list.

If you a have an app or software suggestion that you think others might love, please let me know in the comments and I'll try to reach out to them. Feedback is also much appreciated.
I am going back to using Lynx next.
How is FaaS different from other RPC technologies that already exist like CORBA or SOAP?
I often wonder where I can get one of those mini trucks. They are so much more practical than F150s for transporting things around a city.
I find I'm being subconsciously trained to keep moving through the listings before the autoplay triggers. In addition to my distaste for them, they also seem to freeze up the app for a moment while they start; it's less than a second, but it's noticeable.

I assume it's driving engagement with people in general, but it inhibits my engagement.

Which goes back to one of my perennial frustrations with all this tracking and A/B testing bullshit; they're tracking my every mouse movement, they're slicing and dicing pennies in an effort to advertise at me, but when it comes to something I'd actually like, like them noticing that not only do I not "want" these autoplaying ads but that they actually decreased the very metrics they care about for me, suddenly our monstrous tracking machine with seemingly endless resources to stare at me like Sauron's All-Seeing Eye goes all blind on me.
What would (1) look like?
Mine is 3 and we do zero screen time. Once every few months I watch something with him and he gets obsessive when it's over. we read books, he knows the stories, he memorizes lots and lots of songs and speaks 3 languages daily. iPad turns him into a whiney addict right away.
I can’t understand this design decision. What if they open the URL in a new tab, while still focused on another tab? How do you as a user know something is playing on that new tab?

You’re helping yourself to their bandwidth and local compute without their consent or knowledge.

Why do you think this is okay?
Good point, I've only been in Terminal C.

The AirTrain is handy, but it costs $5 to go a couple miles, which is absurd.
>Sounds like the FBI is just flailing around, and latching onto bottom feeders in an attempt to find dirt...

I find that hard to believe.
Sending Mail by Rocket
We did not go from 700 billion to 50 billion spent on the military from 2017 to 2018, so yes, that chart (and the associated data) is bullshit.

There are a ton of technicalities involved in government budgeting and accounting though. It's just not a chart you'd want to share to make an honest point in a conversation like this.
Afraid not. But I think you can use "add to home screen" in Safari to get an icon to launch it as an app (i.e. no browser controls).
Microservices After Two Years
I have to agree... the fact is, Node isn't the best at anything in terms of raw performance and won't be. What it is, however, is good enough for almost everything.

Node/JS offer some serious advantages. An expansive ecosystem of modules for which to build applications quickly. A well-known scripting language that allows for fast development and turn over. A language that allows for less distraction and context switching when going from one layer to another in terms of full stack development. Allows for a complete feature set to be in a single language with less disconnect to the front end.

I won't say there isn't a place for other languages. I will say that applications created with JS front and back using Node as at least the direct API/middle tier tend to be up and running faster, and perform well enough for most tasks if horizontal scaling is already part of the overall design of the application.

It also does well for cross platform scripting and orchestrating CPU intensive tasks.
There is honestly little/no question there as to production methods and their human and environmental impact.
I have been to many places in the world, rich and poor, and Newark Airport isn't fairly nice, even compared to poor places. Terminal C has had a makeover, but the quality of food and service is bad, of course prices being sky high. And the Airtrain from the airport is hilariously under capacity, you get to be crammed into a tiny monorail car that barely has space for luggage, and slowly go down some tracks that are very susceptible to problems due to weather and maintenance. Also, you get to pay $5 for this and you get to pay a crazy amount for luggage carts (which in civilized countries don't cost anything).
Skunk Radio Live Auditions: Experimental Hip Hop – Christchurch, New Zealand
thanks for your reply - i noticed you reworked the job spec as well.

Would be cool to hear about your Rust project, however, I realise you might have an NDA on this.

Sounds like a great role
Is the Kubernetes native (for lack of a better word) service discovery used in many real world use cases? The sense I've gotten talking to people who use kubernetes is that they fall into one of two camps:

- they're moving "legacy" infrastructure off EC2 or similar onto Kubernetes and their service discovery stack is already in place. They end up bypassing cluster IPs and dealing directly with pod IPs.
- they're starting with Istio or something similar from the get go because the native service discovery is hard to grok and leaves out a lot of the nice things that Istio gets you for free (once you've set it up)

There's lots of overlap, but I've not heard of anyone making a strong argument for the native service discovery.
I'm curious why you find that depressing? Do you think the idea of lacking free will and consciousness as chaotic dynamics reduces agency or something else?
I mean, to be fair they do have more and bigger cities than the US. China apparently has 102 cities with population over 1 million vs the US's 10 [1].

If we consider "megacities", they are at 15 vs the US's two (NYC and LA) [2].

In fact this is interesting, because although its population is huge in terms of the rest of nations-- about "a full Brazil" bigger than all of North America, and Europe (including Russia) combined [4]-- to put things in another perspective, we're talking about a country that's just 4.3 times the size of the US [3], yet it has 10x more cities and 7x more megacities.

This makes me think it's less rural than the US, which probably yields more focus on cities and less investment in rural areas.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacity

[3]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+china+%2...

[4]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+china+-+...
I find declarative style hard because you can’t use a debugger, which means you can’t “go in and look around”. You need to have a theory of what’s happening a priori that you can test. That means you need to model the internals of the tools in your mind to be able to make guesses. That means a slow learning curve.

That’s fine if it’s one of one or two major libraries that you use all the time every day. But in practice most of us are using dozens and dozens of tools, tools which change all the time, and we have to learn as we go. So these “big learning up front” APIs are just not very ergonomic for teams to engage.

Unless you’re Rails or React or something where you can claim to be basically a programming language or “standard library” in your own right, something everyone on a team will have already dedicated themselves to studying in depth.
Isn’t sync/mirroring the proper tool for that? The data itself may of course be monetized by the various sources but if one goes down there can be others, as long as the protocol is resilient to that.
Or people are just piling up on you.
Y Combinator’s Women-Only Forum Is Becoming Its Own Business
That's the problem, though: The web has steadily been growing more convenient/friendly for developers, while steadily growing more hostile for users.

All these javascript "advances" just make it easier for people to e.g. mine monero on my system without my consent and enable mediocre web developers to load up previously quick-loading sites with custom scrolling animations, autoplay video, and malvertising.

I'm sure it's in better shape for you, a web developer. It's objectively worse for me, a user.
A more complete analysis requires taking into account that epigenetics can allow such traits to be deactivated in most individuals and that humans are an extremely social species. These details combine to make natural selection of such complex traits both possible and beneficial to the social group.
There were notable performance improvments with several positional argument only functions made 1.3-1.7x faster in stdlib https://bugs.python.org/issue35582.

namedtuple attr access is also now 1.7x faster https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/10495

Other performance improvments : https://github.com/python/cpython/pulls?q=is%3Apr+sort%3Aupd...
Switzerland has a population density of 206 per km^2. NJ, RI, MA, CT, and MD have higher density. After all, nobody's expecting an express rail across Montana anytime soon: we're talking about the more populous part of the US.

It's hard to use "they are different" argument when your country is objectively worse than Switzerland and China.
I've seen discussion of this on a few sites, but none of them explain how this is Linux related. It appears they find vulnerable installations of JBoss and PHP applications to gain access, but there are no details around persistence. i.e. They cover the C&C aspect, but not the root attack vectors and persistence.

Does anyone have a link to the Linux rootkit aspect?
I just made HN account to reply to this, as I feel like I suffer with "existential depression" too. I had never heard of that before, so thanks for commenting.

As I get older, the more I read, it just seems to be always doom and gloom. The obviousness that's occurring to things around us. I'm a natural born worrier anyway, but as I get older I think more about "existence". My wife and I plan to have kids, but then I'll lay there awake at night and part of me thinks, why? I don't think we're heading to a particularly nice place.
About 2 years is about when most seem to pass the worth-it-to-repair mark. These are all basically designed to be nearly disposable as technologues and tastes change.
The libraries that generate(d) such graphics typically only could render such scenes because limiting all edges to the three major axes and discarding perspective (distances on the projection do not get smaller the further the line is from the viewer in the 3D scene) makes it computationally a lot easier to render scenes.

To distinguish them from “true 3D” libraries, a name had to be found. 2.5D seemed fitting.
I should do a version 2.0 that just has a colorimeter and a probably cause light.
I opened microsoft site and it only showed me microsoft affiliated products. I think an anti trust lawsuit should be filed for that.
For this to work you'd need as much capacity in supercaps as in batteries. In that case you'd want to use that capacity, except it self-drains. The UX would be strange and difficult to manage.

EDIT: The above comment was meant about supercharging, not regenerative braking.
This was precisely my wife's symptoms when we were first married. She was angry nearly all the time. She could hold it together in public, but at home it was miserable. She would go a full day at a time, alternatively not speaking, stomping around and throwing things, and yelling.

It took a long time for her to be correctly diagnosed. It wasn't clear to me that depression was the issue, because as discussed in the article, anger isn't usually associated with depression. And it wasn't clear to her either, because in her mind all of her anger was justified. Most of it was my fault.

I had to keep telling myself that, no, it wasn't my fault. I wish I had had a support group or something but I didn't know that such things existed.

Happily, she did eventually find a doctor who worked with her to get a correct diagnosis and figure out the right meds (in her case, a specific SSRI. But everyone is different). She is a thousand percent better now - she's back to being the woman I married. But without diagnosis and treatment, we would not be married today.

If you have frequent anxiety attacks accompanied by anger, violent or not, definitely consider depression as a possible cause. If you are living with someone with these symptoms, get yourself some support. If your partner's anger turns to violence, for your own wellbeing, leave. Even if you are a man, abused spouse centers should help you.
This is what I'll do actually. I have no choice, and I'll do it ASAP in order to not loose too much money as the building state is devaluating as time passes.
That's not technical criticism. You can't know if the devs are 'flying blind', and given the lack of knowledge the author had, they were throwing deprecating words around. It is saying they didn't know what they're doing. Regardless it's still ad hominem, and unnecessary if the author could show it instead of say it.
Five why autonomous cars aren't coming anytime soon
Wow I'm happy for you that you were able to find relief via dietary changes
Well yeah, I am not talking about Capitalism in the traditional sense anymore (business builds a moat, provides a service to you and charges fees). I am talking about a collaboration economy (open source, science style). You may still be able to sell stuff, but not the stuff whose marginal cost to copy is zero. Information would be free. Asked who would generate it, the answer is increasingly “everyone”. News and Maps can be crowdsourced (see openstreetmap for example). The hard part is in the consensus model, ie data sets will be honeypots for people who want to alter the “truth as we know it” (like Stephen Colbert and Elephants on Wikipedia). I am not convinced that a for-profit top-down corporation is necessarily better for that than a flat, democratic crowd, provided we have interesting game mechanics built in (like high stakes challenges where you can lose a significant portion of your accumulated reputation if you don’t win by a large margin).