skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Anyone could issue their own currency, and try to convince people to use it for actually buying and selling stuff. But that convincing part is really the key

Absolutely true, see EcoCash. It's a fascinating case study.

>and crypto very explicitly doesn't solve the problem that businesses will need to trust the issuing entity before they switch to using a new currency.

Trust is a relative thing. EcoCash is issued by a mobile phone provider. That should be crazy (who would trust verizon to issue currency?) except that _literally no one_ trusts the Zimbabwean government to issue currency any more, so the phone provider won by dint of a) being in the right place at the right time and b) being relatively more trustworthy.

Actively building trust is something you need to do if you've got a pile of venture capital burning down that you need to pay back before you go broke. However, cryptocurrencies are usually not VC-backed products, and therefore don't have time-bombs strapped to them. Bitcoin is doing extremely well in Venezuela right now as faith in the bolivar drops through the floor. Cryptocurrencies are at this point extremely well position to be conveniently accessible any time people's faith in their national currency drops enough for them to start looking elsewhere. This is a slow burn situation.

>People and companies want to have a central, stable issuing authority they can trust.

I'd love to see a citation on that. People trust a wide array of deities and insist that the deities other people trust don't exist. This is a Homo economicus argument, it seems unlikely that we can quantify what people want and how they trust so easily. My anecdotal observation is that people want to have something that sounds plausible enough that they feel comfortable not researching the details. If people wanted a central stable issuing authority they wouldn't accept fractional reserve banking.
Homework is a bit of a catch-22. I agree that they can be made more real world than typical interview problems (although not all are). OTOH, why should I do your “4 hour” project, in which I’m competing with people who spend 8+ hours on it, just to get to the same onsite interview I could get with another company after a recruiter chat and a 45-60 minute technical phone screen? It’s not a good use of my time.
> what do we do?

Good question. It's a very hard problem, and requires a lot of thought and self-reflection to even begin to solve. Simple university admission policies will not solve such a broad social issue, as you've noted.

> original meritocratic competitive default mode

Can you explain this? When/where did this meritocratic system exist?
3.9% since current population is 8.8m. NY is not far behind.

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/cities-boasting-the-most...

Bear in mind that these days having a million doesn't make you rich like it used to, or even able to retire much earlier. The line for super-rich is currently drawn at $30M, then there's only ~4.5k people who qualify in London.
That's a strong yep ;)
There's a classical test of giving a never seen before programming language (invented for the test), then the candidates need to reason about some code. Never seen that in the industry though.
I'd answer in the negative here.

Most cryptocurrency fans seem to be optimistic investors looking to join in on the massive returns seen by investors in 2016-2017. Most of them care more for generating 'hype' and seeing an increase in the value of the coin they hold, just so they can dump their holdings later. I don't think they'd be too interested in a coin that inflated in value that they didn't hold (they'd probably instead promote something they did hold). Most cryptocurrency fans do not hold one particular coin, and generally change which coin they advocate for pretty often.

Cryptocurrency communities are generally pretty toxic and non-constructive environments. I've been part of a couple, and I've noticed multiple times a massive decline in the quality of the community (and, sometimes, in development as well) as the cryptocurrency got more popular (and more people joined the community).
I'm always interested in learning about things like this. For example, it was really neat to learn that the Intel SME ran the Minix microkernel. Or it was neat to learn that the Apple secure enclave was running the L4 microkernel.
You touch on a very important part of this equation: there are good interviewers and bad interviewers.

A good interviewer, in my opinion and experience, will try to get to know the person first. They'll put the candidate at ease. They want to try as much as possible to be talking to the person they're possibly going to be working with, not the anxious candidate that just walked into the room.
What, you couldn't derive a solution in a vacuum from first principles? I bet you think referring to API documentation isn't cheating, too!
Are recruiters still relying on keywords? Are we underutilizing the advancement of AI in this space?
That's the socratic method. Far more constructive.
I fail to see how either of your anecdotes constitute racism
Well, it depends on the company. But as a rule, said titles are:

1. Entirely meaningless between companies, since different companies have different ideas as to what counts as junior, midweight or senior respectively. For instance, a senior at Google and a senior at a small agency are a million miles apart.

2. If the company isn't a tech company or technically minded, they're probably meaningless within said organisation too. The most accurate thing you can say about 'seniors' is that they're usually the more experienced web developers in the company, whatever more experienced actually means in said case.

But yeah, meaningless between companies, meaningless in ones which aren't tech savvy and don't take them seriously, maybe meaningful at FAANG type companies.
I received a cold call from a Lyft recruiter recently for a senior machine learning position. I asked why they were reaching out to me and the recruiter mentioned that it’s an especially hard time to locate experienced machine learning candidates, they don’t have enough applicants.

I said I was interested in interviewing but that I would only agree to a process that evaluates me based on my previous work history, and not any onsite or takehome coding projects, system design questions or whiteboard coding questions.

The recruiter said she would run it by the manager, but thought it would not be possible, and a few days later I got a rejection email.
Sure!

Breach against patientdatalagen and GDPR

Shall be encrypted so that the patients identity are protected.

"Uppgifter om en patients identitet som har dokumenterats inom hälso- och sjukvården och som landstingen ska sambearbeta med sådana uppgifter som avses i första stycket, ska vara krypterade så att patientens identitet skyddas vid behandlingen. Lag (2013:1024)."
"Information about a patient's identity that has been documented in the health and medical care and which the county councils are to co-operate with the information referred to in the first paragraph, shall be encrypted so that the patient's identity is protected during the treatment. Swedish law (2013: 1024)"

Transfer of personal data outside EU Tredjelandsöverföring. "Transfers of personal data to third countries or international organisations" Thailand is not on the list of authorized countries.
https://gdpr-info.eu/chapter-5/

The GDPR section about sensitive data records
* medical records.

Den personuppgiftsansvarige ska genomföra lämpliga tekniska och organisatoriska åtgärder för att, i standardfallet, säkerställa att endast personuppgifter som är nödvändiga för varje specifikt ändamål med behandlingen behandlas. Den skyldigheten gäller mängden insamlade personuppgifter, behandlingens omfattning, tiden för deras lagring och deras tillgänglighet. Framför allt ska dessa åtgärder säkerställa att personuppgifter i standardfallet inte utan den enskildes medverkan görs tillgängliga för ett obegränsat antal fysiska personer.

Further persons working at tillsyndsmyndigheter may have done "Tjänstefel", that is fault committed by a public sector official servant that is not minor.
20 kap. Om tjänstefel m. m.
"Section 1 Anyone who intentionally or negligently neglects the exercise of authority by action or omission shall be sentenced for misconduct for fines or imprisonment for a maximum of two years. If the act, having regard to the perpetrator's powers or the task's relation to the exercise of authority in other respects or to other circumstances, is to be regarded as poor, shall not be held liable."

Failure to run a network security scanner, failure to encrypt sensitive data records, failure to use passwords, failure to limit access to sensitive records
its still debatable however if there is neurogenesis in the human hippocampus so not sure if this method results are transferable. it would be cool if it worked generally though. alzheimer's causes neuronal loss throughout the cortex, while parkinson's mostly on dopaminergic neurons.
Yes - isn't that obvious? You need infrastructure to use a 'state of the art' currency as a medium of exchange.
Not a solution for CSS I guess but if I was using a programming language that had only global variables I'd write a compiler to generate variable names.
So much this. I've been programming for 30+ years. My brain only has so much cache space and it dumps frequently. Asking me questions that clearly are testing my ability to hold large amounts of data in my meat computer isn't testing my ability to design and write computer programs.

Sure, I'd love to have a "mind palace" like Sherlock. Alas, I do not. I often admit this as early in the interview process as possible to avoid wasting time.
I misunderstood you at first.

That’s an interesting speculation, but it remains to be seen what will happen when inflation is near zero.

If people value transacting on the network, then they will pay the necessary fees to keep it running. If they don’t then it will go down.

I suspect this isn’t the big issue people think it is, regardless there’s no way to “prove” that transaction fees won’t be enough — everyone from miners to speculators by owning mining equipment and Bitcoin are specifically betting that transaction fees will be enough.
> I fail

You got that part right. You have a moral obligation to be aware of racial discrimination and its calling cards.
Recording the calls could even be a requirement. You call in to get medical advice, then later decide the advice was wrong and sue them for malpractice. Recordings of the calls could be crucial to deciding the case later on.
What crisis are you referring to? Why do you call it a crisis, rather than simply an ongoing problem?
Project Chrono – An Open Source Multi-Physics Simulation Engine (C++, Python)
After we've corrected the historical discrimination?
i.e. not yet.
> Have different standards for awarding doctorates based on race?

Things need to be fixed systematically, including education from the pre-school level on. Every kid is a potential scientist, it's the ones we nurture that make it there.
Ah gotcha, misunderstood your comment — good point!
> Yeah, the road system here was designed by a drunk Indian

What does including Indian add here? If the (alleged) drunk was white would the person have said, "drunk white guy"?
So, how would you then like to arrange your mortgage if banks are not allowed as intermediaries managing the credit risk between depositors and yourself?
I used this to get a software intervalometer on my T5i and now I can take awesome timelapses of things. It's really a nice set of features.
TBH I'd rather my assets be frozen, in the case of the network halting, than allow double spending, just because some honest players lost internet.
Thanks for the reactivity !
No need for the hostility.

And if you want to have a discussion whether there are alternative ways to achieve specific valuable outcomes, count me out. This thread is about whether cryptocurrencies have any potential valuable outcomes besides the potential of lottery-style winnings for early adopters.
I always struggle to see people victim of racism identify themselve only through their race.

. “I have been the only one in most of the universities I’ve been to — the only student or faculty in the mathematics department.”

“To say that I feel isolated,”

I have always been different looking than other people around me and never identified myself through my race but through my interests and undertakings in life. I find it sad that even people with PhDs think all people of the same race are the same and feel isolated when they re not around same race people while for me being a mathematician surrounded by mathematicians should be the only thing that matters.
Linux x86 Program Start Up
Is Accenture’s SynOps automation solution a killer app or a job killer?
It can be used for purchases via services like Bitpay which can automatically give a fiat value for the cryptocurrency amount, hence shielding you from price volatility.

Generally though, merchants wouldn't bother accepting it. Alongside the fees and whatnot, adoption is too low, fees are too high, time to confirm is too high, and it can complicate some legal stuff (like issuing VAT invoices).
In the first one, a person made the argument that the sole black person in the department was there only because he was black. That's what "token black person" means.

The second recapitulates a common racial stereotype about native Americans.

Hope that helped!
I'd highly recommend it. I'd pick it over a Coke/Pepsi any day if given the choice. You can find it in pretty much any Indo-Pak grocery store in the US.
I've interviewed tons of engineers that ace the interview and you have no choice but to pass but you see later on writing abysmal code. The problem is that design, quality, and maintainability are not valued. As a result, you end up with extremely mediocre "hacky" engineers at larger companies that can spit out tons of valid code but lead to a tangled mess shortly thereafter.

Worse, there's this huge emphasis on "big O" with zero focus on clearly egregious bad practices (tons of copies, outrageous memory usage, casting between strings and numbers all the time). I've rarely seen clearly bad algorithms be deployed but I have seen plenty of unperformant code go out.
I like some coding in interviews. I try to make the tasks fairly real-world though. I am a UI engineer so my tasks typically fall into one of two buckets:

- A take home (2-3 hours) task for retrieving tabular data from an API and displaying it. Here I'm looking for general framework chops, readability, some design sense.

- An in-person (~45m) not-quite-pair programming task, with a real computer, tools, editor etc., for doing a typical UI operation, e.g. truncating text. Starts simple and gets more complex as time allows: make a function to truncate text to x chars; now add an ellipsis only if truncation occurred; now make sure not to truncate in the middle of a word, etc.
I was thinking the same thing. Just generate two random numbers in polar coordinates and then map back to a cartesian offset. Only trickiness is taking the square root of one of the numbers to generate the radius rather than the random number itself.
Is Celebrity Endorsement Right for Your Startup?
Aside from all the things mentioned in the article, this also seems like a fairly predictable application of Goodhart's Law: "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."

Once upon a time, skill at doing these sorts of problems might have correlated (imperfectly) with general aptitude as a programmer or software engineer. But the very act of trying to leverage that correlation for hiring purposes probably also made it go away. Now you've got a whole lot of people practicing hard on these sorts of problems, spending huge chunks of their free time grinding away on Project Euler and Advent of Code and HackerRank. That muddies the quality of this stuff as a proxy for what it was originally trying to detect: natural aptitude. I'm guessing having time to level grind like that also correlates inversely with other traits that are desirable in a programmer.
Because to most people, stability of said property is just as important as possession of it.
Meritocracy was the default for institutions so long as someone could enter the competition. The aberrations were for nepotism/ cronyism but those appear to be relatively limited.

I can recommend some books about how the German university system worked or how the British civil service worked or how the Dutch trade houses worked if you’re interested.

Today isn’t a perfect meritocracy, the last wasn’t either, but modern affirmative action is unprecedented in western civilization for allowing the proliferation of non-maximally competent people to rise. I can also recommend some stuff about the disasters of affirmative action policies in South Africa under black (mis)management
I mean, doesn't the madness stop once the identity breakdown in a given field roughly matches the identity in the general population?

If X% of people are Black, I would expect given no structural impediments that roughly X% of Mathematicians would also be Black.

The how to get there in the quickest and fairest way is a political question.
Any reason this article completely skipped over the userspace tools like DPDK and Netmap (there are many others). Considering cloudflare uses a customer version of nginx using the dpdk stack?
"I intend to fully cooperate but first I'm going to talk to a lawyer to get advice on the best way to do that".
> And it sounds to me like you're working rather hard to misunderstand me/my-opinion and paint me an idealogue. :)

That's fair! I'm really sorry I typed that, it was completely uncalled for and I wasn't referring to you specifically!

> Because "generics" as a feature suffices to support multi-paradigm programming.

I don't really agree with that. Despite being widely used in functional languages, they aren't really a "functional" thing, as much as static typing is.

In fact, I'd argue that Go already has a feature that is much more important and representative of funcional programming than anything else: higher order functions. [1] With higher order functions (and recursion!) you can implement pretty much anything functional.

Generics don't really allow for much more than something like interface{} can already give. The problem is that interface{} comes with both runtime performance and type-safety penalties. Generics could fix that and help programmers arrive at better/safer practices, IMO.

My point is: with generics the language could be much simpler and we'd have to rely less on (IMO) complicated/unsafe features like Reflection and interface{}.

[1] http://aquaraga.github.io/functional-programming/golang/2016...
Liberals and Conservatives Can Believe Fake News, but for Different Reasons
Unless that author, musician, or artist operated in a vacuum, their work is a direct derivative of the work of other authors, musicians, and artists.

Every dollar a musician earns I'd, therefore, a dollar they take out of the hand of the musicians, whose work they based theirs off of.

This is why the public domain exists. You can make derivative works without paying anyone... But your work will fall into the public domain, so that you pass this benefit on to the next generation.
I'll be honest I don't understand "never talk to cops". Last night I was walking to my home (this is Boston, MA) and a cop very politely asked me if I walk this way every night this time. I was dumbfounded since I was listening to music and I get super anxious around cops so I said a few stupid things like "uhmm maybe, sometimes". He took a step away probably tried to show I'm not being interrogated and asked if I was here around this time last night, he's just looking for information for some case. I told him I went to the gym last night so I wasn't here around this time but a few hours later. He thanked me and I walked my way. In that situation would it make more sense to not say anything? I mean why would that be any better than saying what I said.
Since you’re saying that simplicity is the goal, I would change the highest tier to have unlimited SMS credits. Increase the price as needed.
Dr. Brant Cortright: “The Neurogenesis Diet" | Talks at Google
I understood the point. If an employee/applicant felt they had been discrimitated against and reported it there would be an inquiry and serious financial/social consequences. Hiring is a lengthy process and firing is very difficult.

Lots of information is available in Sweden that would make Americans squeemish to have public. The difference is that most people aren't interested in the sordid details of their neighbors.
These examples were nicely curated. Thank you.
He seems to say most of us can quintuple our neurogenesis by quitting coffee and alcohol, avoiding constant stress, stopping any inflammation one might have, doing cardio, socializing, reading, and eating oranges with a bit of the white stuff left.

Would be interesting to hear HN's take on this.
If the public library system weren't grandfathered in it would never exist today. Too many people want their cut and nobody is willing to make a stand for the public good.
UKGov Disinformation and Fake News Conclusions and Recommendations
Probably sold India as an open modern marketplace where tech companies can thrive, without the typical gov intervention at every step. Then after a ton of foreign businesses got heavily committed/invested there the local political leeches swarmed in and made getting anything done hell.
If you're FANG you kind of want to hire that guy though -- the one who sees there's a task and a set of things he can do to accomplish that task. Same thing with the ACT/SAT, colleges want good test-takers because they're going to be giving a lot of tests.
It depends on how important you think it is to optimize for future readers or maintainers of the code. I weigh that pretty heavily and a do think relatively minor style issues impose a tax once they're pervasive in a codebase.

Tooling is great, but I think there are a lot of style issues that aren't readily enforceable with linters - commenting, naming, control flow, abstraction, etc.
Anonymity. There are some cases you may want to be identified by a random wallet address (with your payment proxied around to make identification very difficult), where the payment is not an attempt to sidestep the law. First example that comes to mind would be memberships to explicit content.

Course, you could just use Visa gift cards for these kinds of usages. It's probably a bit more convenient to do it this way, rather than keep topping up a card.

Some other use cases noting that cryptocurrencies tend to have public ledgers.
"So, the real question is, where/when at some point does this madness stop?"

Maybe when all race and gender fall under a single label such as human, in all forms of life. But then, that's meritocracy as we know it.
You have put it into perfect terms. Thank you for noticing that.
I've worked for several companies who made up tests that nobody on staff could pass, including the authors. But the test did imply that the existing staff was superhuman, since no applicant could pass.
Reduced trade and economic interference does not equal war. And just because the strategy doesn't make sense when taken to the very extreme, doesn't mean it's not good in small amounts - the dose makes the poison.

But why argue theory when we have empirical evidence. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage#Criticis... : "none of the world's most successful trading regions, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now mainland China, reached their current status by adopting neoliberal trading rules."