skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Have Generics been accepted as “considered useful” in modern languages?
Now that golang 2 will have generics I wanted to see what HN though about generics being generally accepted as useful.

Typescript also supports generics similar to the way Java added them (with type erasure) and I find them amazingly useful vs normal Javascript.

Other language features like checked exceptions are far more controversial.

I think it would be interesting if we've evolved to a point where most programmers felt like generics were a good addition to their languages and that their use was no longer controversial.

The only major downside I see to them is that they add more verbosity.

Also, the type erasure is a major pain and can cause all sorts of confusion but this is mostly an implementation detail.
Hi, I'm one of the founders of Coda -

In Coda we use zero knowledge proofs to stand in for downloading / checking the blockchain. This means you get the identical computation to normal blockchain syncing, but in only the size of the zero knowledge proof and your account, which ends up being both constant and ~20kb. Which makes a big difference if you want to use Coda from a phone or browser.

Check out this video if you want to understand more of the tech behind it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWVGATxEB6M

And feel free to ask any other questions as well!
Thanks for posting this! It looks very interesting. I wish I had the time to go through all those books!
Most successful distributed databases taking load at scale with powerful OLAP engines are written in C++, not Go.
Yeah, but think of all of the money that could be made by the publishers.
Yeah, and it doesn't even need to be within a certain radius - just make it within a certain latitude / longitude.
> I just question if it is really led by safety concerns, fairness and science or just our default knee-jerk "drugs are bad"

It's a race to the bottom kind of situation. There are plenty of substances that have been shown to not have any side effects but act as performance boosters( creatinine comes in mind) that are perfectly legal and every athlete uses. So I think steroid bans are meant to protect athletes.
Well, it's not true. Bitcoin has increased the demand for coal power in China. Bitcoin miners flocked to New York State for cheap natural gas power.

Green energy is not necessarily the cheapest form of energy. If it were, it wouldn't even be _hard_ to stop burning fossil fuels and prevent climate change.
In the UK it seems it has mostly been a weapon among criminals more than a honor thing that is more common in the developing world.
Blockchain Staking and Inflation Explained
We spend so much of our time in the western white world, worrying and thinking about minority issues. I'm honestly sick of it. What a huge waste of time and effort. Meanwhile, China is just sailing by the west. Diversity is not the future, diversity is divisive.
How do you know you're a suspect? Are the police required to tell you? What if you become a suspect after you talk to the police? Are they required to disregard all the things you already told them?
>it has no answer to the exchange problem

Actually, there are smart contracts which act as exchanges. Not for all currency pairs yet, but it's on the way.
My point was that was the point of the article, as much as the age of the hardware.
So in Marx’s view, free trade is actually a bad thing. He is for it just like someone might vote for termites if their objective is to destroy a building so they could have power over how it’s rebuilt and who gets to live in it. Good for him, bad for the building and the people currently living in it.
There is a balance to be had here. In a high volume, sensitive environment you'd run your own mail server. But that is a challenge in-and-of itself. I don't recommend it for a home setup because there are numerous things to worry about like MX forwarding and what happens if your server goes down -- where does the e-mail go? Granted, using Gmail means if your server is compromised the bad-actor would have your gmail password which is why I recommend enabling 2FA/MFA on Gmail and then using an app password. Check http://reddit.com/r/selfhosted if you want to self-host mail.
I totally agree with this. You shouldn't ask a question where some amount of luck of figuring out the problem is necessary. Instead ask something practical and relevant to your domain. Also, leave room for exploration if they sail through it and recovery for someone that goes down a bad path.

https://github.com/spullara/interviewcode
An interesting angle is in the export of donated clothing to the third world.

It's not that the locals really want the shirts with the logos of our Super Bowl losers and the outfits even Goodwill couldn't unload domestically, but it's what they've been forced to settle for.

It gets dumped on their market so cheaply no local manufacturer can compete, even if they can offer choices better for local styles or needs. Clothing manufacture is fairly low tech and not really location sensitive, so it's something that most countries can do to start moving up the economic ladder beyond raw extraction.

Give them a protected window of a few years without cheap imports, and you can ramp up supply and distribution networks (so you can compete more effectively on price) and also potentially improve local standards of living enough that the workers can afford to buy the goods they're producing.
The tests have become a pure filter, screen out those who dont study heavily prior to taking them. They are uncorrelated from the candidates ability at every day tasks.
"Deprecate CSS, disregard design" seems to be the standard practice for engineers silo'd off from designers, and the business-at-large.
Optical illusion breaks your brain for 15 milliseconds
Exactly an idea I had a year ago. I mean, there are more services that do it, but very few of them do exactly one thing.

Good luck!
I go back and forth about how I feel about doing heavy algorithm/data-structure stuff in interviews. On the one hand, I have never once written any kind of sort algorithm or LRU cache by hand for a production system, because why would I? Pretty much every language's standard library has a fairly-optimized sort and caching thing built in, and if they don't then there's still probably a million outside libraries to do it for me.

On the other hand, I genuinely do feel theory is really important. While not knowing the minutia of a tim-sort doesn't indicate that you'll be a bad engineer, not knowing the runtime efficiency of a sort can lead to some really awful code. Not knowing when to use a hash table instead of a nested-for loop can be a sign that you don't really know what you're doing, and not knowing some rough theory on concurrency indicates that I might be stuck debugging your race conditions or deadlock.

I try to not be a complete jerk and I won't do stuff like give out an NP-complete problem (which an interviewer gave me once), nor will I ask for intimate details of how one would implement CSP, but I do tend to focus on theory-heavy questions more than my peers, but I try to give a fairly-generous amount of hints so that people don't get too stuck.
Western civilization is in crisis because of these social experimental policies undermining its original meritocratic competitive default mode.
So, the real question is, where/when at some point does this madness stop?

We have a significant segment of the population that has been historically oppressed and suppressed. After desegregation whites fled the cities. Go look at the population of the top 50 cities in the U.S. in 1960 and compare with their populations in 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000. That white flight had a very bad effect on the school systems in those cities since school funding is largely a product of the tax base. So while from a legal standpoint there is equality (and this is generous given how bail, policing, etc. are done in the U.S.) there is indeed a state of inequality. Western civilization is not in a state of crisis because of attempts to remedy this state of affairs.

I submit the real question is when will people understand the social context in which a significant segment of the population exists and seek ways to remedy the problems. Be part of the solution.
Hmm, interesting. The high profile ones seem to go through without any more than a ceremonial objection so those less prominent ones are surprising.

Thanks for checking this!
As a POC of an alternative medium of paiement.

As an idea, a hope, the starting point for iterating on the future of money.

As a way to make the society think and debate.

And as all that, I think it had been successful.
The Challenge of Keeping Up with Algorithmic Pricing
C++ comes to mind.

Also some would say that Go is actually from 1968.

http://cowlark.com/2009-11-15-go/
I'm not sure I understand this but if you prefer it in terms of strange analogies - you're walking past a construction site where they're building a highrise and see they're hammering a giant steel pylon into the ground. You smirk and say 'that won't keep the rain out!'.
Commenter looks at a field that hires only white men, and excludes everyone else, and sees a meritocracy. If an single extremely competent, outstandingly-qualified black man is hired, it's because of his identity.

Remarkable.
It is a solution for CSS, and it's called CSS Modules.
Cryptocurrency doesn't cause a government to lose control of its money supply.
>Why did you feel the need to state the obvious?

The implicit -- wait, no -- the explicit argument of your grandparent post is that all white men are the same.

Of course people are going to push back on that.
> Imagine, you got a standard website the serves data from a database. When a customer types in the url into the browser bar what needs to happen until the customer see the website.

That's a favorite of mine too. It sets up a broad range of discussion without needing to spend much time setting up hypotheticals and lets the interviewee really delve into topics for which they have expertise and/or interest. It's also easily adapted or sets up follow-up questions for different positions or levels, e.g. "with TLS," or "how would you debug a problem with symptom x?"
So I use a separate gmail account for my server but forgot to mention in guide. I will add it.

Although I wonder if its necessary if you use an app password. What is the worst a bad-actor can do with the app password?
I am really not qualified to comment on what is happening internally in India but as an African looking on I see quite a number of positives. Most of our drugs are now from India. Companies like Cipla are quite prominent. India manufactures their own cars( Tata and Mahindra both sold here). In Africa we have a few assembly plants, none of the cars or IP is really ours. India has launched a rocket into space and is planning on going to the moon. As I type this the Zimbabwean vice president is in India for medical treatment[0]. It has become common for medical aids here to send people to India for types of operations. I understand India has some way to go but hey at least you are making some strides. I am not so sure about Africa. The people making bricks and connecting solar panels for lighting are making some progress but nothing large scale such as going into space. Our governments are too inept for that.

[0]https://ewn.co.za/2019/02/12/zimbabwe-s-vice-president-recei...
With all its hype in RL, I am yet to see significant real life problems solved with it. I am afraid with all the funding going into it, and nothing to show for except being able to play complex games, this might contribute to the mistrust in proper utilization of research funds. Also the reproducibility problem in RL is many times worse than in ML.
The latest Call of Duty game has a battle royale mode. I can't recall hearing anything about their BR mode after launch. Clearly, just making a BR game isn't a guaranteed path to success even when it's backed by a major brand name.
The CAP theorem [0] states that during a network partition a consensus system must either lose availability or consistency.

* Bitcoin loses consistency

* Algorand loses availability

I'm glad Algorand exists so that systems which value consistency over availability can be built.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem
That's not very much.
Are you sure Argentina isn't part of SWIFT? That's insane if true. A quick google search suggests otherwise:

https://www.theswiftcodes.com/argentina/
Interesting post! I appreciate this being shared.

Would Triplebyte mind sharing the data? I'd love if the numbers could speak for themselves, rather than having to rely on an interpretation of the numbers.
How to Regulate the Internet Without Becoming a Dictator
People from poor demographics in general are discriminated against in various ways.

Want to learn math but come from a poor neighborhood? Good luck. You’re probably locked in a school system with bad teachers and few if any math courses beyond calculus.

Even if you’re talented you probably know 0 people that can help you. Now your growth is prematurely stunted.

That kid from a better off family that shows talent in math? Probably get recognized for it from an early age and gets tutors and advanced training. Probably already completed proof based courses in analysis, algebra by the time they completed high school. They get into better schools and have ahead start. Even if they are just as talented as you the poor kid.
Still, sending the data unencrypted wasn't so much the issue here as the server was open to anyone.
That's a good point. I guess I'm marketing the long term vision rather than the reality of it right now.
Independent of intent, all education is indoctrination.

Where I rent comes into play is what you intend for the indoctrinated to do with that education: buy coke, participate in the local ICBM program, or maintain society’s plumbing, the same plumbing the water and sugar in all that coke is pissed down. Either way it creates jobs.
It is also not helping that there actually is such a thing as "token X". A less discussed side effect of affirmative action.
My experience with having my code reviewed was overwhelming positive, if frustrating at times. There was one reviewer in particular who had a way of asking just the right questions to point the way to a better approach. It also changed the way I write code, too. Little things like naming stuff, internal consistency...I grew to have an intuition about these things.

I try to view code review as my chance to pass this on. It's about teaching someone how to read their own code with a critical mind. It's definitely not about superlatives like best, perfect, whatever.
I dont think we have any real evidence that cryptocurrencies are predominantly using polluting methods of power generation. The entire argument falls over if it is all renewable energy.
I've travelled a bit and I think most people have the same potential to be good at different fields across races. The main difference is how much value is placed on a skillset in a society.

There's more of an emphasis in Math (and Science?) in Asia. When I was in India, I was a part of a group scavenger hunt and all the girls decided they would work together to solve calculus problems. That blew my mind. In USA, people are able to brush aside math by saying it's hard or math isn't for girls, etc.
Every human who lived before the invention of Coca Cola and ice cream found a reason to live. The question I have is how did you end up thinking that the only lives worth living must include these specific amenities? That's a dangerously inflexible attitude toward other people's cultures.
My apologies. I was referring to "myofibrils" which are the strands within a muscle cell. So I meant to say that hypertrophy is the mechanism of growth. But you are correct, these are simply parts of a single cell and I mistakenly used hyperplasia.
To be honest, I found myself slightly offended at your original comment, but I decided not to say anything since I agreed with the overall point you were trying to make. This response makes me feel like I have to say something though. Sometimes the person calling everything else toxic is actually a source of toxicity. Frankly, as a white guy who has been known to wear hoodies, I don't like being grouped in with toxic assholes just because of my appearance, and I think you could convey your point better by learning to phrase it in a more respectful way. Instead of trying to call out an entire group of people based on gender and skin color, just point out that it's hard for toxicity to survive when surrounded by a large variety of viewpoints and backgrounds.
yes, definitely, and that's why I'm excited about it. What I was writing about when I posted that comment was more about how the environmental impact is often just left out of the conversation - and I was surprised that the original article didn't even give it a mention.
The very same pattern happened to Spain < Netherland < France < British < USA. The government (King) in capitalist countries from the West tried to be protective and then lost investment trust.
The ultimate apex predator is already there.

Man.
Especially as you have no idea when a government hostile to you or your beliefs may take power, and if they do, well then it could means news and things you believe in get censored or banned. Anyone who believes governments should have the ability to decide what 'fake news' is should remember who's in the White House about now, or who runs the FCC at the moment. And who might be in the White House in a few years/run the FCC in a few years, etc.
Always. Google gives me 5 thousand pages of ads before the results I want. I hate to admit that sometimes I still use Google for searching. Like I love their shopping search.
Sure.

My point is, when it comes to visual styling, you inherently have a shared visual context.

The post I was replying to was concerned with the "global" nature of CSS.

I'm pointing out that this is inherent to the problem space. You have to deal with it whether you use CSS, code or any other mechanism to style.
There's something to be said for representation. If you're a bright high-schooler with some interest in mathematics, but don't have a single mathematician to point to who shares your cultural background, it's much harder to visualize and manifest your goal. There's at least a partial self-sustaining mechanism to this sort of thing, which I think is the best argument for affirmative action.
Apple buys AI voice startup PullString
You realize that this approach is flawed the moment there are blogposts / books ( e.g. Cracking the coding interview ) on how to crack it. The how to crack 'x' becomes a field altogether ( coaching / youtube videos / blogs / books etc ).

Also, platforms like hackerrank are adding fuel to fire. I read the CEO write somewhere that he wished the below "were taught in schools :

1) Communicating complex ideas with clarity
2) Systems thinking
3) Grunt work tasks
4) Boundaryless thinking
5) Self-awareness / EQ"

Please note almost all of these are not evaluated on their platform (they profit from coding tests) or during interviews and almost all are soft / intangible skills (skills which are not immediately obvious about the candidate during a typical programming interview). [ Side note : some could say that coding tests are the problem they have chosen to solve - in which case, why are they worried about these skills ? Are the companies seeing coders crack the tests on their platform, while not performing well on the above skills post hiring ? We could only speculate. ]

All good work is done by teams, and to be effective in a team requires a lot of intangibles which aren't even assessed in a typical interview.

A better approach could be from this article: https://leerob.io/blog/technical-recruiting-is-broken/

Or :
A couple of weeks of work with a task being assigned and the mentor or interviewer looking at how the candidate is approaching the problem and whether he is able to solve the problem within the time constraints (an easy task shouldn't take long, and a hard problem shouldn't be short circuited to give a sub-optimal solution.) and other such observable traits can be evaluated.

My two cents!

EDIT : Poor wording above (i.e., couple of weeks). A task should be assigned and evaluated post a time (which is ideal for task completion as per the interviewer). No constant interaction with the candidate and spending loads of time with that candidate - that isn't scalable when the demand-supply equation is imbalanced already.

EDIT 2 : The idea above is not about spending weeks for recruitment. The idea was about being practical about the kind of questions / tasks that are given during interview (example : code a feature or fix an issue we have, as another user has suggested well in the comments). Took me a while to realize we have missed the point I tried to convey for the logistics of how it should be done.
Looks good, I currently use UptimeRobot for monitoring my own site and servers, but I have put it on my list to sign up for this too - for extra resiliency.
Indeed.

Most plastics (unless specially formulated and/or treated) will break down when exposed to UV light. So weathering and release of plastic particles is indeed a concern.

We'd be better off looking for more things to make out of cardboard printed with non-toxic inks, glued with non-toxic (and non-plastic) glue.
Here’s a decent guide: https://github.com/drduh/YubiKey-Guide

PS I’d love to get some shoved into my hand. Paid $100 for my pair.
The Soviets didn’t view the Eastern Block as independent countries, just extensions of the Soviet empire. It’s like saying the US is for free trade if they only allowed trade between California and Puerto Rico. While the Eastern Bloc counties weren’t de jure territories of the Soviet Union, they were certainly de facto territories. Look at Prague Spring and then try to argue that the Soviets didn’t own that country.
I'm assuming this is a genuine question on your part. I would suggest reading up on common stereotypes of the native peoples in the U.S. Native Americans did not design the road system in West Lafayette. Whites did. The person making the remark is in essence saying:

Yes the road system is really fucked up. It's so bad that I can't give a real explanation for it so I jokingly say a drunk Indian had to have done it because that's the only thing that can make sense.
That might be the case in some countries, but in China for example much of the mining is done with stolen electricity, or bribing officials for an unreasonably low rate.
If it uses many orders of magnitudes more energy per transaction than all the existing ways of people sending money to each other, it's being peed away.
I really agree. At companies I've worked at for the last 20 years (at least) the approach has been to ask pretty simple questions; people who struggle on those we don't want; people who don't struggle, even when they make silly mistakes (due to feeling interview pressure) are good.

Questions about the standard library of the programming language in question are good. Questions about the dusty corners of said library: bad.

And don't ask about floating point: most likely the candidate won't really know more than the usual things; anybody who really does understand them will probably give answers over the interviewer's head :-).
While I have similar feelings, I enjoy code reviews on high quality code. I like reading high quality code. But yes, the enjoyment of a code review is inversely proportional to the amount of feedback required. Some people enjoy mentorship more than others, and that's ok.
I'm responding to the argument you made without attacking you for it. I would only hope you have the courtesy to do the same. Dropping it at that.
The historical British civil service is your prime example of a superior meritocracy?