skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My group likes starting with easy questions and ramping up the difficulty, not to eliminate people with wrong answers, but for two other reasons: first, to see whether people understand the questions and whether they try to make up answers, or ask questions, or say “I don’t know”. Second, to see what the limits & boundaries of their experience is. We know that people don’t know everything, and we measure more for potential than for knowledge, but it’s still useful to understand someone’s experience and exposure level.

More important than question difficulty to me is attitude, and I’d love to see whether attitude is measurable and how it compares to later performance, but curiosity and optimism and communication really do go further than right or wrong on math and engineer questions for me. That point might even be tired already, I know people say it all the time, but I’m going to keep saying it because we still have blog posts on question difficulty, when easy vs hard engineering questions are pretty low on my list of what matters when I’m hiring.
Sell it before building it.

If there are no buyers - validation done.

If there are buyers - refund money, apologize for delay, send X% OFF coupon and start building it.

Maybe a bit controversial but works with many types of products or services.

(About 15 yrs ago I had an idea to combine all esoteric spiritual ideas that belongs to certain fragmented discipline into one place and sell it as eBook. That exactly what i did and was very surprised to give 4 refunds within short period of time, before putting it "off market")
" it's possible to solve without using a country's-worth of energy to support a pathetic ~10 transactions per second."

I think it's more accurate to talk about the amount of value the Bitcoin network is storing than the transactions per second.

Bitcoin currently has a market cap of $68B. I'm not aware of any other distributed system that's worth that much money. It's definitely interesting that a fully distributed system has been able to achieve that valuation without any centralization or governing authority (debates over developer and miner power aside).
Ask HN: Better Jupyter code completion?
I've been consistently hitting a wall with Jupyter's autocomplete and docstrings capabilities, especially when working with pandas:

* No autocomplete when kernel is busy

* No docstrings or autocomplete for dot-calls (e.g. `Series.str.contains`)

So I end up having a devdocs.io tab open for just those two situations.

Is anyone aware of efforts to lighten this situation? Say, plug-ins, or integration to other services that would overhaul the default results from Jupyter's <Tab> and <Shift-Tab>? Thanks.
So according to w3techs.com, four out of every five websites are built in PHP. Based on nothing but my gut feeling, that seems like a high estimate.
XDP is sort of that for the network subsystem. (Though it doesn't allow you to implement drivers, "just" protocols.) Next step could be filesystem stuff, then libvirt drivers, etc.

But BPF is no that versatile, but at least it has a stable ABI.
Maybe you were raped but don't want everyone to know, but you spoke to your doctor about psych referral for rape victims? Or you had a mental health crisis? Or you had/have sexually transmitted diseases/infections? Maybe you've been suicidal, and work will fire you if they find out? Perhaps you have cancer, a degenerative disease, but you don't want your family/employer/SO to know?

Seems like lots of possible blackmail opportunities.

But even something like having an ulcer could be used against you. I recall one national ruler using another's fear of dogs to humiliate them as part of a negotiation. Give someone food to inflame their ulcer prior to a business negotiation, use their discomfort to wrong-foot them ...
If you ever feel like trying out the algorithms contained in the book without going to the trouble of reimplementing everything from scratch feel free to come over to https://github.com/Svalorzen/AI-Toolbox. This is a library I have maintained during the past 5 years and implements quite a lot of RL algorithms, and can be used with both C++ and Python. It's very focused on being understandable and having a clear documentation, so I'd love to help you out starting up :)
My understanding is RL is a reasonable attack for situations where the environment is either (1) mathematically uncharacterized (2) insufficiently characterized (3) characterized, but resulting model is too complex to use, and therefore RL simultaneously explores the environment in simple ways and takes actions to maximize some objective function.

However, there are many environments (chemical/power plants, machines, etc.) where there are good mathematical/empirical data-based models, where model-based optimal control works extremely well in practice (much better than RL).

I'm wondering why the ML community has elected to skip over this latter class of problems with large swaths of proven applications, and instead have gone directly to RL, which is a really hard problem? Is it to publish more papers? Or because self-driving cars?*

(* optimal control tends to not work too well in highly uncertain, non-characterized, changing environments -- self-driving cars are an example of one such environment, where even the sensing problem is highly complicated, much less control)
Well, my question is more relevant and useful than quoting the date of the document (which anyone can read in the document) without adding anything else.

Let's move on, as clearly you won't provide any reply.
It happens and it happens a lot more than it used to.

And at some point it becomes a significant deterrent to the prospect of starting a new job search.
>Although I agree with the base of your point, I think it is worth noting that there are likely plenty of folks underneath him with the knowledge to sway policies and implement them.

True, and while I understand that high level officials do not necessarily need to be able to write code or explain the difference between public and private key crypto, they should have a base level of understanding to make decisions on the materials prepared by their employees.

I don't think someone who isn't familiar with the concept of a USB drive is at that base level of understanding.
People want an interface such that a folder represents all they want to know at that moment about a component. But then someone else may want an interface such that a folder can represent all the styles across the app.

Otherwise I do think that the naming collision problem is really easily fixed.
You mean that you can't imagine when a memorized graph traversal would be useful?

I find that hard to believe.
> Java also lacks green threads

Green threads are not the be-all-end-all solution for concurrency. They have their place, but so do event based async io.

That being said, Java is getting green threads in the form of Fibers.

> Compare https://golang.org/pkg/io/#Reader to this mess https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/io/Reader.htm....

Obviously Java's Reader interface does more work, and has a `close()` method, which golang lacks. Golang is forced to go with this way to write interfaces due to how they are implemented (sacrificing usability to get nominal typing, which is a very questionable design decision). Languages like Kotlin, Rust, Scala among others have superior solutions.
Sorry a total newbie here. Why use Matrix?
> Since you don’t know about tech, it’s going to be really hard for you to know how to hire someone who has the appropriate skills

Ideally, if you have a network that will help you succeed as CEO (these are important and startups aren't fair, as Ben Horowitz has pointed out), then you can ensure you're getting a good co-founder and CTO through that network.

> And taking on a co-founder not because they are someone you want to co-found a company with but because it’s the only way of getting a particular job done

You most likely do need a CTO, but you also need to make sure it's someone you do want to co-found a company with. It sounds like these are being conflated.

> CTO types expect both chunky equity and a decent salary

Yes, as they need to live, you should both have a livable salary if you're working full-time. And yes, they should expect 50% equity. It doesn't matter if you raised the family-and-friends round (structure it as debt instead of equity), or if you had the idea. Startups will generally take 5+ years to an exit, and by that point, the amount of blood, sweat, and tears will make any beginning inequity in contribution look incredibly microscopic [0].

> Getting a CTO early on is expensive, and often you realise later that you’ve brought the wrong person on board.

Again, I think the solution here is to bring on a co-founder and CTO from within your network, ideally someone you have worked with prior [1].

Altogether, I would argue that the answer here is that you most likely need a technical co-founder and CTO. The article is arguing that choosing some random individual as CTO is bad and unnecessary, and I'd agree, but that's aside the point that you need one; the caveat is that they have to be a good one.

[0] https://blog.ycombinator.com/splitting-equity-among-founders...
[1] https://medium.com/@curious_founder/paul-graham-and-drew-hou...
In what way does this address the parent post's argument that to the extent Bitcoin produces more negative externalities than positive effects, it is because the price of electricity is not set correctly by governments?
You can trust the government's intentions while still being wary of the unintended consequences of a policy.
As someone who has studied both math and computer science (and is now a professional programmer), I have no idea what you are talking about. We are far better at teaching people to program than we are at teaching them to do math. Its just that most people self select out of math [0], so, due to selection bias, it appears that we are great at teaching those that remain.

As an aside, as someone who also studied linguistics [1] (and a couple of foreign languages at a beginner level), I am very confident in saying that our approach to teaching natural languages relies almost entirely on natural aptitude. It is just that, absent a serious mental disorder, all humans have a very large natural aptitude for natural languages

[0] Probably because we are absolutly terrible at teaching it.

[1] I assume not what you mean by teaching natural languages, but the topic of language acuisition (including in adults) does come up; plus it gives some perspective on how teaching language would look if we didn't rely on natural aptitude.
From Bismarck to Hitler, how German rulers rewrote history
Are you sure that's not just an optional convenience thing?
> ...if I died alone.

An alternate viewpoint on this - perhaps it will help you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5_m_3eHuQo&t=7723s

Regardless of whether you agree with Big Clive on this, his channel is amazing - IMHO at least :-)
Tell HN: After the user, the most important thing is less code
In 2019, I'm surprised most programmers I see still completely underestimate the importance of having less code. Code is their friend and more code is the fix for most problems. I'll make a claim: after the user satisfaction, less code is the most important consideration you should have as a developer. Because less code is exponentially more customer satisfaction and money. It's simply more happiness for the developers (and the user).

When you have less code, you have less code to write, you have less code to read, you have less code to understand, you have less bugs, you have a smaller team, or, for the same budget, you have more time to do new features and bug fixes, you then have more customer satisfaction, you then have more money for even more features and bug fixes. All at the same time.

The way I see it, nothing beat that.

I would even stretch a bit: it seems to me, it makes judging programming skills very easy. Take a source, can you reduce it without impacting the user? if yes then bad coder else good coder. As simple as that.

How come this is completely disregarded? For example, does triplebyte tests applicants for their ability to do less code? It's not my recollection.. How come? I would even prefer a complete beginner that I'm sure do less code, than a senior who pisses lots.

Hopefully this will lead to an interesting discussion. I'd be interested to hear specifically people who disagree, I'd also be interested in ideas to make less code more known.
If your exercise truly takes 1 hour, and you're evaluating it on the basis of 1 hours' worth of effort, then fair enough. I would say that roughly equates to the technical phone screen in this case, except without all the annoying "let's talk about every little thing we're doing while we're doing it, so it takes twice as long" BS.

And there's nothing wrong with whiteboarding, if done appropriately. Whiteboarding a system design question is totally appropriate. Asking a candidate to write down code for finding the longest palindromic substring of an input string in linear time is not. I've never come to a situation where writing anything more than the barest pseudocode outline for what to do on a whiteboard was the best way to get a real world task accomplished.
As long as the code does what it is supposed to do with acceptable performance then I don't comment and approve the PR.

Because unlike people that think there are right ways I know that it's all religious arguments. Last I checked there are 0 credible reproduced scientific studies about what is the correct way to program. Or even a better way. So as far as I'm concerned it is all opinion based and sure I also have my opinions but, consistency, rule of least power, DRY, agile, OOP, single responsibility principle etc etc are all religious notions.

There are only 2 things that matter: does it work? does it work fast enough?

And normally the arguments boil down to:
"Oh but it is not changeable!" - maybe you should make something new
"I can't read it!" - I also can't read Chinese
"I don't like it" - well not everyone likes chocolate
I would say you are a relatively rare case though. Most people I've seen primarity socialize with people of the same race. Not strictly, obviously, but in general. Like in tech circles in the Bay Area, you have the white, indian, east asian groups and they, in general, tend to hang out with the same races. And by this I mean most of the friend groups I see are typically mostly of one race.
Optimizing word embeddings for the web
Die down, not die off. The melting pot is a great idea, but Balkanization is a terrible one. I worry that the drift is toward the latter.

And, I'd support policies to actively discourage aspiring pop stars, of all flavors! But I do mean particularly mathematics here, who are several sigma off the middle of academia.
> The only demographic division that I can think of that would reduce someone's willingness to abandon their personal life would be age.

I can think of a few others tied to national work culture.
It's being used to help people send money to each other very very very inefficiently.

As someone else in this thread pointed out, there's only 500,000 active Bitcoin addresses, and yet the Bitcoin network consumes the same amount of electricity as the entire country of Denmark
Post Sans
That video, with the pre- and post- differences is pretty remarkable.

Here's my stupid question of the day: given that this color-grading of RAW streams makes _SUCH_ a massive difference... why don't companies like Conan and Sony just ship it with the product? Why do their cameras fall short of having something like Magic Lantern? In the end it gives the customer what they want... surely Sony/Canon are capable of producing something like this, so why not produce it?
One could argue that CS undergraduate degrees are perfectly suited for this purpose. FAANG & Co don't seem to care for that. You've successfully passed a few dozen exams at MIT or Stanford? Well, let's make the reasonable assumption that you have no clue about algorithms and data structures and start with our third whiteboarding session, that should be a way better proxy for your knowledge.
>A false dichotomy

It's not a false dichotomy because I am not suggesting that both skills are mutually exclusive. I'm highlighting some personal experiences where I've seen one skill is vastly overvalued compared to another.

>Managing complexity is a valuable skill that should also be screened for at interview

I've never been part of an interview, on either side, where I've seen testing for managing software complexity. Good interfaces, function design, side effects, state management, etc, are all second class citizens to finding the appropriate algorithm to solve the interview question. I've seen it over and over. The only time I've been close to a complexity management question was on a systems design question, but even then, it was only a very high-level systems discussion. I don't think most places know how to screen for it.
Hold on, let me catch up here: your poor-neighborhood peers tell you you're "sexually inadequate"

No. My peers told me I was sexually inadequate and less than essentially human. This was also mixed up with my having been molested be a peer in high school. As a result, I was pretty much unable to have a relationship until my late 20's, and even so it was hard to sustain a relationship long term for many years beyond that. (I'm happily married now, however.)

Insults and gaslighting with regards to one's sexuality are a particularly potent psychological weapon, and from what I've seen both as a direct participant and as an observer, some people from poorer backgrounds will actively punish those who are demonstrating academic excellence, or who are cultivating themselves in some other fashion. Such people are likely just a small percentage of the general populace. However, if one "sticks out" then that small percentage tends to find you more easily.
Charles Sturt Uni is a fairly well regarded Australian university. It isn't one of the so called "sandstone club" but I believe it does legitimate stuff (it isn't that easy to be called a university here). They also often specialise in rural/earth science matters (I always thought of them as a rural uni). If that helps?

Yeah it is my instinct to to use credentials but then I pull myself up and think "is this a high brow ad-hominem thing" but it probably makes sense to be curious/skeptical at first.
Most AI they have tried to sell us so far, are more smarter list compare algorithms. For example, when to pickup a garbage container. Turns out, there is no real AI involved, its just a list of conditions to watch.
You should be able to route all traffic through to the VPN by setting AllowedIPs to 0.0.0.0/0.
Of course it would have made more sense to not say anything! Can’t you see that you may have made yourself a suspect in a crime by admitting that you walk that way every night to a cop? It sounds ridiculous because it is, but it doesn’t make the fact that you put yourself at risk by talking tot he cop any less true
> JSX is a very thin DSL on top of Javascript.

With its own syntax. Which looks like HTML but isn't.
Yep, and thinking about that some more, I have to wonder if he might be suffering from early/mild signs of schizophrenia. The assumption of racism is unjustified paranoia.

When schizophrenia starts, it is common to assume that people's actions are in some way plotting against you. A person does something for a reason unrelated to you (example: bumps you accidentally), and you assume it was intentional.

I recall that there is even an increased chance of illness for math experts. Famously, it hit John Nash.

So his interpretation of other people's actions may be a sign that he is not well.
NATO Group Catfished Soldiers to Prove a Point About Privacy
For 1, are you suggesting something like a GUI for a list of data transformation recipes? I.e. specify an input format and an output format and press play? How would these recipes be created?
Yes, as far as I am concerned. There has been a nontrivial number of instances of the payment processor oligopoly wielding its power against things that I care about (by preventing certain companies/institutions/organisations from using it) in the past decade, and I want that sort of thing to become impossible.
There are unorthodox ways to test a future company, but none of them are listed. My favourite include: asking the most senior person that you talk to:

- What’s the biggest mistake that you made in the last six months? (Covering their asses, citing minor infraction, laughing at the question, saying they have not thought about it: bad; a sincere admission of a really bad call that sounds like something that will inform their management style: forwarning; either way: they’ll talk about the topic that they care about: financing, recruiting, growth, clients, etc.)

- What’s the biggest mistake that you will in the next six months? Why is it OK for you to expect that from happening? (Same as before, harder to answer; we can learn a lot from others but for some things, no one was here, and this is how we are going to make it OK if we have to: better. Same, will cover the topic that they worry the most about)

- What’s the most important thing that you won’t be able to make if I say no right now? Keep in mind, you have other candidates in the pipe, and I hope that they are good too.

- What’s the biggest problem for people in [your team, or another one that you interviewed with]? (If their answer does not match what you’ve heard from that team: bad; if it does, preferably with one level of abstraction above and a fix.)

Call customer service, and ask them how they feel about the company, preferably before your last interview. “Overworked” is good, “excited” is great. “I’m not sure why I’m here” or “There’s a list of 74 problems that I have, I wanted to raise to the CEO…” good material for your interview. “Not sure, but if you know, tell me: I am the CEO. Talk to yo on Thursday.”: presumably good.

Ask to talk to a client if it’s B2B. They might refuse: “Why?” is a good question then.

I like to ask the investor but that’s because I always go for the same investor… I know, that’s lame. I don’t ask for a name, I just mention one (other) company and ask if they are more, and then respond asking if they could rank them. Depending on the investor, I know that means technical maturity, or business potential, or management. It’s not for everyone, but it helps. You can also ask competing investor and they might let you know why they didn’t invest. Not sure about the ethics of that one though.
Oh, you'll certainly be better at solving programming puzzles type of problems, but the thing is that those questions usually don't translate well into real-life problems that you'll encounter at work later. You can't architect a good solution IRL by trying to figure our what the test author wanted you to do, like with programming puzzles. And for implementing some algorithm keeping every detail of it in head definitely helps, but it's not a significant advantage over someone who just googled all those details 10 minutes ago. So both types of tests are not testing the real dev capabilities, they test how much they prepared for the test. IMO only tasking the candidate to build some real piece of software or even better refactor some real code, with enough time and full access to google and stack overflow, and being fully able to ask other people for suggestions & help will show you the realistic picture of the candidate's future performance as a part of the dev team. Put them in a real situation and give them the real type of problems, and you'll get the real results. Everything else is like giving sudoku tests hoping to choose the best mathematician.
golang authors seem to only have experience with C++ as they keep talking about C++'s deficiencies, as if it's the only other language that exists when it comes to generics.
I'll bite. What exactly is the danger?