skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The ideal question or problem from our perspective is is one that is equally challenging for everyone

It seems like you could solve this by asking a question no one has ever been exposed to before, or by exposing each candidate to the theory relevant to the question yourself.

Except that the first strategy is guaranteed to fail some of the time, because there are no questions like that.

Why not go the other way?
I couldn't pay a late bill once because my ISP's website was down for several days. Luckily for me I could afford the fine.

Imagine if this is your power company and a bugged website means you can't pay your bill before your power goes out.

Problems in prod can have affect people's lives.
It's unnecessary, unenforceable and off-putting. By definition, if you make an offer of employment to someone and they choose a different one, then your offer wasn't "as good". Maybe you're offering the same salary, but that's certainly not the only thing that goes into an offer. I get you want to keep students around for yourself or for your staffing clients, but this is not the way to do that.
To add on to this: developers don't get choose what architecture a customer's phone uses. If they could, perhaps they would choose x86.

For servers, developers are often the customers of their own software.
This is a very well-written essay which explains its computing concepts effectively and thoroughly. I upvoted.

However, the bit at the end with the balanced parentheses matchers being a bad interview question seems to be missing the forest for the trees. A simple solution to this problem which has nothing to do with any of the computational theory discussed:

def is_balanced_parens(s):
nesting_depth = 0
contains_nesting = False

for c in s:
if c == '(':
nesting_depth += 1
contains_nesting = True
elif c == ')':
nesting_depth -= 1
else:
return False

if nesting_depth < 0:
return False

return contains_nesting and nesting_depth == 0

This isn't that hard of a problem, and if an interview candidate couldn't come up with a basic solution like this, I'd very much like to know that.
The reality of multiple systems is that their stacks are always slightly out of sync even with full support and commitment. The most used system is always updated and fixed first.
Nowhere in that article does it explain why smart contracts actually save costs. Yes, some derivatives contracts are simple enough to explain to a computer, but still quite complicated. Why does putting them in a smart contract on a blockchain save money over just putting them in the dealer's computer?
A close friend of mine lived in Mexico for many years. I would visit him occasionally and spend the odd week or two with him. I got to know his home help.

He being an American of generally liberal persuasion tried, as your family did, to treat the cook and gardener as 'equals'.

Over time that changed though. One day the maid sat him down and politely explained that it was sort of insulting to be treated too familiar in this context. She was speaking of the gardener and said, "What you are doing makes him feel very uncomfortable". She explained, "the old man there is kneeling in your garden pulling weeds 8 hours a day, and you come home...breeze in in your 50K auto and ask him if he wants to share a beer with you..."

He realized she was right. These people were not "passionate about their career", in fact there was no career, nor even the semblance of it. They were just doing whatever possible work they could do to earn enough money to keep food on their families table. Treating them too familiar, or even implying they shared lots of things in common, was sort of demeaning.

In the end, he wound up treating them very formally. "Sr Veracruz" "Sra Sanchez" etc...always keeping a sort of respectful distance between them. Posting work schedules, etc and generally treating them like employees.

I'm not at all against what you said, nor implying you guys didn't do what was right, simply showing there are more than one interpretation of such situations.
> If you don't like Facebook/Google/etc., wouldn't you be better off just not using them rather than spending time trying to hurt them?

I don't use Facebook/Google/etc., but they collect data about me without my consent anyway, and there is no way to delete that data or to make them stop.

That's what makes me so furious with them and all other ad companies. Since they're never going to change, I wish that they'd go out of business pretty much every day.
I always wondered about that incremental optimization. It makes sense in a lot of ways, but then there are cases there big leaps happen, which would require many steps at a severe disadvantage in between.

E.g. the evolution of flight. Flying is a huge advantage, but evolving towards a body capable of flight without being able to fly, should require millions of years of disadvantages to get the flying advantage. But incrememtal optimization and survival of the fittest contradicts a very slow process over several disadvantaged steps.
It's not simple cause and effect. Servers cause compatible dev boxes and dev boxes cause compatible servers.
I wonder if one could claim autism or ASD as a way to get a decent private office with a door as an ADA/EOE thing.

(I've done something right in my life that one of our office buildings was built with not-soundproof-enough walls on the private offices, so the office manager/ops person (who stereotypically would be the one fighting this for budget reasons) was the first person to suggest/drive the "we should completely rebuild our 6-month-old office to have better sound isolation and even more private offices".)
YMMV.

My bootcamp had 90% placement rate within 90 days and has for years. This question kind of ridiculous though, no education system works for every single participant. There are plenty of people with B.A.'s not getting hired. Even people with law degrees occasionally. Much less financial and time risk with a bootcamp tho.
It just establishes new model assumptions. In the linear regression case, fitting boxcox(y) = βX + ε and predicting with boxcox^(-1)(yhat) produces different predictions than fitting y = βX + ε (minimizing Σ(boxcox(y) - boxcox(yhat))^2 does not minimize Σ(y - yhat)^2 in general). Either model would be an approximation, of course, and it's possible for either to produce more accurate predictions than the other for a given set of observations.

I'm not familiar enough with Prophet to know whether the same logic applies here, though I'd hazard a guess that it does.
Orbital piracy is going to be a great subject for action films.
I assume this is other apps using FBs analytics toolset? Where I can send a custom event with {email:dillondoyle@gmail.com, data: {likes_dogs: 1, likes_cats: 0}} or what they are mad about is {weight: 120, has_hiv:0} ?

IDK seems silly to me or maybe I'm in too deep and can't see the forest for the trees.
You are not compelled by law to use it. You may be addicted but it is a different problem. So the short answer is it just you that makes it difficult.
Aside from the fact that emulation is slow (and thus more annoying to test), now you have to contend with emulator bugs. Is your software crashing because your code is bugged or because the emulator is bugged? Or worse: your software may only be working because of an emulator bug.
Brutalist buildings are awesome canvases for graffiti sprayers, they essentially just reclaim their environments by ornamentation.
What does a republic get you that a dictatorship couldn't do more efficiently?

I did it guys. I'm finally enlightened.
Even something less traumatic like being drafted for the Vietnam War has a measurable impact on descendants:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/01/be...
The idea of capturing the best commentary from that thread really stuck out to me. It would be great to do some kind of annual anthology, internet-wide. The best insights rounded up, year after year. You could break it down by topics or region, and publish each year.

The historical value of something like that would be really excellent, as time goes on. You could really capture the mood of each society for a given year or time period, in a very accessible way for future generations.

I'd read the everloving crap out of that.
Any plans for more videos about system programming?
Maybe it was a combination of the two, but let me tell you, his inability for empathy and emotional understanding was the crux of the problem. I've known a handful of autistic people and while I definitely know some really nice autistic people, I think that being a manager requires a lot of empathy and understanding that they just aren't equipped to handle.. When you have power over people and you are unable to empathize with them, you become a tyrant.
Interview with Founder of Genius (Tom Lehman)
On the other hand, the worth of bitcoin in terms of actual goods and services fluctuates wildly for no reason at all.

(The collapse of the dollar is the least likely financial crisis to worry about in the present day.)
Anthropology: The Sad Truth about Uncontacted Tribes
The Quaint Obsession with Civilization's Canals (2016)
IIRC, optimal information density is achieved by an alphabet the size of Euler's number [1]. So trinary might actually be theoretically optimal since we have to be discrete.

But there are pragmatic considerations to consider that make trinary difficult. Since most of computation currently happens with voltage, that's a one-dimensional quantity that we would have to divide into 3 levels to discriminate "bits". This requires more sensitivity and precision than merely two levels. (Edit: although maybe not, some historical computers were trinaryband reportedly more efficient; time will tell I suppose).

It would be easier to achieve trinary if we had two axes with which to encode, but that intrinsically yields quaternary; maybe that's how DNA operates.

[1] It is via radix economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_economy#Radix_economy_of...
I’m finding this out the hard way. I recently shut down a startup that became very distant from my interests, and now I’m having trouble finding jobs in my actual interest area, hardware engineering. I’m no longer a ‘recent grad’ so my college internships don’t have much weight. I wish I had taken advantage of the amazing opportunities afforded by being a fresh grad instead of starting my own thing, and I wish I had had the foresight to not do a startup that would distract me from my career path.
I've known about Stratechery for some time. I understand the content is very good, but my interests aren't quite in that space.
I ran a little test last weekend. I got a 1 CPU / 2GB RAM virtual machine from a cloud provider and deployed Matrix/Synapse on it with spantaleev's Ansible script.

I created 100 accounts for chatterbots. (This is not federated to the main Matrix network -- just local.)

The VM showed some lag when the chat bots connected and started inviting each other to their channels. But once all the invite sending/accepting settled down, it's been pretty smooth. It's randomized, but I think each channel has about 18 or 20 users.

The whole thing is using about 900 MB of RAM, and that's including everything -- CentOS, several containers, the Postgres database, Synapse, nginx, etc.
I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed when the controls wouldn't let me change them :)
> You can block trackers pretty easily, or just not visit those websites.

And since they're buying data from non-internet data brokers such as credit card companies, retailers that track you in their stores, etc., blocking the trackers and avoiding the websites doesn't actually stop the spying.

To stop them from spying on you pretty much requires that you stop engaging in large swaths of real-world society.
It's mostly to do with the income share agreement. Doing it outside of the US is complicated and Leif, our vendor, doesn't do outside of the US yet. That affects the availability of capital (big funds would rather stick to the US for now). In the future this will change possibly, especially if we adopt a different payback model.
I am the opposite, If I see a targeted ad, I just leave the site.

Moreover, if I see any ad of any product. I put that product/service on my I want to avoid this product if possible list.

I do not like propaganda and that is what ads are.

If I need something, I will search for it. Do not tell me what I need.
I am not sure why this got downvoted, it is a valid question which got an informative response.
Thanks for this. I am shocked to learn that re-recordings of previously copyrighted work are not deemed derivative works and actually receive their own separate copyright even after the original has expired.
Ever wonder why Facebook is giving everyone on earth so much free software and processing power? They seem to be making money, how do they do it?

[10 minutes of deep thought]

Ok, we get it. If someone offers you something of value for free, politely say "no thanks" and run the other way.
I like the "Time Machine" feature of going back 1 (to N) year(s) in the past, it brings a lot of insight as to how technologies and trends evolved (for those of us who have only recently joined Hacker News).
Why does the signed hash need to be on a blockchain? Why not on the university's website? Or on some national or international clearinghouse's website, or all three and more.

The hash is already signed, then so as long as you can trust the keys used to sign it (a problem not solved by blockchain), then you can get it from anywhere, any untrusted source, because the trustability is inherent in the object itself.
If your values are expensive to compute like that, then you'd have the object return a function that would call foo(), bar(), and so on; and you wouldn't call them all to setup the map in the first place.
Of course I can, but the question is why would go out of my way to do any of that?

I was interested in trying the state of server-side ARM for my mostly-interpreted language, and I pretty much immediately found that it doesn't Just Work. I had a vision of spending many hours searching, creating and +1:ing GitHub issues and tracking discussions around "why package X doesn't work on ARM" and the developers saying at best "happy to accept patches" (which btw is the mantra for why "why package X doesn't work on Windows", and why you don't want to develop with Node on Windows to this day despite all of Microsoft's ecosystem work). Nope, not worth it.

I'm not interested in supporting ARM just for it's own sake. A 30% discount on the cloud instances is also not nearly enough for me or my team of developers to be spending any significant amount of time on this, solving problems unrelated to our core business.

Let's see again in a few years. Of course, if ARM development machines become mainstream by way of Apple, then the calculation changes completely.
Use Bookmarks to Create New Google Files
Just a general warning, if you leave two factor on for a set number of days (I can't recall the exact amount), it is impossible to turn off again.
Western Union will do it in minutes, and I've actually used it to send myself money in Africa in lieu of better options when having bankcard issues (turnaround time <1 hour including finding the agent, fee ~5%). Admittedly the transaction fee on a transaction as small as $5 is pretty steep (20%!), but they're getting spendable cash for it, and I doubt the average family in Africa is getting a better deal when asking the local computer expert if he'll give local banknotes in exchange for their satoshis...
> Cambridge Analytica is not defunct, but rather changed its name to Emerdata.

Not technically correct, but basically the truth. Cambridge Analytica declared bankrupcy in May of last year and the creators of that company created Emerdata and rehired many previous employees of Cambridge Analytica. Their HQ is even in the same exact building.

They're just playing the shell game, really. "Oh no, we're not the bad guys, we are just mostly made up of those old bad guys and do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way with the exact same location as those old guys... But, as you can clearly see, we have different bank account numbers and a different company name, so we're not the same thing at all."
Many projects don’t care about subtle bugs. They need to deliver features in time. Bugs are acceptable.
How to Get a Six-Figure Job in Data Science and Analytics
Some people seem to think that a movie is automatically terrible if they're not in the movie's target audience.
Yes, in the late 80s/early 90s 10mm was chosen by the FBI because 9mm ammo at the time had a tendency to under-penetrate (not an issue in the present day, 9mm today performs significantly better than 9mm 25 years ago).

The story of the FBI's switch from revolvers to semi autos is pretty interesting. They decided on 10mm but some agents found it to be too "hot" and had trouble controlling it. So they put out a request for a modified 10mm round and Smith and Wesson came up with the .40S&W. They developed the round before they had a production gun to shoot it, though. Glock had "acquired" some of S&W's new ammunition at a trade show to study it and found that by making minor modifications to their existing Glock 17 they could fire S&W's new ammo. They submitted the new gun to the FBI who chose it as the standard issue firearm for all of their agents.
What really hit home was this passage:

> I acknowledge many people’s lived experience that the thread felt right-wing; my working theory is that most of the people I talk to about this kind of thing are Bay Area liberals for whom the thread was their first/only exposure to a space with any substantial right-wing presence at all, which must have made it feel scarily conservative.

I moved from Western Washington where I grew up to the Bay area. I lived in a liberal area in WA, but conservatives existed and more importantly were visible. The congressional district I lived in flipped between Republican and Democrat twice while I was a kid. Some of my parents friends made cases for conservative viewpoints, and in retrospect I really respect my father encouraging me to listen even if I didn't agree.

When I moved to the Bay area it felt like I stepped into a world where conservatives might as well be foreigners, or even a different species given the way some people talk about them. Even though I usually agree with the positions they hold, I've become alienated from much of my co workers by the way they openly express disdain for conservatives in a way that demonstrates a clear lack of experience in talking with people on a different end of the political spectrum as normal people. It's jarring to see people simultaneously patting themselves on the back for being inclusive and welcoming at the same time as they exhibit disdain for half the country.

I also worry that this is a positive feedback loop of exclusion. Fewer non-left people join Bay area tech companies because of the liberal monoculture. Then the liberal monoculture becomes stronger as there are fewer people calling out ways in which the company is being exclusive towards non-liberals, this leading to an even bigger monoculture, and so forth.

It's probably the second biggest thing that is makinge consider moving away from the Bay Area, after cost of living. Sure, I prefer to hav mostly like-minded (liberal) friends, but consider this: in close to a decade of living and about 6 years working in the Bay area I have met exactly one co-worker that openly expressed conservative views. I just don't think that kind of extreme political segregation is healthy.
> I also don't really understand why AOC is being scapegoated for this —

For the same reason the purple-haired woman screaming into Logic Man's face fuels millions of "SJW cringe" video views.

AOC for many people is a symbol of "snowflake socialist millennials who want the world to be handed to them". This is a narrative that persists even when it is Amazon that pays no federal tax and demands extra concessions despite already being highly profitable.
Active trading does make sense for certain participants (e.g. certainly for HFT firms, but arguably for many others, e.g. maybe even for a well-educated individual investing in under-researched small cap), and as the fraction of investment money that is passive increases it starts to make sense for more of them.
True, but I just need to stop thinking I can climb every mountain faster than people focusing on a couple. To put it another way, I need to rely more on others' progress. Even better, help them progress.
I'm definitely on the side of ARM(and RISC-V and other new architectures for that matter) getting "wins", because the modern environment is displaying the signs of a low-layer shakeup:

* New systems languages with promising levels of adoption

* Stablization and commodification of the existing platforms, weakening lock-in effects

* Emphasis on virtualization in contemporary server architectures

* "The browser is the OS" reaching its natural conclusion in the form of WASM, driving web devs towards systems languages

All of that produces an environment where development could become much more portable in a relatively short timeframe. It's the high friction of the full-service, C-based, multitasking development ecosystem that keeps systems development centralized within a few megaprojects like Linux. But what is actually needed for development is leaner than that, and the project of making these lower layers modernized, portable, and available to virtualization will have the inevitable effect of uprooting the tooling from its existing hardware dependencies, even when no one of the resulting environments does "as much" as a Linux box. The classic disruption story.
But how are those of us who already don't use their services supposed to protect ourselves?
This highlights some very troublesome trends on the internet these days. We once envisioned the internet as a place of revolutionarily open discourse, where any idea under the sun could get posted somewhere and read, no matter how crazy or bad it seemed, with the worst ridiculed and dismissed, but still able to be read, and the best rising to the top.

It seems like we're moving in the opposite direction these days, with the internet as a means to control, oppress, and indoctrinate. Giant tech corps effectively taking over most means of communication and using their powers to openly censor things are part of the problem. IMO, a bigger part of the problem is the trend among activists that anyone with an improper opinion must be destroyed, along with anyone who allows them to express that opinion, and anyone marginally associated with anyone who allowed them to express their opinion, etc.

It seems like a well-honed process now. Cherry-pick the worst things anyone has said or posted. If nothing sufficiently bad has been posted, then make some fake accounts and post something bad yourself. Write hit pieces on the owner or author and highlight those cherry-picked things. Spread those pieces far and wide, and keep writing new ones with the same theme. Direct them at anyone associated with the target. Repeat and keep spreading the net until somebody breaks.

Is this what we created the internet to be?
systemd's log subsystem has been doing exactly that since 2012:

https://lwn.net/Articles/512895/

Although here's a detail i didn't know:

The algorithm for FSS is based on "Forward Secure Pseudo Random Generators" (FSPRG), which comes from some post-doctoral research by Poettering's brother Bertram.

So that's just peachy.
If you have a digital system that can handle disputes (by dispensing penalties say), how will it handle the other party lying about what happened in the real world? How would the other party handle you lying about what happened in the real world?
Is it? Or is it evidence that Apple has worked REALLY DAMN HARD to make it work decently?

I’ve certainly heard of bugs that the simulator doesn’t reproduce because it’s not ARM.
You can pay $200K and go to university for 4 years and still not get hired. That's more likely for non-CS degrees, but true nonetheless.