skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>There seems to be a dogma that the population must grow, and any sign that it might stop growing at some point is bad.

Well, when you have most nations in the world making Keynesian policies that assume future economic growth (China included), then yes it's a bad thing. In that case, you're left with an ageing population who previously planned for their retirement investments to carry them, but instead must rely on government services funded by a much smaller, younger working population.
The primary problem with ephemeral environments isn’t distributing secrets, it’s provisioning the environment itself. It’s perfectly fine to generate an empty, self contained, with dummy “abcd1234” passwords or randomly generated credentials that are used only locally.
Take care of your health everyone. Health, Family, & Friends are all more important than work.

Note: I'm not saying work caused this, especially since he was set for life with his work at Square (according to the article).
I don’t really understand the whiteboard hate either. Take home tests don’t reveal how a person communicates or collaborates. Maybe it’ll predict competency for siloed heads down work, but even for those positions you need to be able to explain solutions, get feedback on the approach, and be able to incrementally adapt to new requirements quickly. Even when programming solo I’d wager most people are using pen and paper to sketch out solutions so it’s not like it’s an implicitly unreasonable request to then do this on a whiteboard in a group setting.

And to address the OP more directly, are loops, maps, trees and graphs really “CS trivia”? They seem more like fundamentals to me, and those are usually the subjects whiteboard tests revolve around.
That’s just not true, but the truth is complicated.

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

While recreational use, possession and trade of non-medicinal drugs described by the Opium Law are all technically illegal under Dutch law, official policy since the late 20th century has been to openly tolerate all recreational use...
I don't run a bug bounty but I do sit on a security@ inbox. I don't believe I've ever seen a report I would want to pay out on even if I could, but if you discount blatant spam (often peddling EV certificates), I've received reports asking about bounties for:

- nginx version disclosed in headers
- "Feature-Policy" header missing
- DNSSEC not set up on zone
- Domain not in HSTS preload list

Responding to this sort of thing with "not a vulnerability" is intensely difficult because the of the potential for a PR backlash about "poor security" from people who just don't know better, particularly when the company is definitely not a tech company.
k8s is a nightmare to run. You need a good clusterfuck on ansible scripts and carefully tuned ... everything .. to get something for your needs.

I've written about container systems before, and I still think the industry needs a way better solution. k3s and some of the stuff coming out of Racher might be the better way to go.

https://penguindreams.org/blog/my-love-hate-relationship-wit...
This is pretty much where I've landed; the filter can go both ways. If I make dumb (minor) syntax errors on a whiteboard and it bothers the interviewer enough to not hire me, or if the question is some "cycle a red-black subtree" BS, I'd really rather not work there anyway, and not have it take 4+ hours of my personal time.
Google style guide has me sort of leaning to always using ++i:

https://google.github.io/styleguide/cppguide.html#Preincreme...
Normally I'd agree with you, especially when concerned with languages like JavaScript. But C# is a different beast. It's being used quite frequently in large gaming projects and even operating systems where it is frequently less managed.You can even use it out of the box in a more, but obviously not entirely, unmanaged way to increase performance.

I don't consider this pedantic in this case. But the line isn't hard so we'll have some disagreement how to teach / not teach this.
Looks like it's this: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/dumogi

I don't love performance tracking software. It can (1) easily become something that people deliberately game; (2) lead to a paranoid environment [in a Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom/Brave New World sense]; and (3) actively impede productivity.

That said, I'm sure there's a vigorous corporate market for it.

One large obstacle (as you mentioned) will be your writing. Working on your grammar or finding a business partner with strong writing skills will help.
They are invisible whitespace characters that are handled reliably and flexibly in every editor that I've ever used them in. The same cannot be said for spaces. If a codebase is using two space indenting, I get to look at the resulting puke (this is subjective, of course) on my screen. I might be able to do some hackjob fix to change how they're displayed, but why should I have to? There's a character that satisfies both me and the animal that wanted to indent their code with 2 spaces.
Anyone know what the addiction was? given kidney involvement i'm leaning towards alcohol, but don't want to assume. I know it's cliche to say, but asking for a friend.

A loss for a lot of people, especially his young family.
I've written a script to allow me to filter the list, using the Functional Perl libraries. Maybe someone will translate it to JS?

https://github.com/pflanze/functional-perl/blob/master/examp...

If you want to run it:

sudo apt-get install libfunction-parameters-perl libterm-readline-gnu-perl libpadwalker-perl
git clone https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
git clone https://github.com/pflanze/functional-perl
functional-perl/examples/hiring-without-whiteboards --help
functional-perl/examples/hiring-without-whiteboards hiring-without-whiteboards/

E.g. to search for companies that offer remote jobs but not also jobs in London, UK:

$cs->filter(fun($r) { $r->remote and not $r->locations->any(fun($l) { $l=~ /\bUK\b/ and $l=~ /london/i }) })->show_items

Disclosure: I'm the author of the Functional Perl libraries.
Addiction is a terrible thing.

Never take the first step. It's your best defense.
Cannabis has never been 'completely legal' anywhere in the Netherlands. It depends a bit though on how you define 'completely legal'. Wikipedia has the details.
Given how dangerous child-birth was, there's a something of a tradition going back to at least the Romans of protecting a wife by using prostitutes for base sex
The process of scribbling characters with a marker on a whiteboard is quite tedious and takes up a lot of time and effort. And doing it feels more akin to multitasking than a normal coding process, since so much of the effort goes into scribbling out things (as opposed to the actual coding process). Ability to draw glyphs on a whiteboard will become a confounding factor here.

Being able to type out things in a text editor simply makes the interview process much more efficient.

Note: I share your annoyance with people who gripe about whiteboard problems and algorithms / data structures problems not being representative of everyday work.
I usually turn on colour filter and cannot find the click arrow initially. But those preamble seems okish for once. But good to have a shortcut.

Static functional ... lisp?
The Erlang VM presents such a unified view to programs that run on it. The asynchronous messaging built into the language works the same between servers as it does locally.

You can determine whether the process to which you need to communicate is local or remote if desired, but it's unusual to do so.
The bottom of the article is (most likely algorithmically) populated with a display of Square’s live stock changes. Which seems in poor taste.
That was at least an unreleased development version of the product, with a test driver in the car. And it was at fairly low speed - one would hope that shipping automated braking systems would be active in that case.
Some of the photographs in his portfolio are amazing, I'd suggest a look:

http://otierney.net/cities
When I was diagnosed with kidney disease, I was one step into stage 5 kidney failure where dialysis is considered. However there were very few outward signs. Even my PCP was not expecting it when he ordered a standard lot of tests. Our bodies don't always have clear signs of things going wrong. Make sure to have regular checkups.
I'm so torn with how to see Huawei. The dealings with Iran seem pretty cut and dry, and the laws in China are impossible for Huawei to ignore. On the other hand, their consumer products are very different from the commercial routing and telecommunication branches. Yet, the high level US government folks are being forced not to use the consumer products. Why aren't they being prohibited from using other Chinese consumer electronics, like Lenovo, Xiaomi, etc?
Liberty and Justice for All
Years ago I was trying to use Merkle trees for checksuming and synchronizing database replicas, since everyone was doing it this way. It was immediately obvious how impractical it was. So the first thing that came to mind was to use a fixed sized Merkle tree (half trees or whatever they are called). It was essentially an array of 64k hashes with each element storing a hash for a set of database keys. That, however, required rescanning multiple keys on updates and the number of keys depended on the database size. Of course this wasn't going to work well. Naturally the same idea of adding and subtracting hashes came to mind. Adding a hash of a key on update and subtracting on removal allowed to completely eliminate reads from disk. And rescanning a particular set of keys was only necessary during background synchronization and only when a key was missing on a replica, which was pretty rare. Although I don't use this approach anymore, it did work well and was trivial to implement.
I think the question is not "What happened to OpenStack" but rather, "Is OpenStack still total garbage?"

I've been at two companies that attempted to go down the OpenStack route. One wanted to start a cloud offering to their clients and hemorrhaged tons of money trying to just keep OpenStack stable. We couldn't even run our basic Logstash offerings on our OpenStack cluster without them having bizarre performance issues.

We had a really good manager too who had accounts on every other provider (Rackspace, RedHat, Canonical .. all the big ones) and time and time again he was like, "What is this? How are they doing this.." and we just figured they used a ton of specialized proprietary plugins they just weren't open sourcing or a ton of special patch sets.

Second shop had tried moving onto an OpenStack cluster to save on AWS prices. It could never run anything reliably and they scrapped the entire project and re-purposed all the servers for DC/OS, which was super nice and reliable and every team migrate hundreds of services onto.
It was alcohol addiction.
I don't have a lot of recent experience with other ecosystems, so take what I say with a grain of salt. With that disclaimer in mind:

* Visual Studio is the best IDE, bar none. It's a pleasure to use and Microsoft keeps it up to date so it's usually bug free for normal use. I don't even know what its serious competitors are. Eclipse? VIM? Forgive me for not knowing. :)

* C# is the best OO programming language (if you don't need the raw speed of C++ or, I guess, Rust). Java is a disappointing mess controlled by, yes, Oracle. Python and other dynamically typed languages are fine for scripting, but not for developing complex professional software.

* F# is the best functional programming language for getting stuff done. In fact, it's the best language for getting stuff done, period. Haskell is amazing for its mathematical purity, and I've learned so much about FP and category theory from the Haskell community, but F# gives you immediate access to the zillions of packages created for the .NET ecosystem and is totally compatible with C#. You can also use F# for imperative OO programming when you need to (which is almost never).

* SQL Server is the best RDBMS. Oracle is painful. The open source databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.) have come a long way, but still don't have SQL Server's combination of power and ease of use. NoSQL databases are interesting, but seriously lacking in important features. I've yet to come across a use case where I would actually want to use one. (Special demerit to MongoDB for using JSON as a query language. Good lord.)

* Windows is fine. It's not Unix/Linux, but it lacks for nothing.

If I had the time to investigate other ecosystems, I'd like to pick up Rust and Haskell. I'm afraid that Python and JavaScript will eat the entire world, before then, though. :)

All of the above is massively IMHO, obviously.
Some things that came to mind as I read it. I have little knowledge of the topic, etc.

The price stated comes from:

> Though the price fluctuates, NH3 typically costs about $0.23 a liter ($0.85 per gallon) and has no byproducts other than harmless nitrogen and water.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density says liquid ammonia has an energy density of 11.5 MJ/L while gasoline (petrol) has 34.2 MJ/L. I believe that means it's $2.55 for the energy equivalent of 1 gallon gasoline. Commodity price for gasoline is US$ 1.73/gal https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/XB1:COM .

Second, there's already a big market for liquid ammonia, eg, for agriculture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia says "The global industrial production of ammonia in 2014 was 176 million tonnes". The current rate is something under $500/ton , and strongly dependent on the price of the natural gas used to power the conversion - https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2016/06/anhydrous-ammonia-... .

(It has a density at 40 °C of 0.58 g/cm3 => $0.32 / liter (that is, $500/ton * (0.58 g/cm/cm/cm) * liter ), so the given numbers are reasonable.)

Because there's a big market, there is an incentive to develop new methods to drive the price down.

The invention here seems to be a way to produce ammonia locally, in a small device and using local power sources, rather than natural gas + large industrial production. No doubt that's more expensive, but as the article points out, might be useful for distant facilities where the transportation costs are high.

I'm surprised to see "There’s actually no other zero-carbon fuel out there, so we really don’t have any competition" because hydrogen is often described as exactly that. Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_economy .
This is technically true, but these days using anything other than C# is strongly discouraged.
Upvoting this. I’d like to know, too. :3
haskell is great at being imperative too look at chris done's work on xml parsing haskell and c; nice example
See my reply elsewhere in this thread.
I am fascinated by all the 3-legged furniture in the painting. The design guarantees stability due to all legs being on the same plane, solving the wobbling/instability problem so common in 4-legged tables and chairs. However, quadripedal tables and chairs are nearly universal in the modern day, with tripedal pieces being mostly reserved for eccentric art. I wonder at what point the trend changed, did it have to do with manufacturing techniques or simply aesthetics?
I somehow fail to see why the example in the article needs the hash to have some special property of homomophicity. When you represent the overall hash of your dataset as a sum of individual item hashes it trivially follows that change of one item means that you substract the hash of original version and add the hash of new version.

Or am I missing something? (apart from the somewhat obvious security implications of doing such a thing in the first place)
As a lefty, my biggest problem with whiteboard interviews is writing code on the whiteboard. I just can't write text in straight lines very easily because my hand is occluding it, and so I write slower and use more strength doing it, getting tired pretty quickly. I have no problem drawing on a white board (I draw my shapes in counter directions like most lefties), or writing simple labels/lists, or whatever, but coding on a freaking whiteboard should be illegal :).

And then they expect me to talk while writing code on the whiteboard...
Thank you for sharing! I work in tech but photography is my passion. Those are some wonderful pictures he was able to capture.
I think the two could be tangentially related. Not necessarily intelligence, but constant thinking and wondering. In my own experience, I loved working on new things and learning new things. I took some time to step away, and wow did I get bored easy, and found myself zoning out thinking, even so far as doing it when others were talking to me. Sleep was impossible, and it was really easy to turn to alcohol just for the mental rest.

Even Elon Musk commented on this recently. Paraphrasing because I don't remember the quote, on Joe Rogan, he mentioned it's not so nice to be him because his mind was always working and he couldn't turn it off. It really hit home for me, and I couldn't even imagine how much worse it is for some folks, especially those who founded companies and have that stress on top.
> the five most populous counties in America selecting our President for us

The 5 most populous counties have less than 10% of the US population.

Moreover, I have yet to see a good reason it makes sense to prefer tyranny of a minority to tyranny of the majority, where we can't avoid both.

> limits the effects of massive voter fraud

This is an important point that's not often discussed, IME
Sorry to see this. My last year of college, with absolutely zero experience in tech I tried to build a fintech startup that needed seamless processing of micro-payments and so I pinged Tristan in the early days of Square's beta program when they were just shipping out card readers asking if they might expose an API in the near future. Small interaction, but he got back to me and coming from the Midwest, that was my first experience with how open Silicon Valley can be, with a co-founder at one of the hottest startups taking the time to respond to some random college kid interested in kicking the tires on his project. My project went nowhere but I had fun exploring the tech involved, decided to learn to code, made it out here and am now running a venture-backed startup after a couple engineering jobs. I thought just the fact that he responded was really cool at the time and try not to blow off cold emails like that as a result.
Gameboy Emulator for Emacs
The Risch Algorithm was mentioned in a recent XKCD[1]. Perhaps that was the trigger for this submission.

There were a few rabbit holes to investigate from that comic. Bessel functions were what first piqued my curiosity. I never did get around to the Wikipedia page, but Wikiquote[2] had some interesting quips.

[1]: https://xkcd.com/2117/
[2]: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bessel_function
Citizen of the United States of America gets job offer revoked due to poor credit. We aren't any better.

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/awmvre/50k...
The people who ask why HTML table is not looking right are unlikely to express a strong opinion on Oracle etc either way.
So if I made a webview to PornHub, and sent feed notification over SMS, that would be okay?

I'm sure Google would take it down in a heartbeat.

And as you said, it wouldn't have any effect on PornHub as people would still go there through the website, but it shows that Google is okay with government-backed slavery but not with porn.
Guide D'achat Fer à Lisser
Sorry, this is too black-and-white.

Of course it's stupid to ask somebody to write down red-black-tree rebalancing algorithms from memory. Especially on the whiteboard without any syntax/compiler help.

But given a more-or-less concrete basic problem that every programmer should be able to solve with just basic knowledge of the chosen language hands-on (at a computer, not the whiteboard) is a different thing. It can be a collaborative process where the candidate can sketch an approach on paper/whiteboard, then write code. While doing that they can query API question to the interviewer, which, if they are doing a good job, will be giving that information willingly. Watching the candidate building their solution towards something that works tells a lot. It's not just whether the code works. It's communication too. Code organization. How they think, how they approach a problem, what to do when they get stuck (ask for help? run in circles? just get confused?), what do do when their code has a bug etc.

Take-home exercises seem to be praised as the key solution, but I think that's fundamentally flawed as already discussed here. If done badly, it's just as bad as from-memory-whiteboard stuff. In-person-problem-solving can be done quite well.

And the market proves that it works. Successful companies do it. If their hiring would suffer substantially, then they'd have stopped doing it, because their competition would have a substantial edge.
>you can see how a business is being impacted by things that you can see

Strongly agree. The biggest barrier between devs and refactors with zero interface impact is AGILE mentality of always aiming to deliver value to the end user with every deploy. Business people just don't understand how much of an impact crappy implementations and error handling does have on the end user. We see 5~6% error rate, which represents hundreds of thousand of people daily, but shipping a new "feature" (that within months will be used by a few hundred people with a very high bounce rate) is always the top priority.

From time to time there is a meeting with the following subject: "why are users not using the basic features", and the business people's answer is always "the ui is outdated" or "the menu is confusing the user". Those answers are gathered by talking to some random users on the streets close to the company building (I'm not making this up).
I'm not talking about build issues, but runtime ones. There's a lot of stuff that comes up during routine debugging of desktop apps, for example.
I do call one week in 10. I typically have between one and three out-of-hours pages during this time. A typical page takes 20 minutes to deal with, although sometimes they do take longer.

30-minute response time means I can still do things like skiing or hiking during on-call weekends, if I'm a bit creative.

As a result of doing call, my team's product runs reliably and meets its SLA requirements, allowing my company to sell the product to other serious companies and therefore for my job to exist.

I get paid around $4k for each week of this (on top of my normal salary). It is worth it for me.

I have "other interests and people in my life", including a girlfriend, friends, outdoor adventuring. One week in ten hardly affects anything, and I can usually trade with a teammate if I want to go away a particular week. Most of my friends have their own careers which make far more onerous demands on their lives for less compensation (doctors, lawyers, nurses, restaurateurs).
China is much better than western countries at getting shit like this done, because they have fewer scruples. For better and worse. But one consequence of that is that if they really want more children they will figure out a way to make it happen.
Really makes you wonder how much is too much, how many years, frequency of regular vs binges, etc.. apparently some alcohol-related diseases only take a few decades to manifest.
That works for services you control, but if you depend on external services, and these are relevant to what you’re attempting to test with a tool like FeaturePeek, then you still need to deal with credentials. Or am I missing something?
Never attribute to bitcoin that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
We're way past the slippery slope though. Google already is removing apps for completely frivolous reasons. They removed gab.com because some nazi trolls were using it, so that is the standard that Google has established. And by that standard, they are fine with the handmaiden app.