skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree but the very employers who are the literal gatekeepers to a good job often use credentials as signals right from the start, which contributes to the credentialling arms race that I think we've been going through.

Apprenticeships and trade schools will become a strong alternative path as soon as employers accept them to be. Moreover, often times the credential itself isnt the big deal, just its viewed as a competition and someone who got a good GPA from a top school seemingly displayed an ability to do well in that competition.

I wish it were different, but I don't see employers changing their game anytime soon.
Export Table as Laravel Migration in TablePlus
I get salads at Sweetgreen (one of the referenced cashless retailers) periodically. On two separate occasions I've been behind some stranger in line who didn't realize the place was card only, so I paid for their salad with my card and they gave me the cash. It is a weird policy, but I understand why they don't want to deal in cash.

Interestingly the flip side of this is cash only places. New York is also a huge user of Venmo for those times when you only have a card, but the place is cash only. Often if you don't want to have to leave to find an ATM and pay an ATM fee someone else will pay your bill in cash if you Venmo them the money. The problem of a cash free, or cash only place is easily solved in both cases with a little cooperation with your fellow New Yorkers.
In the digital transformation era, multicloud data protection turns smoking hot
Tell that to the companies who use it as a login.
No, you've got it backwards. The format is called that because it was the format of the a.out file.
I got to interview a lot of people in the past 2 years, and I noticed that new grads are REALLY good at solving Leetcode type of problems.

The expectation in the industry is that Senior people would be even better at it, because of their years of experience.

This,however, is not what I’ve seen on the ground. Most senior devs that I interviewed, who were clearly smart and experienced took much longer than new grads to solve most of the questions. Personally, I try not to hold it against them, if they can clear the bar, but I wonder how many other people do the same.

Also, I know in music they do blind interviews, were people perform behind a curtain to avoid any biases they might have (gender, race etc).

May be it’s time to do something similar in Software, since we already are prioritizing white board interviews above anything else?

Edit: I am not advocating for Leetcode types of questions. I do believe that most companies hire like this (including my current company, where I get minor if any say in hiring process). So just pointing out my observations regarding the status quo.
Yes, but sometimes things are more complex. I know physicians that were assaulted with a knife in their workplaces. A bagcase raised in the last second stopped the hit, aimed towards her heart. Some people could have solid reasons for acting like that.
I have a boring solution to the Fermi paradox. It is old, but really, really boring.

Start looking at things that are weird about our Solar System and the Earth. Figure out which ones are probably necessary for intelligence. Add those into the Fermi calculation. And see that it is likely that we're the first intelligent life in this galaxy.

What are some of those special things? It is not enough to have a planet that has the right ingredients to start life. It is necessary that it's progress not be constantly wiped out by major disasters over a very long time scale. What kinds of disasters?

You don't want a supernova going off too close. We have been lucky to avoid that. Our odds were greatly improved by the fact that we spend most of our time out of the galactic plane, away from other stars that could be about to go boom. This is an unusual orbit.

You don't want to be hit by too many comets. We've been hit by some, but far, far less than we would have without Jupiter acting like a sweeper to clean up dangerous stuff in our neighborhood. How rare is that? We have cataloged planets in hundreds of other solar systems. We see ones with only rocky planets. Ones with only gas giants. But we're the only one we know of with both gas giants and rocky planets. The only one where the rocky planets wind up protected from most of dinosaur killer kinds of impacts.

Oh, and get this one. Without the Moon, the tilt of the Earth's spin is unstable. Without it, in simulations we would wind up with one pole aimed at the Sun and the other not once every few tens of millions of years. Probably not good for the development of intelligent life. Again we don't know how rare this is, but we suspect that it is rather uncommon.

Suppose that each of these only happens to one star out of a thousand. Suppose further that there is one more, as yet unidentified, special factor about us that is also required. Again make that a 1/1000 coincidence. That would make the odds good that of the ~250 billion stars in our galaxy, we're the only ones with intelligent life.

Or if you do the back of the envelope just with the three that I named, and made them 1/10,000 coincidences, you get the same result.

As a sanity check, the fact that no other intelligent life has been observed is evidence that it is unlikely. And given Fermi's argument, it is probably unlikely at least on the scale of 100 billion to one against.
The scenario you talk about happens for sure. And some of those protests are legitimate; we've made little advance in real productivity since the 70s but all the while churning languages and libraries and environments like fashionable clothes partly because programmers are on the average young and inexperienced. So after a decade or two of riding the wheel, a lot of engineers decide it's pointless and just kind of check out. (Not me, FWIW; I'm on board with React Hooks and looking for an excuse to use ReasonML.)

On the other hand, ageism is real. When I was younger I was told more than once by managers, straight up, this candidate is too old so find an excuse not to hire. And now in my 40s, when I walk into some companies for an interview, I can feel the decision has been made before I even start talking. Not everywhere, not even most places, but it happens for sure and it's not even that subtle.
You're right about everything but the weather. It's only good for about 2 months of the year. 10 months out of the year it's either too hot or too cold. Air conditioning is a must. If you love Bay Area weather, you might want to stay in the west coast instead. Portland seems to be a good alternative.
What are the big expenses that cost Uber and Lyft so much? The driver takes the cost of owning and maintaining the vehicle, and they're only paid a fraction of whatever rides they get. Aren't the companies just running an app?
So what about Walmart who does double Amazon in revenue AND has their own private label brands? They have so much retail power they are known to get manufacturers by the balls and make manufacturers accept the cost they want instead.
This article is all about money. What about life?

Suburbs are depressing. I find myself both happier and healthier in walkable communities near city center.
By “Apple supplier” they surely mean “Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and the rest of the world supplier”?
We’re actively working with army, navy and marines in US. Why put a Blackhawk and crew at risk where one it a swarm of autonomous cargo Speeders can do same work. 400-600lbs cargo of equip, blood supplies etc. Not to be used for insertion of operators in covert mission but in overt ops our noise signature isn’t a factor.
Society by and large does do this, just not with a grandiose show at every "incident".

"Whoa, there sure are a lot of fights at bars we have to keep responding to! Maybe those would happen less if we had fines for bartenders that had too many fights? Or maybe if they had to get a license that we could revoke if they weren't preventing fights?"

"Whoa, it seems that a lot of people don't own guns, but then go and buy one when they get pissed and shoot somebody. Maybe that would happen less if we had waiting periods?"
I don't know; anecdotally, these days it seems things are not quite like that anymore.

I'm pushing 40, and like reggae, acid jazz, electronic. I keep up to date (as far as one can) with tech, programming, cloud and the like.

It's not just me - it feels like a lot of older people around me don't match the old stereotypes. Older colleagues are learning Typescript, my grandmother reads erotica...

Youth culture is of course always changing, but older people are perhaps more liberal than they used to be, and don't feel like they need to behave a certain way any more more.
The role of Escobar’s residence in Medellín’s historical memory
By forcing freedom of speech onto twitter for example. I don't see how that would be restricting their speech.

Personally I see this as something that will come eventually. However, I don't think that's what Twitter should do.

My idea is that twitter should act more like the united nations. You create a 'diplomatic immunity' type of account that people can request. It can be something like:

Minimum 50,000 followers.

Account history of 1 year.

If approved you can no longer edit or delete your posts; but you also cant be kicked off twitter or other be harmed by rules of twitter.

this by itself will solve the problem that twitter has.
Aren't you basically just describing a more complex, weaker form of RSA SecurID hard tokens or Authenticator-app soft tokens? With a centralized API for validating a generated key vs identification details?

EDIT: Thinking about this more, it seems like a much harder problem than this quipped solution gives credit for. The agency wishing to validate a generated key would need to have enough identifying information to isolate a single row in the centralized database to validate the token. Because we don't want every token assigned to John Smith to validate every John Smith. So now this centralized database needs to have something that's unique to every single row... Or, in other words, the same problem as SSNs have to start with.
I've worked with at least 3 older IC software engineers (close to retirement age) and their experience has been invaluable in forseeing issues that younger people don't spot in advance due to limited experience. Also the breadth of the work that these people have been involved in is very useful in being able to pull experience from other areas into an unrelated project. I genuinely don't understand the bias against this unless the person is unwilling to learn new things which hasn't been my experience.

Hopefully this attitude will change as the valley ages and people will learn that a lot of software engineering principles don't change as quickly as the buzzwords do.
AVS an open standard for self-driving vehicle visualization from Uber
IC doesn’t seem like a viable track. Consulting in a specialized area (i.e. FORTRAN or COBOL mainframe programmers) seems to be where it’s at. Beef up your network and you can setup a gig consulting at upwards of $200/hr on some obscure system that very few people know about.
The "I" in "IoT" stands for "internet". If the only thing "IoT" means is 'small digital sensors', then I'd suggest it's a meaningless buzzword.
There is a problem of equating being "up to date" with "competent for the position". Up to date might mean you know how to work in the syntax & convention of the stack of interest, but that's largely independent of the level of competence for overall software development & discipline. If an older programmer is solid on the latter, getting up to date really isn't a large amount of time. It's harder to assess, just like its hard to assess in interviews even if the engineer is "up to date" - look at the perennial debate on how best to interview candidates.
sweet game demo video, how about even the simplest prototype? you know, something like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB1LUwRePKA (www.hoverbike.com.pl) - and even that is just an investment scam (pumping EU grands)
So they named the standard compiler output "a.out", for independent reasons, and when it came time to distinguish formats, they called the original standard format "a.out" just because that's what the file name always was?
Relevant text:

> ... legislation that requires large tech platforms to be designated as “Platform Utilities” and broken apart from any participant on that platform.
Companies with an annual global revenue of $25 billion or more and that offer to the public an online marketplace, an exchange, or a platform for connecting third parties would be designated as “platform utilities.”
These companies would be prohibited from owning both the platform utility and any participants on that platform. Platform utilities would be required to meet a standard of fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory dealing with users. Platform utilities would not be allowed to transfer or share data with third parties.
One possible reason for the lack of interest in older coders is that they're largely white and male. Hardly a sympathetic demographic in the current cultural environment.

For myself (note: am old), I'm just following the advice I've always given to other minorities that are discriminated against to various degrees. Which is: don't whine, and play the cards you were dealt as best you can.

The FAANGS may not, but many other employers can spot talent when they see it. Keep looking--there's a niche for everyone.
duplicate, please check before submitting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19330812
The "one-time use the account and routing number on the check to pull money" is utilizing the data from the check to perform an ACH pull. There's a specific process called an EFT [1] where merchants can perform an ACH transaction in lieu of a received paper check.

[1] https://www.occ.gov/topics/consumer-protection/depository-se...
Solving leetcode is not software engineering.
> Robert X. Cringely is often incredibly observant and accurate.

Quite the opposite: http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/writings/holes.ht...

Cringely is a good writer and storyteller. The stories he tells are often hearsay or wildly inaccurate recounting of events by third parties. His writings should in no way be treated as being accurate, and should not be referenced as historical sources or anything like that.
I wonder, though, if this had more to do with how much they are actually investing in AI vs electric car tech. Surely Tesla is an EV company first and an AI company second. I know they like to brag about their autopilot but it eems to me that having a lower cost car is more important than having an expensive lidar system on board.
> gives their in-house service priority in search results over existing market incumbents and self bids on google search advertising for key industry terms to drive up costs of advertisers to keep in business.

It would help if the competition in hotel booking, Expedia, Orbitz, ETC weren't all literally owned by a single fucking company now. The sites are entirely rigged against the user.
And if Amazon is broken up, whoever thinks the US will still win the global E-commerce market against Alibaba is also quite high.

The rules are changing. We need to think about the geopolitics here as well. We need US companies to win global markets in an era of increased competition.
My background is not in quantum mechanics, so I could be totally misunderstanding the idea of quantum indeterminacy, but I thought it had to do with what we can know based on measurement. But a truly omniscient being would not have to rely on measurement.

So ...

Are you saying an omniscient being is impossible, because something about quantum mechanics implies that it is impossible to possess all possible knowledge?

Or are you saying that even if an omniscient being possesses all possible knowledge, they would nevertheless be unable to accurately predict all sequences because of some knowledge we have about quantum mechanics?
Off-topic: That site's design could use some refinement. Took me a while to even figure out how to get to the actual content (scrolling didn't work in Firefox or Chrome, I had to click the little white arrow).
There are 1.4 million Lyft drivers in US and Toronto.

Waymo is going to buy and retrofit and provide 1.4 million cars?
> I don’t understand how someone can argue that society should let a group of people ruin it for everyone.

I don't understand how someone can make sweeping generalizations about an entire group of people, and argue that they should be excluded from "learning, community events, tutoring, many things" because of ignorant stereotyping

>It’s the same as someone walking in with speakers and blasting loud music in a library

It really isn't at all. People don't walk around blasting loud music because they don't have access to proper facilities and products to care for themselves at the same level that you are able to.
WHAT?! I CAN'T HEAR YOU! YOU NEED TO SPEAK UP! WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO BOMB THE PENTAGON?!
On the upside, the NSA won't have any issues apprehending sitcom terrorists
Show HN: Unicode Calendar Generator
I've met a disturbing amount of employers who love coding schools because they provide underpaid code monkeys.

IMO, things must change if we are to survive future obstacles.
Cli.fan
There are other regulatory tools to level the playing field with foreign companies.
>Almost all engineering programs I've seen, practically don't have any English requirements.

This is certainly true if you're a rich international student paying international student fees.
Celebration, FL [1] is a Walt Disney developer master planned community. I lived north of Orlando for a few years, only ever visited for sports events, and it was nice... if a bit sterile looking.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida
Ah, yes okay, that's right.
Then I had it wrong, sorry!
It's not that I only like new food, I absolutely love comfort food as well. I just love food in general, including good tuna/chicken salad :-)
Didn't know about https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/LinearTypes until now; I'm assuming you're referring to that?

Neat!
Kong Brain and Kong Immunity Released
As both a calligrapher and a developer, I love how calligraphy combines the pure logical beauty of information (involving math, bits, Shannon, entropy, compression) with the very human beauty of bits of ink on paper (involving finger dexterity, visual pathway of the brain, the beauty of symmetry, our adornment of religious/important texts, thousands of years of evolution of symbols that a culture agrees on).

There is a beauty in code itself too, and I did a fun calligraphic rending of rc4 years ago: https://imgur.com/GP25ZCn
I agree. I don't understand the point of temporarily busting monopolies. With Bell, forcing them to diversify seems to have only made them stronger.
Last time I flew with United was to Tokyo from North America on a ~$500 round-trip flight. Inquired about first-class, and it was going to be an additional $10k.
Looks like a useful product. We'll give it a try at our company.
Feel free to tell us more about it! :)
They don't track that, if they did they wouldn't have the problem.
How do either statistic handle people are are slightly employed or have given up working? Barely employed doesn't make ends meet.

https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0609/what-the-un...

Does this bet mean anything if the only employment you can get is 10 hours a week at minimum wage?
Still pretty interesting without the need for conspiratorial bent.
I spoke to a manager at a major airline - he told me that their research told them that many of their first class passengers are now renting private jets instead. Just another artifact of our "winner takes all" economic systems.
> as a person at 1.95m/6'4". My legs fared a lot worse than my mind.

As a fellow tall person, I've idly wondered (but no more than that) if there could be cause to petition for people above some height (6'2" maybe? hard to say since it's really hip height and femur length that matter) to be considered a protected class, requiring a free upgrade if a certain minimum leg room was not available in a standard seat. I've had to do trans-Atlantic flights with my knees smashed, surviving only by frequent standeeism and my wife's good graces letting me take up part of her seat space.

I've seen some people use devices to block the person in front of them from reclining, but I'd rather not be that level of asshole. On the other hand often on domestic flights my knees are that device.
> Europe has higher unemployment than the U.S. because it has stricter labor market regulation

French here. I think he is stating the obvious, nobody is denying that. It's also the same reason it's hard to find a house in France: protective laws make both tenants and employers worried, and they filter quite hard the hiring/renting prospects.

On the other hand, once you are hired, being fired is pretty hard. So you don't have to worry about your boss being as abusive as you can find in the US because you can talk back.

Well, that's the theory. In practice I've rarely been talked badly by most people, the one time somebody was abusive, I told them to piss off, and they fired me. And I've never had any trouble finding a gig in my life ever since.

So your milage may vary as usual, but most people around me do report having a hard time with hiring/renting because of high steaks for both parties.
And far cheaper (last I saw was $50 for an overnight transatlantic flight) than an upgrade to the premium economy/business/first class seats (double fare or more).
Not yet. I currently use it for small JSON files and I'm only up to 7GBs at the moment.
Saying Google == email is a bit naive. Google is search, and the internet starts with search. They definitely have a monopoly on search and it's what's essentially powering almost all of Google revenue right now.
I think they are talking about this:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/gameplaykit
Try to replace the words "old developer" with "woman developer" or "black developer" and playback the comments people make. It ends up pretty appalling.

People who are good at development can't be determined by any outside criteria -- you have to talk, test, and learn about them. At my company, we have developers from early twenties to early sixties. We don't care about any race, gender, background, anything -- all of it's immaterial to whether you can create and code. Join us: https://www.datakitchen.io/company.html#hiring
Good catch. But that just adds more to my point: modern Chinese can understand seal script to a large extend because seal script is the ancestor of the modern (non-simplified) Chinese. My guess is that neither you nor I are "Indiana Jones".
Learning to Speak and Act in a Fantasy Text Adventure Game (for AI agents)
I think the rush of IPO's may be because of some economic clouds on the horizon. Investors are probably looking to cash out while the going is good.
Indeed, as recent Tesla patent(s) show:
https://electrek.co/2018/12/09/tesla-patent-technology-accur...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_allocation_scheme

Only that you don't need an agreement to make it happen. Tacit understanding works just as well.
I usually joke that “there are always cozy government jobs which are usually starved for good pogrammers”.