skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with all "contract to hire" schemes is you essentially set yourself up for failure on the labor marketplace. Unless you're offering some other compensation, why would any talented candidate take your contract to offer job over the firm next door that's hiring them flat out (assuming both of you pay market rates). Not to mention you shut yourself out of any nonlocal market.

Especially in the US, asking an employee to give up even more rights is a hard bargain. You run the risk of naturally selecting for employees that can't get hired anywhere else (which tend to either worse, or at the very least require more investment; something you're not willing to do or why have you made them use their time to do a take home and start this contract to hire business)

In my appraisal, more firms just need to recognize that they don't need half the technical skill they think they do. Building a CRUD back end or a mobile app doesn't take deep algorithmic horse power and the engineers you've managed to retain to administer the interview probably aren't qualified to do so anyway.
That was what I did when I was trying to lose weight. I ate subway sandwiches (different variety without cheese) for 2 years - every evening. Mornings were just a plate full of fruits and lunch was variety of typical foods but small portions. Combined with running thrice a week + Muay Thai, I went from 82kgs to 62kgs in three months and stayed around that for a long time.

It is hard to keep up though - I eventually stopped the eating/exercise regime and gained a significant portion of the lost weight back.
"If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
They were the first state in the US to grow them in quantity, although these days they are 3rd behind SC and Cali.

Peaches are just a niche fruit. Worldwide production is ~25M tons a year, mostly in China, with just under 1 million tons in the US. Oranges do about triple that, even more in the US.
Please don't cross into incivility or personal attack in HN comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Ahh, the old George Costanza defense.
What’s special isn’t so much putting people into LEO, so much as a private company having done it! It’s one thing for a nation-state to send a mission across the Atlantic or to the moon, but it’s a VERY different thing for companies to begin doing those things — developing rockets has always been enormously expensive, and this test (among others) signals that companies are finding ways to do it profitably. If this trend continues, we can probably expect the cost of a ticket to space to drop dramatically in the next 20 years. Wouldn’t it be amazing to visit other planets in our lifetimes?
Many things happen:

* You hire people who end up not being able to do the work (I hear my wife complain about this problem in accounting just about every three days)

* You end up needing more stringent certifications than exist in comp sci land (you mentioned lawyers, so that's one with bar exams, but also accounts with CPA exams, professional engineers, doctors, etc)

* You get proof of prior work

* You rely heavily on recommendations, with all the pros and cons there
Which is why I expect massive layoffs at uber/lyft, they have too many employees for the simple things they do.
The term you’re looking for is ‘bred’.

Genetic modification is a term of art, one which doesn’t apply (yet) to fruits on the market.

This will not be true forever, papaya and banana are likely to be the first ones.
Lawyers pass the bar once.
The Embryo in the Hallway
It has nothing to do with the traction, it's the fact that people are now travelling across the road at different angles than they were before, if you're trying to stay in the regular lane, you're going to be fighting people moving across the lane.
No doubt the internet itself has created new opportunities for small businesses, but why do you say that huge companies like Facebook and Google needed to accumulate market power to achieve that?
That is great experience, particularly "a whole bunch of assembly languages for exotic processors". Here, a job listing for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19284153

Within 10 years here I had encountered more than 10 different CPU architectures. I've lost count now, but it is probably at least a dozen. The same goes for OSes.
Programmers often get this idea that programming has to be "hard" to be "programming". Perl vs. C++, Visual Basic vs C++, Ruby vs. Java, etc.

Check out these:

- Pure Data (http://puredata.info/)

- Max (https://cycling74.com/products/max-features)

- My own (discontinued): http://www.nitrogenlogic.com/docs/palace/

My MO with technology is that easy things should be automated, and hard things should be made easier. Visual programming is one tool in the toolbox for leveling up technology and people's access to it.
The Evolution of Baseball Scouting
The Political Economy of the Safari
Nearly 9 years ago I started a job where (tldr) it wasn't practical to go out for lunch most if the time. Since then I've eaten sandwiches for lunch nearly every day at lunch. With some variations, but not a lot recently.
Down sides: I do sometimes miss the chance to get out of the office for a bit. Upsides: have saved a bunch of money and lost about 30 pounds of weight without really even trying. Also I only need about 20 minutes for lunch each day (+shopping once a week, which doesn't take long since I mostly eat the same thing).
This isn't about what's good or bad for Microsoft. You are making a very bad decision for yourself if you are trying to keep an old, insecure version of Windows. Having to spend five seconds uninstalling Candy Crush is not a good excuse for not using a vastly more secure operating system.

Also, a surprisingly large percentage of your Steam library will work on Linux. And you can always use a VM for those that don't.
Ask HN: Double word .com vs. one word .co
I own a few domains, one of which is a double word `.com` domain that's pretty easy to say. I also have been in contact with a broker for a one word `.co`.

In your opinion, should any consideration be given to the one word `.co` domain, or is ".com is king" still a steadfast rule?
It is entirely possible that animals have different degrees to what we call emotion/consciousness in a similar manner to what we see in humans. What may make us 'special' is the spectrum to which humans are able to move within the emotion/conscious area.
I have VS installed on 64 gig SSD.
But if you're a developer, hardly you can't afford better.
> If you use drugs

> If you are gay/religious

Uh, neither of these can be inferred definitively from location data.
Weird, when I search "Jaguar self driving" or "Jaguar Hands Free" I don't find any real videos of it at all. Are you sure it's not Jaguar that doesn't have self driving?

Do you actually drive your car hands free and feet free for more than 30 seconds ever?
Java Annotated Monthly
Right? All they’d know about you is your home address, where you take Ubers to/from, where you like to eat, shop, places you post from, your habits over time, and anything else they could correlate across the myriad apps that send your precise, unique location to them. NBD.
True, cle is mostly a joke lol
All I can say is that a lot of people disagree with you. If you're interested in that perspective, a good book is "World Without Mind" by Franklin Foer.
Is this suppose to be public?
GitHub’s open source personal website generator
I don't know where you went to college, but I learned nothing about how to learn. How exactly did you do this? College for me was 4 years of remembering exactly what was taught and then taking tests on it.
It's cheaper but way more dangerous imo. That puts away a lot of people. Having said that it's changing and a lot of start ups do move there.
I think the issue is more that it's not guaranteed to be safe than it's not safe. Salt water is corrosive. It might take a many times more exposure to salt water than a single landing for it to severely damage it, but it still gets rid of the guarantee until they study it more.
> a Matrioshka Brain would put out such a small amount of radiation, it'd be invisible for all sensor technology

A huge object emitting infrared radiation would be quite detectable.

At the level of energy output from our Sun, a Dyson sphere with a diameter of the Earth's orbit, would actually have a surface temperature of 395K or 122C. It would put out lots of infrared radiation, and would be very detectable against the cosmic background which has a radiation temperature of 2.7K.

Some SETI programs have looked for these, and already in 1984 we had the technology to observe, and as it turns out, to rule out any of these (Dyson spheres around stars with energy output comparable to our Sun) existing within the nearest 300 light years.

https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#HEAT

https://www.aleph.se/Nada/dysonFAQ.html#OBS

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/weirdastronomy....
Only for those doing documents as if we didn't progress.

I was using LaTeX for university reports 20+ years ago.
I'm pretty sure that your comment falls under Poe's law somehow. I just can't tell if it's meant seriously.
3D acceleration works just fine in Android.
Yeah, it was too much. I hate noise in my inbox.
Funny, I just went through a pre-screen assessment for one of the big ones and it was not one but _two_ DP problems. I could have probably come up with a slow solution using recursion and a bit more of time, but was given only 90 minutes. And I thought to myself, what exactly did they learn about _me_ after this exercise? Absolutely nothing, except that I can't solve DP problems on the spot. What a waste of time.

And the funny thing is, I work as an embedded developer and actually have to look up a topic or two from CLR at least once a year for work stuff (which is not very common). But DP? I've never needed it or used it. Why the emphasis in it then?

It feels a lot like software interviewing is just a bunch of rain dances and cargo culting and those that know the dance get through the hoop. I guess I'll have to order Elements of Rain Dancing from Amazon and get to practicing.
Am I the only one that feels like the YC brand is being diluted by the increasing size of their batches? 200 companies feels like too many.
Are you sure you have gains in health, considering you’re eating burgers, tortillas and fries only, every day?
The big rockets of the past were in very large part designed by NASA. The contractors did have a lot of input, but NASA drew up the detailed specifications and had the final say on every aspect of the design and engineering. Different components often had different manufacturers. For example each of the three stages of the Saturn 5 had a different manufacturer and all three were designed by NASA. The first stage was built by Boeing, but the F1 engines on it were made by Rocketdyne, all to NASA specs.

In contrast every aspect of the Falcon rocket and Dragon capsule design was determined by SpaceX. NASA set the overall goals and safety criteria, but you can see from the differences between the Starliner and Dragon designs how much scope the manufacturers had. It really is a completely different paradigm.
No. Bitcoin uses its own protocol. Raft could not be used for a secure cryptocurrency bevause Raft does not handle byzantine faults[1]. It assumes nodes are not run by malicious actors and messages sent are unaltered in transit.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault
Comparing to the US population is a touch disingenuous. Those are California-based companies, and California has a much larger number of Asian residents than the US as a whole thanks to its proximity to Asia (15% as opposed to the 5% you quoted for the US). They're still over-represented, but not at 9.5x the base rate.
@fullshark I think you missed the 130 comments this morning [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19338830
You mean developer in a developed country.
>a small take home project with a reasonable due date (say 5-8 days) that is representative of the kinds of work that is expected on the job. Then, a 1-2 hour code walk through and presentation. Candidate should expect to build, run, debug and describe the code and architecture, tools choices, show source control use etc.

The problem with this is that talented developers generally do not want to work for free on someone else's proprietary software and there is a very real risk of companies trying to abuse this practice to extract free labour from candidates the closer you get to "work that is representative of the kinds of work that is expected."

I do not want to spend hours of my life on unpaid labour for a company that may or may not hire me. Give me the 45-minute algorithmic challenge that puts me on the spot every time.

I also strongly suspect your 3 month probationary period would be an effective anti-signal as well, useful for attracting desperate candidates rather than the ones you really want. You can't reasonably expect a senior engineer to jump at leaving a secure position for a 50/50 shot they might be unemployed in 3 months because they're "not a good cultural fit."
> too pointless

It has seemed to me that we _have_ to colonize the galaxy, if we aren't - as a species - going to be forced to resort to periodic mass genocide of exactly the type discussed in the Marvel Studios Infinity War movie.
For most of human history, eating animals was a large portion of the diet, therefore, people were required to limit their empathy or try to rationalize their way towards eating animals (do or die).

Today's environment is an abnormality in history (e.g. individuals wanting to be herbivores) created by the excess of food and technological advances we have. Maybe this is the way to go, maybe it isn't, maybe either options are irrelevant anyway.
Which big outcomes do you think represent particularly savvy trend spotting?
https://theconversation.com/are-sharks-being-attacked-by-kil...

Reminds me of pods that only eat the livers of rays.

Whole, dead rays wash up on the beach with only their livers missing.
I'd guess you're underestimating the cost per employee by about half, is one factor.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. I don’t care to argue about whether we should avoid causing emotional and physical suffering to other beings.

Carnivorous animals kill to survive, unlike all of us living in the modern world.

It’s not just the killing, it’s the whole process of enslaving, breeding, raping, mutilating animals just to serve our tastes. If you think I’m being melodramatic don’t take my word for it. You can see the terrible suffering inflicted on animal farms and slaughterhouses only a quick google search away.

It’s not necessary. We aren’t living in the bush having to kill another animal in order to live.
Even if every driver knew for certain that the income wouldn't cover the longterm cost of wear, there would still be drivers who needed money now enough to trade the future value of their car.
I see it the other way, this is a great example of why its irritating when microsoft holds security enhances behind anti-features. (on top of putting adware in their updates like that IE windows 10 update infobar they added shortly after GWX (that was included in a security update pack))

I did a job for a small (5 employee) tax/accounting firm that paid us to disable windows update on all of their windows 7 machines to avoid the windows 10 update after it brought down their entire office on a february monday by updating overnight.

I asked him about upgrading to enterprise versions of windows so things like that can't happen while still having updates, and his response was "I shouldn't have to pay microsoft more to gain control over my machine, so I'd rather pay you more to remove their control."

He's not wrong, neither are you. So the question becomes, who should give way? The user? or the corporation?

As far as I know, he is still on update disabled windows 7 for his office.

Users don't care about security, they care about usability, and when security gets in the way, users will bypass it, even if it means paying somebody to bypass it for them.

The current trend is to solve this by making security unbypassable by the device owner, but thats not sustainable, nor is it ethical.
This is not a problem - it's a feature!

Whenever I'm confronted with surveillance-based "identification" and I'm unable to just choose a better option like receiving a letter in the mail, I make sure to only answer questions that can be directly deduced from the basic information I've already entered, or otherwise researched online (like the ones about what street is in what city). When confronted with questions about past addresses and whatnot, I make sure to answer "don't know" lest I confirm something they actually aren't so sure of.

I haven't had any problems as a result of doing this. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some "confidence" score based on how much the surveillance databases have actually recorded about you, and even if they aren't super confident will still supply a pass result to keep the client from losing customers.
I was a student part time dev in Russia 12 years ago, and I could easily afford the necessary storage and RAM.
Well, pardon me for stating things as I understand them and making a mistake in doing so.

I sincerely apologise for wasting your time by typing something that was true as I understood it.

Clearly you've never made a similar mistake.
YouTube will soon tell you that the world isn't flat, vaccines work, etc.
I really hate your use of ‘eggheads’ and similar crap. Just call them researchers ffs.
Bitcoin consensus is extremely simple: the chain with the most accumulated difficulty. Furthermore blocks aren't removed or changed, so consensus is in fact a monotonic process. You don't need either Paxos or Raft or any other sophisticated algorithm; just broadcast every block you believe to be part of the most difficult chain and consensus will be achieved.
>What other US-based company has had a man-rated rocket such that they owned the full stack, launch facility, etc?

No company does (including SpaceX)
So a startup shouldn’t try to gain market share with a free product?

Is Linux dumping on Windows?
Yeah, I had to turn ReSharper off despite liking some of its features as it brings my monster development PC to its knees and is basically unusable due to its abysmal performance. It makes vanilla Visual Studio seem svelte and responsive by comparison.
Depends on the target market. More tech-savvy folks will understand .co, non-tech savvy not so much.
Before you leave your lab try to establish a relationship with the PI such that after you've proven out your technical skills they can write you a letter of recommendation as to your general work ethic etc. A recomendation from an established technical professional can go a long way! As others have mentioned if you have the opportunity to write software for the lab as well that's a great first step.
Luarocks.org Security Incident March 2019
Is there any evidence that coding interviews aren’t just tests for 1) general fluid intelligence or 2) memorization?
I think the SEC kind of deserves to get poked in the eye a bit, they were too cowardly to actually enforce the law against Goldman Sachs in the run up to the Great Recession. I hope this doesn’t end too badly for Elon Musk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keweenaw_Rocket_Range

So yah they didn't reach orbit but you betcha it was still pretty neat to see it.
What if he is doing that to support people, who believe in crypto? Considering his other wealth, that's not even a dime.
I don't ride it often and haven't seen any violent crimes, but I've seen police remove quite a few people. Last time we had to wait a while as the police asked the guy to pick up his own used needles.
I guess it depends on the chimp's religious beliefs. These unstaged chimps from BBC PlanetEarth clearly has no compunction about eating a rival gang's carcass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al-f_WWoHI4 .
A kid that hurts herself and is crying requires conscious empathy?
Please stop fixating on those California disengagements. They mean approximately nothing. They are unregulated, voluntarily reported incidents. A low number could mean that safety drivers are acting irresponsibly, or that the vehicles are only being used on public roads in known-safe circumstances.

I strongly suspect that the quest for a low disengagement number is what got that woman in Arizona killed by Uber. These reports really should be sealed from the public. AV startups seem to be using their disengagement rate as a way raise money. They are aided by journalists hungry to make sense of a highly secretive field publishing these figures completely out of context.
Jerry Nerryman: The man who killed the slide rule [pdf]
> You hire people who end up not being able to do the work

Funnily enough, I've heard the same thing from some friends who worked at companies with algorithmic interviews.

> You end up needing more stringent certifications than exist in comp sci land

That sounds great. You just have to study up and take a very hard exam at the beginning of your career instead of having to study up and take a hard exam every few years.

> You get proof of prior work

And what about Github? Most employers want to see proof of prior work unless you've got a very good excuse.

> You rely heavily on recommendations, with all the pros and cons there

This may be the only decent argument against the accounting/engineering/medicine interview. Even with good performance, recommendations are a crap shoot (did you get along well w/your boss, are they pissed you're leaving, do they refuse to give out references to anyone like one contract employer I worked for for a year a long time ago).

But then again, puzzle interviews are also a crap shoot.
> ASP.NET WebForms app running on IIS, ... Go microservice running in Kubernetes and using Kafka

Those things don't really count as languages, they appear to be a mix of development environments, software packages and architectures. Learning these things is critical and hard but there is a key mitigating factor. That factor is that really what needs to be learned is 'how we do things around here' which is typically company specific and needs to be learned by a new hire anyway.

My experience suggest new hires in cognitive roles (at medium-large businesses) take 1-2 years to get to the point where they can be proactively useful, purely from learning who is who, what the corporate history is, what ahs been tried before, why things are what they are and what their role's problem domain is really intended to be by their boss. Compared to that set-up time, the cost of knowing or not-knowing a technology is quite small.

> This whole "learn a new one in a couple weeks" mindset is toxic and needs to die.

It is true though. Learning a new programming language to the point you can write bug-free code and execute someone else's design is really easy. Learning how to solve a new problem is typically the hard part.

I 'learned' Python in 2 weeks. What I write looks a lot like C code, and I didn't make great use of the standard libraries, but it works fine. Compared to that learning how to use a large new library for a new problem typically takes a months.
I'll be honest-- there is a lot of stuff you have to learn. It's a high hill to climb.

But if you really love it, then the work is fun. It's certainly possible for a newbie at 34 to learn enough. That's the trick-- find something in IT that you really like, and dig into it.

I'd suggest going to a bookstore so you can peruse some programming books. Maybe you like web apps, or mobile games, or even hard-core C code. Find what you like.

The next step would be to find open source projects in this area. Study those, compile them, and eventually try to make contributions.

I think that's a good path. Good luck!