skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Timed programming puzzles are silly and self-defeating, for the simple reason that writing software is a creative process, not a production process. It's the same reason why kloc metrics were dumb and have been mostly and justly relegated to history's dustbin. These things are dreamed up by hiring managers to cut their workload, and for the non-technical ones it gives them some simple thing they can comprehend and make a decision on.

I understand the attraction of simple decision metrics, more so if you're in the unfortunate position of having to make a technical hire with no experience of your own to guide you. But consider the referenced tweet that implied 250 resumes were too many to read. You're going to hire someone to do a highly complex job, spend months getting them up to speed, probably work with that person for at least a few years, and you can't come up with a way for your company to at least scan 250 resumes? I mean it's like pretty close to the one main thing you're there to do: find and hire the right people.
ZIO: Simple, Testable Functional Effects for Scala
I like the site's design: simple and functional. However, getting the ball rolling on this kind of platforms is the hardest part; it would only work right off the bat if it was already populated by a considerable amount of users, which is, of course, impossible. But that's the kind of conundrum an app that relies so heavily on the network effect has to deal with.
Original article on Microsoft's AI Blog: https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/bing-vector-search/
When You Need a Better Indoor IoT Mousetrap
> ”I’ve yet to use React to build an app, but I have taken the time to learn the basics of how it works. If I needed to use it I could, and would, and it wouldn't slow me down much, if at all.”

TripleByte has a very clear process which leads to a two-hour frontend interview, an hour of which will be dedicated to building something with React.

Give it a try: https://triplebyte.com/iv/NKCtNG2/it

You’ll surely learn something.

I did.
She learned it, in college. Her job isn't to write code. And I can't even remember the last time I implemented a damn binary tree.

It's not that it's difficult. It's that it's stupid.

edit: Let me put it this way... if you're hiring a senior/lead level code security analyst, the odds that they will be implementing (or even reading for comprehension) a binary tree are effectively nil. The odds of having to show how to mark false positives in a Fortify scan are very, very high. Can they explain buffer overflows, html encoding, etc? Can they write a description of unsafe practices in plain English, for both developers and managers? Do they have experience in conducting training classes for developers to reduce security problems? Do they have a working knowledge of HIPAA, SOX, or other relevant industry regulations? Can they do good Powerpoint presentations on this stuff?

Being a security analyst isn't about writing homework assignments from freshman year of college. It's about regulations, about training others, about using high end tools that aren't taught in college, and a bunch of other stuff. Ask questions about the actual job.
I think the argument here is that they achieve their popularity via similar tactics that are somewhat misleading to consumers.
Even if you do accept that disordered eating behavior leads to a longer life, that doesn’t mean that it’s the right thing to do. If someone is spending years of their life with increased social isolation, decreased free time, and decreased enjoyment of food, just to live marginally longer, is that a rational choice?

For me, it wasn’t a rational choice at all - it was an anxiety response to food with a good justification (health) that people around me were willing to accept. In retrospect, I realize how much I was missing out on. Life’s much better now that foods something I can enjoy and now that eating can be a social experience.
Sure, there are other elements (derivative, (anti)symmetrization, lowering/raising indices). The core element of summation stays the same.
An review of the post is at https://lemmster.de/tla-liveness-review.html
"Einstein developed his theory of relatively by simply discarding all the known theories about how physics worked."

That's ludicrous nonsense. The primary breakthrough of the theory of relatively was taking what the math had been telling physicists about the universe for years seriously. In hindsight, everything necessary was there before Einstein, it just was very deeply assumed not to be reasonable. Relativity builds on numerous pre-existing foundations and is very much in the "standing on the shoulder of giants" tradition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity#Developme... , first paragraph
Exactly. Pre-sales, post sales, and proofs of concepts. Technical Account Managers seem to lean more on the software/proof of concepts side.

Third party AWS partners can have consultants who are more software architects.

But SAs are all over the map between pure sales => infrastructure (lift and shifters) => "cloud native" architects/developers.
I am pretty sure I'm a terrible interviewer and interviewee. I've had generally bad experiences all the way around. Interviewing (both sides of the table) has been a big time-suck, yielded mostly unsatisfactory results, and has been an emotionally draining process.
I took the initiative to divert the conversation into semantic territory, and invited the Spelling-Stasi into my home. So as far as I'm concerned you can have a cup of tea while you're at it. And I'm glad you pointed out the serendipity of the mistake, so I can attempt to claim it as as my own clever play on words.
Wasn't her name Carolyn?
I got a 128gb SE for less than $250 shipped on ebay, graded at B condition but I couldn't find a scratch on it, not even by the ports (yes, plural :^) and the battery is at 95% health. Just as quick as an x in real world use, the screen repair is way cheaper, and I could stretch the battery life two days.

I love the size too, the last one handed iPhone and I forget it's in my pocket.
I'm realizing that the github link would have been better

https://github.com/yuanming-hu/taichi

mods can you change it to the github link pls?
According to their recent financials, 8% of revenue (vs 54% from iPhone, 10% from iPad, 20% from services, 9% from everything else (wearables, accessories, etc).
dril and many other Weird Twitter posters are migrants from the FYAD subforum on Something Awful, which had similarly absurdist memes.
Btw you can begin a line with two spaces for code formatting:

.*amp.*
Culture fit does make a lot of sense though. I interviewed at a company where everyone was a gamer. Would I have fit in? Probably not. Another company everyone looked about 25 or younger.

I don't blame them for not wanting to hire someone pushing 50. They just don't know if they're going to get the cool 50-year-old or the grumpy old troll who won't listen to anyone.

Of course they can never come out and say that for obvious reasons.
4chan started on one of the ytmnd test servers. I might still have a screenshot of that somewhere.
A side business that is still a requirement for anyone to ship software into Apple’s iPhone ecosystem, so there’s at least some incentive for Apple to continue supporting it.

But given that developers have no choice in the matter, they’re stuck putting up with whatever issues Apple doesn’t bother to fix. I’m sure Apple is well aware of that when prioritizing what bugs are important.
Given my experience with microSD cards, I wonder how reliable that device is. Is it even possible to write the full 1 terabyte successfully with a good chance?
I don't think we are in disagreement on "should be able to." The argument is that it's not an efficient use of time.
In Canada, white collar jobs often come with some extra supplemental health insurance, but it's not a huge deal for most people. I think I get half of dental costs covered, for instance. It's not literally life or death the way it is in the US's evil system.
For us old folks... it's the equivalent of roughly 1 million of these 25 year old storage devices:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Floppy_d...
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offers a wide variety of mathematics courses online for self-paced study[1]. The courses range from 100 - 400 level. 100 - 300 level courses confer undergraduate course credit at UIUC, whereas 400 level courses are eligible for graduate credit. (Note that you are not enrolled as a degree-seeking student in a mathematics program, you're simply taking courses online).

You have 16 weeks from the date of registration to complete each course. The courses themselves have weekly homework, two midterms and a final. You must find an eligible proctor to complete the midterms and final in person, but otherwise you need not go anywhere. Each course costs about $1500 - 2000. The lectures for each unit are video recordings of lectures in the corresponding course onsite at UIUC. There is also a certificate you can earn, but it's primarily focused on completion of lower-level courses.[2] Your homeworks are graded (with feedback) by a lecturer or math TA at the university. There are also remote office hours available.

UIUC is probably the highest caliber mathematics program which offers something like this. It's generally difficult to find a top ~20 math university willing to support online, self-paced study for credit. The ones which do offer such a system are usually very expensive[3] or predominantly focus on lower-level courses like a simple calculus sequence.

_____________________________

1. https://netmath.illinois.edu

2. https://netmath.illinois.edu/academics/certificate-program

3. https://cvn.columbia.edu/program/columbia-university-applied...
I think many of these container orchestration adjacent companies large and small are standing up straight hoping for an acquisition in general — I don't think it's going to happen for all of them.
NeualStyler 3 (Pro)
If you want to play the hypothetical game: maybe you're the kind of person (most of us are!) who will never be fast friends with someone who's a woman. Or gay, or Muslim, or Mormon, or vegan, or deaf, or Republican.

If your hiring criteria excludes groups like that by a "fast friend" proxy test, then yeah, you should be taking the better programmer.
This is one of those cases where active memory might prove extremely useful.

Imagine store instructions that can tell memory some metadata about what's stored. "This is a pointer in an object at offset O to another object". "This is an object with a header you can use to paint objects". "This is no longer an object or a pointer". Also imagine instructions like "clear all object paint", "do a one layer trace", and "report unreachable objects". The one-layer trace would have every cell that has a pointer paint the pointed to object with either a "reachable by a reachable object" or "reachable by an object whose reachable state is unknown".

Then GC could proceed as follows: clear all object painting, use the CPU to scan roots to the first objects on the heap and mark those reachable, do two runs of one-layer traces, report unreachable objects and reclaim them.

Something like that.
BCH Under Attack Serious Issue with the Planned Hard Fork
>200ms latencies are not uncommon

Those numbers match my experience a long time ago with Quake3 based games where you'd pick servers that are local to you and get 10-40ms latencies.

> He designed for <200ms which by the frame of reference he cites (T1 connection) probably was a lot lower than 200ms on average.

I didn't forget the < sign. Designing for <200ms means you can handle the 200ms worst case. But maybe he meant 200ms worst case but much lower average like you are suggesting.

> It seems more likely to me that perception on what an acceptable hand to eye latency is has changed, just like the perception on acceptable frame rates.

Right, makes sense that the expectation today is much higher.

>High latency unfortunately is, and client side prediction is still an effective mitigation strategy that makes a huge difference to online play.

Just for curiosity, how low does it need to go for prediction to no longer be useful? I guess if you want to be able to have players from all over the world play each other then you have to deal with 300+ ms of latency. But if you are willing to do servers on each geography it seems 10-30 ms would be feasible. Would that be enough?
I used to give a whiteboard coding interview (for a QA engineer position) that started with "swap the values of two integer variables. Yes, you can use a temporary variable," then went on to find the highest element in an array, then implement any kind of sort for an array, then implement depth-first-search.

People who would ace the entire interview would look at me funny when I asked the first question, and I just said, "I mean, look: about 25% of the candidates fail this first question." Lots of others got partway through it.

It is very true that you need to qualify someone's ability to write code at all.

I think there's usually a lot less utility in some of the "clever" coding challenges that require you to remember some difficult-to-derive-from-first-principles data-structure or algorithm. But on the other hand, if we literally just give fizzbuzz to everyone, we'll eventually see people who have memorized fizzbuzz but can not create any other program.

There's a real challenge to creating a coding problem that hits the sweet spot between "doesn't just test that you had a particular intuition," "does actually test real coding skills" and "isn't so common that people have memorized the solution."
How GraphQL is putting REST to rest
Major appreciation to Terence Eden for putting his own time and expense into representing the interests of the Internet here. I'm extremely comforted that there are people out there that care enough to take our words here on the Internet and bring them forward in person, and I think if you look at the meeting notes, it's clear there was some real impact.
youtube probably doesn't save the originals (though they could in some cold-storage tape drives, perhaps). But even still, it's not difficult to imagine that there may at some point exist a compression algorithm that can be applied to existing compressed video that could change a couple bits around in whatever encoding scheme you've chosen. Depending on the file type, that could be enough to corrupt the whole thing.

Sure you can get around this by adding ECC, but that isn't implemented here.
"They can just throttle access to Google documents to something like 4 GB per hour"

No, that's not likely to work. I'm sure there's far more legitimate users using 4GB of documents per hour than abusers right now. You have to remember things like bulk downloading, bulk scanning, bulk backing-up, shared automated accounts doing all sorts of legit things, etc. are all legitimate use cases. You can't just throw out all "big uses" or your enterprise customers are going to pitch a fit, and that's a bigger problem than people abusing your storage for a while.

(Those things will still have different access patterns than abusers, but thinking about how that will manifest and could be detected is an good exercise for the reader.)
Europol PC tmw. at 14:00 CEST about an unprecedented $100M malware operation
Yes, that's ultimately what one would want (otherwise filtering is not very useful I suppose)
What's this voice captcha you use?
What do you mean by Fizzbuzz? Normal fizzbuzz or the pointless overengineering fizzbuzz?
The iPhone integrations (assuming you mean Handover) are one of my favourite parts of the MacOS/iOS ecosystem and one of many reasons why I can't see myself moving away from either OS for a long time.

I've also experienced very few bugs in MacOS which have affected me on a day to day basis. Not saying they aren't there, but to me the MacOS team are doing a pretty great job.
The Minnesota Starvation Experiment
Ask HN: What is your best way to learn a new programming language?
I want to learn Python for web development. Programming is totally new to me.

So what's the best way to learn it and maybe the fastest?

What would be your learning methods? Do you have any tips/hacks etc that works for you?
In a little over a month, I'll be turning 46. I've been doing software development professionally since I was 18. I have no formal education in it, except for a couple classes taken at a CC for C++.

Between hearing things like this, the way the internet is going, the way cell phones are becoming more closed up and walled in...just everything about the way the world is going...

...I honestly am beginning to think my best course of action would be to (somehow) change jobs entirely, move out to the middle of nowhere on 40 acres, drop off the internet, build my own cellphone (which I've mentioned), and just go back to hacking on my TRS-80 Color Computer. If I ever accessed the internet again, it would only be for email and maybe the occasional "telnet BBS" - and that would only be after a 50 mile drive into "town".

While I know and understand that despite 25+ years of experience I may not be at the same level as others with fewer years, that time should count for something. In my case, what I lack mostly has been any sort of opportunity for a "management" role; I have never been a team lead, for instance. It pains me. It does nothing for my self-esteem as a software engineer.

But that shouldn't count against me. Nor should being able to solve some rando problem concocted as a gatekeeper. I've worked at places for short periods, and I've stuck around at places far longer than I should have. But lately things have been hovering around jumping at 3 years, and that time seems to be coming up for me at my current place of employment.

The thing is - I don't want to leave. I like it where I'm at. I enjoy the problems. I enjoy my coworkers. I enjoy the development environment. But more often than not, it seems, outside forces seem to conspire to kick me out whether I want to go or not.

Maybe I'll get lucky once more and land a new position. Maybe I can use the fledgling skills I have in ML in some manner. Or I might have to drop my salary requirements down and take something lesser, just to stay employed?

But at some point in the future - the near future - it feels like it won't matter what I do or don't do, I won't be allowed to "make the cut" any longer.

Thank $DEITY I have no debt other than my mortgage...
And many of us took the jump and refused to do things that way. You're wrong, PHP scales and you CAN do separation of concerns and have pretty, maintanable code, using a framework or not: just a matter of knowing what you are doing
Population quadrupled since 1960 [0]. Going back 100 years, population exploded fourteen times over, from 1.2M in 1919 to 17.5M in 2019 [1]. Still growing strong, estimated to add another 9M by 2050. Pretty sure none of that population explosion was caused by "climate change".

[0] https://www.populationof.net/guatemala/
[1] http://populstat.info/Americas/guatemac.htm
Does this authentication rely on devices, or is the authentication at the carrier level?
> Today, many voice providers have held off developing and deploying call blocking tools by
default because of uncertainty about whether these tools are legal under the FCC’s rules.

Is this really true? How absolutely dysfunctional things must be.
Yeah this somehow still works for pretty much every other profession, and worked fine for programming until a few years ago when everyone decided timed programming challenges were the way to go.

I wish all jobs could just hire devs for short contracts then convert the keepers to full time. I'd be more than happy in that scenario because I know they'll want to convert me and now it's up to me.
For the influence SA had and the business it currently is -- it's incredible. Impact:value is so out of line. An analysis of how Lowtax failed to become a billionaire and has to sell coffee mugs and t-shirts or whatever the business model is would be a good read.

SA was my first paywall for content, my first micro-transaction (forum avatars, titles, etc.). There were elements of reputation and social networking. I don't know how it all went so wrong.
Isn’t that the same with as C? You can use alloca to allocate on the stack, giving you the same benefit as RAII (I think?). I haven’t used C++ so maybe I’m speaking out of my ass though.

But regardless, you could use the Boehm GC for objects you don’t feel like tracking the lifetime of.
I guess it was available in a few months after it was launched? Yeah, you had to know about it and request it from the service number. AFAIK, it wasn't mentioned in any instructions etc.
The problem I see is that the term is a pretty exceptional one. The employer reasonably thinks you both have been talking about a full-time position.

It's like going through the whole interview process with a company that's clearly hiring in-office positions, and then only after getting an offer, telling them you will only work remotely. It would be different if it were really part of the negotiation - ie they're offering way less than your asking/current salary, and you're countering with part-time for that same salary (or other benefits) to compensate.

For retail transactions we have bait-and-switch laws which address the same type of issue.

Personally I'd be pissed at whoever wasted my time like that, and wouldn't hire them based on the ethics they're displaying. If they brought it up during the interview process - even as just something they're looking for - I'd respect the fact that they gave me the option of considering it as part of the evaluation, giving me the option to clarify and end the process early if it just wouldn't work for the employer.
> poor management decisions

You make the mistake of thinking it is a bad decision for Google to make AMP. It suits Google's interests, that's why it exists. It might be selfish, monopolistic, and harmful to the open web, but Google doesn't have to care.
I know this sounds conspiratorial, but I think the leetcode tests are there to keep older people out. Because the whole "leetcode culture" stereotype of the junior/senior bachelor's CS student "grinding leetcode to land his Big-N job" means that younger grads are going to have seen these problems before and know how to rattle back the solutions without even thinking. Whereas an older dev is more likely to have a family or be secure in his/her years of experience to not waste time calculating the Big-O bullshit of reversing linked lists while merge sorting. They are more likely to have not seen the problem before and have to run the gauntlet with no practice. The motivation to discriminate is purely financial: a fresh grad is half the cost of a 20 year veteran.
We track our spending based on budget categories. Grocery stores are the toughest, as items bought there might fall into the category of "food" or "personal care" or "household items" or "pets" or other categories.

Most receipts are easy - the name of the store is all we need to know what category that spending falls into. Grocery receipts we generally have to look at items and divide.

This sort of information would make that a whole lot easier.
I'm getting a 403 for this (and for every other URL I try on tomsguide.com). Is anyone else seeing this? Wondering if it's blanket blocking European users, which is a notion I wonder about only because I've seen it before, and it always seems quite rude to do so without so much as a message as to why.
Wasn't even that long ago (maybe 4-5 years) that my old company dropped $150k on a couple of fusionIO cards to support and Oracle DB that was 4TB. (I think that was 3 servers total, to get the standby, and the failover in another DC)
To me this isn't making light of full stack teams, it's making light of expecting a single individual human being be able to do it all by themselves, the full stack "dev" as in singular dev. A unicorn. A super hero. A single person who at any given moment know every single line of code and how to fix any problem that comes up off the top of their head.