skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm working in a vanilla PHP codebase right now, and I see all sides - the fractal design fails and the surprising improvements to the language. I've just read up on the architecture of Laravel, and given the public opinion of it, must be a very nice framework.

What strikes me most about PHP is the fundamental request/response execution model. Your execution context begins when a request is received and ends when we send the last byte or terminate the request. There's no startup healthchecks, no cache warming or any other bootstrapping of your service unless you jump through convoluted hoops on your own. Your service is either accepting requests or it isn't. You either lazy load your data into APCu or you don't. I've leveraged AWS healthchecks to achieve these in the past, but that path is not very maintainable.

Inevitably in the course of maintaining a service, I find use cases for a phase of execution that should occur before the server is live or shared static memory that should be available at all times, but (unless I don't know something) those are things that PHP doesn't do.

This is the reason that I find PHP to be a bizarro language - for its fundamental design assumption!
What's wrong with gimmicks? Voice control itself is not a bad idea, the interface to control your technology is something you are born with :)
Are there any other, maybe more consumer-friendly, anti-robocall tools?
How can you expect businesses to survive if you don't offer them everything at a subsidy? That's downright anti-capitalist.
On the one hand, that's so smart I can't believe it's not widely used by everyone.

On the other hand, if it was that common, there would be a market for systems that defeat it for the spammers.
I get you’re joking, but I wouldn’t trust a RPi anywhere near this card because of all the card corruption the RPi has done.
If you count Chinese who are using Pinyin that jumps to being a majority using latin.
When I interview candidates for the company I work for I describe a key part of our system in general terms (20 possible elements, at least one active but any combination, items are single/set/hierarchy) then ask them to talk me through issues they can see writing generic code to handle data management and computations given these conditions. They don't have to write code, but they do have to be able to think logically and express themselves clearly. Some describe pretty much what we do, some get creative, and some are completely at a loss. Some pseudocode to help describe what they're thinking, most don't.

Even if their "solution" is incomplete I look at if they get the gist right.
Engineering is not organized by platform, but function. Apps that are cross-platform have engineers who move back and forth between macOS and iOS. Lots of code is also reused between the two. Both platforms use essentially the same tooling and languages (if anything, iOS development is more painful), though certainly iOS codebases tend to be better because they are newer.

A fight for attention by a specific, resource-starved macOS engineering team could not be more incorrect. That’s simply not how Apple works. You have to come up with a different explanation for these perceived quality problems.
>>. A dedicated NAS device, even a really basic one, wouldn't have the issues you have.

How so? What's stopping a NAS maker providing shitty support and/or firmware? I actually used to own a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo and I got rid of it mostly because of how loud it was and Netgear stopped releasing updates, which meant that things like Timemachine backup stopped working. And it was super slow for transfer speeds compared to what the drives could do.

For comparison sake, that Linksys router I have is super duper quick - it can actually do 100MB/s reads and writes on the connected drives which is very impressive(I thought) - this Samba issue is the only thing separating it from being great at it. And then I could install OpenWRT and then just install the newest version of Samba - it's just that I'm a bit lazy to do that.
> "....learn about how not having [likes and retweets] could potentially change how people read things,” How does that change the way you interact in a conversation? That’s super interesting.”

So basically, a bunch of tiny iterative UX changes that won't move the needle one bit. This is the company where moving from from 140 to 280 chars happened over the course of a decade.

I feel for the product people, they are working with one hand tied behind their backs. Twitter is tailor-made for drama and outrage; nobody would be on the platform if it wasn't primarily a promotional channel; otherwise it'd just be you sending your thoughts into the void.

The way Twitter currently is is because that's the balance they struck between a microblogging platform and something you can actually make money with/on. Lowest-common-denominator content is the only thing that can generate enough eyeballs to pique the interest of fly-by-night T-shirt companies and diet pill peddlers who buy ads on it.
National dumping is unenforced, but for international dumping there are teeth
Sounds like you don't phone screen.

I've screened people like you describe, but the only time I've interviewed them face-to-face was when they didn't have a technical phone screen for whatever reason.

FWIW, one of the ways I screen companies when I'm looking is whiteboard problems. I refuse them and move on. In my experience, only HugeCos and places with problems use them. I'm sure that's not true, but I have a necessarily small sample-size, and skipping over firms that do it has worked well for me so far, and there are plenty of fish in the sea. (I do in fact suck at writing on whiteboards, I just don't consider it a skill worth developing to pursue jobs I probably don't want.)
The more I look at things as I age, the more I see market based solutions as only benefiting the supplier and always hurting the consumer.
No, it's something you acquire--no one is born speaking.
That's what FB does these days: how fast can one code, how bug free, etc.
On the other hand, I'm compelled by law to part with my property to fund the FCC, because they must regulate shared communication resources for the common, public good.

If they can't stop intentionally deceptive businesses that spoof their identity on those shared resources from calling my elderly parents 3 times a day because of freedom of speech, they can go ahead and return a bunch of my property and let me do what I want with my ham radio.
Actually, there's nothing sad about the state of code editors in the world today. I'm not sure what code editors you're regularly using that is giving you that kind of latency, but there's plenty -- more than ever before, in fact, that definitely don't have this problem (some of which are even electron based!).
> Bicycling in general is terrible, though.

It's really not. It has its disadvantages, sure, but there's plenty of advantages to it, too. In comparison to cars, it's healthier, kid-friendly, cheaper for the user, cheaper for the government, less noisy, less pollution, less danger generation, better for the community, etc. And it's quite pleasant with the right infrastructure.

You're exaggerating the downsides here. Climate? Tokyo has a high bike mode share with plenty of heat and humidity in the sumnmer, Oulu a high bike mode share even with near-endless winter. Hills? E-bikes are rapidly becoming cheaper and more common. Distance? Well, that's part of the land use/infrastructure problem. America in general has been designed to be hostile to anything that's not a car, and that hurts walking, it hurts transit, and it hurts biking. It needs to be fixed for all those.

Biking doesn't have to cover every person or every trip, but declaring that it's "terrible in general" is just projecting your own preferences onto the world. Reality begs to differ: we can see that places that have the right infrastructure and land use see high bike rates. Period.

Now, maybe you personally would still avoid biking in Copenhagen or Amsterdam, but that has little to do with whether it's good general policy.

> The problem is there's a large, noisy cadre of bicycle enthusiasts who spend tons of money on their hobby and think it's the answer to the world's problems. They tend to dominate conversations like this.

This is wrong for a couple reasons:

1. Biking is an excellent option for a variety of reasons. Most Americans are plainly ignorant of how it can work. Not that it's their fault, really: everywhere they've lived, biking is awful, so naturally it must be always be awful, right? Same thing with public transit.

2. The kind of people that would benefit most by things like protected intersections and protected bike lanes is not the lycra-wearing, dentist-bike-riding, "take no prisoners in the war against cars" crowd. The kind of people that benefit from Dutch-style bike infrastructure are ordinary people who do not think of themselves as cyclists, but just people who happen to bike.
“It's morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money.” - W. C. Fields

My first impression most "audiophile gear" and specifically on ShakiStones below is "well, that's so ridiculous it shouldn't be legal" but on better consideration, good for them. If someone is that dumb, they need to be relieved of their money before they do something dangerous with it.
Us old school WoW WSG veterans will miss catchthatdruid.ytmnd.com :/
The thing about GPT-2 is that it's only a marginal improvement over a markov chain, and much worse than paying somebody on mechanical turk a quarter of a cent per hour to write lies. It doesn't actually hang together -- it only looks like it might if you are skimming rather than paying attention.

The appropriate way to counteract GPT-2 having any effect on politics is to promote social norms around careful reading, and this solution also works against all other forms of grey propaganda. ("If you go home with somebody & they don't read critically, don't sleep with them" is the new "if you go home with somebody & they don't have books, don't sleep with them".)

Technical solutions aren't really viable, and miss the point. Most human-generated content on the web isn't amenable to trust chains, because it's generated anonymously or pseudonymously by people who don't really have the technical chops to understand cryptography. It's trivial to write a text document and put it on a web server, & it should remain trivial to do that. The onus of epistemic hygene falls on individuals and communities.

> I have family members who have sent out images that are clearly photoshopped because they not technically literate enough to understand that they're fake.

Mock them mercilessly and they will quickly learn how to distinguish shooped photos from real ones. It's not a deep technical skill, but a shallow recognition of tell-tale signs -- a skill that is easily learned passively, if social pressures exist to encourage learning it.
Yes, this is something that we need to continue to improve. Part of the challenge is that there is a tradeoff with making something "native" vs. consistent across MacOS, Linux, Windows and different formats (containers, VMs, etc)
Unrelated, because IR is on the other side of the visible spectrum from blue light, but I'm convinced some day we'll find that IR is damaging to the eye. Every time I see those creepy glowing green eyes coming from the baby's room on friends' and relatives' baby monitors, I just shudder. I can't see blasting an infant with invisible light for no good reason.
One problem I have is at my level it's really more about architecting than coding. Although coding is still important.

(And by the way I realize in a lot of companies, 'architect' is a completely bogus term for someone who's more of a flim-flam man than actual doer. So just substitute "staff engineer" or whatever you call it.)

But the main parts of my job I have to get right are picking the right approaches technology-wise, and setting up frameworks and patterns to make devs' lives easier in building out the actual features. You can't test that stuff on a whiteboard imo. You have to just talk it through and try to get a sense of how the potential architect/lead thinks about problems.

It also takes a good architect to interview an architect imo. There's plenty of great devs who just haven't acquired that level of scope yet - not of thinking not just about how easily it is for you to get something done - but how easily it will be to maintain as a team, within the greater ecosystem, over the life of the product.
Is that why I need to enter a passcode? I always thought that was stupid.
The interface is sound and you can generate sound with your organs if you want to go full pedantic.
Why don't you provide some comments on how Lisp machines implemented GC acceleration, and how the approach outlined in this paper is worse? Go...
Cities are great, if you build them for people, and not cars. We don't do this anymore (outside a few exemplar places like Denmark, NL, etc.), sadly.
I specifically purchased an app on my android device ("Call Blocker") to do this, but recently google changed it's play store policies and banned apps from directly forcing calls to voice mail. I think the only way to do it on an android device currently is to put your phone in "Do Not Disturb" mode and only allow calls from your contact list.

Edit: Just checked again on my phone. Even if you specifically tell do not disturb to only allow calls from your contact list they still pop up on the screen and they don't go straight to voicemail. Google seems to have outright banned any behavior that sends calls directly to voicemail without a notification. I'm on a pixel 3 with google fi.
1. Network contacts device with a request for synchronous voice communication, including identifying information from the originating party.

2. Device consults its own program, controlled by the subscriber-recipient, and responds with a signal to the network regarding the disposition of the call.

3. The network will then relay that signal to the originator, who may be required to respond one or more times before any human even knows someone is calling.

In short, I'd like the service providers to give me options other than "connect the call" and "send the call directly to voice mail and notify me anyway". I also want, at least, "refuse the call immediately without me knowing anything about it", "pay me a toll before I allow my phone to get my attention for you", and "prove you are the real person that you claim to be before I ring my phone on your behalf".

I'd like to be able to whitelist all my contacts so they ring immediately, and blacklist some numbers that will always get a fast busy signal every time they call my number. Ideally, there would also be some way to validate that the caller id number belongs to the call originator, perhaps by sending a nonce to the number claimed, and requiring that the originator repeat it in the current call session.

The provider can handle a simple program for land lines, dumb phones, or other phones that can't understand the newer protocol, but given that smartphones are pocket computers, I want to be able to control my own device without some third party stepping in and possibly selling me out.
They're declaring bankruptcy and closing up shop?

"It's been an incredible journey... thanks to all the Russian hackers, spambots, intractable ideologues and lazy journalists on a deadline who've helped make Twitter such a special place these past 13 years..."
SpaceX Is Launching 60 Starlink Internet Satellites Tonight: How to Watch Live
If someone is legitimately calling me, they need to be able to speak English, or I need to take a few courses in a foreign language first
Generators were added in Python 2.2:
https://docs.python.org/2/whatsnew/2.2.html#pep-255-simple-g...

Built-in set objects were added in Python 2.4: https://docs.python.org/2/whatsnew/2.4.html#pep-218-built-in...

defaultdict was added in Python 2.5: https://docs.python.org/2/library/collections.html#collectio...
That about page doesn't help at all.

> Taichi is an open-source computer graphics library with implementations of 40+ graphics papers. It has a hybrid design: a C++14 kernel part, and a user-friendly Python 3 wrapper.

That's the extent of the information on that page.
Robert Rayford
It's obvious to anyone who spends a moment thinking about it that some portion of what you say remains.

What's less obvious is that they store everything and most definitely index it so it can be used later against you (all it takes is one legal action - separation, police, you name it).

What's further disappointing is that Amazon stores the transcribed text. Which may be incorrect but deemed "truth".
From what I gather, what is most shocking of all is that candidate still fail this test, despite it being so common, despite there being an several github repos devoted to it, as well as other pages and articles about it (somewhere out there was a page or a repo or something I encountered that had it written in almost every programming language out there, include whitespace and brainf*ck).

Even when given as a "take home" challenge, they can't even copy-pasta an example off the internet...
It's generally a lack of problem solving skills in my experience. The main coding question I ask is actually a short word problem (less than 4 sentences for the entire problem statement).

Without giving away the question I ask, I can tell you the solution is a for loop and an if statement. If I told them exactly what they needed to solve the problem, I'm sure most could write the code (though honestly some would have still failed). It's a question I would think could fit as one of 5 on an intro to programming class final, yet I've had candidates with 10+ years of experience fail it. I even had one such candidate argue with me over asking a coding question when his resume shows so much experience at different roles.
Nope. Craig’s directs are responsible for apps and all the platforms those apps ship on or cross-platform technologies that power apps.
I'm not wondering about the usefulness of categorization (so long as the categories are standardized). I'm wondering about the usefulness of those circles.

How is it useful to know what percentage of spending went in each category in a single grocery trip? You can't combine that data with the same data from other grocery trips, and the only way I can think that knowing what percentage of spending went into what category is if it's done broadly, such as for all shopping in a given week or month.
I wouldn't want to work somewhere that was interviewing me based on programming language trivia
Author here. Be warned, this was just a proof of concept that I did because I thought it would be fun/weird/interesting!
>In fact, the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health estimates that city dwellers face a nearly 40 percent higher risk of depression, 20 percent higher chance of anxiety, and double the risk of schizophrenia than people living in rural areas.

>In their review, Meyer-Lindenberg and van den Bosch found that some potential threats had been examined more thoroughly than others. For some, including pollen, there wasn’t enough information yet to show a convincing link to depression. However, the team did find a number of studies suggesting that heavy metals like lead, pesticides, common chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA), and noise pollution may contribute to depression, although further research is still needed to confirm that this is the case.

The article gives me the distinct impression that the author is in denial of the stress associated with living in a crowded place. I doubt that it has to do much with fumes in the air- stress is a side effect of spending all day hustling, bustling, and competing. The popular opinion in the zeitgeist is that urban development is a good thing- so any bad effects are treatable. Adding green space may be a decent way to treat the symptoms of city living, but I think it will always be a stressful, mental illness-inducing lifestyle.
I'd assume he's not expecting foreign callers
It’s not really even a market-based solution unless there are blockers competing for your business.
Security Issue with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Titan Security Keys
Apparently Unix Version 6 (1975) used Thompson Shell which (provided the manuals are correct [1][2]) didn't support arbitrary variables (and even environment variables were not a thing back then). However for use in scripts $0, $1, etc were replaces with the script name and the arguments.

1: https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/bourne/v6/

2: https://etsh.nl/man/_tsh.1.html
Needs [video]
There's a huge difference between going to church every Sunday, and talking about church on Reddit. Internet ties are transient, anonymous, and adversarial. The idea of the meetup came into being precisely because these ties were so weak.

even coworkers...you have weaker ties because too much social sharing can and will get you fired. Coworkers are under no obligation to be with you long term and have no bond apart from their employer. The reaon why people make social ties among them is because they literally have no one else; their family may live in another state, and friend networks can be absurdly hard to maintain.

Pinker is just off base on this one. Part of the modern knowledge worker's idealization of college and replication of it in their workspaces is that it's one of the few times where social interaction is forced through proximity. No one, and I mean no one, has spoken rapturously about the glorious communities of online learning.
> Perhaps a better system would be to upvote only? Then constructive comments would raise to the top and who really cares what's long way down?

I agree. That's one of the conclusions I've come to from having used different comment voting systems online. I think tildes.net works that way.

But HN specifically has the problem that its founder thinks downvoting for disagreement is good. It mystifies me that someone who ostensibly favors intellectual curiosity has a stated policy which creates a narrow-minded echo chamber (at least, for certain topics).
shit, I'd have to look up NAND gates. also: that's EE, not CS.
You misunderstand. There is a very common class of engineers that have no problem describing and explaining their work to their peers.

They do have a problem with doing it in an adversarial and stressful situation like an interview. I've seen it happen to engineers I _know_ are good.

Also, over years of actually engineering hiring pipelines for software engineers, I've seen no evidence that its easy to weed out the good talkers. Quite the opposite I think it's one of he hardest things about designing these pipelines.

> Don't take those jobs if you want to be hireable I guess?

My point about this is not on behalf of the person being hired, its the person doing the hiring. Your process creates false negatives. False negatives in hiring pipelines is nearly as expensive as false positives.
you can read all the books you want, cover all the moocs you want, but in the end nothing gets your noodle working more than working on a project of interest
I have. And honestly, with modern, professional PHP development, most of us are not just FTP'ing PHP code to our shared host to deploy. So realistically, we are dealing with some of that deployment complexity regardless.

The modern Java ecosystem has tooling like Maven and Gradle. IDE support and static analysis in Java is more advanced as well.

As I said above, the additions are fantastic and I think they have absolutely improved the PHP experience for projects where PHP is required. But for new projects, I just do not see deploying PHP vs deploying Java with modern tooling as holding up like it may have 7-10 years ago.
https://www.usps.com/business/prices.htm

See how much a stamp cost vs. "Commercial"/"Direct Mail" options

(though maybe 10x is an exaggeration)
>basically Uber would be a lot better gig if you could be an Uber driver and have good health coverage

Haven't heard about it in a while, but this is a goal of the current CEO: http://fortune.com/2018/10/04/uber-driver-benefits-insurance...