skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe this is a false argument. There is a difference between avoiding additional life instantiation, and nurturing existence life.

All of us are worth something because of our knowledge, skills, experience, that has led us to today. Whatever that value is, it is more than that of life that hasn't been conceived yet. The less people on the planet, the more resources for those people who do exist.
I think you are actually helping to prove my point. The global fertility rate has been dropping rapidly since 1970[1]. The poverty rate has also been dropping rapidly for just about as long[2]. Isn't is possible that the increase in living standards is being driven by the decrease in birth rate? That seems more likely than more people=less poverty.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sp.dyn.tfrt.in

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GAPS
Stereophile routinely recommends $20,000 'power conditioners' and multi-thousand dollar cables. FFS they've claimed CD players 'sound better' sitting on 'special' racks. (https://www.stereophile.com/standsracks/206finite/index.html)

This is the history of a successful charlatan.
> 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 play video games. I have all of the last two generations of consoles, a smattering of older consoles I've managed to hold onto over the years (lost most of them for one reason or another) and a half-decent gaming PC where I prefer to play games if possible. On top of that I've done game development on the side, and have run multiple gaming communities for approximately a decade now.

If I went to go interview with a company and they talked about how they were all "gamers", I'd be running for the hills.

You know what I want to do at work? Work.

You know what I want to talk about at work? Not video games.

You know what I want for non-monetary compensation? Not a weekly autochess tournament or PUBG squad night.

You know what kind of people I want to be surrounded with? Not a bunch of clones who all have the same beliefs and values and (lack of) experiences.
whiteboard interviewers like to ask dynamic programming, I really don't understand it. I have asked around and have never seen a single programmer used dynamic programming at work once.

Other skills, such as multi-thread programming, debugging skills, get less coverage. Many whiteboard coders who know how to solve dynamic programming on a whiteboard, don't know how to use mutex and semaphore.

I think the whiteboard interview process is broken.
Well, did she actually not know, or was she offended by the simplicity of the question? I graduated in ’95, and I still remember how to implement a binary tree, so it’s not like it’s something that’s so irrelevant you’ll forget a few years after graduation like, say, polynomial long division.
Some farmer plants and harvests a crop, and allows some portion of the crop to go to seed. So far, so good. Normal practice for 1000s of years.

Then one year, the neighbor down the road plants some super special patent-protected seeds and doesn't control pollination. Farmers crops get pollinated by neighbor due to no fault of farmer.

Farmer plants seeds next year and notices genetic differences. Farmer specifically selects for desirable genetic traits in determining which crops to allow to go to seed. Normal practice for 1000s of years. Only this time, Monsanto comes knocking.

Or alternatively, farmer sells excess seeds to seed repo. Normal practice for generations. Seed repo notes genetic differences. Some farmers notice that repo sells seeds which include many that have desirable trait. They increase purchases from such repos. Monsanto comes knocking.

Nobody stole anything. Nobody violated any license or contract. To exclude contaminated seeds from inventory would place significant burden on farmers and repos. So Monsanto can intentionally or unintentionally contaminate farms that don't use Monsanto, then very intentionally ruin their ability to harvest seed for future planting.

Farmers have to sell non-Monsanto seed for a discount to pay for screening and disposal of contaminate. Repos have to sell non-Monsanto seed for a premium to pay for screening and disposal of contaminate and insurance for legal liabilities if screening is imperfect.

Self-sustaining farming is effectively crushed. You cannot harvest your own seed, and non-Monsanto seed is more expensive to purchase because of legal threats. Voila! Monsanto becomes the single source for seed. Nobody is able to produce seed without their permission.

Of course, you could try to turn the tables and sue Monsanto if your crop is ever contaminated. Good luck with that.
There's no such thing as demand constraints if you are talking about the whole economy: the supply of money is the constraint.
> I can't even trust my results sometimes because there's always that feeling that perhaps a candidate missed a question because I was a poor communicator.

This sentence shows a level of awareness sadly uncommon, that I don't believe I've encountered in... thousands of interviews.
What? Why? I just lovingly forged this hammer shaped thing and some crude nails for you! Surely they are as good as any off the shelf hammer and nails! In fact, 70% of this whole village was built with these little puppies!
The article is down.
Yup. If you need to hire a juggler, throw them some balls and get them to juggle for you.

You'll get the talented, flexible people that can get things done.
must be nice getting so much traffic that it brings your server down. Geez.
> Shouldn't that be up to the consumer?

The telephone provider is the only one who has the technical ability to block these calls. But I agree that it should only do so with the consent of the subscriber.
What if the job doesn't really involve coding? That's true of rather a lot of senior/lead level software engineering jobs. Security analysts, devops engineers, architects, and others may never write code at all as part of their jobs.

As a senior devops engineer, I write a lot of trivial Groovy code for Jenkins pipelines. But the interesting part isn't the code, which for the most part a monkey could do. It's redesigning the release process. The rest is just implementation details.

Thinking coding is important is a failure mode.
> My diktat is "clone is banned unless you can explain why you must have it", and then I teach people about what a move is and how to think about lifetimes.

That is good advice for people that are getting familiar with the borrow checker, making them think about allocations and ownership, but making newcomers that are getting familiar with the entire language, in some cases coming from very different paradigms, can be very demoralizing and the reason they stop or become convinced that "Rust is too hard for them" when what is happening is that they are trying to learn too many concepts at the same time.

The way I see it, the learning curve for most of Rust is a fairly mild slope, with a climbing wall around lifetimes. The further you progress learning the rest of the language, the shorter the wall will feel.

That being said this is born of my experience helping a few people learning Rust, but I could be completely off-base for the general case.

> w.r.t. Arc/Rc, I'd say that it might feel verbose at first, but it makes explicit what a GC does implicitly, and you can get all the benefits of Rust's ownership model at the same time.

But it is verbose. I think this is part of the problem with Rust learnability, because Rust makes inefficient code evident (think unsafe, clone and Rc), and that makes experienced programmers want to remove the inefficiency before they are proficient with the language enough to do so, so they encounter the hardest edges of the language early.

I appreciate that these markers make it better for me when reading the code and I wouldn't want them to disappear, but it does make it for a more verbose experience where the compiler sometimes feels pedantic. I think that better refactoring tools could make these kind of pains (and related ones, like adding lifetimes to a struct) go away almost entirely.

> I can pick and choose when to rely on the GC and when to explicitly manage lifetimes myself. That's really cool! I maybe a bit weird in this, but I like complexity to get surfaced so I can't pretend it's not there.

I'm in the same boat. I just wish it was easier for rustc to detect early when you're trying to apply a pattern from a language that doesn't have memory ownership or thread safety or relies on internal mutability and provide appropriate advice beyond "you can't do that".
"It’s easy to be overwhelmed by climate change and what to do about it. Global greenhouse gas emissions, for example, went up again last year—another reminder that we must act quickly if we want to prevent the worst-case scenarios of our warming planet.

Still, as I learn about all the new ideas to address this challenge, I am optimistic that with the right mix of solutions we can deploy right now and new innovations we can build a path to a carbon-free future."

I bet if you google it you will find exactly the same statement written by somebody 10 years ago. And I bet somebody will write it again 10 years from now. When will we stop fooling ourselves that technology is gonna save us?
Writing with PHP is better than ever... and getting better and better.

And... you don't need too worry too much about the server, or the request lifecycle, or networking... you just write your app, in a language which is, in my opinion, going in the right direction with a stronger slant towards OOP and types.

Of course it's still entirely possible to write garbage PHP code... but it's possible to write garbage in anything.

I'm increasingly proud to say I'm a PHP developer; it still gets a lot of bad commentary but it all tends to be based on historical stigmas which are increasingly untrue. Yet all the original benefits are still here, and the language itself is going from strength to strength...
Bummr: The Greatest Startup, App, and ICO of All Time
For any feature on OSX there are some people who love that feature. But the reality is the core reliability of OSX has been declining for years, and many of the bugs are becoming more egregious. Especially some of the recent security issues. They are all symptoms of an under-resourced team. I have no doubt the OSX engineers are heroes to a person. But I can't imagine they have the resources they need. I also can't imagine Apple really cares when accessories appear to be on track to generate more revenue than macs in a few years.
I may lack the imagination to see how VUI will be the predominant interface paradigm for computing.

People often need to stop speaking, and often ask for silence, when they need to think. Thinking and Talking is definitely a useful modality (think, relationship discussions, brainstorming), but Thinking and Non-verbalism is also a necessary way to function. Think of when your partner goes silent in a conversation and you look over and they're starting at their phone, or doing something on their phone. People can't talk and do something else at the same time.

I work from home. I often wake up, go for a run, eat breakfast, sit at my computer, begin my workday, and when my first conference call of the day begins... find myself a little rusty at speaking. It seems like "talking" has a spin-up cycle for some people.

I don't want to talk to my computers... so I haven't yet developed any positive notions of living with a VUI.
Right. So you would be weeded out by the culture fit, as I was. And in the long run I was glad for it. I think they made the right decision and I'm glad I didn't end up working for them. Even though it paid a little more and was half the commute of the job I did get.
Anveo Call Flow. Numbers not on a whitelist get a recording "press 1 to be connected" which repeats three times a couple seconds apart. If they don't press 1 they get sent to voice mail. I also have a blacklist that gets a captcha which says "press 1 to leave a voice mail" and hangs up if they don't.
No, but there certainly is a macOS team.
I’m starting to experience that too, where as the breadth of languages learned widens I forget the language specifics and really keep the generic terminology keen. Searching questions like how to sleep in LanguageX, how to iterate, create a thread, whatever need be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interference_theory#Retroactiv...
Can you share some concrete examples of techniques?
My lungs hurt just thinking about this.
How is a consumer supposed to reliably block robocall without help from the provider? The provider is the only entity in this system that has the information needed to curb robocalling.
There's a great book about this called "The Diet Myth" by Tim Specter. IIRC he's a Professor of Genetics and specialized in twin studies and sort of stumbled into researching gut bacteria because he was fascinated by identical twins were one was obese and other was a healthy weight. It's mindblowing how little we know and understand about such an important topic.

Edit: If you're interested, this talk[1] he gave at the Boston Science Museum is what made me read his book.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEAdtGa549I
> The reflex of many economists when thinking about the fertility rate is to point to income as the likely determinant. And sure enough, between countries and over time we see that higher incomes are associated with lower fertility. But good things come together – richer countries are also healthier and better educated – and so this correlation between high incomes and low fertility alone is surely not evidence that it is increasing income that is responsible for the decrease in fertility.

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-... (Our World In Data: What explains the change in the number of children women have?)

TLDR Major contributing factors are a woman's education (educated woman have fewer children, and delay having children until later in life), access to contraceptives, a reduction in infant mortality, with social norms and increases in income and quality of life to a lesser extent.

Sidenote: Thanks to Our World In Data (YC 19 NP) for performing and hosting top notch datasets and the analysis of such.
"Am I totally off base stating that Phoenix/Elixir is used in the same places React is?"

There are so many things to consider when deciding upon an architecture that the choice of going SPA + "regular" backend tech (js, php, whatever) vs something as specific as phoenix + elixir + server side rendering is really not a matter of "react" or something else.

A few questions you'll have to ask : what if you want to add a mobile GUI, will you want to keep rendering everything on the server ? How will you fetch the data ? Should the GUI (either mobile or web) work offline ? If you go mobile will you want to benefit from reusing react patterns ?

Now purely on the server side, erlang VM is highly optimized for concurrency (and not so much at pure cpu), but elixir is also a very peculiar language. How will you recruit people ? Is your team used to functional programming ? Do you have the skills to go to C programming in case you need performance ?

Then comes deployment. Will you plan on using OTP and actor-based architecture, for maximum availability ? Do you want to deploy on google cloud using kubernetes ? Heroku ? App-engine ? Each of these options have implications on your stack.

etc, etc. I could go on forever. The post you mentionned only talked about the most basic thing every single tech has been able to do for the last 30 years, aka : render a web page from a template. But that's a very very narrow consideration for picking a tech stack.
And wouldn’t they, presumably, expect to be compensated for providing this convenience?
I explicitly tell candidates that they should use pseudocode. Nitpicking stupid syntax that the compiler can catch in a whiteboard interview is pretty pointless.
This is a new update though.
RIP Java EE
I think it is to do with the culture of consumerism and capitalism, in conjunction with taking of moral stances against one's own health, than American culture per se:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLk5AAKRem8
If the Green New Deal is really the only alternative, then we can pretty much say that the US will do absolutely nothing about climate change. That proposal was drenched in equity policy that people find unacceptable.
Well, officially, OS X doesn't exist anymore. It's "Mac OS" now I believe. But yes, they'd be the Mac OS team
No, because my password is in my password manager, and I need my (now destroyed) phone for 2FA.
For the same reason we have DNS.
Yes, that was why my assertion was qualified. The part I disagree with is "I think devs who think they can do everything are lying to themselves."

I agree that devs can't do everything efficiently.
I think this is an important essay. The advice at the end is good: these tests are inevitable, and if you want to stay in the biz by applying for dev jobs at companies, you must accept that you will retake you college CS exams over and over for the rest of your life.

Alternatively you could look for a different path in life. Best to get out of the coding jobs early in your career. Don’t look back.

That said, there are some good reasons to do the coding path. At the high end, they pay very very well, and there's no bar organization forcing you to get a $200K 3 year degree. Salaries start higher, and working your way up in other job ladders can be a grind and take quite a while to get up to SWE salaries.

I’ll leave the paradox of industry claims of a shortage as an exercise for the reader.
> So, I'd say, enjoy it while you can.

I'd say most certainly do not try this. Do you want to loose access to your gmail, maps, contacts, whatever else you rely on Google for, because you were found abusing google drive?
Venezuela’s self-declared President urges Europe to “legitimize” his diplomats
WordPress Alternatives for Startups (Or Anyone basically)
Yeah but then inevitably the company starts grading on a curve. Did the dev nail every single possible mistake or bug? Did they add any extra flourishes? So you're not just testing for basic competence anymore. You're testing for devs who are really good at timed coding challenges - just like with challenges where it's tough to get the right answer in the allotted time.

Companies don't get excited about a dev who just passes. Even though that dev might be by far the best candidate - they just need a few days to chew on various architectures - or they take the test literally and don't add bells and whistles. Etc.

Companies get excited about a dev who aces it with flying colors.
My critique was of the article itself. The article seems likely to mislead people into thinking new findings show LEDs are inherently harmful to eyesight, when the study seems to actually communicate the importance of factoring brightness and color temperature into the decision. Sure, one can get the right idea from reading the article thoroughly and critically but if you read the comments on the article it's clear the target audience is being misled.
HR told me I couldn't ask such questions without proving they were useful first.

Basically a scientific experiment, have someone else ask and grade the questions, but those results were not considered for hire/nohire. Then 6 months after a bunch of people were hired we pull the results of the test and compare to their performance reviews. If the questions were a good predictor or future success we could use them on future interviews.

The overhead of this was more than we were willing to pay so we went back to HR's allowed questions.
I do! The blue ball machine started when someone on SA posted a template gif which other people used to make their own tile of the machine. You just had to make sure the balls entered and exited in the same spot. I made the one where the ball gets frozen in ice. Then all the tiles were combined into a single gif. I remember being disappointed when the version that went viral only included half of the tiles that people submitted.
> And I mean that literally: they're at a loss at how to write a function that adds two numbers or counts the number of elements in a list.

Seriously, Where are you finding these candidates? seriously.

I've worked at a number of mid-sized companies, and interviewed dozens of candidates, and I have never, ever, ever come across a candidate that couldn't write code on this level: "write a function that adds two numbers or counts the number of elements in a list".
I noticed that my job enjoyment took a hit during a period of heavy interviewing for new devs for all the reasons you mention.

A one hour interview required a minimum of 30 minutes prep to read the resume, etc and generate questions. Then at least 30 minutes to write up my findings in a way that would allow me to participate in the roundup, which could be up to a month away if I was the phone screen. The roundup itself accounted for at least another 30 minutes. So you were 2 hours and 30 minutes into it assuming everything goes perfectly. It's a huge time suck.

But beyond the time that I lost, it's a very difficult and crushing experience to have candidate fail and have to be the one that says "no" (and that is happening way way more than yes, especially if you are interviewing early in the pipeline). But it's equally disheartening to see a spark of something in an interview, tease it out, imagine that the person can be raised up to become a good developer only to have the candidate get shot down by all your colleagues because they didn't have a similar experience.

I disliked losing time during the day, but I really disliked the emotional burden of interviewing and saying "no." I empathize with the person on the other side as I've been there.
Quoting Paul Ford
For our last hire, I was the only one on the hiring committee to ask about past projects. The others defaulted to "fundamentals" questions.

I think the reason people do this is a mix of 1) not knowing what traits to look for 2) not comfortable with unstructured conversation 3) frankly that it takes work to evaluate each resume and research projects enough to have a useful conversation.

For me though, how they achieve success at past work is the best indicator of future success.
Yeah this is the M.I.T. and Harvard "process". Hire success, instead of fostering success. Works well for small companies. If you need to hire 10.000 to 30.000 people a year, this approach is absolutely useless.

Also just because someone can't come up with the coolest solution for your project, doesn't mean they aren't good developers. This is even more biased than algorithmic interviews, because algorithmic interviews have structure. I actually CAN solve a puzzle in 20 mins. You definitely can not solve a project in 20 minutes or even an hour. It is impossible. And the best candidates will be those who sit back, analyze the problem for days or even weeks and come up with a good solution for your project. This approach is so infeasible for general interviewing that I don't even know where to begin. You are basically filtering out EVERYONE and take the one person who knew enough upfront to accidentially solve your problem best...