skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> if you can't obey the terms that someone else has given for the use of their creative work, then don't use their work.

Yes I agree, but the conclusion to this is that you probably should never use the GPL.

If you want other people to be able to use your code, use the MIT license.

If you want to monetize your code/keep it secret/sell it, then don't try to open-source it.

The GPL makes code radioactive and useless to everyone.

I get the intent in the OP that people should obey the golden rule and only build open source on open source. But what actually happens in my limited experience is that when a company comes across GPL code, the boss asks you to find equivalent code with an MIT license and ditch the GPL code.

If no such MIT code exists, the boss asks you to find another way, or to rewrite the GPL code yourself and keep it secret, or maybe even release it as MIT code.

GPL code is a dead end because it poisons other code.

And the fundamental reason for this is that programmers have to get money somehow, which almost always means being able to have some of the code they write as closed-source.

MIT allows closed and open source to exist side-by-side. You can write some code that does something, release it under the MIT license on GitHub, and also use it as a component of your company's proprietary product which ultimately pays for you to eat and live.

And this problem recurses. If I am not in a corporate setting and I am choosing between a GPL library or an equivalent MIT library to use in my own open source application, I should choose the MIT one because otherwise my open source code becomes "infected" with GPL, meaning that people in a corporate setting can't use it. If I'm deciding which library to learn as a hobby I should choose the MIT one because that will be useful for getting a job. Etc.

GPL will IMO be radioactive for as long as we insist that most programmers have to sell something in order to have a house to live in and food on the table. If the rest of society sets up a big fund to hand out money to programmers who make useful software, then we can talk about GPL.

But actually even if such a fund existed I still think MIT would be better.
because they stand up to the US less often...
from the comments:

> I'm not trying to defend all current interviewing practices, but Leetcode-style interviews became popular because they're designed to find people who are good at programming without requiring overly specialized knowledge about specific tools that are popular right now but may not be in a few years. The idea is to find someone who can reliably learn what they need to know for the job rather than finding someone who's an expert in X and Y which you currently happen to be using.

I use synthetic / algorithmic questions for this purpose. I don't need tool specialists, I need people with wider skills.

I also like concocting fizzbuzz variants as a high pass filter. Some people fail them...
I was in BevMo a few weeks back and there was a similar robot. It had a screen on the front to look up what you’re searching for and it would bring you to it.

I decided to give it a try since I was trying to find watermelon flavored liquor for the SO. I found some pre-mixed watermelon margarita on the screen and then it proceeded to bring me to the right spot....or at least it tried.

On the way to the aisle and shelf, it clipped the corner of a chest-height shelf rack knocking over a ton of whiskey on the top shelf shattering on the ground.

It was seemingly unphased by hitting the shelf, but right after ran straight into a ceiling height rack of shelves knocking over bottles of tequila.

It just stayed there with its face buried in the shelves and simply said, “Can I help you find anything else?”, despite not being where the pre-mixed margaritas were.

There was a single employee there working the register. When the whiskey crashed, everyone in the store just watched and then when it crashed into the tequila, the employee looked at the mess from behind the register, sighed, and then just continued ringing people up. This clearly wasn’t the first time she’s witnessed this thing make absolute chaos.

I’ve yet to go back to BevMo since then, but I imagine they’ve gotten rid of it.
I get blank page without running javascript. Not observable.
I spent a day debugging a problem this created. Without going into irrelevant domain details, we had a set of objects, each of which has numeric properties A and B. The formal specification says objects are categorized in a certain way iff the sum of A and B is less than or equal to 0.3.

The root problem, of course, was that 0.2 + 0.1 <= 0.3 isn't actually true in floating point arithmetic.

It wasn't immediately obvious where the problem was since there were a lot of moving parts in play, and it did not immediately occur to us to doubt the seemingly simple arithmetic.
Spotify's recommendation system is dealing mostly with artists that have recording contracts and professional production- their problem shouldn't be compared to YouTube's which has to deal with a mix of professional, semi-pro, and amateur created content. Also there's more of a "freshness" aspect to a lot of YT videos that isn't quite the same as what Spotify has to deal with (pop songs are usually good for a few months, but many vlogs can be stale after a week). Not only that, but many channels have a mix of content, some that goes stale quickly and some that is still relevant after many months- how does a recommendation engine figure that out?

It's better to compare Spotify's recommendations to Netflix's recommendations, which also deals with mostly professional content. Those two systems have comparable performance in my opinion.
I don't know much about the law, but wouldn't reverse engineering Widevine be illegal, as it is protected by DRM?
Yes, I want the same thing. I do hope dockerfiles won't be the underlying configuration files to describe the machine setups though...
Serverless Operational Analytics
It's worth recognizing that that was the case because China told the British that they would invade HK if the British gave them full self-determination.
What I don't get is:

1. Pretend it's the 1900s.

Walk into a general store, shopkeeper sees you looking at ammo for 20 minutes and then leave without buying anything. Next time you walk in, he recognizes you and says he'll give you a discount on ammo if you buy in bulk.

This is totally cool, not a violation of privacy, and both parties benefit. win/win

2. Use a computer to do the same exact thing automatically

Rage, pitchforks and proverbial molotov cocktails and people going on privacy diatribes.

What's the difference?
Storm Scents: It's True, You Can Smell Oncoming Summer Rain
I do whenever I can. For instance, for close to a decade now I maintain a blanket ban on Groupon for that one time they spammed me with retargeted ads a bit too hard (3+ same ugly pink ads simultaneously on a single webpage).
Wipr works good for me. It doesn't have many (any?) configuration options, but it does the job.
> Isn't that what the GPL is? You use my code, and then you must pay back to me your improvements on the code.

No. You're not obligated to pay me back, you're obligated to share the code with the public. You can't exclude me, because I'm part of the public, but you don't have to have any contact with me at all.
> The problem is only one side is evaluated.

I tell all of my friends that it's your job to interview the interviewer as well. The company is about to get 8 hours of your day for the next few years. figure out how you can figure out if it's the right place for you.

Obviously, if you are in dire straights and you need to take what you can get, sure, but the questions are still relevant and will prepare you for whatever poo you might find yourself stepping into.
This is ridiculous. Universities duped students into over-paying for essentially worthless degrees. Now, the taxpayers get to foot the bill and the Universities pocketed the money.

What we really need is a complete reform of the student loan system.
I’d say the developer is making their life much more difficult by using such a confusing name, which is a pity because the project looks really interesting.
And this, too, should be illegal.
Amazon hires Washington, DC official who participated in HQ2 talks
I'm always surprised that F# didn't take off. It's a great language and in addition to the strenghts of ML you have the .net ecosystem and Microsoft behind it.
what was wrong with this code? I don't deal with exceptions a lot so not familiar with the idioms here. Is it because the catch is not doing anything at i<3? And then at i==3 it just breaks from the for? So rendering the whole thing useless ?
I'm not entirely convinced that the let operators were a good idea. What's wrong with the ppx rewriter notation (let%bind = ...)? That's, after all, what it's for: provide custom extensions to the language syntax.

Quality of life improvements in the standard library are maybe the biggest deal for me (since I don't use any stdlib replacement like Batteries or Base). Stuff like the Int, Bool, Option, etc. modules, or filter_map... It's mind boggling how they've only been added now (but good thing they were).
They did a garage take/video project called Scotch Mist which is somewhat better.

https://youtu.be/ukythkK4EPQ
This implies there is not a society benefit from healthy options.

The parents are the most well placed to know at an individual level. But responsibility is a cop out, if you are just dropping it on someone.

Granted, I agree it is a hard problem. Not even sure it is solvable. :(
It's all about advertising money. TV and newspapers are dying and they need someone to blame.
Those are all really interesting points! The division between clauses and lists is a really great insight; I think for me, I actually have the opposite preference ("&" for clauses and "and" for lists), although in practice I don't find myself using "&" in English very much.

> people read by seeing ascenders|descenders (okay that one was on purpose :-)

I actually totally missed that you had done that until you pointed it out :)

> and btw always with an Oxford comma

Now we've definitely found some common ground!
Agree with you. If you can't do your job then maybe you'll have to be shut down.
> Maybe the existence of such toolkits is a Chesterton's Fence that says you can't make this work without something installed on the phone. But this would be possible without these trojans.

Without these trojans the store would have on its hands a major networking infrastructure project. With these trojans, all they have to do is drop a few battery-powered beacons in their venue and store their IDs along with coordinates in a database.
I love the idea but leaving out original stuff like the vocals and instead depending on copyrighted material is kind of... not what I would describe as open source. But anyway, many thanks! A lot more people should do this
So were FF tab groups the answer after all?
A lot of Verizon stores are owned by third-party companies. I had the chance to speak to one of the regional reps in a college class and he told me his company [1] does facial tracking of everyone who comes in the store. It also monitors employees and how many breaks they are taking/what they are doing (like hiding in the stock room).

[1]https://www.tccrocks.com/
I'ts not hard to do because it's already done.

Firefox will show the previous contents of tabs in place when you update firefox live. So it must already have that ability.
I can’t really speak to that specifically. But I can say it doesn’t really fit with either my government contracting experience nor what that particular engineer was explaining to me at the time.

In general, it matters very much how the money is appropriated for whatever you’re going to do with government money. What you might not be able to do under one particular program may not be prohibited at all under another. Or, some official may be empowered to waive some requirements. I would expect, for example, that FEMA might be able to waive the requirement you speak of, if, for example, they found it was less expensive, or even just convenient for the government.

And in terms of what the specific person I was talking with had to say, his bid on work with PREPA included proposals based on getting funding for upgrades as he had previously done in Florida after another hurricane. Which seemed reasonable when he explained. Basically, Florida Power & Light got grants from FEMA to do various upgrades to their grid because the upgrades were likely to save the feds money in a future hurricane. Or at least, that was his explanation. And it fits with my experience in DC early in my career as well.
Spotify does share their revenue with Apple if the person signs up for Spotify using the app. That was one of the points that Spotify had against Apple when Spotify filed a complaint against Apple to the European Commission. I would assume that Netflix would have to share the revenue of individuals who sign up using the iOS app too.
[Harrison Starr] raised his eyebrows and inquired, “Is it an anti-war book?”

“Yes,” I said. “I guess.”

“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”

“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”

“I say, why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?”

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were
as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.

Well good news for humanity. We're well on our way to stopping glaciers, so maybe we can stop war after all.
The Rosetta examples show a solution that only compiles the C file if it has not been previously compiled, or if it has a newer modification timestamp than the executable.
Made my last student loan payment at 40 as well. Got my computer engineering degree in 99 from UIUC and since my parents paid a substantial portion of my costs, I "only" had about $25,000 in student loans (equivalent to about $50,000 in today's dollars) with about $350/mo payment ($700/mo today).

Starting salary for an engineer was $60k, so there have been effectively no raises for the middle class for my generation or younger. Which means whoever reads this is going to be paying 2-4 times as much as I was, even with a degree from an affordable state school like I went to.

I also dorked around a lot and basically wasted my 20s on trying to win the internet lottery.

All that said, I strongly disagree with most assessments of why college is so expensive. I feel that the real reason is that it coincides with the decline of the US middle class, starting around 1980 and Reaganomics.

We don't make anything useful anymore. We don't automate the real burdens in people's lives, things like necessity or health. We just chase get rich schemes to do as little work as possible. So the rest of the world is eating our lunch now.

You want to fix the cost of college? Go back to pre-1980. Make it government funded, build more darn campuses so everyone can go (or at the very least get trained in a trade), and do a jubilee on all student loan debt effective immediately. It's how they do it on Star Trek. That's the future. Anything short of that is a bunch of unamerican hogwash to privatize everything we used to hold dear and make someone rich on your backs.

Disclaimer: this is one humble opinion from someone who paid his dues and is sick of the I've got mine mentality pushing the US to the brink of corporate fascism. I don't want anyone else to squander their potential making rent like I did.
I find it interesting that the article doesn't mention how various agencies track you through bluetooth beacons when you drive down a road or walk around a city. These devices are in plain view for everyone to see, but for some reason it seems that most people don't see them and basically nobody ever talks about them, yet they are everywhere.
We've been moving towards it for about as long as people have been predicting it. It's been happening in fits and starts, but it's been happening. I suspect that the rise of the "gig economy" is due in part to the fact that there is so much less necessary manpower required to keep society running. So the only work left is to cater to the desires of the rich and/or lazy.
This seems like it takes some notes from Veritasium's theory on YouTube's recommendation algorithm which he posted after his initial reservoir shade balls video went viral. (edited for clarity)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8 for his theory.
>It is no one’s responsibility other than the parent

Yes, but you _must_ understand that most (no, ALL) of the millennial generation grew up with public content over the airwaves that was curated and had to pass certain guidelines. So many parents think that the YouTube Kids app is the same thing. it's not!

If YouTube want to be the next Television, they're going to have to assume the responsibilities and expectations surrounding the appliances they intend to replace. Pulling a Pontius Pilate and tossing the issue to another algorithm to fail at figuring out is not going to fix the problem.

Thankfully, there's much more out there than YouTube when it comes to children's entertainment, actually curated by human beings with eyeballs and brains, and not algorithms. The problem is that parents don't know these apps even exist, because YouTube has that much of a foothold as "place to see things that shut my kid up, so I can see straight."
I am preparing myself for a week of onsite interviews as we speak.

Of course I hate them, but what other choice do I have?

The biggest problem is that the questions are so random and span almost anything.

Will I get asked:

a pthread question?

implement mergesort or quicksort?

implement a Read/Write lock?

implement a smart pointer?

a bit manipulation question?

topological search?

dynamic programming?

graph question?

backtracking question?

What the default timeout for TCP/IP is?

a Java internals question?

best practices about Cassandra?

N-ary tree search?

linked list?

b-tree?

Paxos vs Raft?

What is the access time for an SSD vs spinning disk?

How does Hadoop work?

Design Netflix

various random programming questions, as evidenced by Leetcode's 1000+ questions

It's impossible to know everything and yet this what people expect and ask. I've been asked those questions above over the last 6 years. It's utterly insane the expectations that interviewers have.

I personally also interview candidates, I've done hundreds of interviews throughout my career. These days, I do about one interview a week, and often 2.

My coding question is a simple recursion question, with a for loop and some basic knowledge of data structures. It's not hard, but I look for perfect code. If you can't code a bug-free 15 line function in 45 mins, that's my red flag. I don't think that's unreasonable. As long as the person asks good questions, we work together well, and they can code in a sane way, to me that's a pass. Interestingly, 70% of the people fail the interview because they can't code properly, even after the phone screen. I think because people are expecting a hard leetcode algorithm question, they can't think properly when someone asks them a simple question.
The queue for getting your video posted on YouTube would grow infinitely. (Or, more realistically, people would give up and not bother once it takes years.)

But I guess they could charge money to get to the head of the line?
Show HN: Transform Google spreadsheet into a ready-to-embed image gallery widget
Sorry this is off-topic, but can you expound a bit more on the history of WebDAV in this context?
Home Internet Is Becoming a Luxury for the Wealthy
A link from the article shows that turning off Bluetooth in Android is as futile as it is in iOS:
https://qz.com/1169760/phone-data/

If you don't want to be tracked, you can either turn off your phone or put it in a protective sleeve when not in use:
https://silent-pocket.com/products/faraday-cage-sleeves-for-...
I completely disagree, my children have a wonderful time following the recommended videos that youtube provides. I'm interested to hear your reasoning on why it is "disastrous".
The Biggest Nonmilitary Effort in the History of Human Civilization
anyone know a good ide for ocaml? something with tab complete and jump to definition?
Ha, I'm up front: "this is a synthetic question, which has the purpose of x,y,z". Synthetic questions don't rely on specific tools, or specific problem framings, it can be thought of in isolation.

E.g., I usually put a database question on interviews, for the purpose of seeing what and how much the candidate knows about databases.

I also like doing a design question regarding handling larger data and doing back of the envelope complexity analyses of the solutions they come up with. I.e., what I expect a colleague to be able to do when we're working at our desks.
Repeal the law that made student loan debt immune from being liquidated in bankruptcy. Lenders might actually take a moment to decide if someone is worth the lending risk.
From my own observations, financial centres typically act as gateways into more heterogenous or poorly understood regions... like an API gateway of sorts for countries.

London acts as a financial centre for many businesses seeking to do business with EU nations. Hong Kong was historically the financial centre for traders seeking to do business with China. Being a former British colony, they had advantages such as being literate in English and understanding both eastern and western cultures.

If indeed globalization has not yet run its course, we may see less and less of a need for these financial centres in the future.
>YouTube is a _disastrously_ unhealthy recommender system,

Can you explain with more details?

I use Youtube as a crowdsourced "MOOC"[0] and the algorithms usually recommended excellent followup videos for most topics.

(On the other hand, their attempt at matching "relevant" advertising to the video is often terrible. (E.g. Sephora makeup videos for women shown to male-dominated audience of audiophile gear.) Leaving aside the weird ads, the algorithm works very well for educational vids that interests me.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
Would using a built in library be acceptable? Actually in C knowing how to use qsort() does require having a little knowledge of how function pointers work. If they did, I would ask them what could be some drawbacks of using the built in qsort function (function call overhead).

On the other hand, would you accept a bubble sort as a solution? Or the most degenerate case- a bogosort ;) ?
It's rage-inducing because the 1900 shop keeper doesn't keep a book about you specifically, notes down your presence to the last second, follows you home or into other establishments, etc. Also his memory is not accurate and no tangible proof (it's just his word after all), so nobody can download his memory if they want to spy on you for whatever reason (dissident, whistleblower, etc.)
Well, I mean, they're my own vocals. I chose not to include them because I'm kinda super self conscious. :3

As for the samples, well, yeah, I mean, if I get a C&D I'll have to remove them, of course.
I'd recommend this thread from 9 months ago: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18011332
To me, this isn't big news -- It's at the point where I turn wifi and Bluetooth off when I'm shopping.

Look at some of the filings by Kroger:

https://fccid.io/PBR-SZG3APWC/Users-Manual/Manual-3994818

They are tracking down at the bay level for some items.
No, everyone does most assuredly not agree on readability when it comes to case statements. Flat case reads better, and indenting it would be like indenting "elsif" and "else" in an else statement.
Every time this debate comes up, I think of MINIX:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/minixs-creator-would-have-like...
There’s some hedge funds using F#. C# has historically been popular in certain parts of finance any many of those shops are now exclusively using F# for new code.

Personally, F# is nice and all, but the lack of higher kinded types rubs me the wrong way.