skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm currently doing the interviewing process. Fun.

I just finished a take-home assignment that I considered roughly "not completely sadistic", and it took me about 10 hours.

And there is some level of trust I have for the hiring company, etc., so I was comfortable doing the 10+ hours. Not happy, necessarily, but decided I wasn't going to try to change the hiring process while I was trying to be busy getting hired.

I could easily see someone spending 20-40+ hours on it, and still not completing it successfully. I was offered proactive help by the existing staff, which was super-nice of them, and it probably helped.

I'm not sure how long it was supposed to take.

I would generally guess that hiring companies think their take-home tests/assignments take about one-fifth/tenth of the actual time they take. They often are simple if you're an expert in the company's proprietary software platform.

I don't know what the difference is for remote vs. local hiring -- I'd guess the hiring is generally more tedious for remote positions -- they require more trust.

I'm generally in the sales engineer/tech acct mgr/tech support/other-type space. If I don't love the company, and I get a homework assignment that is 20+ hours, I usually bail.

I had another position I was working on that required a codility (?) test. I took the sample test and 'passed' it, or thought i did, but then the eval said i got a zero. So, not sure what that was about.

I ended up bailing on that position, or telling the company i'd do any other type of tech screen, including live coding, whiteboarding, etc., but they weren't for it. I said I'm not down with that tool, but it was over. Fine. I know better than to try to justifying my objection to these types of tests.

Lots of companies have been asking for recorded video interviews. I try not to voluntarily talk to robots. Again, I try not to object on 'dignity' or any other grounds -- it's not a language that 'we' commonly understand yet -- it's too sci-fi.

So "let the robots do it" is one strategy for hiring.

I think there are lots of sane things we can do to improve the hiring process, but one thing I'd generally like to see is an easier try/buy process (like traveling nurses seem to have).

In theory, contracting or contract-to-hire can make everyone's experience better, but...it just doesn't seem widespread in my experience.

For example, I would love the opportunity to work for some company for 2 or 3 months, at some percentage of my normal rate, and then if we both like, we agree to the full-time hire. But it seems everyone is deathly afraid of having to pay unemployment. That's the best guess I have for as to why this is not a more common practice. This arrangement or something like it would seem to offer a good mix of risk/reward for everyone involved.
CPAN also exists, but not as it once did. Perl 5 wasn't just a language, but an ecosystem.
> the major complaint around these authors is that they seem to just tear down the “grand narratives” of the past without showing the way to a better future.

IME the main complaint is that they seemingly operate from a standpoint that the work of "tearing down the grand narratives" can itself be a "grand narrative", a "theory" of its own. We shouldn't be surprised when this doesn't work very well! The fact that they aren't "showing the way to a better future" (unlike, e.g., pragmatists who can be just as skeptical as postmodernists when it comes to all-encompassing grand stories!) is really a symptom, not the main issue.
TECO is notably more tractable than Malbolge.
I don't get the point they're trying to make.

I think the analogy between math and a language that you can learn as "native language" is quite far-fetched and flawed, but let's accept it for the sake of argument.

Then, I'd say that in most developed societies, we already learn math as a native language since birth. Many toys for babies are focused on counting (among other skills, like recognizing colors, shapes and basic words). Parents routinely ask their kids to count things, just as they help them learn the language. Then, once you go to preschool and then school, there are always math lessons alongside the language lessons.

So in my view, what they're advocating already happens, so I'm not sure what change they're proposing.
coming from C pike felt rather natural, and i felt pike was ahead of its time when people elsewhere argued about typing and python, ruby and javascript (typescript) started adding optional types. pike had them all along.

pike attracted me because it was the first language i came across that allowed me to recompile classes at runtime.

i also love its deceptively simple class model. each file of code IS a class. there is no need to declare the class inside (as java has you do), but you open the file and put functions inside. done.

elsewhere you inherit the class by referring to the filename: "inherit foo.pike".

pike was the start of my career as a software developer and i am still using pike for all my websites to this day. the difference now is that i write the frontend in javascript and the backend is a BAAS platform with a REST API in pike.
I use Slack–alone–to get more done
Such a great language. If only it had a good GUI library...
My understanding is that Wolfram rewrote Macsyma in C but that Macsyma was his direct inspiration for Mathematica.
The problem is, most airlines who ordered or are considering to order the 737 MAX have not much choice. The only real competitor is Airbus. But not only does Airbus alreay have filled order books, so cannot deliver any additional orders in a reasonable time frame, but also this would move the market into a near-monopoly, something that airlines are trying to avoid strongly, as that would remove their negotiation powers with the manufacturer.

This shows, that a duopoly can be as bad as a monopoly and can degenerate into one quickly. Consequently, it should be avoided as much as possible. Merging Boeing with McDonnell Douglas was a big mistake by these events. As was, not to develop a successor to the 737 even long before the MAX development started. After 40 years, tweaking a very successfull design isn't enough any more, there should be a proper successor.

Unless some more large flaws are discovered, the 737 MAX won't be cancelled and it will be bought. The market is trapped. Airlines, who operate on 737 only will have to change their operations soon, as the MAX can be only a gap-filler now. But on short notice there is no other possible replacement available. Boeing will certainly start a replacment design soon, but that won't arrive till the late 20ies. This might of course be the opening for new aircraft companies to enter the market, e.g. Chineese companies or Japanese.
FWIW, I don't think "hermetic" is in widespread usage.

My understanding is that "hermetic builds" refer to the kind of thing that tools like Guix, Nix, etc. go for. Something like "Declare all the inputs and dependencies to get a reproducible output".
And what should they buy instead? See my longer comment about that.
It's difficult to agree with the idea that VB displaced COBOL. Even if this were the case, it certainly wasn't because COBOL compilers were expensive compared to "a cheap interpreter" that came with the machine. COBOL compilers surely were expensive, but they were also intended for mainframes rather than PCs. Also, I don't remember VB ever coming packaged with Windows for free. VB has been a part of Visual Studio for as long as I can remember and I don't believe there was a free version of until around VS2005.

Lisp, it turns out, is a weird and challenging language. It takes a little extra before you start to see the exciting bits. Unfortunately, until you reach that point, it's a matter of struggling with the parts around it - namely the editor. Lisp and Emacs go hand in hand, and while today you can rely on other editors to competently work with Lisp code, 20 years ago I don't think this was the case.

So now a user has to pick up Lisp (challenging when viewed through the lenses of either VB and COBOL) and Emacs (positively baroque if your only experience is within a GUI and IDE). I'd venture to guess that getting a functional Lisp environment running on a 286/386 era PC was probably a challenge in itself for most people.

Now consider VB or Java, significantly more familiar languages that didn't effectively depend (at the time) on the features of their editor or IDE. Both were a mouse-click away as far as installation, and Java didn't cost anything. Both were backed by large organizations that had a lot of incentive to invest and convince people to use their particular thing.

Lisp was this weird, mostly academic, language intended to tackle relatively esoteric rather than business problems, that was Unix only at a time when PCs and Windows were taking off. It doesn't seem unusual to me that it didn't take over the world. Frankly, I'm surprised and thankful that it's still around, actively used, and even sporting a significant community.
I am as anti-pomo/critical theory as it gets, but, sadly, this phenomena is very much present in the hard sciences as well.

For example, about 10-15 years ago, the big craze in biology was microarrays, and the early papers made crazy promises about everything that they would deliver. With hindsight, it turned out almost all the early papers were fatally flawed and were drastically statistically underpowered: it turns out that living systems have a huge amount of noise, making clean measurements is difficult, and things are very complicated. The same exact thing played out with microRNAs, epigenetics (chipSeq data is exceedingly noisy), metagenomics, single cell genomics, etc.

Every single time you'd get 'trailblazers' who'd come into the field, do shitty rushed science, hype their results like crazy, and by the time people figured out that all the initial results were garbage, they'd have moved onto the new hot thing.

I guess the advantage that hard sciences have over the humanities is that eventually we'd figure it out and do things properly - but the amount of money that has been wasted in shitty research that didn't add anything to human knowledge is probably in the hundreds of billions in the last 15 years alone.
I will also point out that a huge amount of businesses are running Cent OS and RHEL 7 right now. Buster is shiny in comparison.
not really. if you are waiting in a line, or taking public transportation, you can use you smartphone to practice some natural language, but not math which requires deep focus.
I think it's not an order per se, but a letter of intent.

I'm sure it contains some pretty good discounts and opt-outs in case Boeing cannot fulfill their Max obligations.
These positions as the OP describes require continuous, unbroken professional desication to reach top credentials. You can't just compare it with the general working female population outside of academia and/or sum up average total years spent in the field.
Unheard ways in which big businesses are using their spatial data
The "furious exchange of proper nouns" made me lul.

"Derrida and Badiou at Tanagra!"

It's like this because like the Tamarians, everyone in the discussion is assumed to be familiar with all of the background material -- and if you are not, then what the hell are you doing here? I saw this kind of elitism unfold here on Hackernews once. Someone once asked for an explanation of what deconstruction was and was told basically, "Have you read your Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzche, Freud, and Levinas yet? No? Then shaddap, you are obviously not prepared to even begin to understand deconstruction." Can you imagine Feynman doing that? Like, "Have you read your Newton, Leibniz, Maxwell, Einstein, Bohr, and Schrödinger yet? No? Then shaddap..."

Philosophy is like AI: as soon as we know it works and put it into practice, it ceases to be philosophy. So people who majored in philosophy are put in the uncomfortable position of having to justify the importance -- to others and perhaps themselves -- of what they study, and it's much easier to seem important by forming exclusive intellectual cliques and inventing ways to consider people outside your clique to be stupid and wrong-headed than it is to dig deep and find out why and how your work is important in the real world -- or, worse yet, face the music and admit your work is not important at all and you're better off doing something else.
If you look at the orders by customer[1], you will see quite a few that exclusively or mostly fly 737's.

It would be costly for an airline to have to retrain almost all their pilots, mechanics, etc on a new aircraft...and to purchase all the associated supporting equipment.

And, the Max has significantly better fuel efficiency, seating capacity, etc than other 737 models. Falling back to an earlier model isn't easy either.

They are banking on the general public forgetting about it over time. Which has happened in the past.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_orders_...
John Backus's FL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxcT4vK01-w

IBM research really should release the FL compiler they wrote! They stopped working on it in the early 90s, and haven't said a single thing about it since.

There is the beginnings of a Haskell implementation that I tried to mess with a bit, but I don't know enough Haskell to get anywhere: https://github.com/jgrimes/fl-hs
As I have understood, there are waiting lists at both manufacturers, and they're not short, so short-term changes are probably bad for all parties in that business.

A Saudi company changing could be more notable, because if anyone has enough money to buy themselves a better spot in those lists, I don't doubt it wouldn't be them...

I have absolutely zero affiliation with the airplane industry, so everything I said might only be coincidentally true.
Of course this will shift some orders towards Airbus. But besides that Airbus won't be able to deliver additional orders on short notice, the airlines certainly don't want to give Airbus too much power by dropping Boeing completely.
I have a lot of gripes with the first part of this article regarding old languages that "failed" (which I detail below), but what follows is a pretty reasonable assessment of why Lisp never really "clicked" as an enterprise language. My opinion on the subject overlaps, but I would say that the biggest issue is not programmer understanding (it is easy to write unreadable code in any language), but problems with the language from a business owner or manager's perspective. Lisp programmers are less replaceable, and the trade off between the benefits in power of Lisp compared to what large businesses lose in terms of ability to replace employees quickly was not worth it to them and I honestly couldn't say whether their judgement was good or bad in regards to this.

Starting at the top:

> Other languages of similar heritage (to Lisp) are still widely used.

Which ones? Unless I'm very mistaken, there were virtually no languages which fit into a similar role as Lisps for at least 1-2 decades after Lisp (1958) came onto the scene. The only language I can think of that would accurately match this description is Prolog (1972), because although Basic (1964) was also a dynamic, symbolic language, it was really meant to be an easier alternative to Fortran II with instant feedback and simpler syntax for people with little to no computer science or math background.

> Some of the above languages are no longer quite as popular as they once were. This will be the definition of "failure" we will use here. The question is why did they fail? The first stand-out is COBOL.

COBOL failed?!? It is possibly one of the most successful languages ever. From a 2018 Reuters report on active COBOL use that continues today (and was even more prevalent in 2009 when this article was written):

- 43% of banking systems
- 80% of in-person transactions
- 95% of ATM swipes
- 220 Billion LOC

> as time progressed fixed sized arrays as data structures became obsolete

According to who? Vast amounts of numerical computation software from weather and climate models to modern AI algorithms make use of fixed length arrays.

> The ALGOL language family succeeded. The reason for this is that these were the languages written by programmers for programmers.

There is no doubt that the Algol (C, really) family of languages have absolutely dominated, but whether that was because they were well designed or something like that seems a questionable notion. K+R were essentially looking for a portable assembler with which to rewrite Unix, and many would argue that C's popularity stemmed primarily from it's use in Unixes, which spread to all main stream operating systems.
> Every single time you'd get 'trailblazers' who'd come into the field, do shitty rushed science, hype their results like crazy, and by the time people figured out that all the initial results were garbage, they'd have moved onto the new hot thing.

Same thing happens in business with the latest startup or investment fad. People are sheep.
The parent is a good summary.

I'm also not sure what the point of training kids to do advanced math tests is, but it would be interesting to see what the results are, if any, over the next 5 or 6 years.
I don't believe I've ever seen someone refer to a full system as "Hurd". It probably doesn't come up much.
The whole design behind the max was to minimize pilot training and retraining. The airlines have as much to gain from retooling an existing design as Boeing has.
But probably memory as well. If I start specializing elsewhere I'll forget the intricate details of the thing I'm already specialized in.
Actually, math is not an universal language. There are several different languages within math, see http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/rosetta.pdf
The reported TDP is the designed TDP for the motherboard power delivery, not the measured consumption of each processor. To keep the number of TDP values low and to allow motherboard makers design a small number of variants, TDP values are rounded up to 65W, 95W and 105W. That means everything that goes above 65W in real life will be classified as 95W, even if the real consumption is 70 or 75W.
Okay if you want to treat life like an RPG you need to minmax the right skills in, fine. That's a very strange, naively calculated, and from my perspective, totally unfulfilling way to live life.
I completely agree - I've worked through most of this as well and I feel it is a really great way to introduce someone to the language. It seems to me that a lot of languages would benefit from this style of tutorial or introduction.
How can someone defending DoH talk about the spirit of domain separation? This is so absurdv IMHO
Vector Autoregression (Var) – Comprehensive Guide with Examples in Python
In my Bay Area neighborhood, residents have been feeding coyotes by letting their cats run loose outside. Then when the coyotes eat the cats, those idiots get mad because Santa Clara County Vector Control won't do something to remove the coyotes.

https://www.sccgov.org/sites/vector/programs-and-services/wi...
Sounds like wisdom of the crowds. A tax on soda is a fairly pragmatic choice that's implementable with minimum fuss and could show a fairly decent improvement across the population of maybe 2-3%
"something it shouldn't be running on"

That's not a law of nature though. Linus Torvalds hasn't decreed "thou shall not run this on an MCU". If it runs on an MCU that's fine. Theres a rich history of using computers for things they weren't designed for.

Id agree though, Arduino is in general the way to go, but STM32 is cheaper than Arduino and it depends what you're wanting to do.
Most of my day to day work is in python, but I have a number of projects in Racket and have been dabbling with common lisp. I think the author is simply incorrect here. Other algol like languages offer the illusion of understanding, but then you get things like 'patterns' where even though in principle you know what the atomic elements of the language mean you are confronted with an undocumented 'pattern' that you have to puzzle out to understand what the code is actually trying to do. Lisp provides structure for these patterns in the form of DSLs, and if that means someone has to confront that they don't know something, at least it whacks them in the face rather than giving them the illusion of understanding. More importantly lisps provide a way to formalize, specify, check, and document the pattern.

So if lisp failed for some internal reason then I don't think it was for the reason the author specifies. What should worry people more is that a language that is better in 99% of cases can fail for reasons that have nothing to do with its technical merits, but purely by accident of history or as a result of politics unrelated to those technical merits.

Trilobites were the most diverse clade in the history of the earth. Trying to rationalize why they went extinct by studying their anatomy is going to be fruitless. Same with LISP.
It looks like I was right, until about 2016, Alex Crichton was the only big contributor.
Free Resources – Ask Leo
Story can be read here:
https://outline.com/X6uzgf
Protip: the cultivar of durian matters, and is what I suspect makes many foreigners dislike durian (since they're likely to buy the cheapest to hedge their risk).

Musang King (mentioned in the article, though some unscrupulous sellers might pass D101 off as it) and D24 are favourites among the locals.

The cheapest is usually either Red Prawn, Green Bamboo, or Black Pearl, which aren't that great.

I think this article is pretty decent in describing the more common durian cultivars found in Malaysia: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/hail-the-king-of-frui...
Nice! Some time ago I worked on a ZX BASIC interpreter in Javascript, so it could run on browsers. My idea was that kids these days™ don't have an environment as easily available and immediately gratifying as we did back then, so I wanted to make one!

Have you considered doing something similar with yours?
I'm just waiting for the US Tax payer to pick up the charge through a bailout when Boeing has to pay out. Every airline in the world (that has 737 Max Aircraft) is going to want some sort of compensation (Billions $$$) for the grounding.

We should probably get some lube because it's coming.
I never said understanding, I said debugging. There are 4 implicit objects here (discounting proxies and wrappers), so unless you know them by heart, you have now idea what's in there. Then of course most debuggers will consider that one line, so to debug, you will hall have to split it in several ones to have the right to know what's going on. Plus, now that you have done it, what ? You put them back as they were ?

That's also hoping your code map files and your browser work well together, which is often not the case. Transpiled code is always a pain to debug at one point or another.

And that's just one line, a code back "full of those" will let you do the dance again and again. A very slow dance at that, cause babel is not the fastest horse in town.

Finally I'll pray your intern doesn't have to do it. But we all have teams full of good programmers right ?
As someone who lived in China for 10 years, they aren’t wrong if we are just talking about earning potential. The number of bilinguals is pretty high, you would make more than a couple of thousand RMB a month if you knew English in addition to a native mandarin. On the other hand, a machine learning expert would easily start around 60k RMB/month.

From a personal perspective, knowing another language is enriching, but don’t do it purely for the earnings gain.
Wouldn't you just offer a contract to anyone outside of the US? Treat it as a b2b contract?
For me Lisp was a lot of fun to learn and play with, but I dont think it had a chance to survive in modern production environment because:
1. Not typed
2. Absence of a proper package mechanism and package managers like cargo or npm
Less than a months production. For context, Boeing has over 7 years of MAX production in backlog.
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