skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The aspects of debt that you're focusing on aren't really relevant to how I use this metaphor.

Rather than trying to use the tech debt metaphor to actually calculate the interest rate, I think it's more useful at a higher level of abstraction.

When faced with the product decision to do more work now and build something better, or less work now and cut corners, what are the consequences of doing less? Without some way of conveying the long-term costs, your stakeholders will always push you to do the least work possible to tick the box.

The debt analogy is a universally-understood way of conveying the fact that if you cut corners, you'll likely pay interest later in the form of slower development speed. And if you take on too much debt, then all your spend will be going to paying off your interest, and your progress will stall. Non-technical people understand this analogy, and so it's a useful way of conveying the shape of the problem without having to start from first-principles.
Is a recession coming in 2019? Perhaps
> “It was like he’d never eaten before,” Boylan said. “He was just shoving the tacos down his mouth without chewing.”

To be fair, that's supposedly the correct technique for hotdog contests. Tacos don't seem like they'd work the same way though. Especially if they're hard-shelled.
I've only done whiteboarding in interviews for system diagram type stuff and explaining high level ideas. At my job, this is mostly what we use the whiteboards for in day-to-day work. Some people say they built a system, but when you ask them to draw the boxes and arrows to describe how data flows, it becomes obvious what pieces (if any) they actually touched. I think the people who do best in these are either more senior in their careers or have done a lot of side-projects from scratch. They have either seen a system evolve over time and solved scaling bottlenecks or they've set up many systems with a few different stacks and have thought about what the pieces are for.
Article author was confused by the org charts and diagrams, but it looked to me like the founders are setting the public company up to be machine for transferring investor money to themselves while maintaining voting control and without delivering any additional value.

Can someone better versed in finance explain to me how this is not a blatant flimflam to grab the IPO cash?
I think demand for VC-subsidised labor and real estate will always be high.
The majority of AI startups use AI instead of a glorified outsourcing house to manually do what the entire purpose of the business model claims it is doing.

But I guess i'm expecting too much from an Indian startup.
Depends a lot on the places you're interviewing at. The places that are bad at interviewing have the exact problems you're describing. Better places test for more real-world skills. The best places tailor the questions to the expected seniority of the candidate.

If the GP has had some amount of luck and/or skill with picking the places they interview at, they might not have experienced this too much.
> I don't think you are aware about Kashmir's situation prior to the abrogation of the article.

I'm no expert, of course, but I am generally aware of some of the issues in the region (disclaimer: I may not be a neutral source–none of my family members are Pakistani). I'm still of the opinion that shutting down the internet is a government overreach.
Great article. I do have one question for the void:

Am I the only remote worker who has zero interest in traveling to meet colleagues in a specific location? I already have a fulfilling personal life, I don't need to meet up with colleagues in-person in order to stave off isolation or function effectively on the team.
Wrong? Lol. It is my property. Obviously no one should surreptitiously record someone in an PRIVATE or INTIMATE moment, but in a free-space, in my house? That's fair game you dummy.
In my mind, the main feature of a tech company is the ability to scale due to almost zero marginal costs, compared to other companies which need much more time and resources, which is also why tech companies can have such huge profit per employee numbers.
Don't forget Amazon's Ring cameras!
Nothing will change until he election commission officials are held criminally liable for this.

In any country.
We're certainly a convenience service. You can definitely do this cheaper on your own and I wrote a bit more about that here:
https://nanagram.co/blog/how-to-mail-photos/

I think our prices are pretty solid and often hear that from customers. For $6.99 per month we mail 5 photos and all you have to do is text or email them to us. We also have an annual plan which brings the price down to just under $6 per month.

The service also really shines when you have multiple senders (siblings, cousins, etc) using it as we curate photos from the group via reminders.

We recently had the 5-photo plan set to $7.99 but unlocked savings on the fulfillment side, passing those on to customers.

Pricing has been a challenge for sure, as on one hand I've always firmly believed the product should be accessible to people from all walks of life, and on the other there is a reality of paying the bills.
I mostly agree with you, but I think what's happening here is reminiscent of the e-commerce vs brick&mortar debates from years ago. Ultimately, Amazon started as an e-commerce business that has a whole ton of brick and mortar capital and infrastructure.

For a long time, tech companies wanted to do everything virtually (apps, cloud, etc) and people NOT from the tech industry had an understanding of the brick & mortar world and harnessed tech to create a boom of some kind.

I think Uber is like that, in that the level of tech needed -- not just an app, but a global infrastructure that has to stay up and takes payments in a lot of countries -- when married with the real world, created a kind of behemoth.

They're also financial structure jockeys, and We is more contracts & funding and not really all that much tech.
Greenland was just viking marketing and branding and never intended to be accurate ;) See Etymology [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland
Our WeWork was so close to another WeWork that the WiFi networks interfered with each other, and caused the WiFi to drop out every hour or so. Took them a month to fix.
I'm not familiar with the process - what part of it is a scam? What makes tech a unique sector that makes this possible?
Blind Owl Selectors
Add to that investor pessimism driving bond yields down or inverting them, a trade war, bad global growth numbers, and investors sucking every last penny out of the stock market while there is still time. That's all you need for a downturn.

That said I'm not predicting a huge downturn. As long as there is some political correction back towards the center or left, which there usually is after a downturn, they'll be driving the Dow to 35k+ in no time. History repeats itself.
Deep fake video transformation face swap
Don’t they all?
> Debugging that on mobile platforms is not fun

That's debatable ;)
So their founders should be charged with securities fraud and go to jail if they do not tell the investors that it is what they are doing.
they outsourced that part to someone who doesn't speak English
> GE sold off GE Capital over a decade now.

They did? TFA (and Markopolus’ report) doesn’t seem to reflect that:

> In January 2018, GE reported a $6.2 billion charge based on liabilities in its long-term care business, which is run by the company’s financial services unit, GE Capital. To make up for the costs, GE Capital said it needed to set aside $15 billion to hold against potential losses, and stopped paying a dividend to its parent company for the “foreseeable future.”

A cursory glance at Wikipedia suggests some subdivisions were sold off between 2015 and 2017, which is...not the whole thing and definitely not “over a decade ago”
It's different in a way that makes an important point.

Could it have be put differently? Probably, but another rule of good discourse is to play the argument not the man (or the presentation), so you again seem to be making the parents point.
The objection in the article is that the workers don't directly own shares. It's still a company in which workers vote and share in the profits. They just can't sell their stake on the market.
I could say the same about wind or solar, it all depends on what you mean by "significant". The difference is that nuclear can actually support virtually any nation's energy needs today, wind and solar (or any other "clean" form of energy) can not.
Phyre: A new AI benchmark for physical reasoning
VMware says it is in talks to acquire Pivotal Software
Keats is correct - I figured this is a JS discussion thread so rather than say my target folder, I'd use "node_modules" for familiarity. I should have probably explained that. A bit of verboseness would have saved more verbose comments haha.
If it's so bad, then go short WeWork.
I think there's a good argument that larger-scale work-sample exercises like this are even more ageist because older candidates are more likely to have family commitments that give them less free time to allocate for things like this.
Yes:

- https://github.com/japaric/rust-cross (more involved)

- https://github.com/rust-embedded/cross (straightforward)

(Edited for formatting)
Smells like Theranos. It's surprising how easy it is to fool VCs these days.
"Humans are a cancer." -Earth
A somewhat apples-to-oranges comparison I know but; 277B:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="howdy"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', () => document.getElementById('howdy').innerHTML = 'Hello world!')
</script>
</body>
</html>
WeWork may be billed as a for-profit company but, for all intents and purposes, it is a non-profit.
There won't be much ice in Greenland either in the near/mid future...

>> I know this is off topic and doesn't add much, I guess I use humor in order to make myself feel better about dire situations (such as climate change tipping point).

We all do, its a way to keep your sanity in an insane environment
I don't care for companies that resell search results provided by another company. Bing! is okay, Yahoo, Ecosia and any of these other middlemen in the world of search I just don't have any incentive to use or reason to trust them.

I am sure the work Ecosia does is commendable but reselling search engine results is not going to plant enough trees to save the planet. It might provide their founders with a comfortable salary plus an ego-boost for do-gooding but I might as well do my Christmas shopping from The Hunger Site (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Site) for the good it does.
The entire point of investment is to sell for more than you buy, so yes, the exit is, and always has been the only thing that matters. And your accusation that it is a scam is just not true. A scam requires deception and where is your evidence of that?
This is completely untrue. The airbag will fire regardless of whether the seatbelt is worn, though it will be much less effective at restraining you. Out of curiosity, where on earth did you get the idea that they don’t fire?
That second paragraph is unkind, unnecessary, and unwelcome.
Here's one: 3141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974945/10^60.
Why Some Doctors Purposefully Misdiagnose Patients
Most people live with others in the same home, and more than one person can "own" a camera. Sometimes when no one else is home, privacy is expected of an otherwise shared space. I imagine in those circumstances, it can be comforting to know that the camera is actually off when you want it to be.
> Therefor, structuring the interview around stuff that only fresh graduates are likely to be up-to-date with would be discriminating against older people.

It's only discrimination insofar as the skills being tested for are irrelevant to the job at hand. I've had jobs where algo skills were borderline irrelevant, and jobs where they were crucially important.

Also, even where it is discriminatory, it's not necessarily deliberately so. It can easily be just poor interviewing skills — an interview process designed by people who genuinely think these are skills that they need to test for, without understanding the problems that creates.
Whenever possible I use the burner app if I need to provide a number to sign up for a service that I'm not particularly worried about losing access to, that sends a confirmation code on login. Especially when its something I only need to use once, like anonymously downloading a file from a website that requires a Google or Facebook login, for example.
That's surprising. Does it help to do a hard reload? Are any other WebGL demos working?
In a decade or so politicians may start fighting to tear down the wall.
I'm older as well, but I usually ask my candidates to use the whiteboard to workout solutions. It demonstrates that you can communicate effectively, as well as think on your feet :) I don't think it should be all about coding riddles, but I also don't think you should be surprised by them.

As a developer, I've always used whiteboarding as a way to communicate ideas, architecture, etc. There have been whiteboards in every office of every company I've worked at.

I'd say somewhere around 75% of all interviews I've had for positions at other companies have included whiteboarding.
Backup to S3 or Minio Using Restic
RIP.

No idea why anyone would do that to their body though.
The weekly work plan: A template for success
That has nothing to do with being state-owned. Lots of people in China are in the party.

China has SOEs. It has private companies. They operate quite differently from one another. Huawei operates like one of the latter, and legally, definitely is one of the latter.
It is still possible to make changes that are mostly reusable for both, but it takes some effort, and some parts (JS engine, multiprocess architecture) are so different that you just have to write it twice.
Yesterday I read that Google actually decreases their expectations in the white boarding exercises for experienced hires because they realize the leetcoding techniques will not be as fresh in an experienced dev's mind. The expectations are higher in regards to system design and resume questions. That seems to be fair imo.

Later in the material it said that they reject over 80% of people who make it onsite. The bar at FAANGs is just relatively high regardless what kind of role you are trying to get. My mentality is preparing for high bar whiteboard interviews best case lands a job at a FAANG and worst case makes it incredibly easier to land a job elsewhere at a company that doesn't rely on whiteboarding or has a lower bar in general. That's to say investing in whiteboard practice has little downside and has an acceptable time/reward ratio given the results if you are even just ok at it. In terms of ageism whiteboarding is not required to filter older devs out. Resumes viewing can do that. Why would they waste 6+ hours of their expensive Sr. devs time to put someone through a pointless exercise? Serious candidates will commit the same 1-3 months of study whether they are 23 or 43.
Cloudflare S-1
I did a chunk of the work on the AWS side, and it's not not due to Chrome/Firefox—Google is using Rust for Fuschia, after all.

At least on AWS' side, it was some individuals—me included—who sent emails to the right people internally & pushed on tickets to be prioritized. There was surprisingly little pushback.
Alternatively, don't have commas.
I can appreciate your breakdown and agree with the basic sentiment but the last sentence sounds like a cop-out.

Guns are just tools that poke holes in things. We can't hold the manufacturers responsible for the way they get used.

Fentanyl is just a medical drug. The pharma companies aren't responsible for addiction.

I don't even disagree with your sentiment and I don't necessarily agree or disagree with my silly examples. But I hope you can see why some people would see calling them 'just instruments' can come across as washing ones hands from any responsibility.
I get the point, but you could also argue that big companies want people who are strong on fundamentals and consider them something you shouldn't forget.

As in, the army won't hire a 40 year old for SOF if they can't run just as fast as the 18 year old can, even though they PREFER >30 candidates for, say Green Berets, but ANY candidate is useless if they can't meet basic fitness standards.

Same idea here, to some degree.

Can you write cleaner code and foresee problems as you get older. For sure.

Do a lot of older people get complacent, forget everything, or never knew anything? For sure, and I think they are testing for that.

Ageism is real and scary, but you also have to be proactive in defending yourself against it.

I have seen young devs try to devour an older dev, but they stay away when said older dev schools them.
How to Integrate Apple Pay
this is the right response.

if you see an early stage company using "AI", then assume they are manually doing most of the work right now.

They may have a clever way of making it smart in the future
That idea is the basis for the entire game of Goat Simulator: only fix crashing. Every other bug is hilarious. The game is basically a conglomeration of bugs.
Its also one of my kids' favourite games of all time
Is there any UI framework where testing isn't an afterthought?
I’ve tried spending time learning rust, but keep getting stuck since I don’t have a good project to work on.

What are some good open source projects built in rust which wouldn’t be too difficult to contribute to?
Are there any proven examples of a company doing this (starting with a manual approach), receiving investment, and eventually developing a working AI product?
> Avoid AWS like the plague

Autoscaling: Heroku - 2017, AWS - 2009.
There's a basic truth about being a knowledge worker that most people don't think about. This truth holds for young, old, programmer and non-programmer alike.

If you want to stay relevant and fresh long term, you need to be continuously learning. You can get away with not worrying about ongoing learning in the short term, say 8 years or less, but in the long term it's going to catch up with you.

This is one key reason programmers tend to move to other careers or into management after 10+ years: it's a lot of work to continuously learn. And worse than that, it's uncomfortable and makes you feel dumb when you know you're really smart and capable. Learning to embrace that feeling of being dumb, of being a beginner, is key to growth. And once you stop growing and learning, you start getting old.

For developers this means learning new languages, techniques, technologies, methodologies. If we accept that this learning is going to be happening, then it's not too much to ask that data structures and algorithms refreshers are part of this ongoing learning say 1 out of every 3 or 4 years.

Most engineers actually don't do this, and just stick with what they've been doing for the most part. Or just happen to passively learn whatever is rolling by them in the course of doing their job.

For engineering, there are actually tons of things that need to be studied that are technically not part of the job: writing skills, communication skills, math skills. Sometimes these things help you even though they're not part of the daily grind. The same goes for algorithms and data structures.

Studying these things also sends a signal to your interviewer: you're willing to go figure it out even when it's not fun and not convenient. As a hiring manager, I like that. And we can debate whether it's a good thing, but it is what the situation is at many places. Plus, it's fun to study a lot of it, so it's a good option to get on the learning.
It can't be recycled, that doesn't mean it never will be possible to neutralize it. This is a problem we can put off for a thousand years, we'll likely figure out a solution in the meantime.

You can't say the same about climate change.
The outcome of the electoral college is de facto the will of the people.

Similarly, any unelected bureaucrat working in the executive branch that pursues their personal agenda or tries to slow progress on the plans of the duly elected executive is de facto going against said will of the people.
So... the backend of this game queries the database even if the user name is NULL? And the CPU user uses a magic name 'cpu', which is not a reserved name? And apparently the backend is totally okay with a user name that doesn't exist in the database?

Either this story is just an ad, or this game has been really badly build and some h4x0r is going to have a field day with this.
Hate on WeWork all you like, but this is a shoddy article and a shoddy metric.

Their losses divided by their number of customers might equal $5,200, but that tells us roughly nothing. Maybe they have found a way to print money so they are growing aggressively?

I'd much rather meaningful metrics showing how awful WeWork actually is, than vanity metrics.
> Duggal “was telling investors that Engineer.ai was 80% done with developing a product that, in truth, he had barely even begun to develop.”

Due diligence? I mean, I understand VCs are not the smartest bunch but if you are investing $30M, please do the due.
My LinkedIn is full of spammy recruiter messages. Every message is a copy pasted blurb with the name substituted. I like to compare it to online dating: those poor women getting dozens (or hundreds on the dating sites) of messages by people just spamming messages to as many people as possible.

Maybe one day I’ll meet a recruiter who has actual value
>> is to not advertise when someone is watching.

Are you doing a Ph.D in social sciences?
I wouldn’t see it as a problem if human actions were systematically recorded into a structured dataset to be used as training data.

But it seems from the article that the labor is not used for this purpose at all.
If you are curious about this kind of stuff, I recommend reading [0] and watching a TED talk [1] about a very interesting research to try to unveil the most important painting ever made by Leonardo, the "Battaglia di Anghiari". [2]

Michelangelo and Leonardo were asked to paint large (7x17 meters, or ~ 23 x 56 feet) murals depicting two important battles (the Anghiari one being assigned to Leonardo). The "cartone" [3] used by Michelangelo survived to this day. [4]

[0]: UC San Diego Researchers in Florence Explore New Ways to Search for Lost Leonardo Mural

[1]: https://www.ted.com/talks/maurizio_seracini_the_secret_lives...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Anghiari

[3]: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartone_(arte) (couldn't find the one in English)

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cascina_(Michelangel...
At least it can't literally kill people…
Can you define it (as opposed to giving examples) in a way that calls any non-hardware-producing company a tech company though?

I sort of want to agree, but it seems like any software manufacturer is 'a <domain> company that uses tech, not a tech company' if you keep going.

WeWork, absolutely though. Honestly, the news to me here is that anyone thought it was or called it a tech company.
The FinTech company I work at offers ESPP and an option to invest in company stock for your 401k. I take full advantage of ESPP but sell it quickly. My coworkers have saved it and been through 3 splits and made a ton of money. The same coworker lost 10s of thousands when he worked for WorldCom/MCI in the late 90s. He’s probably even right now.

I would never invest 100% of my 401k into my employers stock. Even 10% seems risky.