skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recall an article (or blog post) from a couple years ago- it made the case that US productivity had been grossly mis-indexed since the 80s, in part due to assumptions about CPU power relating to economic productivity where Moore's Law essentially inflated the numbers. Does anyone happen to remember this same article, and have a link?

EDIT: here it is, from 2012. I saw it again in 2016 when it was brought up to explain Trump's election, by way of reminding American elites just how bad "deindustrialization" and globalization really had been for the heartland:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/economists-o...

"Moreover, at least some of the productivity gains shown in U.S. computer manufacturing reflect the increasing power and decreasing prices that come with innovation. When a computer chip doubles in efficiency, that can turn up in a doubling of output and productivity in computer manufacturing. But that is not what is ordinarily thought of as manufacturing efficiency.

“It is innovation that makes it look like they’re manufacturing a whole lot more in the U.S. than they really are,” Atkinson said."
Putting it into WASM at least will deal with a lot of the potential issues that AS could have, simply because WASM doesn't have access to the outside world to attack anything.

As for RAM and CPU usage, there's not much that can likely be done. Better garbage collectors and other things like that might help but Flash itself was the cause of a lot of those problems.

If this was a full implementation it'd be something open source that could run flash files/movies, so it'd be a bit less proprietary. There still wouldn't be open source editors that could handle doing it all so it wouldn't be complete or even close as an ecosystem.

That said, all this could end up creating a good alternative for when all the browsers and adobe drop flash support in the next year (Firefox ESR is the only one I know of that's committed to supporting it until the end of 2020). A sane and safe migration path would be really useful for somewhere like newgrounds or archive.org to preserve internet history.
What stats and surveys are saying about top programming languages in 2020
See this page: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/CapNotes.htm for an explanation of how the Federal Reserve gets these numbers.
Put them above the road and tall trucks can't go through anymore. Plus, the support structures needed suddenly become obstacles for cars to hit when making emergency maneuvers or drivers lose control, and now you've got tons of glass shards, electrified wires and steel supports falling down onto the freeway.

Under the road is literally the only option, and it's a terrible option at that. Rooftops - or better yet, former farm fields- are always going to be cheaper and more efficient.
Eclipse Collections – the features your collections need
I always assumed they taught the Yale Romanization in schools, since that's what every book I've bought in Hong Kong has used.

Outside Hong Kong, Jyutping seems pretty much universal.

Is everybody really typing with Cangjie/handwriting? xD
Apple will soon treat online web tracking the same as a security vulnerability
Some homeless need homes, others need medical care, drug rehab, jobs or education

Some just need a second chance and a hand to be able to climb out of the hole they’re in

Others won’t be able to ever help themselves

Saying they “need homes” because they’re “home less” sounds so naive

Edit:

Everyone needs shelter and I hope a comprehensive solution could be implemented where anyone in need could find the type of shelter that is most helpful
Intro to Svelte
Or even a general security page like https://kloudtrader.com/security
Upheaval is the issue. First, most contracting firms have pretty crappy medical plans. Secondly, there's generally a wait period before full benefits kick in. Thirdly, you wind up switching your medical plan multiple times in a short period.

That's fine if you're single, but if you've got kids that might mean switching doctors multiple times, which is a gigantic huge deal. Also, you have multiple periods of time where you don't really know your benefits which is terrifying. And if the company does drop you after three months for whatever reason, now you're doing it again.

And keep in mind it's definitely a seller's market if you're a good dev. It's incredibly unlikely that the 3-month contract is the only offer on the table. So all things being equal, who would take it?
It's been done with bike paths. Also got a terrible track record with a lot of failures.
Thank you for your refreshing point of view. I'm a mid-level software developer and I was on the other side of the table as a junior web developer and encountered this same style of questioning and embraced it. This is my go-to style when interviewing because if you are confident in the lingo and zeitgeist of development, there is no way they can bullshit there way and lie through their teeth on their own experiences. It is very easy to tell. Whiteboarding doesn't give that detection since it is too broad of a spectrum to start as a indicator of experience.
What about the high level of oxalates in spinach, the over-consumption of which can result in kidney stones[1]?

[1] https://nutritionfacts.org/video/oxalates-in-spinach-and-kid...
In the US, it's cheaper to build and operate wind farms than buy fossil fuels
FWIW, the common changes were to

- remove DTDs completely.

- by removing DTDs, remove non-standard entities

- by removing DTDs, remove the concepts of notations and all external resource resolution from the core spec. Also, no possibility of entity-expansion attacks.

- by removing DTDs, remove validation from the core spec.

- merge namespaces into the core specification. At the same time, make them mandatory

- merge the concept of qualified names into the core specification

- by making namespaces mandatory, all the variations of how namespaces get exposed can be eliminated

- merge the info-set definition into the core specification

- by describing XML items and how they relate, implementations can understand what data is relevant at a particular point while parsing the document.

- Merge xml:id into the core specification.

You also had some other fun outlier concepts:

- Eliminate prefixes from infoset. This is mostly a breaking change for XPath and XML Schema.

- Add an explicit qualified name token (possibly recycling the entity declaration). This would allow the above specs to have their functionality restored, although likely with a new format.

- Accept qualified names without prefixes, such as via a {uri}:{localName} syntax.
I think for the purposes of antivirus software, trust issues can be set aside here. Windows Defender ideally has the upper edge for choosing an antimalware solution for Windows in that it's baked in directly to the OS and therefore has more control and ability to prevent malicious activity than a third-party solution. You might not have to trust Microsoft due to privacy concerns, but for something like antivirus software that protects their operating system, intentionally making Windows Defender inferior software just isn't within their best interests.
I prefer take-home assignments. I know that they often get a bad rep and have the potential for abuse; for this reason I'd argue for implementing some or other solution in the field.

I recently had one requiring me to develop a native mobile application, which I enjoyed. It was interesting, the code is useful down the line, and if I don't land the job, it beefs up my portfolio.

Initial screening by recruiters is tough as my background's missing a degree and industry experience.

Context: self-taught, started out with game dev, tried going solo - not a runaway success. Looking to move away from the field.
> But that’s just the first ten years. After that, nobody can think of a single feature that they really need. Is there anything you need that Excel 2000 or Windows 2000 doesn’t already do? With all due respect to my friends on the Office team, I can’t help but feel that there hasn’t been a useful new feature in Office since about 1995. Many of the so-called “features” added since then, like the reviled ex-paperclip and auto-document-mangling, are just annoyances and O’Reilly is doing a nice business selling books telling you how to turn them off.

> So, it takes a long time to write a good program, but when it’s done, it’s done. Oh sure, you can crank out a new version every year or two, trying to get the upgrade revenues, but eventually people will ask: “why fix what ain’t broken?”
Hmmmm....assuming Brexit happens, will English remain one of the official languages of the EU?
It is finally happening! Nice to know about it.
Thomas Edison DC Electrical Cables
Parameter Optimization in Neural Networks
Relax it a bit more and you get Neon: https://ne-on.org/
I guess the reason is that if it would work we would already know about it and there would be a bullet-proof way to prove it
Does it? Maybe on the micro but at the classical macro level, it's pretty deterministic. Why not both? And in some beautiful Taoist fashion, perhaps they're mutually complementary, both opposites need to exist for reality to exist as is. But as a layman, I know enough to know how hotly debated this subject is so I digress.
And when you’re trying to program as close as possible to the speed of thought, every keystroke counts.

And when is that ever important? I've been in development and sre roles for decades, and I've never been in a situation where I have to program at the speed of thought.

The only time I've seen milliseconds matter is watching movie depictions of hackers.
and same goes for solar farm as well.
It’s also very subjective and hard to train for or to audit externally. When a company gets too big, you can’t properly vet hiring personally anymore, so you have to scale it.

You don’t want ‘bozo cliques’ to form, so you make a semi-objective process like ‘solve this algorithmic question’ as part of the interview loop. I think execs and the founders doing a final review before hiring all engineers comes from that fear.

Then other companies cargo cult interview processes from larger companies and the trend propagates.

If you want to ‘hack hiring’ as a smaller company, you should use hard to scale processes like the one described in the parent post.
These are the kinds of interviews I love, and I appreciate that they're still given at some places. I agree, it's nearly impossible to bullshit your way through this kind of a conversational interview but people still think they need to ask trivia questions.
Britain makes the best cars in the world, the problem is they only make a few dozen a year. All that hard work, just for Lewis Hamilton to lead a parade.
• Largely assumed mouse/keyboard interaction and had no plausible mechanism for responsive design

• Proven track record of terrible security bugs

• Was most frequently used for ads
Can you help me follow, because that seems like a leap of logic. Why would that imply there's a bullet-proof way to prove it?
3-in-1 Machine for 3D Printing, CNC Carving, Laser Engraving. Is it worth?
Outside the HN bubble, in the designers and game development community, Flash was loved.

* Powerful graphical tooling, where HTML/CSS are still catching up to

* Guarantee to actually have hardware acceleration, instead of CSS z-index tricks hoping for the best

* It was the first to support game engines on the Web, like Unreal

Unknown to many, Flash apps actually do exist on mobile, because Flash also AOT compiles to native code.
> /changes lists all the IDs that might have changed.

How does it do this in a distributed setting? When clients might be connecting to multiple servers with different states?
SIGSTOP / SIGCONT
That's where it is. He then calls it a "set it and forget it" crypto bot. Yes, please forget about the $1,000 you just gave me...
* It remains to be proven how WebAssembly is so much better than everything that came before it (hackers are yet to start having fun with exploits)

* Flash games market was huge
Any good YouTube videos on the topic?
You didn’t read my comment. The problem will not be solved by lumping the underpaid with the mentally ill or drug addicted. You have to address each issue separately. And like I said, millions of migrant workers come here from Latin America and aren’t living in tents or cars, they just get roommates.
People drive into things over roads:

https://gfycat.com/difficultgrizzledfox

Imagine that, but with solar over the road- you now have sheets of glass shards, live electric wiring and support steel falling down over the road. Additionally, the supports (along side the road to hold it up over the top) become targets for collision as well.

The sheer amount of materials required to make it sturdy enough to survive tornados, general high speed winds, and the occasional accident from a moving vehicle means that you're going to have a hard time coming out carbon neutral- or at the very least, you'll lose a lot of the benefits.

Of course, putting the panels under the cars is a pretty awful idea as well. Simply put, they don't belong near roads at all.
Okay, my favorite Indian dish is shrimp saag. Please add a shrimp option.
I'll try - a few thoughts:

Software engineering is part knowledge and part application of knowledge (problem solving) and part ability to acquire and apply new knowledge. We remain current in our jobs and roles by making sure we're constantly learning. Interviews should be part testing of knowledge, but a lot more discussions to evaluate problem solving and ability to acquire & apply knowledge.

Also, knowledge in many cases becomes stale if not used. If I learn a new language/framework but don't use it in a project immediately, I'll forget almost all of it. I may learn react via books/tutorials, get a great score in the test, never use it and/or forget it by the time I get a job based on the score. Am I a good hire?

Given that it's not clear as to what problem such a test will solve and moreover it's unclear as to the long term impact of such a test. Is this just for initial filtering, or will become an actual hiring criteria?

If graduates from colleges are expected to take such a test to prove something, then what is the value of the work these grads did in their colleges? How is a score in these taking in regards to the work students do in colleges?

Some people are better test takers than others. An a good interviewer is able to probe and work with the person. So such tests may end up discriminating, not on purpose of course, against bad test takers if they become the sole filtering mechanism. People may have to take tests again and again till they get a good score. An effort, which in no way helps in their job per se but is simple an additional burden.

The only potential place where I can see some value for such a test if to evaluate the coding camp folks, since different coding camps have different quality. However, even there, it's unclear how this will pan out.
> Food isn't all about efficiency

This thread you have been commenting on is talking about efficiency...

> I think it's equally likely that it'll stay an overpriced niche product

You say, ignoring that the opposite is happening

> Yet, it's more expensive, so there clearly other inefficiences in that process

It's still currently expensive because of the sunk cost of R&D. Now it's just about demand and scale which are both there and growing.

Your arguments are weak. All you have is "it's more expensive" and "It's tasty". Keep your head in the sand.
> XML cannot be parsed into nested maps/dictionaries/lists/arrays without guidance from a type or a restricted xml structure.

? Using XML without a schema is slightly worse than JSON because the content of each node is just "text". XML with schema is far more powerful, also because of a richer type-system. JSON dictionaries are most of the time used to encode structs, but for that you have `complexType` and `sequence` in the XML schema.

I've been using XML with strongly-typed schemas for serialization for the last couple of years and couldn't be happier. I have ~100 classes in the schema, yet I've needed a true dictionary like 2 or 3 times.

> And we didn't even need to get into the needless complexity of validation, namespaces, and other junk.

Validation is junk? Isn't it valuable to know that 1) if your schema requires a certain element, and 2) if the document has passed validation, then navigating to that element and parsing it according to its schema type won't throw a run-time exception?

Namespaces are junk? They serve the same purpose as in programming languages. How else would you put two elements of the same name but of different semantics (coming from different sources) into the same document? You can fake this in JSON "by convention", but in XML it's standardized.
That’s definitely the case when thinking about security in a strictly limited scope. In contrast, my team is holistic — any issue that could affect ICA (integrity, confidentiality, availability) is in our purview.

My team engages in the earliest phases of design. Holistic security is our priority, but not a limiter for our engagements.
How can one "set aside" privacy issues?
May I please read the real-world experimental data that will save other companies millions of dollars?
That had already done that back in Windows 8 introduction.

You just need to code with UWP and async/await.
> I've become a bit too PC over the years.

What's "PC" ? Did you mean PC as in "PC vs Mac" boring/conformist vs cool?
I'm not sure we will ever see another Edison like figure
Ask HN: Alternatives to algorithms/data structures for software interviews?
Most candidates mention spending months on LeetCode/HackerRank/Spoj before interviews. If you need to spend months brushing up a set of skills, it's a clear sign your previous job(s) didn’t use those skills.

Algorithms/Data structures knowledge is useful to software engineers, but using it as the most important proxy for candidates’ software skills is debatable.

Some arguments for this approach include:

1) It’s an objective approach, with little to no interviewer bias especially when interviewers use a common question bank.

2) New interviewers need little training, so practically anyone on the team/org is ready to take interviews after shadowing a couple.

3) Algo/Data Structures rounds can be easily automated with online judges.

What are some alternatives to algorithms/data structures approach that don’t lose some/all of the benefits mentioned above?
Oh don't get me wrong, I wouldn't trust the guy farther than I can throw him either. I just wanted to be a bit pedantic about "normal fraud" vs. "crypto fraud" (= ICO or similar).
Politically correct.
One company sent me (before the interview) a small technical assignment. After I had submitted the code, an interview was scheduled. The entire interview was an extended code review -- talking about trade-offs, about other potential solutions, etc.

I felt this was much better in that it was less stressful, yet allowed me to demonstrate both knowledge and design skills.

Another company did something similar but more thorough: They invite candidates for a full day of work where they try to solve a small problem. Then the code is reviewed and evaluated together. They also start the day with a 1-hour overview of their current architecture and you get to ask questions and talk about alternatives. I think this gives both sides a better chance of finding the right fit.

I realize this is not always reasonable.
Ah, makes sense. Thanks. Somehow the obvious was escaping me.
I'll give you 1000:1 odds that we won't.
> and it terrifies me

You can get natural gas alarms cheaply e.g. on Amazon. Since natural gas is lighter than air, they should be mounted above the hob area.
Acne Skin Care
"can't I figure out what the macros are by asking the chef for an ingredient list?"

It's possible but the burden of doing so means most people would abandon it after a few days.
I don't see why self discovery has to involve external expression. Isn't the whole point to delve inwards?
> What kind of community is this if you can't question the motives of someone with a penchant for only replying to policital threads of a certain flavor?

The kind of community where users are asked to assume good faith and not allowed to sling mud at each other.

> If I didn't say anything about the guy's post history would you have checked?

In this case I already had, because another user followed the guidelines and emailed us.

> it's very clearly biased towards "China" news articles and the CCP party line

Every account that posts on political issues is biased toward their point of view. Alas, many users, when confronted with an opposing bias, simply can't imagine that someone else sincerely disagrees with them. That's absurd, of course, but it's what underlies virtually every accusation of astroturfing/shilling/spying on political topics, including, I'm pretty sure, the one you're making here.

> the most obvious AstroTurf shill account I've ever seen

That is a good example of what I just described, as anyone who looks carefully at the account's public history will see. It's true that they were breaking the site guidelines by using HN primarily for political battle. But that's not evidence of astroturfing or shilling, it's evidence that they're fighting for the group they're loyal to. Such loyalty isn't hard to understand and needs no sinister explanation. It's as simple as that people come from different backgrounds. HN is a diverse international community, so many different backgrounds are represented here. As long as people follow the guidelines, they have a right to comment without being denounced or smeared.
I worked at a company that introduced recycling program and we had three bins: trash, recyclables and food

We were all trying to abide by the program and go “green”.

One day we stuck around late and noticed the cleaning guy come in take the three bins and empty the onto the same trash container

We asked him and he said they only had one type of trash containers we downstairs so everything went into the same one
The latter is quite likely.

I have come across quite a few “green” initiatives over the past several years which are extremely questionable in their technicals - and all are taking public money, mostly from European Development Funds in the EU, and from similar bodies elsewhere.

They are usually highly visible, buzzword bingo initiatives. You see these projects in the press - a group grinning in hard hats, a colourful initiative behind them. You go back a few years later and it’s tape and barriers and broken glass and danger signs.

Whether folks start with good intentions but then move on, or don’t have adequate plans for maintenance (which then makes one wonder why funding was granted in first place), or simply see an opportunity to extract wealth from a public body, I don’t know.

An anecdote: a service station near my home in north wales proudly announced that they had received a grant to put on a turf roof, solar and wind power. EU funding. Three years on, and they’ve just announced that they’ve received a grant to do exactly the same thing. Plumbing the Europa site shows that the previous grant was paid, and the project reported as completed - but they never did a thing. I’ve seen the same cycle being pulled elsewhere.

There is such a push for governments to be visibly green that they are spending money on highly visible nonsense. The current elected power gets the boost for snipping the ribbon and providing the funding. Their successor gets a beating over the wasteful failed project.

There are good green initiatives happening, but it’s usually where nobody is looking.
Here's a start:

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/Eng...

for something more in-depth:

https://history.army.mil/html/books/070/70-54/cmhPub_70-54.p...

And if you want to do a REALLY deep-dive into the original Soviet theories:

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/combat-studies-ins...
Software architects are more like ancient architects who were responsible for everything, which includes structure integrity and load requirements.