skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wouldn't deal with the contractor paperwork myself, but in at will employment states that's not even needed. Hire by W-2 and let go after a few months if it doesn't work out.

Thats absolutely my personal preference. The argument against it (very valid), is that if someone with a family relying on their paycheck quits their job to go work at another with that policy, and gets let go after 3 months, they're kind of fucked.
>There's a selection bias there.

You're right, that is true.

>but are you arguing that the interview process should select most people?

Not by any means. Just that when possible, and to the extent possible, interviews should select using the least-bias methods available and to select the most applicable candidate for the position. Not the candidate that had the best recall memory of obscure problems after spending a few months studying from some "beat the whiteboard interview" website.

I have no problem with whiteboard problems in general. It's a very specific subset of whiteboard problems that are used as a be-all-end-all, and are solving problems which will never be encountered in the position. These are they type of questions all of my comments have been regarding - not the whiteboard questions that demonstrate knowledge that will be used within the course of the job, or obscure questions where you are graded on the how rather than if you memorized the correct answer.
> It was entirely predictable that they would get none of the lottery tickets

No shit.

You've been in this space well over a decade. If someone offered this comp package to you, you'd likely anticipate exactly how it'd play out. (Maybe... looks like the investors got scammed this time too, so perhaps it was a practice that people typically respected.)

I guarantee that, when employees accepted their comp package, they weren't doing it with the understanding that they would never see a cent of equity if the Toptal succeeded well beyond anyone's expectations. So, yes, it was a devious move on the CEO's part, but at some point deviousness becomes sociopathic. Ripping off your workers is one of them.
Launch HN: We.fo – Smart landing pages for any podcast
Sure, because people decided the claims were credible.
Ah, that's a fair benefit I hadn't thought of. If you're a big company with tons of little remote offices having a single bill is probably nice.
1) "Technically" possible. Google won't do that though unless there's an external, super strong push.
2) DDG can do that since its main target is tech-savy users (at least for now).
3) EU can do that until it doesn't escalate into EU vs US trade dispute. 5B is probably okay since Google really didn't even pay their tax in EU appropriately, but 50B will be big enough for US to intervene.
> it might also be the case that many cook jobs were displaced by the decision of consumers who would've eaten out if the minimum wage were lower

So... paying people more makes them less likely to eat at a restaurant? That logic doesn't work, you're forgetting the other side of the consumer equation.

Look: you can find all the excuses you want. There will always be excuses.[1] But in real terms wages are declining at the bottom of the income scale, and that's not something you get to brush away as not a problem via some cherry picked data.

Is it genuinely your opinion that there is money in the US economy to give the super elite a 10x raise but none at all for anyone flipping burgers? Just say it if so and argue the moral level instead of all the excuse-making.

[1] Hell, Spain isn't even the only crazy outlier from 2014! Go look at Greece! Gosh, it's like both of those countries had something else going on besides simple market pressure due to wages, but whatever. There will always be an excuse.
Now tractable for smart undergrads who are into competitive programming.

Even if we leave aside the question of to what extent facility at competitive programming contests actually correlates with success in real engineering environments (my own sense is: yes it can help; but at the end of the day, just not all that much) --

if that's a skill you consider to be important, then for gosh sakes, put it in your job ads. Something like "We typically hire CS olympiads, and folks who have at one point or another have been fascinated by competitive programming contests. If this doesn't describe you, then this probably isn't the right company for you."
Of course - but it moved precisely because people with money decided the claims were credible.
yeah. it is rigged.

globalization, from the perspective of someone in a so called advanced country, seems to generally turn into a dressed up way of arbitraging less regulated (environmental, workers' rights, etc.) environments in order to increase profits. this is an easy way for capital to defeat labor's hard fought gains in e.g. minimum wage, maximum hours, benefits, "strict" environmental regulations, paying taxes, and so forth. the proof is in the pudding: US mass manufacturing isn't outsourcing to Germany, Denmark or Switzerland, because the arbitrage in differences in regulations aren't there.

capital loves globalization because it can do things like pit a bunch of desperate places against each other then simply up and move to the "winner", sort of like the Amazon HQ search but internationally. labor, you'll find, typically doesn't have quite the same mobility. it then wags "low low prices" in front of the consumers who then find it easy to ignore their now jobless brothers and sisters as they shave a couple bucks off something or other.

the first wave of globalization took goods-producing jobs and moved them into places where the calculus of (labor + environmental regulation + taxes cost savings etc. > additional overhead/compliance + logistics), then shilled the people on the meme of "lower prices" while their communities rotted away back in country.

now the boomerang is on its way back and we're realizing that the loss of revenues, environmental ruin, illnesses of despair/desperation, etc. etc. may not be quite worth the alleged cost savings we were promised.
This is one of the problems with sites like HackerRank that lots of companies seem to be moving to for testing applicants. I know almost all of us hate whiteboard problems, but I would definitely prefer the opportunity to talk through my thought process on a problem rather than having X number of minutes to get my code to pass a unit test or I fail the interview.
https://gowebexamples.com/
Yup, and re-electing yourself president of the board of directors.
The fact that it might never happen doesn't make it monopoly money. I once had a company that issued a convertible note which basically said, "If we raise x amount of money then it triggers a conversion to preferred." We didn't raise x amount of money, so it didn't convert to preferred. Pretty simple stuff.
That is NASDAQ not NYSE.
It’s pretty hard to have a reliable interview process if you don’t ask all of the candidates to do the same thing. Comparing how a candidate performed compared to other candidates on the same set of tasks is an important part of the evaluation.

Consistent processes are also important for avoiding bias. For example, take-home projects are more likely to make sense for young candidates who aren’t raising families and have free time after work. If you have most of your young candidates doing take-home projects and the older candidates doing whiteboarding, you will end up evaluating candidates differently based on age.
You are missing the fact that shipping containers are built for shipping and are reusable. They are not things that we have a surplus of and are abandoned, with no use. If you want to use a container that is not adequate for shipping to live in, you are crazy. If you take a good one out of the shipping pool, this means a brand new one will be built as replacement. At no point in a shipping container life it is good for the environment.

Arguing that shipping containers are the solution for the housing problem is like arguing frozen steaks are the best way to get a patient temperature down.
The two languages I'd be most interested in seeing added to that comparison are Nim and Zig. Those definitely have most of my mindshare on "new low-level/efficient languages simpler than Rust".
I work at Google in Cambridge, in Kendall sq. Most of my coworkers take public transit, most commonly the Red Line. If you look at https://www.mapnificent.net/boston/#11/42.3729/-71.0760/2700... you can see there's a large area within reasonable public transit commuting distance.

The tech company shuttles in the Bay Area mostly run to the South Bay, where Google etc are, and the public transit options there are minimal.
Is this unreasonable on a work computer? Any company with a well calibrated SIEM is already logging everything you do and firing off alerts when suspicious behavior is happening
> When a doctor interviews for a job, they don't ask the doctor to perform six surgeries in a day for free and then say, "we'll get back to you"...have interviewed countless "senior engineers" with degrees from well regarded universities who couldn't write a simple loop.

I think this is fundamental to the discussion. Are we really sure they couldn't write a simple loop, or were there other factors that prevented them from doing so? For comparison with your other analogy, keep in mind that even surgeons who have amputated the wrong limb are defended by their colleagues, saying “Well, it should have been amputated anyway.” (https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/17/us/doctor-who-cut-off-wro...)

I understand that you specifically might not have used that as your only filter, but a lot of people do – and I think a more holistic approach that takes into account education, training so far, and overall experience with tech. Certifications might be one part of this too.
That would cause any disk-write-dependent service to crash, yeah, but the kernel isn't one of those. Syslog will stop and a bunch of things will complain, but I've always been able to SSH in and free up some disk.
What if the evidence is deemed offensive by a mob because they don’t like the scientific findings?

Or what if the scientist has personal beliefs or opinions that are disagreeable to some?

And what if the evidence is politically toxic?
This was the case when I was in school too. (Gesh, it's been that long already?!).

I bet most schools are in a similar situation. Lack of a proper budget, cheaply made software sold by shady vendors, IT staff that isn't properly trained, etc.
Yes, but usually the employee sees something if the company is successful.

It's like playing Powerball, winning, and then the lottery agency saying "just kidding."
Drakon
Blackboard. Ha ha ha. Blackboard.

When I was in school, there was a vulnerability where you could reach courses that you didn't belong to, simply by changing the id in the URL. A couple of students got punished (banned from school computers for months) for exploiting this (to leave a message on said courses). As of a year later, the vulnerability was still not fixed (although the messaging infrastructure was disabled).
Globalization might have been tough for certain classes of workers in high cost companies but it was a HUGE HUGE HUGE BOON to workers in the many parts of the rest of the world. Literally billions have been lifted out of poverty because of it.

If it's rigged, it's important to remember that it's rigged in favor of those people too.
Probably the politicization of science?
I mostly agree, but attending any interview is also doing unpaid work in your free time, and often takes a comparable amount of time to the sort of take-home assignments used for recruiting.

I think the reason why take-home assignments tend to feel more unreasonable is the asymmetry. If I attend an interview, it's costing a pile of my time, but it's also costing a similar pile of time for multiple people at the company where I'm interviewing, which gives me some reason to think that my application's going to be considered seriously and therefore that the effort I'm putting in isn't going to be totally wasted.

Whereas a company can hand out a take-home assignment with no effort at all, so the fact that I've been given one doesn't indicate that the prospective employer sees me as a serious prospect or that there aren't hundreds of other candidates in the same position as me, so it's no guarantee that my chances of getting hired aren't miserably low, so there's more risk that I'm wasting my time.
Heard of a PIP or forced grading to the curve at say Microsoft back in the day.

You cant directly compare a professional job to say an skilled worker in a corner store / bodega - we may have similar problems but they express them selves in very different ways.
Is it possible that you are conflating ‘function’ with ‘reason?’ As a biologist, my perspective is that thinking in terms of functions (ie, the G6PD enzyme functions to produce NADPH and substrate for pentose phosphate using glucose-6-phosphate as a substrate), assists in creating further hypotheses by distilling observations, with objectivity as a goal. When I think of ‘reasons,’ I think more along the lines of: ‘the reason scientists express observations as functions is to avoid criticism from their peers about use of imprecise language, and to facilitate the production of publications to increase their professional status.’ Function is about describing observations, reason only makes sense if you are describing agents in their context.

Just a thought. My first sentence was a question because I’m not sure if my distinction boils down to semantics.

EDIT: if I had to elaborate, I would say that we can readily ascribe functions or reasons for things, but saying 'the reason for x is y' strikes me as treating the case as closed, whereas 'y is the function of x' brings up a whole raft of other questions, opening new territory for inquiry.
Its common to do that right before the company funded annual holiday party.
"It's not really a measure of mental health to be well-adjusted in a society that's very sick." -The OA
Would you feel better for it if you were paid $100 to do the assignment? That might be way less than you normally make, but it's something.
Haj subsidy is not history. It is targetted to be removed by 2022. I was harping on it because the other commenter cherry picked it and it is good to have discussions on matters that are usually brushed under the carpet. I am glad that you at least partially agree with me on unfair govt policies.
It's not perfect, but personally far preferable to having to perform with a gun to the head in an interview. Which has nothing in common with how software is written in the real world.
Enjoying lock-in - that's a new one. Instead, I enjoy breaking it (for example by using dxvk).
I think you may have blown past my point a bit in the rush to label what is and is Not Science (:P). Generally speaking, scientists and engineers today do not seem to be indifferent to the concept of teleology at all - in fact, many of them seem to have reached very strong (and quite hostile) conclusions about the topic with shockingly little basis. This lack of open-mindedness regarding the concept is precisely the problem I am attempting to point out. The perspective is so pervasive among the engineering classes in particular that I have routinely heard very well-educated people espouse incredulity at the merest notion of a natural telos (when they're not openly hostile to the concept, that is); from what I can tell the concept does not occur to them even as a remote possibility. My own opinion is that this violates the spirit of scientific thought and should be addressed.
Topgrade – run update for all your package managers
So something that has really confused me lately — I thought socialism had a relatively strict definition. AOC for example claims the label socialist, but as far as I can tell she’s not actually taken any socialist policy positions. It feels more like she, and others, are reclaiming the label. Basically attempting to change the meaning to mean nothing more than a liberal welfare state.

Am I on the right track there or not so much?
Ldidry/Lufi Encrypted File Sharing
~80% in reverse chronological order by year of discovery. Just went through the list of drugs developed in the 21st century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_drugs_by_year_of_disco...

Except for Alectinib, which was developed in Japan, 13 of the 14 drugs developed in the 21st century for example have been developed in the United States:

That's 93%. Again what has the rest of the World been doing?

So 9 by the 24th in the list not 30, so your reliability has also been established.
The Pain of a Child's Murder – IFCJ
https://www.nomachetejuggling.com/2014/06/24/the-worst-progr...
A few years back I cashed in the residue of a UK ISA (remaining balance just £1.50 but local tax laws forced it to be closed). No longer being in Blighty it transpired this would be a serious posterial pain involving sending of certified passport copies to validate signatures, etc, but their helpful man on the phone explained I could skip all that simply by registering for their internet banking access, then login and transfer the investment funds to wherever I liked. So off I toddled and being in a hurry and not overly concerned about the risk that some miscreant steal my half-a-cup-of-coffee's worth I pasted "sasquatch" into all the security question prompts. Clickety-click, done, now to close the account... "Please phone our banking service team for this request"

"Hello Mr Thombat, I can see your account number but first I just have to ask you some security questions...what was your grandfather's occupation?"

"Sasquatch"

"That's fine ... now what was the name of your first school?"

"(nervous giggle) Sasquatch"

"Ahhh...and was your first pet's name?"

"Sasquatch, too. I mean too as in also, not two as in the number...I really didn't expect I'd be telling these to a person, it was just a nice word to say..."

He kindly overlooked my embarrassed tittering, didn't go all jobsworth about this horrific breach of security best practice, nor yet accuse me of lying to one of Her Majesty's civil servants for pecuniary advantage. And (in my defense) no amount of dumpster diving or Facebook scraping would have revealed my family's secret shame that grandpa used to roam the American woods in a monkey suit.
This defense even has a name: "Good heart, empty head". See for ex https://www.pepperlaw.com/publications/why-a-pure-heart-and-...
This is a terrible idea, and I wish sites/foundries would abandon it.

For fonts with features like ligatures or kerning, it'll break these when the adjacent glyphs that should interact happen to come from separate sub-fonts. But even for simple fonts that don't have any such features, it can result in terrible rendering because it's possible the font rasteriser (e.g. freetype), which sees the two parts of the font as completely independent entities, will end up applying hinting in quite different ways based on separate analysis of the disjoint glyph subsets.

I've seen real-world examples where the end result is that half the glyphs "snap" to one x-height value, and the other half (from the other sub-font) snap to a value that's a pixel taller or shorter. The font rasteriser has no way of knowing that it should have auto-hinted "globally" across the two separate resources.
const foo = await callApi(url)
console.log(foo.bar)

Why do we need anything more complex than this?
Animals like squirrels, cattle or deer would render a planting scheme like this useless by simply trampling, digging up or eating the saplings.

Source - friend who attempted to begin re-foresting land purchased in Utah with native trees.
In theory "yes" but in practice engineering doesn't disbar people in the same way law and medicine does.

When was the last time you saw a news story about a Ceng / PE getting disbarred? Stories about doctors are much more common.
I disagree with a lot of what google is doing. It's unfair that google seems to have a free spot and do not have to compete in the bidding here [0].

IANAL, so I wonder if this really fulfils what Google is trying to achieve legally. They are giving users more choice but they are effectively using their market position (Android) to get more google search usage seemingly unfairly so I would think this would lead to more anti-trust issues for them.

That said, I agree with dahdum, I don't see why any of these providers should get any help in a competitive bid. If Ecosia sees value in being here there is a price to be paid, I would be surprised if they didn't pay for all the advertising they have done.

-0 "Search providers are required to apply for inclusion through a bidding process to become one of three alternative choices to Google Search" - from Article
God damnit, why can’t someone just finish implementing Wireless AC support for Intel 9560 in the iwm driver already? It’s been what, a year?

Is it just too technically hard? Is it a matter of money? At this point if I could just throw down a few thousand dollars to pay for someone to finish it, I would.
The market moved too quickly for the parties acting to have had time to actually digest the merits of the report. The market moved because the people who released the report had credibility.
I thought that blind religion is suspicious, I thought.
More general: blind adherence to groupthink is perilous.
The current state of Physics research, as far as I can tell:

[if such and such then] ... physicists should move on to consider alternatives and admit that our original concepts of “naturalness” might have been wrong.

"naturalness" as in: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2017/11/naturalness-is-dead...
Current recommendations on discussion boards for job seeking are to complete 300 medium-to-hard Leetcodes in the 60 days before your interview. This is up from 200 1-2 years ago.

If you won't do it there are many others who will.
It's incredible. That would be, from ~250B stars in the milky way to ~62B Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone.

Assuming even distribution across the whole universe, that's
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars *.25 = 2.5e+20 Earth-like planets in the universe. Astonishing estimates.

As an aside, this Google search result is alarmingly wrong. I wonder how often Google is this wrong for things like medical queries? Yikes. https://imgur.com/a/v75P575
The kind of company that gets upside from spying on its workers isn't the kind of company that rents a trendy office space with free beer.
I was a contractor working on an IS at the FDA in the early 2000's. Shortly before the VIOXX scandal (https://www.drugwatch.com/vioxx/). The number of cheats they were specifying to go around safeguards was scary. Fortunately, they fired the company I worked for and awarded the contract to the company employing the husband of one of the FDA managers. ISYN. A relief to leave.
I'm genuinely surprised this didn't result in his expulsion, knowing how these kinds of stories usually go down.
You write this like it's a dystopia, but that has been a standard practice at every decently-sized company I've worked at.