skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The interviewer didn't like the answer because it didn't answer the implicit question, which is how well you can write your own software. We know that you can load a table into SQLite and have it do the heavy lifting for you. But we're often not looking for software _users_ as much as we're looking for _engineers_.

When we interview people, the answers we want often aren't real-world answers because we're trying to get a deeper understanding of how you think or how well you know the details of a complex mechanism.
I've been to a couple of states in the US that had a bottle/can deposit system -- a machine took the empties and gave 10¢ for each can or bottle. Are the glass bottles just melted?

In Denmark there are two categories of glass bottles with deposits. Particular types of drink must have a deposit on the bottle, and imported or smaller producers don't reuse the bottles. The biggest producers (e.g. Carlsberg, Coca Cola) wash and refill their bottles.

Here, plastic bottles and drinks cans are crushed and melted, but in Germany the largest users of plastic bottles (Coca Cola etc) use sturdier bottles, which are washed and refilled.
Julia isn’t yet ideal (but looks like this will be addressed soon) if your code will run in less than 30 seconds in eg Python, but anything taking longer than that would probably benefit from using Julia. So for most machine learning/data science projects Julia may offer a significant advantage over Python or R.
Apple: only we can track.
> I never understood how YAML is more human-readable than JSON

Two things: comments and multi-line strings.
wow, you just reminded me that AIM used to have a 200 buddy limit
See my comment above. Not all of National Insurance goes to the NHS, and not all NHS funds come from National Insurance. There exists no special tax whose revenue is earmarked for the NHS. Thus, there is no easy way to see how much of your pay you are contributing to the NHS. Similarly, someone in the US can’t easily see how much of their pay goes to the US military or to the National Science Foundation.

edit: On an individual level, a lot will depend on your income, and how expensive your US health insurance is. Here is an informative post:

https://www.quora.com/If-you-make-100-000-in-UK-what-percent...

That works out to about $560/month for someone with a salary of $100,000. If you take into account employer contributions, that's still less than a lot of Americans are paying. If you're on a lower income, you're likely to be paying significantly less in the UK for much better coverage.

And I almost forgot - copays! The amount you're paying in taxes in the UK really is paying for virtually the full cost of your treatment when you're sick.
I find this extremely untrue actually. Distros like Debian make you think that a rolling release must be unstable by virtue of the fact that the underlying software is unstable and it just isn’t true. Most of the software just isn’t breaking. The downstream is just doing too much magic, and that is breaking.

Arch is easily one of the most stable distros I’ve used Period. No hyperbole at all. It is more stable than NixOS unstable, and much more stable than Debian testing, and you don’t have to deal with the periodic massive shift that breaks the world when you upgrade Debian or Ubuntu versions. It’s because it’s simple. When it was a newer distro it had some issues, but for at least the past few years it’s been very stable, and most packages require few patches from upstream to work well.

Even using a bunch of AUR packages doesn’t usually lead to unstability in Arch.

Upgrades that require manual intervention are documented on the front page:

https://www.archlinux.org/

I’ve hit two during my multi year span of using Arch. Worth noting that few bugs will impact everyone since they are often scoped to packages that are not installed by default.
>I've blocked web features like WebGL and Canvas behind prompts

what extension does this? there's plenty that disables it outright, but is there one that shows a prompt?
"Python, Javascript, or Rust"

I feel like Rust does not belong in this list. Why would you introduce a non-programmer to Rust?
I don't buy that. It would have been trivial to support multipart SMS. You know, like all phones since forever.

-Edit- Okay, I was wrong. Forgot to think before I posted.
that seems to be a great asnwer to the question as posed, and as would be faced in real-world situations rather than academic ones.
At home with the couple that launched the doomsday bunker industry (2017)
Are they against universal healthcare, or against the politicians that happen to support it? Big difference.
> But we're often not looking for software _users_ as much as we're looking for _engineers_.

What the applicant illustrated is that he is a much better engineer than the interviewer and the interviewer did not like it.

Good software engineering is about leveraging existing robust tools in a new way, not about re-inventing a wheel while making is square.

For me that would have been an insta-hire.
Crying at Work, Not a Big Deal
Multipart SMS wasn’t trivial to stitch together then, absolutely did not have universal device support then, and in a few cases do not support it now.

Source : own an MVNO
I was lucky to have the chance to take a natural language processing course in the spring from a professor who was very knowledgeable and passionate about the subject.

Sentiment extraction, semantic meaning extraction, categorization... these are all really hard problems (to do automatically) even on properly spelled and grammatically correct text. I would imagine they are even harder in Chinese, which as I understand it has several different writing systems.

The HK protesters are clearly quite clever. If they keep using different obfuscation schemes for text, I could see it forcing the mainland to use human beings to read every post. Which I'm sure they have the resources to do, but it's still more expensive than using a machine.

Some strategies I would expect to be effective:

* Using alternative phonetic encoding (i.e. what is shown in the article, using Latin letters to spell out sounds rather than words)

* Homoglyph attacks

* Using deliberately incorrect or ambiguous grammatical structure

* Using deliberately incorrect spacing and punctuation (for example "m ee t. me;? b!y th e do.,c?s a!.t; m id ni;ght" will completely bewilder all the parsing packages I'm aware of)

* Convert the text to images and post those, possibly adding graphical text which will confuse OCR packages

Mix and match for even more fun!

There are also lots and lots of stenographic techniques, but those are a lot less accessible to laypeople.

I'm not familiar with NLP tools and techniques available for Chinese, but most parsers/taggers for English aren't really written with adversarial inputs in mind. It would probably be possible to deliberately construct valid (or at least decipherable to a human) English text that would crash the common tools available.

As an aside, the articles that keep coming out over the HK protester's tactics are starting to seem a lot like Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother"[1], which is available for free, and definitely worth a read.

1 - https://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_B...
How the Soviets stole a space shuttle (1997)
A sane alphabet. Cyrillic before the 20th century had some freaky things and weird use of letters that we still have. Aficionados say that ‘ѣ’ and ‘ъ’ could be properly used only by people who memorized all the words with them. (Which is not how modern Slavic languages work, even though English-speakers wouldn't bat an eye at that inconvenience, hur hur.)
I think it wise to be skeptical of any new result coming from a complicated proof until it has been proven multiple ways by multiple people. If multiple approaches are not easily attained, then passing the test of multiple counterexample attempts can at least provide some degree of confidence. If something new is significant, it tends to attract that kind of scrutiny pretty quickly. I think that is the saving grace of the mathematics community.
So true. Your comment made my day.
Obligatory "thanks for fish shell".

Try just using line-delimited JSON objects (http://jsonlines.org/). It ticks all of your boxes, especially 3: "jq -s '.cmd' fish_history | histogram".

Neither YAML or Protobufs are quite as easy as that.

All in all it's ridiculously simple, easy to parse in a variety of languages and each row is a single line that's simple to iteratively parse without loading the whole thing into memory.
That data is suspect.
If you download and unpack Slack's .deb package [1] , you'll find a script "/etc/cron.daily/slack" (contained within "data.tar.xz") that is a bash script run by cron daily under root account.

This cron script adds a line "deb https://packagecloud.io/slacktechnologies/slack/debian/ jessie main" into apt sources list. Also it adds Slack Inc. public key into list of trusted keys. This allows Slack Inc. to replace any package on your system including bash, firefox, libreoffice or sshd by publishing a package with the same name but higher version number. Note that they can provide malicious updates only to specific users, identifying them by country or IP address, so that other users won't see anything suspicious. For example, law enforcement agencies can ask them to backdoor a suspect's computer to gather evidence or important data for intelligence.

This is the problem with apt and with Linux package managers in general: they assume you only add package sources you completely trust and do not support installing third-party packags without this trust (unlike Windows that supports portable applications or Android that doesn't give root privileges to installed packages). Linux package managers are not suited for installing untrusted third-party applications.

[1] https://downloads.slack-edge.com/linux_releases/slack-deskto...
It's interactive performance art, imo. Not practical, but offers a unique social experience.
Twitter is prime example that if you load tons of money no matter how crappy your product is you can make money out of it. They succeeded into making celebrities use it.
Ask your butcher to wrap in butcher paper or waxed paper, which can be recycled, composted, or at worst it will break down much quicker than plastic. You could also bring Tupperware with you and have them tare it out. No reason this should be more expensive than pre-packaged meat.
Exponents don't continue forever in the real world.

It's anyone's guess to how far we go, but generally extrapolating a curve far off the current reading is a case of innumeracy.
We try to keep as much in the repo as possible. So raw assets, markdown documentation etc.

It suffers from many of the same problems, but having it be in the same directory/editor that I'm making a code change makes it more likely that I'll update.
A contact list is really a special kind of contact that can contain more contacts. It's more elegant that way. /s
The real skill is deciding what you need to interview for in the first place. Once you know roughly what you need, the next skill is learning how to assess applicants in an impartial manner. Once you know that, the interview is kind of a formality.
> It's actually quite baffling how Americans generally seem much more generous, warm and helpful to their fellow human beings, but the idea of potentially paying for someone else's medical treatment seems absolutely outrageous to most.

this is just my personal take as an american. I think the disconnect has to do with locality/proximity. americans who have some surplus income (ie savings and not living paycheck-to-paycheck) are quite willing to help people they know with cash or free labor and will happily donate time or money to help people in their broader community. what americans hate is being forced by the government to help people far outside their circle. I think partially we are suspicious that the money doesn't get where it's supposed to go intact, but there's also an element of "fuck them, what do those people over there have to do with me?"

obviously this is suboptimal as entire communities can be disjoint and have serious imbalances in funds available. also it tends to leave a lot of efficiency from scale on the table. but perhaps this at least explains some of your bafflement.
Well, sqlite is not recommended for write-heavy workflows anyway.

I have the same impressions as your parent commenter: passing around an sqlite connection handle is thread-safe and always will be faster than application-level locking.

If you do however have a write-heavy workflow then it's likely time to replace sqlite.
> One interpretation of what you're saying is that poor blacks are regressive.

Sure, but by that same interpretation, ice cream sales cause summer temperatures.

I think there is a correlation that politically regressive areas also feature worse poverty rates for minorities. My strong hunch is that the causation goes in the opposite direction of what you imply. Places that care less about civil rights and equality are less likely to work to address the systemic racism that leads to relatively greater poverty for blacks than whites.
matrix.org seems very promising!

I've been using riot.im for some time and have generally been pleased with it.
Buy it or not, that was their stated reason. Tweet/text twice if you needed a longer message.
Layla+Mattress+Savings
As I said, I was being descriptive, not proscriptive. Obviously in a civilized society, everyone has access to a bathroom. Also obviously in a civilized society, people use the facilities provided and clean up after themselves.

Those that are incapable or unwilling to do this either go into drug treatment, get mental healthcare, or if they are unwilling to do either of these and insist on being a public nuisance, they go to jail.

SF is failing to accomplish any of these things despite a gigantic budget.
This has nothing to do with the “UX” of your application. Sure, you may frustrate users if you don’t follow these rules. However, users will never use the thing you’re building if doesn’t meet their needs.
A Webassembly Experiment in Go
As someone who has followed the constructed language and international auxiliary language community for a couple of decades, and as someone with an undergraduate degree in linguistics, I do not see a constructed language catching on with the mainstream public any time soon.

A constructed language is a language that someone sits down and creates; this is different from a natural language which just forms as people communicate with each other. There are many constructed languages: Klingon in Star Trek is an actual constructed language, as is the language the Elves spoke in The Lord of the Rings.

Esperanto, and Interslavic, are examples of International Auxiliary Languages (IAL), languages specially made to be easy to learn to facilitate international communication. We have had those languages for well over a century, and none of them have caught on.

The reason why an IAL has not caught on is because people are motivated to learn a language when it has prestige, not because it’s easier to learn. Right now, for better or for worse, English is that language (with all of its warts: Auxiliary words to carry tense, the rather strange tense/lax vowel distinction, etc.) right now.

I would love to see an IAL to catch on, but there’s a serious marketing issue, especially since a lot of people just don’t have the mind to learn a new language as an adult, no matter how easy the language is to learn.
Bazqux, basically a GoogleReader clone if Google would still develop it. Works really well on mobile as PWA. Not free, but worth 20-30$ sub a year. Not affiliated, but a happy subscriber for 5-6 years. Everybody who still misses GoogleReader should try it.

https://github.com/bazqux/
https://bazqux.com/
understood, ty for the explanation.
Unlikely since the sharing of iCloud notes is essential to our workflow.
But it's not something that you can decide to do as a candidate. Without a picture, you're the oddball that doesn't get past the first screening.
Scientists discover another state of matter
It was GB that gave people more freedom, but the kicker is that the kids that were young enough to remember the 90's and are living in this corrupt system have seen it only get worse. There is nothing they can do except stand up. It wasn't good for them under GB, but it is worse under CCP.
Eh? Swift surely doesn't fall in this category, as it's meant to be used compiled, not from a REPL, and doesn't have a massive heavy runtime like Clojure. I refuse to believe that a Swift CLI compiled to native code as intended has a startup time problem.
I both agree and disagree with you.

I agree that the answer was a good one in the real-world sense, and one that I would like an engineer to use under the right circumstances.

I disagree that the answer demonstrated engineering prowess, however. Sometimes you have to assume the lack of existence of certain tools to understand how a candidate would have implemented the solution him- or herself to get a more thorough understanding of his or her engineering chops.
Yes, and switch to the power bar with low-power when he's chatting with the boss.
I went to check out Be My Eyes, because that sounds awesome.

It’s free, and they keep the video streams... and metadata, and place cookies, and tracking pixels, as per their TOS.

It’s another one of those “free app so we can collect all your data” plays.

Too bad. It was such a nice humanitarian idea, and now I have to delete it.
For those of you using argparse I recommend looking at configargparse. A drop in replacement which adds environment variable support (similar to click) and config file support
> "you had to be there at the time".

^yes. this, and access to technology. there was a pretty significant time where low-end PC tech could support little of the more "advanced" gaming trends. i played many text-adventure, MUDs and 2d platforming games (PoP, chopper commando, etc) because that was what would run on the machine i had access to. my neighbor had a pentium with a cd-rom...which is where i learned of myst ;)

i have a deep love of text gaming (online and off) because of this...and i can 100% see why it may not resonate so well with others
Music Is a Vestigial Trait
Interactive fiction games were the only "intelligent" games available for quite a while. All other computer games were either poorly re-created board games, or poorly re-created simple arcade games.
I wish the INI file format was standardised. It's easy for computers and humans to read and write, and it has nice features like comments and non-destructive editing!
Neat?
> You do not really await anything. What actually happens is an event handler gets called on an event,

So the event handler gets called immediately? No that’s not right. What would be the point of that? The event handler or continuation obviously needs to be scheduled on something that is awaitable. Meanwhile, other concurrent tasks may be able to run.

> This is the essence of asynchronous programming. There are no tasks, no yielding, practically no overhead and everything is deterministic

This is just totally wrong. Especially re tasks:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/asyncio-task.html#creating...

There is nothing inherent about async and await that prevents “yielding”... the issue of yielding and semaphores is a concurrency issue and since async and await are used in concurrent programming environments, the same issues apply.

While it is true async and await don’t require any kind of cooperative concurrent framework to work, that is kind of their whole point for existing. A single task async/await system isn’t terribly interesting.
You’ve just described Brave
Numbers over 2^52. Unicode. Terminator vs. Separator. Weak type system no DTD. No Xpath equivalent. No namespaces.
I'm Ukrainian and understand sample texts. I tried reading it to other people and they can understood it as well.
Don't take my word for it, here it is from Jack Dorsey himself: https://twitter.com/jack/status/912784057863245824
>but there is a lot of space in between where allowing violence to play out could even be beneficial to a ruling party.

That's why I used the word "sanctioned", publicly or privately.
>100% compatibility

Again, this could just as well have been achieved by just adapting a different alphabet, so this is not really a benefit to inventing your own alphabet

>cultural heritage

That depends on what you take "cultural heritage" to mean. I don't think inventing something new from scratch actually brings any kind of heritage. It looks like a case of "we just need to have something unique because, uhh, reasons".

>reduced cognitive load when learning new languages

I'm not convinced this is true. You're trading not having to switch mindsets about the sounds when switching languages against not having general familiarity with the alphabet, and I'm not sure which has a bigger impact on cognitive load. I also don't think either of those really has a big impact; the fact that a different language just has different sounds seems to be the main cause of cognitive load here.

All in all I think these are some pretty myopic benefits at best, and do not justify the gradeoff of having to add yet more stuff to unicode, make fonts for this new language, etcetera. I do not think the world needs yet another format to write down sounds.
Parent addressed your comment in his first sentence.

> I'd prefer XML because of the stability of the tools available for it.
The trouble with technical skill is that you can't measure it with anything like an ELO rating, and it's not easy to prove that knowing a given bit of technical trivia really helps you be productive, or that a given non-technical skill or trait really doesn't help you be productive.

If you hire chess players based on individual performance and regardless of group dynamics, then an argument could be made (not entirely trivially in all cases but it could be) that looking at anything except their ELO is illegitimate bias (and in fact some famous players from Lasker to Korchnoi said themselves that it's this objectivity which attracted them to chess). With programming, or most professions involving something meaningful as opposed to a measurable but pointless (and usually measurable because it is pointless) activity aka sport, it's much murkier.
And mapping out the Great Underground Empire on graph paper, before you could just get a map from the interweb.

Even if some games came with maps, some versions didn't. For example, the Commodore-distributed Infocom games were just floppy disks in large cardboard sleeves. You figured it all out on your own.
And in practice, if one Slavic language comes close to serving as a lingua franca in Eastern Europe, isn't it Russian? If you're going to learn a second language in order to communicate with people, you're going to learn a language with a large existing community - English, Modern Standard Arabic, Standard Chinese (Mandarin), Russian, French (in West Africa), etc.
I am Russian, and you just blew my mind with that piece of info.
JSON Schema (no points for imaginative names)

https://json-schema.org/
The decision of when and how to use attributes is the thing that is most often done wrong or clumsily in an XML file. That is my point.
Make America great again
Whenever you're executing focus is far the biggest multiplier.

Global warming is an existential threat effecting billions of people in a few years, air pollution is killing millions of people every year, but plastic pollution is not proven to be toxic or endangering animal species even though its horrible.
They had misfortunes plenty but in this one regard the dinosaurs were lucky: what a spectacular sight this must have been.
+1 for Pocket City. Definitely worth the $2 (or whatever it is now)
s/great/choke/