skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TLDR; The cost of a bad hire is extremely high and not worth the risk.

I'm a team lead and do a fair number of interviews. It's amazing how many people can talk about their experience and make a ton of really impressive statements that makes it appear as though they are knowledgeable and then that person can't perform a simple coding exercise. On the other hand, it's equally amazing how a person can do an excellent job coding but not be able to get through basic day to day human interactions with their peers.

If a candidate falls into either of these camps, they are an easy no hire. If a hiring manager ends up hiring a candidate that is difficult to work with either because they can't code or because they have poor social skills, it can be very costly. It often takes several months to find out that you made a bad hire. By the time you figure it out it's often taken a large toll on the team and can lead to productive team members leaving.

When you finally find out that you've got a problem most companies have a huge process to go through for firing that person and that process is super intensive and takes months. Not to mention how emotionally difficult it is to tell someone they are so bad they have to be fired.

All that to say, the cost benefit analysis is clear only hire people that will over time be a net gain. Don’t take any risks ever.

If I were a recently graduated software engineer, I would be hedging against these risks in every way. I would produce a lot of code in the area I’m seeking to be hired. I would work a lot on being friendly and carefully choosing my words, so I don’t sound like a know it all or a person who enjoys conflict. I would prepare statements about my goals of how I fully intend to spend at least 3 years at this job if conditions allow, and I would practice being humble.

No one actually expects you to spend the next 3 years at a job if it’s not going well, you just need a way to express that if it’s a good fit you intend to stay put and do a great work. 3 years is just an arbitrary number.
Zuckerberg is a clown.
Restic can operate over (among other methods) plain old SFTP[1]. Therefore, it does - and always has - work perfectly with an rsync.net account[2].

I personally find it reassuring that even though I might be creating and maintaining backups with sophisticated tools like borg or restic or duplicity or rclone ... at any time, and from any system I can grab those backups with dumb old SFTP.

[1] https://www.rsync.net/products/sftp.html

[2] https://forum.restic.net/t/restic-commands-for-rsync-net/216...
I might be overlooking this as I am on mobile, but what is the license for mishegos?
Well for one, you will have a hard time running Linux with 32k of RAM…

For Linux to be viable you need at least 2MiB, 8MiB to do anything useful.

Microcontrollers that are used for sensors and controller devices don't have that much memory.

High end MCUs will have 256k RAM/1024k ROM, but cheaper/lower power devices will have much less.
Hiring for Conscientiousness
The two interpretations are "they worded the title badly" vs "they worded it this way intentionally because they are making a non-obvious point".

I suspected the former but the latter was still a possibility. The likelihood of one over the other doesn't excuse the poor wording.
The Five Most Common Bugs You Should Be Writing Tests For
How does it compare to Rclone? https://rclone.org/
Dart has gained more success since moving away from the "new browser language", which was an impossible task in retrospect.

I think Dart is, in fact, an excellent example of how much power Google is willing to throw behind a language. Dart was constantly marketed on the Chrome blog, for example.
IBM challenges a recent result in quantum computing
"I don't really think Google has "backed it" like Sun backed Java."

It doesn't have to. For a lot of programmers the very fact that Google (or Rob Pike) made it is enough for them to switch to it or bet that it'll do well and at least take a closer look and try it out, compared to the dozens or hundreds of new languages that come out by completely unknown authors which virtually no one takes a second look at, not because of any deficiencies in those languages since the people that ignore them usually don't even know anything about those languages to begin with.
Note also that if a host cancels on you at the last moment, you can't give a negative review at all.

That would never happen with a hotel.
Reflections on Startup School 2019
Borg Backup (for similar reasons as Restic) essentially shifted backup from my "I-don't-but-I-should" list to my "solved problems" list. Is there anything similar for binary distribution?

Here's what I mean. I develop a software/firmware stack that is typically delivered to users as a set of large (100M) tarballs and binary images. Even though the vast majority of the payload does not change from release to release, it really has proven necessary to distribute just the final blobs.

Technologically, it's almost identical, but distribution implies a different set of access controls and an Internet-friendly user interface.

I see the idea floating around in e.g. NextCloud forums but this seems like a relatively compact problem without a obvious candidates to solve it.
I talk for a living. It takes time to improve. Some quick and dirty tips (sorry, english not my first language):

- Relax and meditate

- Practice a LOT. Everyday. Even two minutes helps.

- Learn to breath properly

- Record yourself speaking aloud at home with your phone. Make notice of all the nuances of the voice

- Prepare your material very well

- Visualize you are explaining the stuff to a friend at home. It will help you sound more natural.

Getting nervous is normal and part of the game.
Sounds like they did the switch to avoid getting caught running an illegal or otherwise somehow contract-breaching Airbnb. If they used their correct address, their building would figure it out and shut them down.
Thanks! That's a good idea, but I don't have plans to do that right now. The intention of the project is to let you try out icons on an actual device, as opposed to in a simulator.
Do you even have to disclose that you were laid off? Why not just say you took time off to travel or something? Or just say that assignment/job ended and you are looking for new opportunities without going into further detail?
I know several people who quit jobs to travel for months at a time, in a way it's a signal that you may be a good performer if you have that kind of luxury.
I've been playing this game for a long time now. The crowd has dropped off in recent years. I'd love to see it regrow.

What would be really cool, is a reboot form that worked for mobile.
Solid piece of software, I use this every day!

One small issue which I need to figure out is the hosts directory being empty when using “restic mount”: https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1869
So is that what it's come down to for ABnB users? Record everything and CYA for an adversarial relationship?

Corporate really needs to step up here and enforce its rules and empower its rating system to drive this out. Otherwise it's not worth my energy to use the platform.
Also check out Borg: https://www.borgbackup.org

And some resources on how they're different:

- https://github.com/restic/restic/issues/1875

- https://stickleback.dk/borg-or-restic/

- https://sysadministrivia.com/episodes/S4E5

The general concensus seems to be that restic is borg with more whistles (backing up to various places), but borg is the more trusted tool with the longer history (just use SSH and be done with it). I personally recently used borg for a migration between computers and it worked great for me.
> Yes, but ads with no reach effectively means you have no meaningful voice in the public discourse. So it's free speech, but without any teeth.

Zuck himself, ironically, has helped create that situation by deliberately reducing organic reach to force people to pay to be heard.

This is a cynical ploy for money on Zuck's/Facebook's part. If they really cared about free speech, they wouldn't hobble the organic reach of political actors.
Humans like to pretend business-logic workflow digraphs are actually workflow trees. Every programming language† is an attempt to "tell the story" of the runtime paths through a digraph of control-flow, using a lexical tree of syntax structures. I've only written a few proofs in my life, but I get the sense that "at scale", they're quite similar: a narrativization or expiation of a bunch of paths through lemma-space, that branch out and re-converge.

When any program becomes sufficiently complex, its nature as a digraph is forced to the surface, and the ability to continue to pretend it's just a tree becomes untenable. We get confused, working with these complex digraphs, unless we use tools that allow us to visualize digraphs as digraphs, walking around them and looking at them from different angles.

Honestly, I don't think this is anything to do with "doing programming [or proof-writing] wrong", so much as it is an inherent fact of the nature of systems of lemmas. It's a bit like how humans can't visualize hypercubes directly—we need to instead use a tool (lower-dimensional projection) to "walk around" these mathematical objects and look at them from different angles, in order to understand them. I would posit that systems of lemmas are just such a mathematical object.

Sure, you can try to find isomorphic programs, or proofs, that are more lexical-tree-like, and so easier for humans to hold in their heads. But if you require that your programs, or proofs, fit to some standard of tree-like-ness, there'll be some programs/proofs that you just won't be able to write. Maybe that's not so bad for programs (those programs were probably awful anyway), but ignoring a proof (or an area of proof-space) when it's perfectly valid, just because we need tools to look at it, seems a bit silly.

---

† Or rather, every programming language that people use in practice, because even in languages with GOTO, people avoid it, and restrict themselves to the structured-programming subset of the language. The programmer who wants to write everything as coroutines or (call/cc)s is pretty rare.
So much this. I think the most difficult thing about transition from hard sciences such as cs/physics/math to wet science such as biology/sociology/psychology is to get used to the fact that sometimes things don't work and behave as expected and it takes enormous amount of work to get it right.

Therefore you can't really go and design things form the first principles, since first principles are not really that well known. Of course you can try, and get some successes but that is rare. Add extremely complicated AND nonlinear dependences between the systems you are working with and you may get idea why we still don't have cure for most cancers yet.
I would say the burden of truth is on you, not me. We have it from them that they did this, the documentary does indeed have images from the campaign. Just because there isn't a ton of internet content you can search from your seat doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Yes, this was primarily a physical campaign, but it drives home the point of how these people work. And how they DID work in 2016 as well with respect to targeted advertising on Facebook.

Watch the movie if you haven't, this stuff was well researched by various reporters. It isn't perfect but it certainly shows that what we have now is not tenable if we want to maintain a democracy.
The point is that a computer system can be entirely understood from the chips on up. Sure, it gets complex with millions of LOC. But we humans designed computers and wrote the code. Biology is not like that, and there is lack of a completed understanding form the proteins on up. So you get the complexity amplified on all fronts.
I was tempted to ask, "sure, but what's the data cap?" One issue I've had w/ T-Mobile in the past is they say "unlimited mobile broadband" and if you poke around in the fine print you find that "unlimited" means 2G per month or something.

So I wonder... what is the data cap on their "no data cap" plans?
Agreed. The average hn'er these days is on par with the average redditor, IQ and woke-wise.
I have to think that the hosts have their own trustworthiness rating in AirBNB's system. One guest disputes a charge after you've rented dozens of times? Probably the guest's fault. Every other guest disputes the charge? Almost certainly the host is doing something scammy.
I think most of the charm of the Old Internet lay in the state of social networking at that time. In 1993-1995, WiReD magazine was ablaze with new fresh ideas and grand possibilities made possible by connecting inquiring minds in creative new ways. Add 20 years and unsurprisingly all those fires have extinguished. Once you've been online for a decade, few unexplored paths remain.

It's like ham radio. There's only so much novelty in talking to random people who just happen to be on-air when you are.
> I really wish Itanium had taken off. IMO it is a superior architecture that was simply ahead of it's time.

Itanium was an architecture that was designed for "big iron", i.e. fast, powerful computers. It is thus, in my opinion, much harder to "scale down" to, say, mobile devices than x86.
The Project Trying to Preserve Flash's History
Why not also ban the gun emoji? Oh wait this is an American company where violence is OK but sex is taboo.
> Also, the long corridors, lobbies and elevators in hotels are great outlets for toddlers to burn energy and curiosity.

Please, PLEASE don't do this. You don't know what time people are trying to get some sleep in their rooms. Not everyone keeps your schedule.
I worked there from about 2008 to 2014, and definitely noticed the same thing. Once the core guys started to leave, and teams started to ballon in size, you could tell that the magic was gone. For me, Diablo 3 was really the turning point. Despite clear polish and triple A quality, it lacked the same soul that the predecessors had.
Piston engines are more efficient than turboprops which are more efficient than turbofan/turbojet engines. Newer piston engines are by far the most efficient option but are not used frequently as the piston fleet is very old.

To compare to a car, just using vehicle efficiency (not per passenger) a typical cessna is in the realm of a full size SUV in terms of carbon footprint. Both are about 10-15 mpg. The aircraft in the article is far worse but only because it's rather large and turbine powered. Optimized designs like the Long-EZ can easily hit in excess of 30mpg cruising at 160mph.
Instruction complexities can be used to save bandwidth/delay (and related energy consumption) at the cost of decoder size. Communication limitations are increasingly dominant in processors afaik; so the analysis is not so simple as to decoder size either.
Well, I haven't read it, nor have I seen much other criticism of Go. If you post here, it is up to you to make your argument, not for your readers to seek it out.
You certainly should check the Biostar Handbook[1] then and their forum[2]. BioJulia[3] is worth checking as well (I have really high hopes for Julia language).

[1] https://www.biostarhandbook.com/

[2] https://www.biostars.org/

[3] https://biojulia.net/
You should call it Go Snake Go!

Also, I always wondered what it would be like if you mixed a snake game with Conway's Game of Life. Watching a snake go around the screen blasting through automata would be interesting ( or maybe not).
I think this a case for better GA trining. Expecting engine failure on takeoff, building the counterintuitive pitch-down reflex to avoid stall, and so on. Knowing your minimum maneuverable speed (and marking it on your air speed indicator). Expecting something to go wrong is the key mindset. A GA death happens roughly once a week for the reasons you outline. Emergency situations are not time to learn new skills, you need to have it down.
This seems very similar to Borg Backup [1], so I'm interested to hear from others who have used both on how it compares.

More generally, I've been looking for a solution that helps distribute backups in a peer-to-peer way. I have a few friends with their own home servers, and we want to replicate backups across each other's servers for geographical redundancy. Currently, I have a script that uses rsync to copy some tar archives over daily, but this doesn't scale well as more peers want to join our backup-sharing group, since it requires them granting me SSH access.

What I need is a decentralized network to share and retrieve backups from peers. I tried using dat [2] with a Borg Backup repository inside it, but ran into some nasty issues with dat which would cause it to regularly crash and one time even corrupt the data.

Does anyone have any suggestions for such a situation?

[1] https://www.borgbackup.org/
[2] https://github.com/datproject/dat
You could do a TypeScript change I've been meaning to do for a while now on an open source repo I use:

https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph

The change: When viewing a file, the copy icon should put the file's path in clipboard instead of the window's url.
Just so I understand right and out of curiosity, what does that offer more than the likes of Nextcloud: https://nextcloud.com/ or Duple: https://www.duple.io/en/

Since if I understand correctly both provide backup in addition to other functionalities?
The truly unlimited will de-prioritize you after around 50GB iirc.
IDEX Promise to Reduce User Costs by 98%
Human Nature Applied Virtually
I started using Restic recently. It's good and I'm going to continue using it. That said, there are a couple of bad problems with it:

Firstly, if you want to prune old backups, e.g keep the last N1 hourly backups, and the last N2 weekly backups, etc, then it has that ability, however whilst it's doing it, the client has to download and upload a tonne of data in order to repackage the backup files that contain some data that needs removing and other data which doesn't.

Secondly, I've set up an "append only" system, where my various hosts can append to their own backups, but not overwrite or delete them. I wanted the backup server to be unable to read the backups (easy enough, don't supply the encryption keys to the backup server), however at the same time I wanted the backup server to be able to automatically prune old backups. It can not do that without the key. I don't want to give it the keys to the backups as then a compromised backup server means all of my hosts data are suddenly compromised.
Blizzard should try to be inclusive, but consumers should realize that their progressivism is rooted in cynical self-serving greed much more than a sincere desire to improve the world.
I find it pretty crazy that AirBnB's tech never really evolved on the host or guest side at all. The experience is still basically like a pretty Craigslist with payment processing. I sometimes wonder what an engineer there even does other than maintain a CRUD app.

For example, why isn't there an Alexa-like concierge device in every AirBnB that answers guest questions by now? Why aren't there smart locks on every home that unlocks with the app? Etc etc.
If you don't have respect for CRUD apps, why are you trying to get a job doing CRUD apps?
This looks great. I've been using Arq for years and no complaints but I might switch.

I've also been using Syncthing for syncing machines. It's pretty great. i've got it setup so 2 laptops sync to a server and no issues so far.
I fell for probably the early version of this back in 2015. Google fi number with a non-existent property in LA. Host confirms, emails photos, minimal back and forth about check in.

We show up at the property and it clearly doesn't exist, lucky for us the number is disconnected now and he won't answer us. This is clearly a scam. Though it's Airbnb's policy to give the hosts an hour to respond to a complaint even though it's obviously a scam. We then have to wait in the ghetto of LA for an hour so the host can respond, he never does. Finally Airbnb agrees that it's a scam and that the property doesn't exist, the address is dead center in a industrial park. I then have to go book a hotel on my card that Airbnb will refund at a later date that is equivalent to what we booked, nearly impossible for booking on day of. So going forward we spent 1.5hrs driving to the fake property, 1hr waiting for the fake host to respond, 1hr to confirm over phone how to proceed with Airbnb, then another 2hrs going to a hotel and checking in. All in all it wasted over half a day of our vacation, gas money, and frustration, over an obviously fake posting.
The biggest problem I've had with backup software is being able to verify when using aws s3 glacier with and without a data pull. Is this possible and efficient with restic? The only software I've found that does this well is Arq
As in front-end engineering? Or software _architecture_ design? If you mean front-end then this is already something we enable as we have integrations with front-end coding tools like Storybook and have plans to build on that :)
Anonymous windows have found a second use-case.
I think that you are intended to use AWS as described in this comment [1]. Even if you are a one person operation, you can create those separate IAM accounts for admin and normal use. Once you have this hierarchy of accounts in place, it is fairly straightforward to deal with a lost hardware key.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21411013
How do you manage living in US. HN tells me that living here is terrible in every possible way compare to Canada and even more terrible compare to Europe?
Top Why Your Business Needs a SEO
Think of how much more benefit they'd have had, had they chosen an even simpler language like Scheme.
I wanted to go to the US for at least 4 years now, and I've applied to a lot of US companies.

It's tough as a European CS grad to do that (or I suppose at least when you're me). You can't just move to the US. Not as an above average CS grad with some experience in web development and code bootcamp instructor.

I even applied to Full Stack Academy 2 years ago while I was still teaching at The New York Code + Design Academy as a lead instructor, they never sent anything, and I think that's mostly because a H1B visa is hard to get for a company, not because I lacked the skills (that's my optimistic guess anyways).
I recently set this up using Nginx as my restic backend server. Not as a proxy to a backend server, but the actual backend server. No other applications required:

https://www.grepular.com/Nginx_Restic_Backend