skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People complain about algorithm heavy interviews a lot but I honestly think they're pretty useful for several reasons (some are beneficial to the person interviewing as well).

Even though we many software engineers aren't doing challenging enough work to require algorithms work daily (though, wouldn't you want to be doing this kind of work?) algorithms problems have a lot you have to do. Even if you don't use a linked list every day, designing a linked list and searching it isn't really different than designing a User class. The difference is it will take a few features of iterating on a User class before you bump into design issues where these will pop up right away.

And even though people complain about not being able to code without an IDE, frankly this is a red flag. I've seen candidates white board weird code (lots of semicolons, or no returns in python) that makes it pretty clear they don't write a lot of code.

Finally, white boarding algorithms questions are nice for interviewees because you can study one topic that will apply equally for multiple companies. Take home projects are great, but you have to do a unique one for each company. You can practice leetcode every night and you're preparing for a wide range of places all at once.
Bringing Google Live Transcribe's Speech Engine to Everyone
See I dont even hate tech, I just hate most of these tech jobs. I cant think of last time I felt intellectually challenged by a job and my job feels like copy / pasting (not literally, but writing the same boilerplate-esque webapps with a different database constantly). Sitting constantly for so many hours is also killing me
Well, we don't do it that way in the dystopian US of the 21st century. Disregarding obscure organizations like the Associated Press, there are only about 172 nonprofit news outlets[1] founded in the last 30 years or so! The concept is practically unheard of.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-profit_journalism
Think twice before getting hired. Some companies are like nice looking Instagram profile, but behind the scene it just sucks.
"Never start a fight, but if one starts, don't lose." is what my father taught me when I started getting bullied.

Worked both times I was physically bullied, people stopped pretty fast when they saw that I didn't fight "fair", I fought to win. Eyes, ears, genitalia was all fair game from the start with no regard for "fairness".
> If a well-funded government spy sees that there's an alexa in the room, why not tell it to make a phone call to a throw-away number and listen in?

Because the more efficient way would be to just make use of the backdoors directly or force Amazon/Google to give you an eavesdropping API. All in the name of national security, of course.
A lot of cities don't have any transit timetables at all on Google Maps, let alone realtime bus tracking, simply because the bus company considers it's timetables to be copyright, and wants licensing money to use them commercially, which Google is unwilling to pay.

Those cities usually have local route planning apps, of various levels of craptastic-ness. When travelling round the world, trying to figure out which app is good for local public transit is always on my checklist next to 'buy local data sim' and 'figure out which currency they use here and what the exchange rate is'.
Is it to keep the cover from falling in the hole?
No one is asking you to write them yourself. But it is important to know when Quicksort becomes quadratic. Or when separate chaining in a hash table can lead to linear look ups. I find it abhorrent that this thread thinks these things are unimportant. Just use a "Library". How about you know your stuff .
What? I never said oil prices are high. You just didn't read. I said _when_ oil prices are high, central Canada's manufacturing industry suffers.

Stop throwing insults around and read.
as someone in this thread pointed out, the model is overfit.

I did my thesis on EEG signals, also having a very idealistic view of what could I do with it, only to find that even the most basic of tasks is hard to classify (even to find motor cortex movement intention signatures (if you want to move left or right hand)).

This work will not go into the real world in this stage, as it is badly done and most certainly having multiple flaws in the implementation, rendering it unusable in the real world.

So, don't get too stressed out about this, if it happens, it will be about 20-30 years from now. And keeping in mind how slow the law enforcement technology moves forward (aren't most of them still using windows xp and vista?) I would count more like 30-50 years.
We?

https://www.we.co/#we
This is an excellent piece by Cory Doctorow but I wouldn't say he argues against regulation:

> One exciting possibility is to create an absolute legal defence for companies that make "interoperable" products that plug into the dominant companies' offerings, from third-party printer ink to unauthorised Facebook readers that slurp up all the messages waiting for you there and filter them to your specifications, not Mark Zuckerberg's. This interoperability defence would have to shield digital toolsmiths from all manner of claims: tortious interference, bypassing copyright locks, patent infringement and, of course, violating terms of service.

Isn't that just calling for a different kind of regulation, one that forces interoperability? Which, btw, sounds like a good start, but OTOH I'm immediately thinking of how slowly changing APIs are being abused by big tech to create moats.

In general I find the headline problematic (although that might be editorial meddling). Yes, the current and upcoming regulation of tech is being abused by big tech companies for the worse, by exploiting loopholes that are in the regulations, and I would not be surprised at all if those loopholes are there partially or mainly thanks to lobbying by big tech companies and other vested interests.

But saying that therefore regulation does not work feels a bit like saying that some laws are unethical, therefore laws are inherently bad.

Plus regulation (in the abstract) can be set up in such a way that it encourages healthy competition. Take the Dutch Health Insurance system (which has tons of other issues but that's not relevant to this point). Regulation forces any health insurance company to offer a "core package" with basic coverage for most health issues, at a price per month that has a fixed maximum. This "core" package cannot be denied to any patient based on pre-existing conditions. Insurance companies can then compete by offering better deals for greater coverage. The point being that the regulation means that health insurance companies are limited in where they can cut corners and as a result are encouraged to compete by providing a better service.
> I think the bigger takeaway is that its STILL 500 million dollars lost per quarter which is insane.

And that’s to develop and maintain an app, probably one of the absolutely cheapest things one can do in any industry.

Quite maddening indeed.
The Heritage Foundation has been caught lying in their self-funded "studies" so many times that I find it difficult to give them the benefit of doubt.
Gardena IoT Gateway [pdf]
The crucial point is that to get to (low) relativistic speeds, you also need a relativistic exhaust velocity or the reaction mass just becomes untenable. Current ion thrusters are not up to the job.

For example, if you had a vehicle weighing 10t empty (but including energy), and a thruster capable of accelerating ions to 1% the speed of light, you'll only need 17t of reaction mass to achieve a speed delta of 1% the speed of light.

This ratio holds up as you scale exhaust velocity and delta V, so the exact same reaction mass would be needed for a 10% light speed delta V using a thruster shooting ions at 10% c. As a rule of thumb, you always need a reaction mass about 170% of the vehicle's dry mass when your thruster exactly matches your target velocity.

Now, to illustrate how critical exhaust velocity is, imagine you make thrusters with exhaust velocities 10x that of the target delta V. In those cases, you'll only need a reaction mass of roughly 10%. However, if your exhaust velocity is 0.1x the target delta V, you'll need a 2200000% reaction mass!
> I'm saying you should be able to explain the basic principles of e.g. an array, a linked list, a hash table and a binary tree, and where each would be appropriate to use.

I think most of us agree with that. But that's beside the point, because that's not the algorithm-heavy interview people are complaining about big time.
I don't want to live in a world where inviting people over for dinner is practically illegal because of food safety regulations. And I don't want to live in a world where I'm not allowed to write down my friends' birthdays and phone numbers.

I'm not sure if we have passed the line of too many regulations, but I know it's out there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB4o5n2EGyA

Two times this video has been posted, and two times it's been flagged. Politician in center left UK party saying historys greatest mass murderer "did more good than harm".
Companies should automatically be flagged for a breakup audit once they hit a certain revenue number. A thriving ecosystem of smaller entities is much better for everyone.
I visited an extraordinarily polluted steelworks city a few years ago. Even on a clear day, the air was orange, and as you entered the city you noticed the colour wash out of everything slightly, and the horizon over the estuary blurred out to a drab orange smear.

I mention this, as when I mentioned it to the locals, none of them understood what I was talking about.

You see, when your entire reality glows orange, that becomes normal to you. You cease to notice that everything is orange. You even vehemently disagree with anyone who’s just arrived and asks “why is everything around here orange?”.

This is how propaganda works. Degree by degree everything turns orange, and unless you get out of it once in a while, you never notice.
I've been looking for some way to transcribe my own talks---sometimes I find a turn of phrase or example during the talk that strikes me as useful while I'm giving it, but then forget it. Perhaps this can be coaxed into providing this service for me.
Isn't what I described more like reconstructing a picture from many copies that were each destroyed in a unique fashion?
Did you get an offer?
They don't even replace Windows key graphic with something like Super or Tux icon. Feels like a low-effort job.
It is not as easy as you think.

Take Slack.

Atlassian failed to compete with its Stride alternative and cooperated with Slack instead.

Microsoft Teams maybe a more viable alternative, but it's still less user friendly than Slack and it is remain to be seen who will win.

Money does not decide everything, you have to un-burden a department or run internal startup. This is hard and too few companies are doing it in a good way (Valve?).
But it is ok if the not bright but nice kids are bullied?
> One of Ubers biggest problems is that they have zero brand loyalty.

It may not warrant as much customer loyalty as - say - Apple, but "zero" is simply untrue. To give a most ovious example, in a foreign country/city I'd be strongly inclined to choose Uber over other alternatives because I'm already familiar with it.

For the same reason why I'd eat at McDonald's (rather than some local hot-dog stand): not quality, but safety. I see the risk that I get scammed / food-poisoned as lower.

> Uber has only made finding the ride more efficient but it has not made the actual ride itself more efficient.

It has, to some extent: in the form of shared rides. Traditional taxi companies don't provide such option, for fairly obvious reasons.

> And what if there are robot drivers? Wouldn’t that eliminate at least the human cost? It would. But it would do so for every other transport company as well, and by the same amount.

Not if you've got your own IP behind it - whereas your competitors need to rely on third-party solutions - or even if you can get a better deal on a third-party solution.

> Uber would still be fighting the same competitors in a similar race to the bottom. In summary, nothing can save Uber.

The exact same case could be made for Burger King.

It's quite possible that nothing can save Uber, it's clearly struggling, but I don't think your reasoning correctly sums up actual causes of that.
Minimalist game race with an LED strip
Buildings Are Bad for the Climate
Great - the IRS is now giving tax-free status to the mormon church's for-profit arms.
This didn’t work out for https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Joe's vs Trader Joe’s who also had what seems to be a legal case overwhelmingly on his side.
it was the first NT based OS targeted at home users. At least on the places where I've worked, NT, since 4.0, was basically the default Windows OS for enterprises.
The Inspection Paradox Is Everywhere
But we still have draconian protection for trade secrets. We still have products on the shelves of the grocery store with secret formulas. If patents are a substitute, then why not abolish the legal framework for protecting trade secrets?
Hyphen, dash, and minus do not look the same, nor have the same use.
But due to the higher costs, all but the wealthiest will be "forced" into making changes to their patterns. There was a recent Planet Money episode about these Pigouvian taxes[1].

1: https://www.npr.org/2019/10/29/774494691/episode-949-the-pig...
That language seems to exist only in GPL v1.

It is also part of a list of 'or' options. You can abide by one of the other options and not need to adhere to this one.
The financial stamina comment you made below seems to be in line with what happened to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Joe's wrt Trader Joe’s. Even though he had the much stronger legal case.
From the conference website:

GARDENA is a company with a lot of experience with gardening tools; experience with software development and interaction with the open source community however is much more recent. In May 2016, an article in Golem.de provoked negative reactions in regards to GARDENA's use of GPL code – GARDENA clearly didn't yet understand the GPL. Three years later, most of the source code of the revised gateway is available on GitHub, MT7688 SoC support in U-Boot has been upstreamed, and management even agreed to allow root access to the gateway for hackers via UART.
California Kronic Herbal Incense Incensecloud
Buy Aroma Herbal Incense online from Incense cloud Offering the best california kronic herbal Incense, F crazy incense and Fucking crazy herbal incense.
In the same vein, web developers testing their stuff on ultrafast 4G.
That way of complying already benefits the companies who hold PII which proves GPS point.
What about bathroom breaks ? Also even Microsoft insurance is better than Amazon. All my friends say Amazon's perks sucks. Even at the concert apparently people were allowed two non-alcoholic drinks for the first time. There was a joke that this was a big deal when it came to perks.
Then lets make everyone a non-profit for tax purposes, since its the same.
Are you kidding? On paper I should have been a school shooter. I was bullied relentlessly on a near-daily basis by other students and even some teachers. Physically assaulted, verbally harassed, things stolen.. they even loosened the lug nuts on my car. I gave up complaining halfway through ninth grade because the only support I got was “move away from people bothering you” and “tell the teacher”. By telling the teacher I became the annoying problem.
Oversimplifying a bit here at the price of accuracy and completeness, but mainly arbitrage. Ceiling is easy; if the market price is > 1$, it is free money to create new CDPs and sell the DAI off for ETH on the market.

If the ETH/USD price goes down, so does the capitalization ratio of CDPs. If a CDP goes low enough, users have to either repay their DAI debt (removing DAI supply from market) or rebalance by depositing additional ETH collateral. Otherwise, their position will be liquidated (which means the CDP owner loses their collateral) and their ETH collateral is put up for public sale for DAI on-chain. The DAI used to pay at these sales is destroyed. This creates an incentive for people to burn DAI to acquire ETH below market price (thus creating demand for DAI).

Also in general I advise you to ask clarifying questions rather than post scoffy dismissals if you know that your understanding might be incomplete.
Why? It's all about federal US politics (national government, not state or local governments). The road to today's situation is winding and dark. https://www.forpurposelaw.com/501c3-political-ban-history/

The current restriction is based on a hastily worded amendment to the tax code from 1954 by one Lyndon Baines Johnson, who later became president when JFK was murdered.

It reduces to a few principles.

1. orgs should use their tax-deductible contributions in support of their stated missions.

2. orgs cannot be set up for "selfish" reasons. Because of the present and historical culture of graft (the buying and selling of political favors) in the US, we basically assume that anybody who promotes a candidate gets something in return.

3. confusion in the US Senate in 1954 about the difference between an org's "primary" mission and other missions.

There's also an undercurrent of church-state separation. By dollar volume, houses of worship are very big recipients of tax-exempt contributions. Politicians fear the influence of people in pulpits, so it's easier to prohibit that.

In May 2017, the current president, Donald Trump, issued an executive order weakening the restrictions on political speech. He did this under pressure from his political party and from the "evangelical" churches who support him.
Typically, there is no perfect data source and their applicability depends on your use cases. OpenStreetMap is first about streets, then (geometries of) buildings, POIs etc. An attribute like website information has not been high on the use cases that the community has but I think this is getting better with more use and especially the integration with Wikidata.

In Wikidata, I can currently get 563 results for institutes of higher education in France with website information: https://query.wikidata.org/#SELECT%20DISTINCT%20%3Fschool%20...

EDIT: Applied the fix by yorwba to get more results.
Fantastic read. I took a regular production car once up to 200 mph, it was an experience I would not care to repeat. These guys are aiming for way above that and are not only good at engineering but also at communicating, this article is really very nice. Thank you for the link.
Have you seen new European Medical Device Regulation (MDR)?
Especially classification rule 11 for software makes things interesting. Regulatory compliance is going to be difficult/costly for smes...
Being an intergovernmental body, they also include representatives from the oil states and administrations who are "wilfully unconvinced" by any science that might impact profit or industrial dominance. Yet IPCC reports still require unanimity.

Here's a report of Saudi leading a push to tone down reports to protect their oil interests, which I see as substantively different to making a mistake:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/m...
I didn't say it was impossible; I said that there was regulatory risk in doing it the way he was doing it. Reading his comment here does not decrease my confidence that I was correct. Is your model that no paperwork (reps & warranties, transfer of liability, etc) is getting signed between him and Krispy Kreme as a result of this turn of events? If so, I bet your model is wrong.

There's a playbook.
Analysis of HORNET (and Sphinx): https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.13772
He had to close because even though the legal rulings were for him. Trader Joe’s kept appealing and he couldn’t keep up with the finances for defending what had become bullying.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Joe's
I wouldn't buy a MacBook until they sort out the keyboard problems, but when my employer gives me the latest MacBook Pro to work on, I'm absolutely happy! It's a wonderful machine, and if it breaks – not my problem at all.
How early is “earlier”? Children have no clue of possibilities or consequences. This is why we have an age of majority: to protect kids from long term consequences of life choices they are not ready to make. Why should education be different? - what right have we to put a big cross on a child’s future and declare “you can never amount to more than this” based on childish behaviours and choices they may yet grow out of? We do this in no other area of life.
My new startup: Usurpr
Uber is mortgaging the customers long term for its short term. Not sure why it should have that right, nor why it should be considered a godsend.
Also, while Ubiquiti is failing to provide the source code for AmpliFi, they do comply in other areas. Their claim that they don't provide the GPL licensed code at all is flat out false.

https://dl.ui.com/firmwares/edgemax/v2.0.x/GPL.ER-e300.v2.0....

All you have to do is click on "GPL Archive" on the download page for the firmware.
I bet the average person on the street would tell you that these are the same and they never thought about hyphen and minus being different. For them all three look like a dash.
The thing with APIs is that I have a feeling that companies only offer them as a way to externalize costs.

They offer an API, someone else builds something with it on their platform for them. Then of course they can tweak the API to make sure only things they want on their platform are being built. Or what also happens is that they wait until a community grows around those many tools other enthusiastic people build on top of the API, and there is enough of an invested userbase that they can remove the less profitable parts bit by bit.

This is why I personally think APIs are often moats in disguise.
I think the HN crowd goes 50/50 on this. One half hates it and the other believes it's a necessary evil. And then there's the small minority that enjoys it.

I was apart of the former half who hated algorithms until I was tasked with help hiring people. The only thing I believe that is worse than an algorithm is me spending 8+ hours of my free time on a "take home" problem. So, I used pretty easy to solve algorithms alongside real problems I had solved recently for interviews.

Being on the other side as the interviewer really made me see the value of algorithms. It becomes a medium where candidates can convey competency. I think it has gotten murky due to the lines between a web developer and software engineer blurring. That statement alone can be a can of worms.

Anyway, I would say algorithms / data structures for backend development do come up when laying the groundwork for a new project or something that might see a lot of traffic. Lots of things in development model certain data structures (queues, stacks, graphs, etc.) so knowing them allows you to converse with your co-workers and conceptualize them to others. Probably comes up somewhere between 2-5% of the time. Design patterns probably get brought more as their a bit more applicable for everyday tasks. It really depends on who you're around, how challenging the work is, and what the engineering culture is like.
If Emissions Continue, India Could See 1M Heat Deaths a Year
You control it but it’s not presented in an easy way to set the limits you want etc...
The screenshots documenting the process are fun but it would also be neat to see graphs of install time per OS and how much storage and memory were in use after completing each upgrade step. I don’t recall: could you upgrade 16-bit DOS/Windows to 32 bit or did that require a clean install?
I wonder if patents like "Internet-based proxy service for responding to server offline errors" [1] also qualify to be in the "troll" category.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...