skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, it does if their operating and depreciation costs are a lot more than that (which I don't think they are though).
Is it profitable for Google?
This is frustrating.

There are lots of ways to do software. Some are widely considered by experts to be good, some are not so good.

Then there is a thing called business. You can certainly sell software that is built using bad practices, and honestly nobody will probably complain so long as it works. It might not be quite as maintainable, it might require more effort to add features, and it might be necessary to completely rewrite that software in 5 years when other parts of the system change.

Terrible software is bought all the time, and that's not even really a problem.

Even though you sold it and your customers are happy, there still are things you can probably learn, right?
10.4 x86, the origins of Hackintosh, will be the first version that's actually practical to virtualise.
A recent 'Pitchfork Economics' podcast explores today's Finnish economy (free college, 5 week vacations, universal health care, taxes no higher than the US ...) , by speaking to the author of The Nordic Theory of Everything.
(Link includes transcript)

http://pitchforkeconomics.com/episode/re-imagining-capitalis...
This seems to be a genuine question so I will answer it. I run Windows, Linux, and Mac. The reasons I prefer my Mac:

1. The most important reason is that the Mac UI is generally consistent and powerful: both the appearance but also keyboard shortcuts, modifier key behavior, etc. Neither Linux nor Windows has both of these. Linux has never had a consistent UI and Windows is just a mess (e.g. two control panels in Win10).

2. Compared to Windows, vastly less of the advertising and key-logging nonsense. No Candy Crush ads for example.

3. Compared to Linux, better software availability and quality. There's the obvious big players (Photoshop, Office, etc), but Apple's own apps are quite good. I'll take Keynote over Google Slides any day. In general Linux software is also available on the Mac (VLC, Gimp, etc) but the reverse is not true.

4. iOS integration is sweet: Reminders, Notes, Messages, etc. It's awesome when a 2FA text message arrives on my phone, get forwarded to Messages on my Mac, and then Safari offers it in the text field. (Can I do this anywhere else? Honest question.)

5. For me, Linux and Windows upgrades have been more problematic than my Macs. For example, Ubuntu 16 upgrade left a broken glibc and I had to reinstall.

I believe that Apple's software quality is trending the wrong way, and am very suspicious of Catalyst, so there's cause for worry. But I still very much prefer to use a Mac today.
I'd say they wouldn't shut down everything but may stop adding new features.
Fizzbuzz?

I'm pretty sure the only meaningful coding test is if you can program at all. After that everything becomes artificial in an interview setting.
It only works because there's always another body standing outside the door waiting their turn to be abused by the process. It'll end real quick if they run out of interviewees.
Airtable requests a coding challenge and pays for your time. I was very impressed.
I can't imagine how stupid I would have to be to not comprehend this statement.
When they say that, they want phds, not entry level candidates
2-3 second temporal integration window for naturalistic visual sequences (2014)
> We could already communicate with anywhere instantly back with the transatlantic telephone. The rest is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Totally disagree. You could as well say that the transatlantic telephone is only evolutionary with respect to the first telegraphs (first built in 1816)- and you'd probably be more right. The diffusion of computers and computer networks- which are conceptually different from a telephone line- has changed the world to the point of making in unrecognizable. Try to explain to the average person living in 1980 what do you do all day. How you listen to music, talk with friends, read the news, read and edit an encyclopedia, order food, date, watch tv, buy and read books, play, work.

I think that our idea of progress is rooted in the past- we tend to project into the future the current trends and past successes- but progress always follows new paths and constantly changes direction. You wanted supersonic airplanes? Those would have been an incremental progress over the ones we built in the 50s. You wanted flying cars? Again, an incremental progress on that personal mobility revolution that was the car. Exploring other planets? An incremental progress from the age of discoveries, when explorers and adventurers reached and colonized new continents.

And instead what you got are computers so tiny, widespread and networked that I can take an astoundingly powerful one out of my pocket and casually tap its screen to switch on and off a 10 euro connected lightbulb that can be 2 meter or 20000km from here, because the signal goes back and forth from China anyway.

So I don't know what the future has in store, but if I think we'll get petaflop-dust particle-sized computers embedded in our brains I might be wrong. Maybe the next fifty years will be about genetically engineering completely new types of plants, or replacing parts of our bodies as they age, or new economic paradigms... who knows?
IIRC this was (and still is!) pretty common in Europe after World War II.
Using C as a lowest-common-denominator for game engines makes sense but I do love having Objective-C (despite the platform limitations). It just makes expressing game logic so easy, with protocols, etc. and I would not want to do it all with just C.
I believe 'women' is the idiomatic usage in English.
As does HTMLPad 2020, the closest I've found to a Coda clone on Windows. (It's not as good as Coda but it gets the job done.)

That said, neither app has the WYSIWYG editing that DreamWeaver had. But I've always preferred to hand ode my HTML anyway.
Your comment history seems very anti-Google. Every time a thread surfaces, you're not very far away, bringing the same, tired and recycled rhetoric. Why?
The DOJ sued to stop the merger of AT&T and Time Warner (DOJ lost). The DOJ sued to stop the merger of T-Mobile and AT&T when they tried a few years back (AT&T backed down). It also sued to stop the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint (DOJ settled).
Most companies have more things they want to do then they can do in the next 6 months. So if you increase throughput without latency, you can still get more of those projects done. Even if you're still doing them all inefficiently.

It's ugly, but "don't hire more people because we'll be less efficient" often runs into this ugly "but we need more total output, not more efficiency" wall.
How did dinosaur parents know when their kids had a fever?
My God - do we finally have a glut of developer talent now? According to some very simple logic, this really is the only explanation.
Absolutely not. There's no clear, ambiguous definition of "species" that does not have counter-intuitive implications. No, the classic "fertile over two generation" thing you learn in high school doesn't cut it. Also, the commonly used criterion vary from which domain is being dealt with.

In practice, this means that two individuals are said to belong to a different (resp. identical) species if everyone in the community agrees that they do. That's what it means to be a "social construct", not that the differences per se aren't real.

Justifying other statements on the lines of "X is a social construct" similarly, where X ranges across a variety of more-or-less controversial concepts, is left as an exercise to the reader.
The US Navy Quietly Shut Down Its Task Force on Climate Change
> You'll spend days or weeks getting the process and tooling right, and you still have to manually wire any vias that connect the front and back sides of the PCB.

Fancy! At school we had a UV box & bath, and made single-sided PCBs. I assume you can use the same process just with boards that have copper both sides. It was great for demystifying the process, and I suspect economical in a school setting.

(Aside: I then studied EE (+CS mix) at university, and there was none if that. Many of my peers without the opportunity to take Electronics at GCSE & A Level would be nonethewiser. Maybe that's fine, lines have to be drawn, but seems to me like an easy extension of existing lab assignments.)

As a hobbyist, if I had the room I'd certainly want the kit. Nothing beats the immediacy for prototyping , or turning around fixes/modifications. The basic stuff isn't prohibitively expensive, we're not talking even hundreds of units before break-even.
Google brass has explicitly called this out as being a false report.
But you don't get to "leave the argument at that", not this time. Here's the unredacted transcript.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D2lhepaU4AAXemG.jpg

There's no room for ambiguity in it at all. Anyone who calls Trump a Nazi apologist based on this lie is either deliberately misled by the "free press", or a liar him/herself. You get to pick which one of these you are.
Hmm. That’s pretty funny
For most programming jobs wages are lower now than in 1995. Back then, I had many friends who were charging $100 an hour just to build VisualBasic apps and they had more work than they could handle. And Phillip Greenspan has written that his company, from 1996 onwards, offered $100,000 to recent college grads. That was really good money back then, especially if you wanted to buy a house.

Wages right now only look good compared to where they were during the depths of the Great Recession. Over a longer time frame, wages look terrible, except for certain jobs at FANG companies.
I honestly don't know why anyone gives FAANG recruiters the time of day anymore. I have yet to meet anyone who feels good about the prospect of working for them, anyone who works there who's super proud of their mission, and the competitors who are looking to hire at that level of talent pay roughly similar wages from what I've seen.

My advice for this poor kid is to look around at startups and do more networking. FAANG jobs aren't anything to aspire to anymore.
When I saw this at Google, the employee had 60-90 paid days to find something new within the company. Some people waited til the last few weeks to find something because they essentially got two months paid vacation.
Ask HN: What to consider when buying a business
I'm currently looking at buying a business via FE International which I believe will synergize very well when combined with my current side business (of which I amm the sole owner/employee) and potentially multiply the value of each other. The deal would be around 50-100k.

This would be a big deal to me. I've never acquired a business before and am definitely a rookie. What are some things that I should know or ask about? How much can I know about a business to inform my buying decision? Any pitfalls or traps to watch out for? Is there a specialized person I am legally obligated to consult to help with this?

Thank you for spending your time on this, it is greatly appreciated.
it is windows10 with same old bullshit, slow filesystem, slow process creation, ugly UI, and bloated dev stack
Seed: South Korea's home-grown block cipher
Since this comment finds a lot of agreement I'm going to play the devils advocate. Private function for the sake of documentation are fine. At least if they are all on the same level of abstraction. If you've ever worked in a team where everyone works this way you stop thinking in APIs, which can be a good thing for internal code.
They had no choice. I don’t give any weight to their denials.
The Inferno Operating System (1997)
>It is a given and is basic economics. Supply and demand curves certainly apply to housing.

Yes but the angle of those curves are important. There are elastic and inelastic demands for resources. There can be unfulfilled demand at the current equilibrium price. Its basic economics.
Amazon EBS addresses the challenge of the CAP Theorem at scale
Comedian Daniel Tosh had a bit about people that claimed to be smart, it's just that they were just bad at taking tests. He said, "oh, so you struggle with the part where we find out what you actually know?"

I hear a lot of complaints about the "typical" software engineering hiring process, and it usually comes from the people that don't do well within the current system. Could the process be improved? Almost certainly, I don't think that anyone thinks that this is an absolutely perfect way to hire people. But it is an undeniable fact that some people pass this interview process; software companies do fill positions with this process.

So that kind of makes me think that many of the complaints are from people that wouldn't cut it at a high-pressure tech company and would be better off coding internal software for a non-tech corporation. I'm sure that the hiring process at Kroger (the grocery store) is much lower pressure than Google's. Google might not need you to code some efficient algorithm to search a b-tree every day, but they pay top dollar and can rightly expect that their software engineers can come up with efficient and creative solutions to hard problems without dragging the rest of their team down.
you start to realize that the color blue is a social construct if you are willing to abandon all reason.
Bogbook: What I think will decide social networking for the next gen
By having a steady reliable supply of heroin.
> rarely will you get to be interviewed by a TDD Clean code geek

Have to disagree. Every interview in the last 3 years was majority technical with top-tier team members. Yes, I talked to a couple HR reps and managers but they were less than 10% of the individual interviews.
Something that strikes me in reading articles like this, is the distopian part often seems to be thinking about this:

p(job_capable | not_interview_capable)

That is, it's crazy that an interview could miss so many people qualified for the job.

However, I wonder if oftentimes companies are aiming for..

p(job_capable | interview_capable)

If p(job_capable | interview_capable) is high, and p(interview_capable) is pretty good also, then the company will probably get what it's looking for.

This means that the author is right to recognize the test is doing a bad job of measuring their job readiness. A reasonable instrument in this case doesn't have to measure everyone's job fitness (whether there are nasty side effects is another big issue).
Finally, something gamechanging around here and not blogspam about making a JS library 1% faster.
That's how they got DFS. Two agents pretended to have a lovers' argument at the library, to distract him, and the third grabbed his laptop.

I don't use laptops anymore. Just host machines for VMs. And I always shut them all down, whenever I leave the building. I have a commercial UPS, with a deadman circuit. So I just cabled that line with the CAT6, and there are motorcycle-style kill switches in key places (desk, bathroom, kitchen and bed).
It's certainly not universally viewed as acceptable intimacy by all cultures. Even more certainly, it's not viewed as acceptable intimacy in public. In some cultures, you're about as likely to see a couple kiss in public as you are to see them have sex in public.

> Similarly, the authors state that “no ethnographer working with Sub-Saharan African, New Guinea, or Amazonian foragers or horticulturalists reported having witnessed any occasion in which their study populations engaged in a romantic–sexual kiss”

That doesn't mean they don't kiss, of course. Consider that an ethnographer studying people in Tehran would probably conclude their society simply doesn't have homosexual behaviour. If nothing else, I would imagine that, like with other forms of intimacy often viewed as deviant (for example, anal or oral sex), clever people frequently rediscover it, and some like it, and then practice it, even if in secret.
I wonder what an ethnographer in New York in the 1920's would have described about the attitudes to kissing.
DRY increases "connections" in the code (often called "coupling"). Pay attention to what you are connecting.

The dominant example of this in my mind comes from some traumatic (and dramatic) work experiences involving web scrapers.

You scrape pages A and B. Both require logins. You notice that A and B use similar code to login, so you factor it out and now you have "connected" A and B. Or, more accurately, the common "login" method is connected to A and B.

The problem is that A and B are separate ships, and they are going to different places, and you tied a rope between them. That rope is going stretch and fray and break. There's no reason logging in to A and B should be similar, it just happened to be that way at one point it time. One day, probably, those two sites change their login workflows to be completely different.

So "just repeat yourself" and let each scraper be self contained. Let each ship sail their own way, don't connect them.

One case of this isn't bad, but if your not careful you end up creating dozens of connections between things going all different directions. Break your project into "things" and graph their dependencies. If you can break X by changing Y, then X depends on Y. If you can break Y by changing X, then Y depends on X. Your dependency graph should look more like a tree than a total graph.
That's not a 9 stage pipeline, it's 9 separate single stage pipelines.
"People who have been stars for us, and hit a bad patch, get a near term pass because we think they are likely to become stars for us again".

Source: your link.
And yet, virtually all boot camps allocate time to interview questions now. Hell, there are boot camps devoted entirely to whiteboarding interviews. Surely this cottage industry, similar to those for gaming standardized tests (SAT/GRE/LSATs/MCATs), is a red flag that the industry has fallen into a pit of Goodhart's law?
Also other trends that, thankfully in my experience, have not yet made their way to tech. I suspect it is only a matter of time, though...

A lot of non-technical positions I have seen and heard about (including non entry-level positions) require a video of the candidate to describe themselves and why they would be a good fit for the position. That just sounds awful to me.
China's doctors, fighting coronavirus, beg for masks
> The product they're presenting isn't significant

To you maybe, to the target audience however?

> other people had already made fine points on it, so I pointed out something that I care about that was on-topic instead.

So you didn’t have anything of value to add to the conversation about the topic, and instead you went off an an entirely tangential rant and then got butt hurt when someone pointed out the irony in the wording of your own rant.
I think this point is really key, more than the general idea that "there isn't really a short supply of good programmers." It's imminently easy for a rich capitalist to tell the difference between a factory laborer who works hard and one who does not, than it is for them to say the same about an engineer; the evidence is plain as day in front of you. Longer hours, more sweat, quantitatively more physical tasks done, period.

For engineers of most sorts, the signals are actually counter intuitive, a lot of the time. There's the easy cliche story of two engineering teams tasked to the same project (not necessarily even software only). Team A has a slow and steady road map, no drama, everyone leaves at 5pm, they never make any noise, mostly hit their deadlines, even if the deadlines are unambitious, etc. Team B always is fighting fires, huddled around someone's desk talking, always working overtime burning to make aggressive deadlines that are never quite reached anyways, always communicating with the wider company about status of issues and problems, etc. Which is the more effective team? Team B will definitely be "known" more in the wider company, and might have more individuals who respect them and think they are hard workers. If you took a "peer survey," Team B might actually still come out ahead. But they may still be a much less effective team for the larger business in a lot of ways.
I first heard it from Fred Brooks in Mythical Man Month. But it's even funnier if it came from Theodore von Karman. A lot of HNers will know him from KSP as the namesake of the Karman line, the boundary between atmosphere and space, typically set at 100km above mean sea level.
Not being able to scroll back up is definitely a first for me.
There are N other separations I could think of besides the ones you pointed out:

- someone who gets anxious and blanks out given hardcore requirements these kind of interviews have, smart people can also go bad at tests

- someone who's having a tough day and would fare better taking the challenge home with quiet relaxing time like they would expect to have at work if they need to code complex algorithms

- no interest in past code written that could potentially show other traits of the candidate a quick coding quiz can't

- etc (no need to be extra creative here, just be humble and imagine what the candidate might be going through to get a dream job)

The simple fact an apparently smart young person joining the industry gets burned out like that due to stupidly arrogant hiring processes like these is a sign HR are failing miserably in the computer industry, and it's not something that started last month. Simplifying the burden of such process for actual people looking for a job to show how they are worth is dehumanizing.
At which point they would quickly become obsolete.

Android was a hedge against Apple. GCP is a hedge against AWS. I don't see Google putting the brakes on GCP anytime soon.
From a topological view, kissing creates one long tube with two arseholes at either ends.
Miguel – Como Jogar, Estratégias, Dicas, Habilidades, Wiki, E Imagens
I've gotten a couple of those "show up and we'll train you" jobs but with a catch - the hiring people didn't believe that "anyone" could be trained quickly to do it. But I convinced them that I could.

Now that I've been on the other side of the table for a while, there's no shortage of candidates looking for job, but there's a (real or not) perceived shortage of quality candidates. And the thing that makes it really screwy is that we don't even know how to train developers very well. CS programs don't teach the "art"/"instinctual" part of it, bootcamps don't, even many jobs don't. Yet the difference between a bad codebase and a good one can have impacts a project that persist for years after those first developers have moved on...
<3 for C
Nah, the next iteration would be called GHTML, it will include fact checking by Google AI and Google Analytics by default, all for free. Everyone will use it otherwise Chrome will give you strange security errors and after all you wouldn't want to use the web that is full of fake news and other content that can be offensive to someone. /s
Blender 2.82
I was pointing to growth, not revenue. A business that doubled its revenue in two years is great to have, even if it is not currently profitable.
Personally I'd call off the interview and let them know they need to rethink their hiring practices. If that's how they interview the company probably is horrible to work for anyways.
A couple of reasons:

- Comp: Total comp for a new hire with 3+ yrs dev experience is probably 300k -> 400k at a FAANG on average (with possibility to be higher). If you want to live and raise a family in your own house in the bay area (2.5 Million for a reasonable house), this matters.

- Access: Few places have the kind of scale and resources of these companies, that can make them fun places to work. You also get to learn a lot from really good coworkers (and go to talks, explore different things, etc.)

- Work/Life: FAANGs are generally pretty good for work/life balance (though this can vary by team and manager). They're generally pleasant places to work as an engineer.
This meme bas been debunked a long time ago, but keeps on being repeated. It doesn't make much sense anyway.