skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a really common experience. Work samples were supposed to be the answer to this, though I've had really awful experiences with work-sample companies.
schools at different levels of selectivity informally have some kind of SAT percentile cutoff but it's not ever a hard requirement, or the only thing considered, and also you can get into a reasonable university with a mediocre SAT score.
It's more about time per person and organization, someone who is paid and working on a specific goal in communication with others doing the same thing will probably be a lot more effective than a loose group of supporters.

That is assuming they appear to not be organized and paid...
https://www.imei.info/news/report-imei-number-lost-or-stolen...
I just got out my 20-30 year old pile of about 100 Lego sets from my brothers and my childhoods and got my three year old engaged.

I proceeded to have this exact rant at my wife when looking up what today's equivalent of Ice Planet or Space Police would be. It's all just IP sets with a ton of custom pieces.
The flip argument is that new cases arise constantly and that the law is always encountering totally novel circumstances. But by and large, most things have been done, or some echo has been. It's just that the novel stuff gets more press.
I feel like I've read about some rocket launch failures that were caused in part by launch delays leading to overflow and sign flipping, but can't find it now =/

It may be unwise to overide static analysis (a leak is found) with hueristics (the program won't run long enough to matter)
You could discuss rather than complain
It's a great library too. the defacto standard to use with Gatsby
The feedback here isn't for the project really, it's for everyone else thinking of using it. Hacker News is a discussion site and not just a place to market things.
Glibc’s malloc has its own thread cache, which contains small chunks that can be accessed without locking at all: https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/MallocInternals#Thread_Loc.... (Interestingly, this cache used to be so optimized for speed at some point that it made a popular target for attackers, because it lacked many safety checks.)
Genomic Epidemiology of Novel Coronavirus
I’m not going to disagree regarding the parental responsibility. However, I would point out that this is similar to college courses where the final test is 100% of the course grade. Of course the priority goes to prepping for the test. There is no benefit from paying attention in class, when performance on this test can exclude someone with a perfect GPA. The system is as responsible as the parents are in this case.

But on the bright side, it seems more fair than Jim-Bob’s dad paying Harvard a few million to get his slacker kid into school despite having worse qualifications than many applicants.
People trying to find ways to justify paying less to programmers
Many top schools are no longer requiring test scores in fact. There is an argument that the test itself is somehow biased against under-represented groups. Also, less nobly, if a school makes test scores optional, their average test scores increase (which is a factor in rankings) since students will only submit them if they have good scores.
I'm not so sure about that. The lobbying for more H1Bs seems to indicate otherwise.

I am quite aware that most positions are for folks that don't have my level of expertise.

I just love designing and writing software; especially software that connects to devices. I'll do it; whether or not anyone pays me.
I believe scrambling should work the best if you scramble the keypad for every digit entered, rather than for the whole of them at once. Otherwise at least the same key presses should be immediately recognisable?
People use the monopoly because it's better than the alternatives.

That would be a more convincing argument had Microsoft itself not forcefully removed the most plausible alternative from the market.
Hi Sam,

HN asks that as discussions intensify, we get more thoughtful and substantive.

I'll do my best to follow that norm as well as to converse with you, with Paul Graham's "How to Disagree" in mind [0].

I'm not quite sure how your response fits into Paul's disagreement hierarchy with my original post in mind, but it doesn't seem to get at the meat of what I said.

I do realize universities offer philosophy degrees. They certainly aren't STEM degrees that have set career paths outside of academia, however I would say that "useless" is too strong a descriptor.

For one, I bet we could both look and find a number of successful people in the startup world that HN encompasses who have philosophy degrees and are doing interesting things within companies (eg they have successful financial careers).

Second, there could be a solid argument that philosophy teaches a useful way of thinking.

Third, if we want to move the goal posts of this discussion to universities, I could go on for quite awhile about ineffective practices and ways they set students up to fail as well. My main concern is the students. Seeing students at any level from early childhood to university and beyond taken advantage/set up to fail/screwed over/bamboozled gets me fired up.

BTW, I checked out your webpage and enjoy the Spartan nature of it. The "end of page" is a nice touch I haven't seen before.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
But then collectively as a labor force, where do we go from here? We can't all dumb ourselves down - or won't, and it seems to me that people understand what it is we do less and less.
I had to stop calling one of my previous roles “data engineering” because people thought I was just doing SQL script ETL... which really was maybe 30% of the job, but apparently that’s too menial to give you programmer cred.
And Readability and Blendle and Contenture and several Google things and I've lost count.

Disclosure: I had the same basic idea and I have a patent on a small problem related to it (reliably tracking visits, allowing paywall passage without revealing user identity, without box-stuffing by either readers or publishers).
Probably shouldn't be exposing internal server errors in your front end
50% of the websites listed are click-bait garbage, content free, or rewritten wire stories. Hope they go bankrupt and learn that the internet is not a copy paste and charge money machine.
Do not rely on facial expressions for how people are feeling
No one wants to buy the cow when they get the milk for free. :)
"Full support" for Unicode is almost never what you want unless your program literally interacts with font rendering, and then it's not even close to enough. Most of the time the important requirement is that you don't mangle data as it passes through your program, which e.g. early py3 spectacularly failed and is still not better at than py2 in the very common case where your input is not actually necessarily well-formed Unicode, but just an unrestricted byte array that by convention usually contains utf-8.

Most of what people hope for Unicode support to achieve beyond that (case-folding, homoglyph elimination, &c.) is not only not achieved, but not even possible.
Ubiquiti's Unifi Dream Machine Pro Review
> The first thing it did was allocate enough memory for the shutdown operations.

That is clever and beautiful. Have to look for chances to do similar to see if I can establish a new habit myself.
> I assume the trains will at least run on time.

If we weld the doors shut, the scheduling will be iron-clad!
> These things are nigh indestructible in my experience.

Not in my experience. When new the plastic has enough flex to tolerate some abuse, but that doesn't last very long - especially if exposed to UV. Polypropylene does not like being exposed to direct sunlight.

Most used examples I've encountered are brittle and break easily if not already cracked. They're disposable plastic garbage.
Not really. Before posting the question here I searched HN for recent similar questions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Even though some of them are lists of startup ideas, they're mostly from an investor point of view, rather than enterprise/end-user point of view.
This was essentially the story of how we built a successful software company at cPanel. Our customers would describe things like “I want a button that does this” or “a script that does that” and we had to make many assumptions about what they really wanted. Finally after determine we were spending massive amounts of time on unused features, we developed everything as a workable “beta” feature. The ones that we got a ton of praise or complaints on kept getting developed. The ones with silence stayed the same.

This was before heat map software and click tracking which can do a great job of augmenting customer feedback.

The key part that we found out is that if you take this approach, you have to couple it with high quality software support. We hired and trained folks who knew the entirety of our business and tech (Linux, DNS, HTTP, hosting, etc). Our tech support reps were paid much more highly than others in the industry but it gave us more benefits than just being able to support customers when beta software was ship to prod, it also gave us a training ground for future software engineers, QA folks, SysAdmins, and Product Managers.

What I think a lot of people forget is that software is one piece of the puzzle in solving a problem, it’s absolutely not the whole solution. If you design a process based around connecting with customers on a regular basis and having feedback flow throughout your company, you won’t have to “make perfect features”.

I’ve only worked with a small number of companies since that have understood this. Most I’ve worked with have created communication silos and sit in rooms trying to dream up the perfect set of requirements.
https://github.com/nfl/react-helmet/blob/master/CODE_OF_COND...

And a properly filled out code of conduct. Not bad.
What devices do you have with a dedicated pin pad? Your safe?
Probably worth mentioning the Emeco 1006, a similarly iconic chair.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeco_1006
I've been going through my childhood collection and sorting and categorizing into parts bins. It sounds horribly tedious, but it's actually very, very relaxing.
> Many top schools are no longer requiring test scores in fact.

When I applied to college, there were a number of schools that has something that was “optional” but word on the street was that you’d have no hope of getting in without it. How “optional” are these, really?
What is the difference between a tech and non-tech company?

Btw, their top-3 repos respectively have 12k, 573, 432 stars. I'm not sure little is the apt description.
A 99 USD commercial web API. This one, and their other endpoints, require being part of paid Apple Developer program. I understand, but it's frustrating if you're wanting to play around or use in free open source.
You seem to be under the misconception that I am a mathematician. I think that's a bit of a stretch of the term, although I do enjoy math; as far as I know, I've never published or discovered a single novel mathematical result, and I certainly don't have any academic mathematical credentials. Very few of the humans would call me a mathematician.

Everyone is born incapable of carrying out self-care tasks. Some of us remain that way for our entire lives, but most don't. I haven't observed a strong correlation between mathematical ability and potty-training or cooking ability, so surely any community of mathematicians would have enough people who could cook a meal that they'd get along okay, in the improbable scenario where they were forced into strict autarky.

Duels are not consensual except in the sense that it's consensual to surrender to the police when they tackle you. Struggling against the police, or fleeing the duel, is overwhelmingly likely to get you killed.

I'm not sure where you're getting this idea that I'm "shit-talking non-mathematicians for taking senseless risks"; one mathematician I know went to Italy for a week to stay in the house of a man she'd just met in Argentina to dance in his tango show, while another juggled his baby to illustrate a lecture about siteswaps (and, perhaps more shockingly, gave up tenure for the baby's mother). I think mathematicians tend to take more long-term risks and less short-term risks than non-mathematicians. None of those examples is quite in the same category as "he grabbed the cop by her bulletproof vest", for example, which is something I saw a non-mathematician do as I helped the cops to arrest him.

What I'm shit-talking non-mathematicians for is killing mathematicians, burning the Academy and the works of the Mohists, destroying the German universities in the service of a stupid self-congratulatory racist ideology, and destroying democracy in America for the same reason. None of those amount to "taking senseless risks"; their undesirable results were nearly guaranteed and indeed intended by the perpetrators.

You're not wrong about the insufferable superiority complex, but you ought to consider the way in which my "tirade" is actually correct, even if my insufferable superiority complex annoys you. As a mathematician, you undoubtedly have a great deal of experience changing your mind after hearing arguments from people you don't particularly like. I suggest you try doing it in this case.
I heard about a device that had fewer keys say 5 only, one for each finger, but to use it you had to insert your hand into a slot in the machine so it’s completely invisible from the outside what keys you’re pressing. Presumably in theory they could use one slot for each hand to get to the full 10 digit range.
Telegram Messenger LLP is (was?) UK based, but it looks like it's being gotten rid of. [1]

From the same article:

> Telegram Messenger LLP was established in February 2014 by two companies – Dogged Labs Ltd. (British Virgin Islands) and Telegraph Inc. (Belize). In May 2018, however, Dogged Labs was substituted for Telegram Messenger Inc., which is also registered in the British Virgin Islands.

How the SEC (or the US in general) intends to undertake effective enforcement action against a cryptocurrency provider operating out of either of those jurisdictions is beyond me. They don't exactly have a physical product whose import you can ban...

[1] https://news.bitcoin.com/pavel-durov-closes-uk-based-company...
Mathematics is modern ontology.

We’re not great at predicting which parts of ontology are eventually useful in other fields — mostly physics and other hard science, but more recently computer science, economics + finance, and even things like sociology and linguistics.

So we let the people who self-select to be ontologists guide what the field researches — and this has generally been fairly effective. Certainly more effective than if we’d only looked at things which had immediate, obvious use. Complex numbers, widely used in science and engineering, were once regarded as suspect abstract nonsense. That’s why they’re called “imaginary numbers”: it was a pejorative name that stuck.

We have cryptography, computers, modern physics, and modern finance to show for our efforts, among other things.

It simply takes time (like, decades to centuries) for new ontological ideas to propagate to other fields. We’re hoping that formalizing into HoTT and other computer friendly systems will allow us to align with software development, and speed the process up.

That seems to be going well, and at an accelerating pace.

The hope is that HoTT and category theory give us a framework to do exactly what you propose — more easily specify and interlink knowledge.

Expect results around 2050.

It took around 40-60 years for category theory to have a big impact — but now it is in fields as far away from mathematics as linguistics. Hopefully HoTT will get there a little faster, but it’s still going to take decades to go from niche research to widely used in mathematics to widely used across disciplines.

So, to summarize:

1. Because we’re bad at predicting the future and abstract math has often turned out to be useful later.

2. Mathematics is trying to do exactly what you propose with knowledge, via exactly the programs this blog is talking about.
No, it's not your fault, Google gives you zero warning that factory resetting will lock out the next user.
From TFA: "“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!?!?”, my inner monologue screamed. My thoughts spiraled out of control: “YOU’VE JUST RUINED YOUR CAREER! WHY DID YOU HAVE TO COMPLAIN ABOUT IT ALL!? THEY ARE ALL GOING TO JUDGE YOU TO NO END! YOU FORGOT TO DOCUMENT THAT ONE FUNCTION YOU ARE REALLY PROUD OF IN THAT ONE GITHUB REPO AND THEY ARE ALL GOING TO SEEEEE IIIIIITTTTT!!!!”"

Haha, that reminds me of the old days of Slashdot, immortalized is this early 00's webcomic:

https://www.pyrocam.com/files/images/clanbob.dundundun.dontt...
Is data engineer just a posh title for a system analyst?
Is this U.S. specific? I've never come across it (though it seems like something I might have seen in a café in north america). The monobloc I've seen in every continent except Antartica - as I've not been, but I'm sure there is someone here who could attest that they've sat on one there.
Honestly, the "coding" is rarely the issue. For most software engineering roles you generally want someone who can: understand problems, figure out possible solutions, decide on which is best, communicate why it is best and (importantly) be flexible when the company wants you to do some other solution. Meet all those requirements and you are a useful member at most companies.

I think a general chat about a broad problem and the interviewee's thought process of how they would approach it can tell you much more than whiteboarding some memorized algorithm.
IIRC there are DSLs that are context free and which compile down to TeX. I just can’t recall at the moment any.. it’s been years. The layout engine inside TeX is second to none. Why throw out the baby with the bath water?
That hit me where it hurts most. I sometimes forget how to declare a class or how to initialize it, because when I working just click to another file and look it up.
I had an interview a few days ago where I came out as a complete moran. I did a take-home test which I was proud of. I expected we will discuss that. It was pair programming. I did some silly mistakes at the beginning and my brain shut off after ~15 minutes. In the end, they said: "We will notify you..."
I wonder if a sensible option might be short term contract-to-hire scenarios.

You have three promising candidates? Instead of trying to extract signal from gimmick interview tactics, hire them all and put them on a 3-month contract with the opportunity to renew to full time. Then you're giving them real weork instead of easily crammed questions, and remove some of the anxiety affecting interview performance.
It's been 15 years since I went through the process but top universities required an application packet not an exam. The SAT and your grades were part of that but so were essays, extracurricular activities, letters of recommendation and so on. Some interviewed potential students as well. There were many ways to show potential excellence rather than a single one.
It's also worth noting that the SATs are offered multiple times a year, which makes retaking them a lot easier.

The big pressure cooker exams in Korea are once a year, so if you choose to retake it (and many do) you are set back for a year.
Show HN: Autoroute – encoding/JSON for Go HTTP Handlers
As long as they are happy with MIT open-source, on my terms, no big deal. They are welcome to knock themselves out.

If they want to own it, though, and have more of a say in what it does, that's another story.
Relying on other's opinions to make one of the most important decisions in your life -- where you will spend 40 hours or more week -- is pathetic. It's one thing to "trust/value" their peer's judgement, but it's quite another for their opinions to make your decisions for you. Good luck with that. Haha.
Do not use this. Full of Go anti-patterns.
> What is the difference between a tech and non-tech company?

The number of software engineers in the NFL is probably a rounding error compared to their entire workforce.

> Btw, their top-3 repos respectively have 12k, 573, 432 stars. I'm not sure little is the apt description.

I’m not saying that they don’t have useful software. I’m just saying that many companies probably have some projects they can open source; it’s not surprising to see that NFL has a GitHub page.
Has a company like Google ever released data proving this? Latino's make up a fairly large number of the people that live in the bay area (23.5% [1]) yet there are like what 3.6%[2] of those people working at google. Seems like a pretty big gap.

It would be interesting to see what their application/success ratio demographics are like.

1. http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/bayarea.htm
2. https://www.wired.com/story/googles-employee-diversity-numbe...
> "'Bigness often cuts against innovation.'

> The term the author needs is 'diseconomies of scale.'"

diseconomies of scale, like economies of scale, are systemic characteristics that change (somewhat predictably) with size.

stagnation resulting from bigness is a self-inflicted dysfunction that is independent of size (that is, it doesn't only happen when companies get big).

and multiple groups working on the same product might not be a dysfunction at all. it could just be risk mitigation (that only a large company can afford).

my point isn't so much to disagree, but to redirect. organizational dysfunction increases as companies get larger because of "coordination neglect" (it gets harder to keep all the initiatives pointing in the same direction as communications channels necessarily multiply with size).

but risk socialization strategies at large companies leading to things like "too big to fail" bailouts really chap my hide. those companies should go bankrupt--not out of business, but reorganized, with the execs replaced, their compensation clawed back, and possibly sued for malfeasance.

the bigger you are (or equivalently, the more power you have), the bigger the consequences and the more important it is to face justice from wrongdoing, the exact opposite of the direction we're headed right now in the US (e.g., recent presidential pardons).
Apple News?
Luckily I've also been doing this long enough that for every one that asks for a project or wants me to live-code, there are two that chat with me for 2-4 hours and come away eager as hell to get an offer to me before I accept one somewhere else, so it's not that big a deal. I mostly just wish places were more transparent about this stuff so if they're gonna whiteboard me I could either put in some targeted prep work so I (maybe) don't look like an idiot, or else say "thanks but no thanks" and save us both some time if I can't or don't want to cram that week.
Our First Weeks of Securing Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
There is a tiny minority of scientists who truly understand how fucked humanity is (a high probability of complete civilizational collapse within the next 30-50, and a population collapse of 20-80%).

There is a larger minority of activists who at least have a _dim inkling_ that something is very, very wrong.

Then there is a _very large minority_ that are actively denying what is happening, and the direction in which things are progressing.

The largest group? Either have no clue or don’t care. This are the people for whom this article is written.
banquet hall chairs
Otto Gross: Nietzschean Psychoanalyst, Bohemian, Free Love Guru, Pagan Anarchist
Do any competing platforms have a similar API with a less imposing barrier?