skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Learning Rust by writing a linked list is like learning Python by writing a CPython extension. Sure, you'll learn a lot, and it may even be useful, but it's not the typical experience of using the language.

I've seen people completely confused that such simple "CS 101" thing is such a mess in Rust. But nobody actually writes linked lists in Rust:

• The borrow checker wants to have clear single ownership, and doesn't support reference cycles. Lists happen to have mixed ownership. I'm not sure if it's even possible to prove at compile time that a list will never have a cycle, but it seems at least in the Sufficiently Smart Compiler territory.

• Safe linked lists are in the std lib if you really need them, but std has also plenty of other containers that are more efficient on modern hardware.

Compile-time safety checks can't prove all valid programs are valid (halting problem). Instead of going after the enormously complex problem, the borrow checker rules are actually pretty simple. It's a feature, not a defect. Simplifying the problem to single ownership with shared-immutable vs exclusive-mutable makes it much easier to reason about borrow checking. If something doesn't fit these rules, you either use a different approach, or use `unsafe`, and then wrap it in a higher-level safe abstraction that fits the model.
Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
Inspired by another post 5 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007
The "standardized" interview at companies like Google has lead to them hiring mostly White/Asian males though... I have had plenty of people tell me that interviewing at Google is essentially a roll of the dice these days. You can answer all the 5x interviews in a satisfactory manner and still get rejected.

I feel "just wing it" can lead to somebody talented from a non-traditional background getting a chance at a great career that they would be auto-rejected by google at the resume submit phase.
Economies of scale are important but I think the thing is, they hit massively diminishing returns after you get past a critical threshold that is usually industry dependent, but related to the cost of capital to overcome fixed overheads.

For example if you can afford to build a fully automated factory to manufacture your product then you are probably 95% as
efficient as a company that can build 10 such factories.

The large companies we have now are exceeding that size by one or more orders of magnitude.
I had the same issue. I emailed blendle, suggesting they write a browser extension which could manually/automatically redirect supported publications to the blendle equivalent. Obviously, they didn't think that was necessary.

Can't say I think much of their decision-making skills.
Is this because of the distortion (it's not a circle anymore)?

I work at FAANG as a backend engineer, and so I don't know this one either.
It’s a valid point.

Every kids are different, we went head first with the big bucket approach with ours, so any further set we bought were more to have a group of coherent pieces at a bundle price.

One side effect was that the stickers on the bricks made them weirder to reuse. Also sets with a lot of specific shape bricks (like slightly curved long flat and smooth triangular cover pieces for instance) can be reassembled in one or two configurations, but those weird pieces are also harder to reuse.

We had Star Wars set which were long and pretty boring (following instructions) to build for our kid, but he loved to try to make his own spaceships with the monochrome pannels.

I see the value of Lego’s current approach, and am glad it’s working well for you. I’d be even more happy if they were more commited to both approaches. Forcing themselves to have any single piece they produce to be available in their pick-a-brick section would go a long way.

PS: schools using Lego’s robotics introduction often use a 400$ set, released and never updated since 3 years. The compatible consumer variant is 300$ and the programming has to be done in the lego app. It is something, and it was super fun for kids to discover programming, we were interesting in getting it, but for instance their latest system (Control +) who technically could do the same things has no interface compatibility with the EV3 ecosystem. Nor does their “Boost” system for smaller kids, for that matter. At this point it looks like a dead end.

The best system right now seems to be using their deprecated “Power functions” motors and elements and plug them to third party central units like SBrick. It’s a situation that feels really weird to be honest, and I am left wondering why we ended up here.
It's an open source project that will gladly accept patches. I've submitted patches for those things that didn't work for me and while getting feedback is useful, getting fixes is better.
I like this, because it's a tree style note system, which I go a bit crazy for, as I haven't found a truly great one yet (my dream is Dynalist, but faster on mobile and self-hostable FOSS). The features of this seem pretty insane as it looks like it allows stuff like drawing something for a bullet point, which would be perfect for some uni modules (I currently just do full hand writing for those, mostly in bullet point lists, which is still pretty much how I think, but a lot of the advantages are obviously lost).

Convinced you'd be able to sustain the project that way, would you consider opening up the project's source? My motivation for wanting this ties a bit into:

> I will not disappear. Moving forward, LearnObit will only improve with new features and polished programming. I promise.

Your promise isn't worth much. You will most certainly disappear at some point (when you die, which might be today [this is not a threat]) and will likely lose interest far, far sooner.

If I made a comprehensive knowledge base I'd want everyone to be able to access it, not just people with a subscription to a SaaS product, which will quite certainly become disfunct within 100 years.

I'd also want to be able to extend it with my own scripts and features. All these problems could be solved relatively easily (but perhaps not as profit-deliveringly as you wish).

Okay, that's the free software preaching.

Conceptually I like the idea of this app, an important part of my bullet point list consists of knowledge base stuff. Other key components are thoughts that need to be noted somehow and planning of things (which might be a great addition to your product, as you are already creating to do-items in a way). Keeping all of these things in one app would be something between good and essential for me, as I think I would like some portability between the use cases.

I haven't even looked at LearnOrbit yet in detail, but the thought of a newcomer in the outliner-niche and your novel concept definitely excite me.
I collect role-playing campaign settings for this very reason. I love just reading through long geographies of made up worlds. Pouring over the maps. Imagining the geopolitical landscapes or how the alternative histories or technologies might function in that world.

I don't actually play role-playing games at all anymore. But it's an entire genre of work (made up geographies, bestiaries, etc.) that isn't really served outside of games very much.
From what I understand, it’s a patent for a weakened Coronavirus strain that could be used for vaccination. A flu-shot, basically.
I see a lot of this at my day job. We've had positions open for over a year and somehow nobody makes it past the phone screen stage. The few that do make it to on-site interviews, we reject for one reason or another. Usually because they're okay but not great. We of course want great.

Sometimes we find a unicorn and want to make an offer. They get hired by FAANG after our interview and before we send the offer. Wonderful.

Contrast that to my side hustle where I sometimes hire folks to help out with coding so I can focus on other stuff.

Go into 1 or 2 Slack/Telegram groups "Hey anyone need work?"

Exchange 5 texts with 3 people.

"Okay here's a project, how much?"

Pick person. Get job done. If I like the way it goes, they get more jobs later.

Whole process from search to hire takes 1 week.

But at the dayjob we're a funded startup so we gotta be choosy and picky and make life all sorts of hard in the name of I'm not even sure what. We wouldn't even consider a part-time contractor because commitment is worth more than getting the job done.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
People always criticize America for having expensive universities but I always thought it was horribly depressing when my German friends told me that their entire future was staked on a single exam. Do poorly and not only can you not get into college but you'll be a sanitation worker for the rest of your life (or similar).
> Perhaps in practice my definition of "a mathematician" is "someone who, when wrong, responds to disagreement by changing their mind rather than becoming defensive or downvoting you", an event I see on a daily basis in lectures on mathematics and very rarely outside of them.

Mathematicians are often OK at this within their discipline, but we're as bad as anyone else at it when dealing with human affairs. (At least, I am.) I might rather suggest the less flattering characterisation of a mathematician who will argue with a statement with which they agree, just to see if it breaks. (At least, I do.)
What a misconception. I know plenty of people in Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles, and even Pittsburgh, pulling in $200k/year in tech.
You can buy one from an artist in Maine. He makes them out of reused slate tiles, chipping them down to size for the right resonance. It looks a bit like a xylophone, and sounds very pretty. Looking at his website, he also has rough stone ones as well: https://www.elementaldesign.me/stone-musical-instruments
Lost a ton of money? Lambda is profitable if 1/4 get a job [1], so 6 * 30k * 1/4 is $45k.

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/02/lambda-schools-j...
The Lego clones are good and cheap. I'd get those for younger kids to get used to legos, because you won't care if they break or lose pieces if it costs 1/3 of the Legos.

And you can get more sets so the overspecialization of pieces and color suites isn't as bad. The chinese knockoff of UCS Millenium Falcon is like $250.

That said, LEGO is higher quality and worth it once the kid, or adult kid, is ready for it. Legos can kind of hold their worth if you keep track of the sets for completeness, but the lego knockoff is completely worthless on the resale market, and for good reason.
This is a book well worth reading even if it isn't one of your 'easy to translate into a blockbuster movie with special effects and tailor made cliffhangers'. It's more of a documentary on how a future historian might describe his own history starting with us.
I could be very wrong and am no HR expert, but I don’t think that question was actually about what would happen if you were an HR director. They wanted your thoughts on those situations in regards to the position you were apply for.
Pestel Analysis – Marketing Strategy
London’s Sharp-Elbowed, Loudmouthed Mary Frith (2017)
> Leetcode style systems are a lot of fun for people.

That’s not true for everyone, especially in such high stress situations as an interview. I like crosswords, but I wouldn’t want to do them in front of someone judging me for a job in 45 min while thinking aloud.
I'm hoping they don't screw it up.

What I'm really hoping is that Lego starts fulfilling demand for old sets (please start making classic space sets again), but I doubt it.
Amazon to donate to drug charity linked to Scientology
The faux em dash definitely caught my eye. The hyphenated "ory" on its own line at the end of a paragraph is another really bad look.

If these are the examples to pitch the system... it doesn't seem ready for primetime. That's OK. Every project has to start somewhere, but the README could stand to frame that a little better.
"I expect that chair to outlive the company and possibly humans on the planet" is a sentence that I would react to with the opposite emotion :-(
This is quite dated. Is there any evidence that this curfew is still in effect?
For playing rock music.
Context free means that the language/program can be described using a "context free grammar": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar.

Context free grammars are more expressive than regular expressions, but less expressive than full-blown programming languages.

If you've got a spare 100 or so hours and you're interested in learning more, there's a good lecture series on YouTube about this stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOsMcgIK95k&list=PLbtzT1TYeo...
Mathematicians should make an effort to reach out to non-mathematicians because that category also includes people like, you know, physicists, engineers, computer scientists, students who may want to one day become mathematicians, those kinds of people.

The point about professions wasn't that mathematicians don't have the ability to do those things (although I'm quite certain most don't have the constitution to do many blue collar jobs), it was that if they were spending 40-50 hours a week collecting the town's garbage, working at a water treatment plant, or doing hot tar roofing, they would no longer have the time or energy to be doing math for a living.

You are truly delusional to think that funding is "only necessary to the extent that it helps keep the torch-wielding villagers away from the gate". Taxes collected from the people you seem to have so much contempt for (basically everyone) are what allow mathematicians to live in ivory towers doing research mathematics for a living. The patronage system of old (which allowed for people like Bruno and Gauss to get any education at all) was even worse, as the money they were receiving was the product of borderline or outright slavery.
Your bizarre characterization of mathematicians as saint-like figures levitating above the unwashed masses is indicative of a pretty poor understanding of history and a shocking lack of ability to empathize. I hope you understand that people who think like you (people who are disgusted by those who built and paid for the ivory towers in which your heroes reside) are the reason why people support things like defunding universities.
I feel the name "data engineer" is perfectly fine for both positions. It's the job of the job post to clarify the requirements.

I don't see an issue with looking for a "data engineer with deep experience building and maintaining data pipelines based on spark".

What would you call it? "Spark operator"?
The good way to hire is to recruit people someone has worked with before and can vouch for.

If you do good enough work at a job that your coworkers will want to work with you again, you've got it made and can choose between jobs for the rest of your career.

If you don't impress coworkers that way, you need to go through this crazy stranger interviews talked about here. Do try hard to avoid that!
Paul, first of all, let me thank you for the great software you’re developed. As a long time JACK user, Can you point me to a more detailed write up on why it is overkill?
We desperately need to move away from these education systems. They worked well when resources were limited and identifying gifted students took priority. The world is a much different place now and we should focus on individualized curriculum and mastery.
I don't pretend to be all that knowledgeable, but I've implemented & used both methods...

There is a similarity in the sense that both are trying to generate samples with a density that is proportional to a given distribution. Metropolis generally in the continuous case, and the alias method is for discrete distribution sampling.

Apart from that, I don't see a very strong connection between the techniques. Metropolis is for random walks, while the alias method is for direct sampling.

The very brilliantly clever observation of the alias method is that when you have N items in your discrete distribution, you can sample from a uniformly discretized set of buckets that have a width that is the average size of your discrete weights, and then split up and distribute any of the weights that are of larger than average size into other buckets that have less than average size. It possible to always have no more than 2 items in a bucket, so it allows storing the data structure in an array of size 2N, and allows O(1) sampling from your discrete weights.

Metropolis is more about taking a walk through a probability field, so each sample is in some sense a result of the history of the previous samples, and it spends more time in local areas where probabilities are high.

With Metropolis, you have to make sure you don't get stuck in local maxima, that your sampler can break through low-probability regions in your distribution. With the alias method, you get independent samples, there's no risk of missing some of the space. Both methods can accept quasi-random or low-discrepancy inputs, but both of them will have limited benefit, unlike inverse transform sampling.
Thanks for sharing, I toast any and all competition for quickbooks.

I clicked pricing first thing, and thanks for having that accessible quickly (not hidden)

I am not the target market perhaps. I want software I can download and own. I am going to assume this is cloud based since it's a monthly fee - I also want software that keeps all my financial data local and out of the clouds.

thanks for sharing, you add hope to my disdain for QB.
> As an RIA, they can make riskier investments

Less liquid. Not necessarily riskier. RIAs also have more reporting requirements and liabilities to their investors than private funds like VCs.

> they refused to acknowledge or respond to the SEC

Can’t imagine this thrilled their investors.
How are American SATs different?
No, You Are Not ‘Running Late’, You Are Rude and Selfish (2011)
This kind of question can be heard as a dogwhistle for

"Are you a leftist? We only hire leftists."
> how are they going to enforce anything?

Fines and C&Ds. If those court orders are wilfully ignored, it turns into a more serious law enforcement issue. In the meantime, they get locked out of the U.S. dollar capital markets.
do you also instrument your own monitoring, are on call if one of your models breaks and have built the system where you "just drop a container"? If you are, then you are a data engineer too, otherwise you're standing on the shoulders of your data eng team and they make it look easy for you. Go buy them some donuts first time you go back to the office.
I’ve been in interviews where I’ve seen the problem before, and know the solution. I’ve always said so if that happens and the interviewer either continues and delves into why it’s an optimal solution, or switches to a different question.
A curfew like that doesn't make sense. I would consider this to be extreme government overreach. In a free society you are allowed to study as much as you want and you're allowed to teach as much as you want.
Have the terrorists won?
Metro city sues drug manufacture over 97,500% price increase for seizure med
I couldn't disagree more. That's my favourite thing about these chairs - they're cheap and ugly, but i actually find them really nice to sit in. There's just the right amount of flex to support you and bend to the shape of your body without feeling flimsy. Most cheap chairs are either totally inflexible, or too flimsy.
With rust and cargo it's often trivial to use a third party lib from a centralized location that has a rich collection of submitted libs to choose from. It's also fairly easy with python/pip and node/npm. There's nothing quite like it on the same scale and as widely used with c/c++, which means it's more difficult to pull in third party libs. It's often easier to just implement the stuff yourself. Or at least that's my experience. I'm not familiar with java.
> If no one, including the author of the linked article, can think of anything better, doesn't that mean that companies are already using optimal practices?

Not necessarily, it might just mean that the more optimal approaches are not obvious. It seems extremely unlikely that the current approach is optimal.
Where I work now doesn't have any real interview structure or way to measure candidates. It makes interviewing difficult, but honestly in the end the most important part is the answer to "would I like working with this person?" There are many aspects that can lead to your answer, but I really believe that is the most important question to answer. Someone can be extremely productive, but if they're an asshole, nope, I don't want to spend a minute working with them. On the other hand, if someone is slow and error-prone, but otherwise a pleasant coworker, I'm pretty forgiving, and hope they can learn along the way.

And for the social justice aspect, we do have a very diverse group of engineers, especially for our size and location.
Here's another thing about tree style note taking and the structure of knowledge that maybe bugs me a bit more than it maybe should:

Yes, for about 95% or (much) more of nodes the structure is hierarchical, but there's still a somewhat significant amount of nodes for which the conceptual structure would actually be a directed graph (here's an extreme but common example: You want to make a list of cars. Do you group them by manufacturer, type, price ...? Not at all? That'd be extremely hard to navigate. You'd also want to be able to easily change it, right? Another example would be general cross-linking).

Have you thought about this before? Would it be feasible to implement something like this in your app?

Does anyone else know whether there are tools out there for this already? I wouldn't be mad about a mind map view (that is not absolute garbage because it's a swing app that's ugly and only available on desktop linux or offers per node styling options [I see how it's good for presentation, but it's just terrible for pure structure keeping] ...), but I'd prefer the main view to be tree-based as it's by far the best representation (I have found so far) for the by far most cases.
You can retake the SAT (and GRE, and MCAT, and ...) as many times as you'd like (and can afford, I suppose).

Also, the amount of weight such exams are given varies greatly by the institution here.

Edit: For the SAT in particular, most publish tables showing their historical admission rate as it correlates to the combination of high school GPA and SAT score.
Modern Whigs are very centrist, though it’s really more extreme parties that pull the Republicans and Democrats apart. Without that pull the parties then to adopt the vast majority of viewpoints excluding a few token issues.
Sony, Facebook pull out of GDC 2020
Venmo messed up again Venmo API Wrapper
I love writing software. In theory, I’d do it for free (and often do at home).

I’m also not an idiot and I can readily bubble sort a low offer against my current comp and against the other offers.
Yeah, I wouldn't want to influence the author to stop working on typesetting, but I found the arrogant boasting really annoying.
Religious leaders in general, especially ones that are all but worshipped by their devotees, have a really bad track record throughout history, and it's not limited to the 60's or psychedelic-inspired interest in alternative communities.

What was different in the 60's and 70's is that more and more people started to be interested in Eastern religion, philosophy, and ways of life, and that interest was partially influenced by psychedelics.

But plenty of non-Eastern alternative communities (particularly the apocalyptic, us-vs-them isolationist kind) have their own issues that have nothing to do with psychedelics or the 60's and 70's.
The article doesnt mention it, but the surgeon also had a brain tumour. Concerned about his fine motor skills, he had his tumor operated on WHILe he was performing brain surgery on the violinist. Amazingly, HIS surgeon was operating on the violinst's docctor while himself having a tumour removed.

I don't know why they leave out details like this in these dumbed-down articles. It was really an extraordinary operation.