skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Woah my experience is completely different. I've never seen a product fail because of poor engineering practices. And I've seen plenty fail because of business issues.

I've worked mostly on enterprise software, many of which had awful code bases but we're wildly profitable.
No one is perfect. No one can check all the boxes. Having the desire to try to check them all is the key. Quoting the last part of the article here.

To me, whoever checks most of the boxes defined in this article and has a good mindset would make the cut.
They pull this BS all the time to students - it's terrible: https://twitter.com/nwilliams030/status/1219687148972056578

I cannot believe how often Austen flat out lies on things so easily disproven.
It was an epic failure because you need a team to support and guide Cassandra use properly but no one wanted to do the grunt work. The VP of infrastructure MM openly called it “toil vs talent”, meaning those that did the grunt work would be held in high esteem and get yearly bonuses, but the promotions would go to those with “talent”, ie creating new things.

When people are openly and stupidly incentivized like this, expect those people to behave in a predictable way. People started building new services to get promotions instead of “toiling” at supporting their fellow engineers.

It affected most of engineering but especially in teams like Cassandra, where you needed guidance and support to properly use it effectively, it was a disaster. There should have been open office hours to help people with questions and to ensure that teams were using it properly but there wasn’t. Instead people were left to do what they wanted with no structure or guidance and Cassandra was completely misused. Productions problems ensued, people left the team because they didn’t want to be oncall fixing fires all the time, and eventually it came to the point where they decided to stop supporting it altogether. It was a complete disaster caused by very poor engineering management.

We all knew that Netflix and Facebook use it without issues, but because of stupid management, it failed at Uber.
I once discovered that my salary was 4x that of my colleague with more experience and the same job title.

I had a good understanding of the value I was providing to the business, of what my next best offer was, and I negotiated my salary regularly. (Where my colleague was accepting a rate that was clearly below the market rate)

It was challenging for me to share my salary in this case. On reflection, the situation was not politically in my favour to do this: perhaps I should have negotiated a different job title (but I didn't care about that at the time).
How Are Underwater Structures Built?
It’s bad from the sense that you cannot tell people that they are paid special when they actually aren’t paid specially.
My opinion on this is really unpopular on HN, but I still hold it's the correct approach: Net Neutrality is a policy destined for continuous failure and we need to abandon it.

* Creating competition is the only surefire path for improvement

* State/Local governments should not subsidize players to avoid entrenching ISPs and creating local monopolies.

* In areas with entrenched ISPs, the only way to break the cycle is to bring in new players (Google Fiber successfully proved this)

The FTC should regulate ISPs, not the FCC:

* An "internet service" provides internet access unfiltered subject to a well defined classes. Anything that is not an ISP is an "information service" provides a narrow walled garden and must be advertised as such.

* ISPs should be regularly investigated for false claims on advertisement.
He only sells to the company, not to an individual.

That's what I thought, you didn't...
https://aws.amazon.com/timestream/
Imagine you succeed in persuading a large number of nonvoters to vote. Do you have some reason to suspect they would make better decisions, i.e. choose better candidates, than people who currently vote? I could never understand why voting per se was held to be a virtue. If you don't care or don't know what you're doing, why should I want you to vote?
I'm interviewing for a Data Engineering position right now, and one of the questions I was told to prepare for is "What is data engineering?" I think it's far more than just the data science aspects this article talks about. Data Engineering touches more aspects of your engineering projects than most people think. Curious what this crowd has to say about my idea here. Also, I'm looking for work. If you like my thoughts, hit me up.

I think there are 4 buckets of data engineering problems, each with their own challenges and solutions.

Operational Data Engineering
This is the detritus that grows like weeds as parts of other projects and often isn't recognized as a data engineering problem. We need to pull a file off an FTP server or hit an API and do something with it. Next thing you know, there are dozens of these little things that are not individually hard, but having visibility into dependency trees and failure cases becomes difficult because they are spread out everywhere and it's not obvious where to look when things go wrong. Tools like Apache Airflow are a good solution even if you don't use them in other ways because they can centralize monitoring, logging, and graphs. Scaling isn't resource intensive for these tasks because they are discrete. You can fan out. The scaling challenge for this type of data engineering is really about tending your garden and keeping things coherently organized.

Business Logic Data Engineering
This is processing where the data is highly structured and sometimes even ordered or sequenced. It's hard to scale because you can't just throw things into a stream and apply multiple workers. You have to have a managed process and likely shared in-memory state that collects the worker results and applies strict rules to a process. This is the opposite problem from big data. It's small data, rigidly organized, and carefully managed.

Data Science Data Engineering
This is sort of classic ETL with a twist. ETL systems are typically pretty static once the E, T, and L are known quantities. But working with Data Scientists requires that your pipelines have to be pretty flexible because scientists are doing experiments. But they also have to be repeatable and comparable, which means your pipeline has to maintain version. This is also the area where you are most likely to encounter Big Data, so you have to be prepared to change your mental model and be able to use tools like Hadoop and Spark to bring compute to where your data is.

Analytics Data Engineering
This is classic ETL pipelines that move data from point A to data lakes or data warehouses. The key thing to understand here is what you are modeling at the endpoint. If it's a legit data warehouse, you are modeling business processes. If you aren't doing that, you are--by definition--pushing data to a lake. Understanding your endpoint is key to choosing your reporting and analytics tools to lay on top of your data source. Data lakes are a good use case for ad-hoc, SQL-driven reporting tools like MetaBase. But if you are sitting on top of a well-structured fact/dimension type of warehouse, you will want more formal tools like Tableau, Pentaho, or Cognos.
Thanks for posting. If they added DNS over HTTPS or DNS over TLS I'd use give them a try.
The most ingenious designs are the ones that are everywhere but nobody ever notices.
Multiclass classification – ML from the Fundamentals (part 3)
As long as the money keeps coming in, I don't think the business guys will see any reason for change.
The problem with the 'game' of worrying about what comes out of your mouth is that you find over time that if it's not on target all the time and every time people will still have a problem and hate on you (friends or strangers). So you might as well just accept (I have found) that fact and be what you want to be. You are only as good as the last thing that didn't matter. Like if you go to 5 social functions but miss 1 people will focus on the 1 and the 5 that you did will not count. (Hence if you go to a funeral of a friend's parents you go to the 2nd parent's when they die not the first as an extreme example of the thinking).

Also noting that the person elected President won by being himself in a super extreme way and saying all sorts of things that traditionally would have sunk a political candidate. Now sure with certain age groups that won't go over as well but people I think hate phony more than they hate real which is objectionable in some way.
Sure, you can't invest a ton in mentoring employees if people don't actually want to keep working there. But one of the best ways to ensure programmers stay is to make sure they keep learning.

And one of he best ways to make sure your senior people always have something new and interesting to tackle is having them mentor junior people to take over the things seniors are bored with.
Interesting. Thanks for the explanation. And I agree, my script isn't that flexible. I believe that " | tee" was left in there from when I tried to skip the sudoers entry...it's definitely not pretty.
I often look like I have no idea what I'm doing with computers when someone is watching. I also find it almost impossible to practice an instrument with someone watching. Performing is another matter. To do well at interview coding I'd having to drill relevant questions to the point that I was performing rather than practicing in the interview, and I'd probably still be freaked out and unable to do it unless I knew the questions I'd face in advance.

Luckily actually working in software development is a hell of a lot more like practicing than performing, and there's usually no-one watching you, so I'm fine at that part.
If one wants to become a data engineer, what specific vendors/technologies are increasing in demand? Ie. Databricks, talend, Cloudera?
That's what they claim: "It would be private, no shadowy trackers selling your data."

On the other hand they bill you based on the percentage of the time you spend on each individual partner site. That seems somewhat contradictory.
>> it would be interesting to know if that actually was enough

If the 'people fail fizzbuzz' trope is actually true then you would probably clear that first bar easily and probably the next few as well.

Personally, I think most if not all software devs have some form of tunnel vision (aka limited experience). While they feel the bar they are setting is low, the manner in which they describe the bar may be completely unfathomable to a person not familiar with the same terminology.

Since all technology is just new terminology for old ideas then it's easy to fake competence if you know the new terminology or look like an idiot if you aren't a slave to fashion.
A good way is for them to pair with senior people until they have grasped the direction and motivations of the refactoring work.
There's been a bunch of similar initiatives, albeit more typically aggregating via a single app (Inkl, Pressreader etc). I've tried some in the past because I'd like to pay for news, but consider site subscriptions as deeply hostile to the www per se. But they all end up with the same problem - great early hope of accumulating more sources over time, which then doesn't happen.

Standardised micropayments are the obvious answer, but it seems to be a ship that's sailed.
Oh, why would you want a percent based border radius?
I missed the fact that it was supposed to be more than just a priority queue. I would have said binary search tree instead of heap, but it makes sense now I know that B-tree is built in.
That's no longer a linked list, it's a vector.
Previous submissions and discussions ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371486 (electrek.co) 135 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22384488 (businessinsider.fr) 5 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22370879 (yahoo.com) 4 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22370346 (businessinsider.com) 3 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22377035 (vox.com) 1 comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22374590 (bloomberg.com) 1 comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22368762 (jalopnik.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22365454 (bloomberg.com)
But its inventor is really cold.
I'm sorry, I should have noticed you were talking about not owning it. I agree with the point that low interest rates mean higher prices, of course.
As a programmer who is for-sure well past "fizzbuzz" quality and has been for a while now, I can just about guarantee I've left interviewers with the impression they dodged a can't-actually-program bullet when they rejected me, a couple times.
Being thoughtful about the environment is important. It’s important to mention that some bed in a box realtors aren’t doing the best they can. Gotta Sleep uses bio foam which is made with soy based oils and donates all returned mattresses. https://gottasleep.com/products/omg-mattress
Or is it? I think this ignores the human psychology factors. Like actually following through with being loyal to employees, training as a benefit etc.

Also if you are going to lose employees because you can’t match competitive salaries than i would say you are losing them if all other things are equal.

In another words this greatly oversimplified version of events here only allows for you to come to that conclusion and dismisses how an organization could adopt different practices, values and foster organizational culture that combats these issues differently which I think training is an essential component.

I actually think this is a good argument for licensure like civil engineers etc have to have, because one thing it mandates is required training hours (among other reasons I won’t diverge into here for the sake of staying on topic)

You can debate what that should look like and I encourage that but I see little downside to forcing employers to acknowledge that all employees may need some time just to train on new things and different concepts away from the day to day work. I know this is a little bit of a tangent here but it’s something I see so often at every level of an engineers career path yet organizations so rarely set aside adequate time for it.
Then perhaps it's not just interviewing that's broken, but the industry as a whole. At least, software engineering education and training.
> "Seeing a white plastic chair in a photograph offers you no clues about where or when you are"

Well you know it's 1970s or later.
Sounds like the problem is low trust. It's a marketplace (for labour) where no transactions are taking place, because the buyers and sellers are afraid to come out to the town square.

What do your counterparts at the company think the source of their hiring difficulties is? If not flawed process?
RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP.
I would argue you’re in a toxic work environment and encourage a change of scenery via interviewing and finding a better employer.
Totally agree. Specifically the verge and other sites that actually promote products without disclosure. Why would anyone want to pay for infomercials? Tech coverage and reviews of this type, if they’re of interest, would be from real users with real world experience and no vested interest.
But that's fundamentally a function of the usage pattern. If the usage is "construct a bunch of nodes" and then nothing, then you should be using a vector-type structure anyway.

The promise of a linked list is being able to iterate and make constant-time insertions/deletions wherever you want. But the more such mutations occur, the more fragmented your memory will end up, and the more you'll get hit by the cache issues—especially if your list is large, exactly where the purported benefits of a linked list are strongest.
My Startup Failed, So We Open-Sourced the Tech
Circumventing paywalls or other annoyances when having no adblocker installed.
What I said is we’re not going to create a Slack channel specifically for everyone to vent. There are a huge number of ways students can send feedback or complain.
Does it work with Oculus Rift?
I once worked for a company that build industrial machinery. Because we were an "engineering" company, the director of our department would only hire software engineers if they had an "engineering" degree. Literally. Many dozens of applications thrown out that only had "computer science" degrees and not electrical engineering, computer engineering, etc.

Needless to say that company had a lot of problems with technology. But they seemed to be good at making money strangely enough.
It must be extremely frustrating for the VC firms to be cut out of the "next Whatsapp" entirely. In the unlikely event that Telegram prevails, it's not entirely clear why venture investment would even be needed in a lot of cases. The "network" would still be valuable, but I think it can be purchased for a lot less.

I'd much prefer a 100% transparent, cryptographically verifiable ownership contract to an impenetrable maze of the usual one sided legalese you will find in equity contracts.

I'm not a VC, though. I'm sure VCs would much prefer the opposite: for things to remain just as they are now. Regulatory capture is a powerful thing.
It's really expensive to hire at that level of seniority - even if the salary is the same once they start, it also takes a lot of time and money to get them to that point.
It's a fantastic pitch to the existing customers who have suffered through those crashes.
Oh yeah, I actively assume such a setup is in place every time I go to make a Craigslist exchange. Thus far has never happened, but even if they tried it wouldn't succeed. Multiple family members in police services has helped me know the "tricks of the trade" from a young age, hahah ^_^
Doesn't leetcode pretty much cover most of the question?
> Large banks have the power to create new money

They always have since the creation of fractional reserve banking. Supply & demand forces keep the creation in line with growth in value in the economy.

Ever since the Fed started up in 1914, however, they create far more money, are not constrained by supply & demand, hence endemic inflation.
The majority of kits pretty much always (certainly from since I'm old enough to remember Lego catalogs) had "a model" to build, the "bucket of pieces" packs always were just a small part of it, and you always could use the pieces of the former to build anything (with some themes obviously having some less universally useful pieces)
I’ve already cashed out some in a company sponsored secondary round, so there’s definitely a market for it. Again, I got lucky, and the company is actually doing well from what I can tell (haven’t worked there for a number of years now)
The secondhand market for Lego can be crazy.

A few years back The S*n would occasionally run promotions where they would give away free mini-figs. There was nothing particularly rare about them, and the packs were specially branded for the promotion.

A colleague of mine hoarded as many as he could and a year later was selling them for €10.00 each.
I agree with you in general. Unfortunately, that only applies to people who are in some sort of position of power. (This is the main crux of what I meant by "things changed from 2009 until now." Previously, it seemed like what you were saying mattered more than who you were.) If you are a regular Joe and try saying everything you want to, you'll find your life gets much harder, possibly for no benefit.

If there is a benefit, though, I'd be interested to know what it is.
They don't stand much weight compared to other chairs. But you may stack multiple of them to solve that problem.
Who cares? Sounds like a win/win to me. Some people get to relax more and the curious or creative get to explore or create more.
This, 100%. I'm a student and, while ISAs make Lambda interesting, am mostly disappointed due to the terrible educational quality (and staff's refusal to admit that the quality is pretty low across the board).

Still, though, I've noticed the ISAs create some nuanced perverse things happening that are specific to Lambda - students attracted to the value prop are often much lower income (Lambda cited $22K average starting salary amongst their students) than the average bootcamp student. If Lambda fails them, these students may leave in worse financial prospects than they started with no safety net.

The ISA also kicks in at 40% when you're only 4 weeks into a 40 week curriculum. After that point, it's very hard to leave due to sunk cost fallacy, and you are roped along wasting time, hoping for them to get their stuff together. I wish I and others left well before.
I'm an SDE, i conduct technical interviews.

No, I don't think so. We would not hire a person who clearly only memorized a bunch of algorithms and data structures to solve toy problems, but cannot describe their thought process coherently, does not show a fluent ability to translate their ideas into code, or can't refactor the code or adapt their process when introduced with new requirements, scaling bottlenecks, or system failure scenarios.
I’m surprised the article doesn’t actually investigate inflation vs perception. This is a common effect with pretty much anything that people last experienced a decade or more prior to looking at prices again. You remember the dollar amount of the price from a long time ago, then look at the dollar amount today and think “wow that’s so much more expensive!”. In actuality, inflation over that period was 20% or more, so of course it seems more expensive than you remember.
> To say that patents always stimulate innovation is obviously false to me.

Yeah, the historical record says it doesn't work. The same for copyrights. In the 1800s Germany had no copyright laws and their economy and innovation boomed. US industry was founded on ignoring British patents.

Today, look at innovation in open source software - without patents and copyrights, it proceeds at a breakneck pace.
Why someone is offering to buy your disabled private SSH key
Yes. Without a doubt.

See my edit, but most interview candidates I see onsite (that's after resume/phone screens) are not good enough to join the company.

Our onsite pass rate is between 15-25%
Next Step for Counterfeiters: Faking the Whole Company (2006)
As an employee, instead of exercising, say $30k worth of ISO, I would much rather buy $30k of preferred at fair market value. Even better if I got a discount on fair market value. I would also like the company to pay the 30k upfront as a loan or sign-on bonus, a common practice for executives already.
My best bosses and I think every mentor I've ever had (some were both) talked about what they value, where they want us to be, instead of micromanaging us on how to get there.

Some business strategies are antagonistic to this sort of work, others are in effect the inverse (as in, doing the exact opposite).

I think the saddest 'joke' I tell is that I watched our industry, during the XP era, look at the numbers and decide that most of our problems come in during the requirements phase, and then instead of tackling that problem, we spent the next twenty years making sure our side of the house was in order (didn't work out that great, did it?).

Why did we do that? Did we think we were going to shame our business complements into doing better? Some of these positions actively seek out people who don't experience shame the way the rest of us do.

In theory, XP's theory in particular, fast iterations split up the business decisions over a long time, so the wreck happens in slow motion and more intervention, talking, and concrete examples are available to improve the quality of dialog.

Then Scrum gets co-opted by the business people, and now the business side does, indeed, have more time to think, and what have they done with that time? Found ways to give the developers less time to think. Oops.