skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
REMOTE | BACKEND ENGINEER / SYSOPS

Location: Hokkaido, Japan
Remote: Absolutely (have prior experience)
Willing to relocate: Unlikely
Technologies: Linux (sh, coreutils, *etc.*), shellcheck, bats, C, valgrind, gdb, radare
Interests: APL/J/K, Haskell, metamath, reverse engineering
Side projects: 8-bit TTL CPU, Makefile linter (*a la* shellcheck), J port of co-dfns[1]
Résumé/CV: wilsonb.com/cv.pdf
GitHub: https://github.com/xelxebar
Email: employment@wilsonb.com

Professionally, my experience is mostly in backend and systems engineering. Academically, my background is in math and model building. Personally, a significant amount of my time has been spent tinkering with linux userspace.
From my GitHub profile, you can see a few (old) projects and several PRs that I have authored. This should give a taste of my sensibilities regarding good communication and code practices. Most of my personal repositories I host personally at my website wilsonb.com. If interested, please let me know and I can provide read access.

Just for fun and to get a flavor of my personality, here is a bit of what my daily driver looks like:

OS: Void Linux
Window manager: bspwm (modular and tiling)
Terminal emulator: st
Mail User Agent: mblaze[0]
Browser: lynx and qutebrowser

[0]:https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze
[1]:https://github.com/Co-dfns/Co-dfns
There seems to be a tons of critics on Zoom in the privacy and data privacy domain recently, wondering whether it will indeed have meaningful impact on the usage rate on the product itself.
Thanks! To answer with respect to Retool directly, we actually wrote that up a bit here https://www.cloudwright.io/blog/retool-backend -- the short answer is, Retool is great for putting together UIs and database queries, but our focus is on the backend. One of the things we want is to make it easy to put together robust, lightweight APIs, with more complexity or connection requirements than you can embed in a frontend.

We also aim to be an easy way to set up scheduled or programmatic jobs -- stuff like scheduled file transfers or email notifications, where the primary interface isn't a web UI (when you aren't monitoring, developing, or debugging)
Even disciplines which typically do cover process control in undergrad often treat process control with a bit of a "there be dragons" mentality. Not for nothing are PhDs mentioned in the title; if some industry employs process control engineers, their group certainly has a concentration of PhDs well above average.
That's the right thing to do. If SpaceX is important to national security, then Zoom security and privacy is so bad, that a bad actor could steal SpaceX technology.

At my previous job, we used to dial in random zoom numbers and entered into random conversations of other companies. Once we landed into a Facebook call where they were talking about Libra (before it was a thing).

If you turn of camera and video, the host doesn't even know you're there unless they check guest list.
They are using the same language as Apple talking about iMessage and FaceTime. Apple talks about end to end encryption, but one end is iCloud which is why you can get your messages simultaneously on all devices.
Slightly off topic but the author recommends expiry periods for certificates. Other than rotating a key because of compromise, this seems unnecessary. We've finally decided that passwords should no longer be mandatory rotated, why should certificates?
As a Googler who has no other options other than Meet, I have to sadly agree with this statement.
Karl Marx, WeWork and the junk bond bubble
https://www.ft.com/content/16f99adf-a8a6-4716-a676-69de62d37...
And driving isn't the only way to die in an auto accident. What's your point?

Look, driving kills people, and we accept it because it brings huge benefits. Going to work as normal in the current environment would ALSO bring huge benefits, and kill people. We don't know how many, but we think it's a few million in the US. This is probably not worth it, but if it were a few thousand people instead it WOULD be worth it.

That's the comparison here.
> Ease of maintenance by the same group of people who already work in that repo? Reuse of shared, low-level components residing in the systemd repository?

I think this is the exact reason why the people who hate it, hate it.

You put everything together like that and it encourages mutual interdependencies. It becomes an ordeal to make a thing to replace a part of systemd that isn't in that repository because they could break any interface at any time and easily update their own version of it everywhere while breaking yours.

Worse, even if your version of a thing systemd does doesn't depend on other parts of systemd, other parts of systemd start to depend on the systemd version of what your program does, which pushes people to use it instead of yours. It somehow feels like something old school Microsoft would do.

> It's similar to why drivers are preferably merged upstream into the linux kernel source tree. Doing so ensures they continue to work as the kernel evolves, it also makes them more likely to get maintained in the long-term in general.

That's because drivers inherently are tightly coupled to kernel interfaces. And drivers are special because hardware never really ceases to exist. The drivers for some 100Mbps network card from 1997 from a defunct vendor still work, and you want them to still work, but the only changes that will ever get made to them is updating them to use newer kernel interfaces as they change.

In other words, you don't have a third party who is going to release a newer version anyway and can use that as an opportunity to switch to the newer interfaces. The only reason to modify most of the existing legacy drivers is to switch to newer kernel interfaces, which has to be done for most all of them if you're ever going to remove the old interfaces, which gives the kernel developers the largest incentive to be the ones to do it. It's also uncommon to have multiple independent third party open source drivers for the same piece of hardware, so having more-and-better competing third party driver implementations was not a thing that was going to happen in the alternative.

Naturally this doesn't apply to most other system components, which benefit from being modular and having clean stable interfaces between them and the opportunity for third party developers to establish a new implementation if the existing ones don't suit them.
Yes, it does. The messages are 'end to end' encrypted in the iMessage service, but then iMessage backs up its encryption key in the iCloud backup service, defeating the point.

"If you have iCloud Backup turned on, your backup includes a copy of the key protecting your Messages. This ensures you can recover your Messages if you lose access to iCloud Keychain and your trusted devices."

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
I've seen quite a few control loops where, when you dig down to the inner loop, D is set to zero.
Oh wow, so the article was written in 2000 and not 2016?

And that's funny/scary. Hopefully those cases still end up being an improvement over not using PID at all?
FixMatch: 85% accuracy on CIFAR-10 with only 10 labeled images
Dolphin has support for two consoles: Gamecube and Wii. It supports both of them because the architectures are extremely similar. I don't get what you mean by "ease of programming model". Saturn/Playstation/N64 were the first to have games programmed primarily in C with libraries provided by the system developers. This generation is harder to emulate simply because the system architectures contain more chips connected with wider buses running at much higher clock speeds. All of those factors make low level analysis, like with a logic analyzer, impractical. Another factor is the popularity of the system and level of interest in emulation of the system. The original XBox is a good example of this. Gamecube and PS2 have much more polished emulators because they have more titles that interest people, while little effort is spent on emulating the original Xbox (despite being essentially a PC) arguably due to the lack of exclusive titles to make it worth it.
Author here - yes, this is why. I looked into Ed25519 and while there are a lot of great reasons to use it (such as a shorter key footprint and it being much quicker on mobile devices), RSA is still more widely supported and has more documentation/examples available. ECDSA was an option too but doesn't provide the same benefits as Ed25519 would.
agreed. Ideally everything would be e2e :-/
I use meet for multiple hours a day, haven't ever had issues with the video dropping, but the tiling thing really does bother me for any meetings that aren't 1:1s. It's crazy when I am in a meeting with 50+ people and can only see the faces of a few. I don't know why they can't fix this.
Yep - this was my gut feeling also.

It isn't a bad time to reflect and improve yourself but I wouldn't take it personally.

From your OP, I'd say...

- grow a much thicker skin

- form and share your opinion more often

- actively seek out other leaders at your level or above to see how you can improve _something_ (this is often just watercooler/gossip for leaders/managers but it is part of the game)

- take a more active part in guiding the team processes

If you really just feel comfortable as a developer then just guide the development process - help create/iterate on/enforce style guides and other development pieces. You can do this with very little people leadership skills but still have a visible impact on an organization.
In type A, people have a choice. They could be informed there is a risk. In type b, they have no choice.
Nondisclosure of interests is a persistent problem here. We can bury our heads or ask.
The year 2000 version: http://fuckedcompany.com/

Times have changed, the message right in the URL has a much more positive tone this time.
I don't live in a rural area (~1000 people/sq. mile), 40 miles away from NYC. At least as of a year ago, T-Mobile's coverage map of my area was "occasional service outdoors".
I don’t want to be too negative, and I realize this isn’t an option for everyone ... but seriously, just use conda if you can.

Judging from comments here and in the past, we all know packaging is one of Python’s Achilles’ heels. I spent a couple years bouncing around with pyenv/pipenv, then poetry, then back. I lovingly followed all the flamewars here and on github.

Ultimately, I realize now, I laboured under the conceit that it was desirable to have a “native” solution that did not depend on a suite like conda. I now think I was totally wrong.

I’m so much happier and more productive now that I’ve switched. For any data science use case conda is hands-down better, and for everything else it’s still more useable than any of the alternatives. I hate to say this but it’s true. The only thing I can think of that was harder to work with a conda setup was the keychain in macOS, and I’m not even sure now that that’s an issue anymore.

conda really does just work.
Nice, sounds like you launched quickly after getting back to the project and looks like you're fixing bugs and gathering feedback as you go. That's the road to success with new products, best of luck!
Interesting tangent from the article:

>Today, SNES emulation is in a very good place. Barring unusual peripherals that are resistant to emulation (such as a light-sensor based golf club, an exercise bike, or a dial-up modem used to place real-money bets on live horse races in Japan), every officially licensed SNES title is fully playable

I had to look up the 'dial-up modem' reference - apparently it's a Japan-only peripheral called the "Famicom Network System" that did in fact have software available that allowed for bets to be placed on live horse races.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System

http://niwanetwork.org/wiki/JRA-PAT
That makes perfect sense -- for a lot of the use-cases that I've experienced, I would have wanted to either hook the interface ('trigger button', 'view past runs' or similar) into an existing app or just iframe-d in your solution to that piece.

Sounds really interesting -- I think we'll give it a go.
I think I agree with this response the most. Even if this person didn't feel much like being in a leadership position, that's still 15 years of real-world experience and accumulated talent they just threw away. Unless this person's code quality was somehow declining in spite of that, they just lost a huge resource.

It makes me wonder if the OP got their lines crossed about the lack of leadership thing being a significant part of the reason they got fired and/or there's a significant part of the story not being told here, like maybe the company is being pummeled by the effects of the pandemic and had to trim some of their more expensive employees (of which someone with 15 years of experience is likely to be) or something.
I work on calling at Signal. If Signal worked for calling your dad in India, would use it instead of Duo? If so, would you mind helping us improve it by providing feedback for new builds and that sort of thing? If so, email me at peter@signal.org. Detailed feedback from you might help a lot.
SEEKING WORK | New York (NYC), USA | REMOTE ONLY

Senior machine learning engineer (data scientist) with extensive experience in computer vision, NLP, and predictive analytics.

* Built products for fast-growing startups (e.g. Scale AI, Fandom) and large corporations

* Recent projects include helping predict cancer therapeutics (NLP), reduce industrial accidents (computer vision), and optimize corporate QA (predictive analytics)

* Published ML research, served as a reviewer for ICML, and spoke at many leading technical conferences (e.g. AWS re:Invent)

* BS/MS in Computer Science (AI) from Stanford

Stack: Python, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, sklearn, PySpark, and more

Email: gabriel@scalarresearch.com

Website: scalarresearch.com / gabrielbianconi.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabrielbianconi/
Congrats on the successful PH launch! :)

Product looks cool. My gut reaction is that its flexibility makes for a higher barrier to entry for a new customer, but its flexibility will also make for a massive tailwind once you get it rolling. Just my two cents and what do I know. Will keep this in mind for use at Reflect when we get there.
CSS Findings from the New Facebook Design
Even on HN, plenty of people have differing priorities, and it can vary depending on the context. For me, my work meetings and family meetings aren't sensitive, so encryption isn't a big deal. For my family in particular, the fact that even grandma can click a single link and be looking at her entire family in a matter of seconds is a huge win. We tried WebEx. We tried Teams. Then I suggested we try Zoom, and it was an instant hit. Would I like for Zoom to address the issues? You bet. Will I give up the audio quality and brady bunch-style screen for the whole family to gather around? Not a chance!
Fun fact: that dancer in front at the beginning of this video-striped shirt, mustache, glasses-is Spike Jonez.

He directed this music video. And the excellent video for Weapon of Choice by the same artist (https://youtu.be/wCDIYvFmgW8), as well as Sabotage by The Beastie Boys, and the excellent mind-fuck movies Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Her (which he also wrote and won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for).

It’s funny watching a contemporary creative genius just kinda goof around.
Nintendo's emulators are usually equivalent to what the state of the art was 15-20 years ago. They have plenty of bugs, usually fixed with duct tape and game specific hacks. They are designed to run the set of games they sell and nothing else -- once you get out of what the QA team has explicitly tested, it's not uncommon to find unemulated or badly emulated hardware features.
Maybe it would count as dual-licensing it: GPL and an ad-hoc non-commercial license.
The only thing the "GNU/Linux" name is useful for is filtering out conversations with people who use it.
Protip (for when the jobs situation improves): change jobs every 2 years or so. That way people won't have any preconceived (and largely incorrect) notions about you. It's useful to start from a fresh sheet of paper from time to time. It also helps with getting better pay, since you can't be treated as a piece of furniture and you always get market rate, which tends to go up over time. Or at least it did for the past 2 decades.
Body physique is the hardest thing to change of all the aspects, so if one has this problem, you need to focus on other aspect.

Napoleon Bonaparte is short, but he was not only a leader, he was a conqueror. Tyrion Lannister, even though fictional, is another example, learn the actor's performance, how he use his face and voice.

Learn psychology and interpersonal interaction, think of it as problem solving using human for human problems instead of your usual tool of choosing.

Learn how to command with charisma. Use visual, sound, and tactile as optimum as you can. For those who see persuasion and manipulation as immoral, get rid of it. As long as your intention are good, you'll use those weapons carefully.
On purely technical grounds, I'm a little suspicious of that quote.

CT scans don't tell you anything about brain function (they're structural), nor do the sort of MRIs that do tell you about brain function tend not to use contrast agents. People have used iron oxide to measure changes in cerebral blood volume, but it swamps the BOLD signal that's usually used to read out task-related activity.

On the other hand, I can imagine that you could figure out if a non-cooperative subject knew the word "SEMTEX" was actually a word with an oddball paradigm. Not sure how much that really helps but...

Also, the source you're quoting actually seems decidedly skeptical about whether any of this works. Here's Mark's paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1005479
Instead of guessing or mind-reading, I encourage you to ask your former co-workers (peers and supervisors) directly for concrete examples where you didn't perform or suggestions for areas to improve on.

Reality testing is critical. Ask them out to lunch or coffee and frame it as seeking their thoughts as a means to improvement, not bitterness about the divorce.
That must have a hilarious commit message.
iOS used to correct for that “looking below the camera” thing in software. It worked pretty well but creeped people out, so they stopped it.
Uh, how does making Swift compile new code to Mac OS 9 help with preserving old code?
Materially misrepresenting the product is not "prioritizing UX", it's lying to your customers.
> how do I tell Cython "it's time to compile things now" from a file I can't execute?

It looks like there are ways to specify which build tools your package requires; I would assume Cython would be one of the tools that can be specified since it's been around a while and gets a lot of usage, but I don't know for sure.
None of those things are intrinsic to leadership, but they certainly inform characteristics that are useful to being seen as a leader.
github: https://github.com/lossness
> Stopping bad meetings is everybody's job

Maybe in a perfect world, but this is heavily context-dependent. Ignore office culture/politics at your own risk.
You can hold alt+drag the red bounding box to crop easily. Screen-region select is on our to-do list, but hasn't been a high priority as it's technically already possible to get the same end result, just not as simple.
Are people who've been unemployed for longer less deserving of work?

> A comprehensive list

Excuse me?
Bull.
Executive leadership is directive, actionable, factual, simple. It's not about taking direction-- at least not overtly-- it's about giving it. You already sound like a great person. Some great people also are leaders and executives but I find as often that is not the case. Great people who learn the executive mindset can be truly extraordinary leaders. They'll ask the question on everyone's mind, and then outline a simple plan to solve it. They will break the ice in a group, rather than wait for it to be broken. They will concede as much of a point as necessary to establish and maintain their credibility. People will trust them not to always be brilliant, but to do the right thing competently and on time.

We all have some work to achieve that kind of stature, but from your question I also sense the people you reported to were not a good fit for what I perceive to be your likely leadership style. Don't take it personally, they dont have all the answers.
Don’t change anything now. I’m not saying « don’t change », but I’m saying emergencies are a bad time to evolve on character traits, particularly because you may be believing an excuse that they used to fire you, when in fact you were just redundant or your boss arrived late at the meeting where they decided of the people to fire.

Secondly, I once asked your question and a friend answered that most managers land their position by necessity for the company. They were here when the team grew. Or created their company, so they had to manage it. Most managers just deal with what is happening. Most people don’t know what they are doing, or why they have been selected. Sometimes there is no rationale. So don’t sweat it too much, because being relaxed and easy to manage plays a good part in career success.

For me it was much easier to be a manager than be an employee, because as an employee you are expected to compete and establish your presence (such as speaking up in meetings); As a manager you have entirely different incentives, it was way more intuitive for me.
And so the final, most extreme approach, would be to expand upon our decapping efforts. We have 20x die scans, but the resolution is not enough to make out and reconstruct individual logic circuits from them, such as was done with the Visual 6502 project.

That was done with the NES too:

https://github.com/SourMesen/VisualNes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Pale_Moonlight

A Starfleet officer participates in the assassination of a romulan politician. The enemy is framed for it, resulting in the romulans entering the war on the Federation's side. This episode is the ultimate answer to the notion that Starfleet will always devise some scientific or diplomatic solution that will allow them to keep the moral high ground. No, Starfleet is not above assassinations and political maneuvering.

There's also Section 31 whose existence predates even the Federation. Were it not for the persistence of a few idealistic officers, they would have successfully committed genocide through use of biological weapons by the end of DS9.

> Interesting, isn't it? The Federation claims to abhor Section 31's tactics, but when they need the dirty work done, they look the other way. It's a tidy little arrangement, wouldn't you say?
The takeaway from the article is that GNU is a marketing term. There are some more modern tools like Guix that the developers have chosen to make part of GNU. I'm sure GNU would welcome a newer kernel or GUI stack if the authors of those projects wanted to carry the banner.