skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A friend of mine works/worked for <large company> in Seattle. He's a really talented guy, probably on his way to Principle Engineer in the near future. He's also pretty critical to some major work they're doing. I'm certain he's paid well for it.

He told his boss he was moving to Montreal. Most other developers, if they said that the boss would probably have said "well, it's been great working with you". But my friend was a critical employee. Can't lose that guy.

Somehow, they found a way to let him be a remote developer from Montreal. Still doing great work. Still being paid well, I imagine. And this is all pre-pandemic.

Correlation does not imply causation. Being allowed to be a remote developer and being paid well are both signs that you might just be critical to your organization.
is this an advertisement?
Refusing to test, secret testing locations, over two hours on hold on the COVID hotline. Things aren’t looking great.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/524159784940511/permalink/52...

> 4/17 Friday: At noon my friend wakes up and asks if I can call her ward's 保健所 and make a PCR test appointment for her. I call them at 12:30.

> It took 2 HOURS to set up a PCR test.

> As I expected, the staff was INCREDIBLY resistant to offer a test, and spent 2 hours asking me 100 questions about her symptoms,
what treatment she had received so far, what hospital she went to the night before, name of the doctor who recommended her a test etc. I'm put on hold for an extra hour as they sort their things out. They finally call me back and tell me all of the information for her test. But here's the kicker. It's a secret location. It's a medical facility that's currently closed, but is being used as a corona testing site on the downlow. To enter the building, she'll have to walk through the parking lot and use the staff entrance. The woman on the phone makes me promise not to tell ANYONE other than my friend the name of the place where she is being tested. Because if people knew they were doing testing there it would "cause a commotion." I really wish I was making that last part up. It's absolutely horrific how much they are trying to cover this up and keep the official numbers low. I am currently waiting for them to call again with her test results. Getting her tested required 1 ambulance ride, two visits to the hospital and 5+ hours on the phone. This is ridiculous and something needs to change."
Apple Could Launch AirPods X, Game Controller This Year
I don't even think it's that complicated. Organizations that offer remote usually won't do it for interns and junior engineers and it probably isn't great for those engineers anyways.

If you just took out all these engineers I wouldn't be surprised if the average jumps by 22%.
Aerosols, Droplets, and Airborne Spread: Everything you could want to know
It would make sense for a nation-wide phenomenon to be coordinated among people with the same problem. Also makes sense for it to pop up around the same it became apparent the virus was not nearly as deadly as initially reported.
Using automated tools to bring easily-scraped news to people is a good way to enure deniability and keep an audience around. Aggregators are wonderful homepages. Then, occasionally, you can (either by accidental scrape or design), push highly biased content that is provably false, and it will be a subtle signal in innocent-seeming noise.

Not saying that's what's happening here, just saying that an abundance of innocuous content does not make a site unbiased and trustworthy, just as it does not make it immediately suspicious.
As New York begins antibody testing, experts caution immunity uncertain
what about Keybase?
Car GPSes have warned about dangerous areas for a long time now.
Yeah, I don't understand at all what the purpose of publishing this hash was supposed to be. Is it just to be able to say "I told you so!" (or in this case, I didn't tell you so, but I really did think this) at some later date?

> In a world where I was wrong, people who trust me professionally would likely think less of me. That was an acceptable risk.

Yeah, what a hero taking an extremely slight risk to his reputation in the middle of a pandemic.

Sorry, I normally generally like things patio11 writes on here (he's the bingo card guy, right?) but this whole thing reads like a lengthy ego-stroke.
it looks like advertisement for me
Telegram vs Signal vs Status.... brought to you by Status
Do you think Apple’s legal team is stupid?
Where is this evidence? How does this square with the evidence that RT-PCR tests are already coming back falsely negative, probably due to missing the virus while swabbing? Pardon me for being skeptical, but this is all from the same people who have bungled this every step of the way.
My favorite part of the review is that you can get theft insurance from Vanmoof which will pay for these guys to track down your stolen bike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuPJk8kTXA8

The optional Peace of Mind theft recovery service costs $290 / €290 for three years. If VanMoof’s Bike Hunters can’t locate your bike within two weeks, they’ll replace it with a bike of similar or better age and condition (first replacement is free, 2nd and 3rd cost $98 / €98).
> no omission of guilt

Freudian slip?
I'm a bit wary of VanMoof. I don't like the frame geometry to start with, but they also offer only one frame size which is supposed to fit a wide range of bodies.

This makes me think this bike is marketed at people who perhaps have little previous experience with bicycles.
Debian Dropping a Number of Old Linux Drivers Is Angering Vintage Hardware Users
Walking Austria's “Cheese Road” Is Heaven for Dairy Lovers
Pimp Your Blog: Make a Reading Progress Bar
Chess elo prediction just after one blitz game
This won't be advice on where to go career wise but some tips I can offer since I recently just wrapped up the interview circuit and my background is very similar to yours.

As much as you don't like leetcode, doing those exercises is effective and meaningful. I understand where you're coming from - I also lack the classical CS background that a company would find in a CS graduate. Leetcode questions might seem like they're very theoretical and unpleasant but a lot of those questions focus on the standard algorithms and data structures (stack, queue, hash map, linked lists, trees) - some of which has opened my eyes to solving some problems efficiently that I face at my job. Heck, some of those I've already been using but never knew/used the right term for it! For a long time I hated the idea of Leetcode too and I avoided doing it because I would have to conform to a broken interview process where I felt like I had the experience to make up for that missing CS knowledge. This was arrogant of me and wasn't working so I tried to adapt.

Like another commenter said, you can't control the BS interview, BUT here are some things that I did which helped me, and I hope you find some of them useful:

1) Learning the standard data structures and algorithms, and doing 2-3 leetcode type problems a day at varying difficulties helped me gain confidence in answering those types of questions and at least being able to get through the more basic technical interviews. Pair program with a friend to try and solve the harder ones together so you can get used to the live remote coding interview style and keep each other motivated.

2) Studying up on system design helped me to prepare for the harder technical interviews where they ask you "how would you build Instagram" on a whiteboard.

3) I went the engineering management track. This also varies wildly between companies but ideally this type of role gives you 50/50 hands on/management type work. I had to study up on the behavioral questions, prep responses to those "was there/tell me a time where..." type questions and put my management style into words.

4) I always ask the initial phone screen person about the interview process in detail just to know for myself what to expect and how I can study appropriately. If they're not clear about it or they're vague about it, I lose confidence in that company because I will likely fail somewhere along the way. I've been to an interview where the company uses Python, which I didn't know at the time and they told me not to worry because they only want to see that I know the basics - when I got to the interview, they asked me to build Minesweeper and asked me to build Blackjack on the whiteboard. I was unprepared and so I failed that.

5) Even after landing a job, keeping up with the Leetcode exercises to keep that stuff fresh. Never forget how long it takes to ramp up again after not doing it for a while.

6) Practicing to think quickly on your feet. Basically if you don't know an answer to a question or you can't answer it for whatever reason, highlight something good to balance it out and recover from the stumble.
Pros: The design and price. This bike would significantly improve my commute and lower my transportation costs.

Cons: Carrying a 19kg (22lbs) e-bike upstairs to my 1st floor (2nd floor) apartment a few times a week to charge it.
Apple is a software company which produces operating systems, programming languages and applications. How are you supposed to prove that you aren’t using knowledge gleaned from Apple in your OSS side hustle? Given the breadth of Apples offerings, how could you possibly have a software project which doesn’t overlap with one of their businesses?
It is possible to contribute to open source without infringing on Apple’s IP.
> somebody will find a creative way to mess with them and a new rule or clarification will need to be added.

Rules can be rewritten in a cohesive way or rules can be written as just an endless series of if statements which may contradict with other if statements.

It would be useful for laws to have an automated test suite so that known good uses cases wouldn't be broken down the road.
Covid-19 U.S. Employment Shocks Likely Larger Than Great Depression
I read that as 'for critical applications, buy a competitor's drive.' Perhaps reading comprehension is limited on my part.

The key thing I want from a drive is reliability. I don't want to lose my data. That far beats size, noise, speed, cost, or just about anything else in what I will shop on. A drive that loses data will cost my thousands of dollars.

My perception of reliability comes down to trust and transparency.If I can't trust a drive maker, I won't buy from them.

WD just went into my don't-trust don't-buy pile.

I actually don't have any non-critical applications. If my mom's laptop hard drive fails, that's still thousands of dollars of my time helping her. It's no less important than enterprise (indeed, I'd argue more, since she doesn't have RAID).
The Cost of JavaScript Frameworks
It’s not that a mid-drive motor adds more wear, as you note it should be about equal to a bike with no motor. But the hub motor reduces wear, as you are applying less force to the drive train to achieve the same moving power, since the motor applies force at the wheel directly.
> choices like 'avoid tolls', or 'avoid highways'

Those choices are insanely expensive for Google to provide.

Every unique configuration of options has to be hosted by hundreds of servers in each region. The cost of running the routing service is proportional to 2 ^ (the number of options). It's because everything has to be precomputed for fast lookups, and the lookup tables for one set of options aren't valid for another. See [1].

This is why Google hasn't added any more options in ~a decade. Even then, some combinations of options use various approximations and in some cases don't return the mathematically best result, or take longer to do so.

[1]: https://bib.irb.hr/datoteka/644571.MaueSandersMatijevic.pdf
The "stolen" argument seems a bit odd. Sure, anything can be stolen.

When purchasing an e-bike a removable battery was a must have. The one I wound up purchasing has a pretty heavy duty locking mechanism for the battery so I never really have to worry about it being stolen.
Signal tying the identity to a phone number is my main gripe about the platform, and I'll likely consider Status if the platform is as well designed as Signal
Homeworld Co-Creator Rob Cunningham: Extended Interview
Show HN: Timelapse of Coronavirus infection rates across the US
Reaction Commerce behind an Airframe static site up quick.

Have an http server between the two, and log the requests.

Users don't update products or orders directly. The critical data that needs to be logged runs on a private network. Something with a lot of validation updates that.

Don't delete services when creating new features. Keep them running.

Avoid a central source of truth. Instead log discrepancies. Then your procedure is "Don't do this" along with "do this".

A lot of microservices are built starting as low as you can go.

I prefer to install proven working software and close it to modification. Have a bunch of them running together instead of making something new.
> the EFRX is the faster CMR drive, and the EFAX is the much slower SMR drive.

From https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-di...
The factory must grow
Author here

Yes the results include only the U.S. but do not include more granular controls for regions within the U.S. So it's possible that this is biasing the results.

That said, I do control for size of company, which often correlates strongly with region (both big tech companies and startups tend to employ most of their workforce from a certain region, i.e. west coast). I acknowledge this is imperfect though
Especially as the Red drives were already upsold from their Blue/Green drives for years as the "home power user" model.
I agree with you. Title is misleading.
Business News: Highlights of the Day
>Having built this reputation, we understand that, at times, our drives may be used in system workloads far exceeding their intended uses.

A use case which seems to cause failure is inserting a drive into a RAID array. These drives are advertised as being for use in RAID arrays.
Perhaps you should read up on Atari's history because they had much bigger issues than simply letting employees moonlight.
I've been brought up on the terminology being 'the Elves are leaving Middle Earth'

https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Additionally, the 'Evaporative Effect'.

I'm not sure which of these many terms is the most 'punchy' though, but I agree that a common vocabulary is needed.
Engineering NetBSD 9.0 [pdf]
As a general question, why is forking a project perceived as hostile? I always thought that forking an open source project was something that was encouraged if one's proposed contributions were not incorporated into the original project.
Fomalhaut b is a cloud of fine dust – not a planet
"We've rigorously tested up to 8 drives" - bullshit. An 8-bay synology will fail a RAID rebuild every single time. If you're lucky, it'll work after the 3rd retry - which will be about 2 weeks later because of how slow it is.

This is a money grab, plain and simple. Had they substituted SMR drives at a lower price they might have a leg to stand on. But as others have mentioned, they didn't - they lied until they got caught and are now pretending like they were up-front. Talk about making a bad situation worse. The headline should've been "We're sorry, here's what we're doing to fix it" - instead it's "there's nothing wrong, it's YOUR fault you caught me cheating".
I am not sure how one can avoid being sarcastic here. You honestly believe top execs at these companies have sat down and decided to ban OSS contributions because that makes for exhausted, overworked employees? Not saner, more flexible working hours, not more vacation time, not on-site nap rooms and such, they've decided? All of the things that, you know, might actually help. Nah, coders are just tired because they work on OSS in their free time. Come on now.

They're simply protecting their IP as much as they possibly can. If they could ban you from using a computer at all in your free time, without getting sued into oblivion for violating human rights and such, they would.
Not a googler/xoogler, but if if FILE_GOOGLE3_ACCESS means what I think it means.... Yikes! (Especially since FILE_GOOGLE3_READ_ONLY_ACCESS is a separate permission, that implies the possibility of writes, but even read-only access is not something Google would want a random outsider to have.)

And that is almost surely only a tiny subset of what could be done via the the whole run with arbitrary permissions thing. Most of the other don't jump out as me as much as that one does, but I may just not recognize the significance of some of the permissions.

It is interesting that he could only make it work in the non-production environment, but I'm not sure if that would actually limit the capabilities meaningfully.
Somewhat tangental:
There used to be a website using google maps called roadbiketoaster that allowed you to select sections of road and strung them together as a route (instead of having to select points). It would then give you an elevation profile, total distance and a cue sheet detailing each turn. I think it went away due to some google API issue and I haven't found anything that can do something similar. Does anyone know of a comparable solution and/or what google changed about its API?
We can, just need to invent time travel first.
Open Telecom protocol....the name is basically meaningless but I'm guessing ericson had no way of know how genetically useful it would end up being at the time.
The title of this post is cynical. Make it opportunistic. It's an entrepreneurial site.
They suggest moving to Red Pros if performance is a concern, but it's not clear from the post if the Red Pros are also SMR-based platters. I have a couple of new ones (soon to be) integrated into a NAS. Anyone know if they are SMR or CMR?
They change a bit, but primarily at startup. After that they're controlled by the stability of the biasing.

I'd recommend "Designing Analog Chips" by Hans Camenzind[0], the designer of the 555 timer. Particularly chapter 3, "Current Mirrors".

[0] http://www.designinganalogchips.com/ has a free pdf
Slavery, is why most of y'all carry cheap clothing. So before you open your mouth to criticize, think about how policies like slavery actually allow clothing manufacturers to lower their prices.
Status is the only one of the three I've never heard of. The other two are widely known. I have only used signal but I'm open to hearing why others prefer Telegram.
GNU Shepherd 0.8 Released as an Alternative to Systemd
How to Get 100k Monthly Pageviews in 6 Months
California Labor Code section 2870[1] states:

> (a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either:

> (1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or

> (2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer.

> (b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable.

Large companies like Apple and Google get away with broad rules that effectively ban unapproved open source contributions because nearly every type of software can be said to "Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer".

If you work at a small company in California, I suggest pushing back on any rules like that. At my current company the employment contract they initially sent me required me to notify them in writing every time I created any work I felt was protected by section 2870 (any personal open source, any music, any writing, anything that could have a copyright). I had that paragraph removed from the contract. The burden should be on the company to enforce their copyright ownership, and provide evidence of ownership, the burden shouldn't be on me.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
Non of his projects have any activity during last year. Yet this announcement is formed in quite an aggressive and quite frankly unnecessary way. In few days we might get another post here which will blame Apple for firing him.
An application that takes longer to load, is slower, and consumes more CPU and RAM is by definition wasting the user's time and resources. The slow and bloated nature of Electron applications is griped about quite often. That people are required to use Slack for work doesn't change that.
Your preference may even change depending on where you're going. For my daily commuting and basic errands, I pretty much always take the most direct route. But then, I don't need an app for that, since it's the same every day. Even for recreational riding, I have a bunch of routes that I know well, and really only need to consult a map if I'm somewhere unfamiliar. And then it's usually not 'tell me how to get home' but 'get back to somewhere I know'. Usually a minute of scrolling around on the map will do that.
It’s hard to take seriously any analysis that lists Telegram in a list about “secure messaging”, honestly.
As long e-bikes are still limted by silly 250w/500w motors they're never going to take out in the mass market.
Confluent raises $250M at $4.5B valuation
Nova Recovery Center
Telegram is snake oil.
Excellent reminder of how useless Bitcoin has become. But hey - Bitcoin derivatives are doing great, so there's some good news!

Bitcoin was somewhat useful years ago when people used it to pay for stuff that couldn't be as conveniently or cheaply paid for with other currencies and the government wasn't paying as much attention.

The volume and value of transactions haven't moved for years and if people didn't move coins between exchanges for trading purposes, Bitcoin blockchain would be almost void of transactions.
You're probably right, but consider the other side. If you remove the FAANGs from consideration (a heavy weight on the non-remote side of the scales) then the remote work premium would look even better.
The latest embeddings/networks like BERT can handle encoding this logic. They take the surrounding words in context when they're encoded.
I've been having issues with what I suspect is a faulty powerline adapter from TP-Link. I spent over an hour on the phone to them, factory resetting, for them to decide my issue was solved because the status lights were functioning correctly when I moved both adapters to the same extension lead.

There was no option to escalate, continue troubleshooting, nothing. I went back to the Netgear ones I was trying to "upgrade" from.
Counter-point: The "everyone needs ridiculous amount of driveway space" rule existed in a suburb I lived in. We had exceptionally wide streets, but parking any car in the street for any amount of time was strictly forbidden. All of my neighbors complained about how "ghetto" our street looked when my parents visited and parked in the street. People really actually hated the idea of anyone parking in the street, even for a weekend, and so we needed driveways that were large enough to handle the 3 days of the year when we had a couple extra cars around.

That rule was dumb and unnecessary, but was also not a "pointless regulation", it was not "regulatory capture" by the Big Driveway Cartel, and it definitely wasn't a response to a legitimate need for more parking (again, super wide streets that sat empty). It was just a reflection of the deeply held convictions of an extraordinarily parochial population.