skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like how they asked a map-reduce question. If your previous experiences didn't involve working over massive datasets with distributed computing, you wouldn't have a clue. But if you did your search about your prospective position, you could find and study for the potential interview topics.

They are effectively selecting candidates who have spot-on experience for the position in hand or are willing to put the time to study for it. Is it too much to ask? Probably not for what you would be getting in the next couple of years if you were to keep it up.
This post is really topical for me. I spent hours yesterday trying to write explicit SIMD code[0] for my the vector dot product in my raytracer and all I managed to do was slow the code down about 20-30%.

The code generated by Rust from the naive solution uses ss instructions mostly whereas my two tries using `mm_dp_ps` and `mm_mul_ps` and `mm_hadd_ps` where both significantly slower even though it results in fewer instructions. I suspect that the issue is that for a single dot product the overhead of loading in and out of mm128 registers is more cost than it's worth.

Naive Rust version output

.cfi_startproc
pushq %rbp
.cfi_def_cfa_offset 16
.cfi_offset %rbp, -16
movq %rsp, %rbp
.cfi_def_cfa_register %rbp
vmovss (%rdi), %xmm0
vmulss (%rsi), %xmm0, %xmm0
vmovsd 4(%rdi), %xmm1
vmovsd 4(%rsi), %xmm2
vmulps %xmm2, %xmm1, %xmm1
vaddss %xmm1, %xmm0, %xmm0
vmovshdup %xmm1, %xmm1
vaddss %xmm1, %xmm0, %xmm0
popq %rbp
retq

My handwritten version with `mm_mul_ps` and `mm_hadd_ps`

.cfi_startproc
pushq %rbp
.cfi_def_cfa_offset 16
.cfi_offset %rbp, -16
movq %rsp, %rbp
.cfi_def_cfa_register %rbp
vmovaps (%rdi), %xmm0
vmulps (%rsi), %xmm0, %xmm0
vhaddps %xmm0, %xmm0, %xmm0
vhaddps %xmm0, %xmm0, %xmm0
popq %rbp
retq

Intuatively it feels like my version should be faster but it isn't. In this code I changed the the struct from 3 f32 components to an array with 4 f32 elements to avoid having to create the array during computation itself, the code also requires specific alignment not to segfault which I guess might also affected performance.

0: https://github.com/k0nserv/rusttracer/commits/SIMD-mm256-dp-...
Model description: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.13553.pdf
Unix was an improvement on all its successors.
I agree, things should be straightforward, readable and logical.

The Java people are describing here is alien to me, and I code Java for a living at the moment.
Heating does as well. Perhaps the Swiss should forgo that too. They are some of the richest people on Earth, having benefited more than most from the fossil fuel age.
Remember, Russian oil oligarchs, Saudi oil barons, and all other anonymous nasty fossil fuel producers have parked their money in Switzerland for a very long time.
Many healthy adults have parents and non-healthy friends.

That's the pretty much entire reason for pandemic-mitigating measures.
Modern PHP Web Development with MySQL, GitHub and Heroku
https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2018/10/20/john-m...
I use XHTML in my own static site generator, together with an external XML minifier library, then validate the output at build time.
In my tests XHTML had a significant parsing advantage over HTML, and I didn't need to do any questionable stuff like in the suggestions here.
This is unfortunately still very true....

On transactions of $5, we’re paying anything between 8-15%

This obviously doesn’t include the App Store/Play Store, where you could be paying anything between 30-45% (the standard fee is 30%, but if you’re an indie seller, then usually you wouldn’t have to charge VAT to EU residents (as long as you earn under a certain threshold), but Google/Apple will still charge this to customers (I assume this is because the sale is being made in their name and obviously they’re VAT registered).
fathom lite (https://github.com/usefathom/fathom) can be self-hosted. We use the pro version https://usefathom.com/ and are happy, especially with their support.

There's a couple more alternatives in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17497699
Sometimes the medium is the message; sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
> Obviously not every can meet that standard and there's no shame in not being the absolute best.

There's an interesting implication in your statement. The inherent assumption is that the metrics which Google uses to hire interviews would be the definition of the best. In other words, if you'd use Google's interview process in the whole world - the filter of that would lead you to the "best of the best" and "not so the best".

I don't know the answer to it but you may want to consider this aspect before reaching the conclusion.
> It may not seem like it, but an average HN reader has a non-trivial amount of influence. And not only in financial sense. Please, use it.

What do you mean by a 'non-trivial amount of influence'? Sure, we can ask our employers to enforce climate-friendly practices and talk to friends and family, but even protesting companies that contribute the most to pollution doesn't provide much relief as they either ignore the protests or make small changes that give them positive PR and make the less active people happy to stop trying.

What steps can a random person take to actually help the planet? I'm asking this without a shred of irony or doom and gloom, I legitimately would be happy to help stop the crisis but the only thing I can think of is planting dozens of trees every year.
Indeed. But in SA this could result in the government stealing your property. Literally.
You also have to factor in how much the US bombing of Cambodia led to the conditions ripe for the Khmer Rouge.

IIRC Cambodia is the most bombed country in history.
> Who uses Facebooks mobile website? Everyone uses the app.

I do, just like I do with every app that might feel too comfy reaching out to my contacts. Not to mention how resource hungry it is.

If you think MFC, VCL, .NET are worse experiences than Android SDK you really never coded for Android.
Athen looks like the first clone I've seen that understands the stack that makes roam viable

I hope they do well
I walk away from the computer when I need to think. Computers are so distracting!

Depending on time of year / weather I will either lie on a couch, pace in circles inside, or go for a walk, preferably with plants nearby, outside.
>Empty space, by definition, is space that can be filled by something.

Is it? I'd say empty space is empty space whether it can be filled or not.

If the universe was just 2 plates N meters apart that was impossible to move any closer (e.g. because of opposite forces, like with magnets which work fine in a vacuum), the space between them would still make sense to call empty...
Is Uber not already in the delivery business in the US?

In Australia, Uber Eats grew 3x post Coronavirus, and they even landed contracts with our two biggest supermarket chains to fill the gaps in their home grocery delivery services. Both companies didn't have enough trucks or drivers to meet the surge in demand:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/consumer/2020/04/27/woolw...

And three weeks ago, Uber Australia launched Uber Connect, a parcel delivery service. They're running a promotion for Mother's Day - since we're still meant to be distancing from the elderly, you can use Uber Connect to deliver a home-made package to your Mom same day, faster than the postal system (which has just about collapsed in Australia).

https://www.uber.com/en-AU/newsroom/uberconnect-2/

So what you're suggesting Uber try has already happened in foreign markets - I'm surprised if Uber US hasn't already built that out there.
Argentine President: Workers will have to download contact-tracing app
Winter is not a Turing equivalent language, so technically Rice's theorem doesn't apply (I think). Nevertheless practically speaking you are right, there will always be valid programs that the prover can't prove are correct.
Clock hand question is painfully obvious once you look at actual analog clock face.
All of the questions were easy bordering on trivial as long as your background lines up with target position. The problem is not the questions, but the culture of gotcha interviewing. Haha we got you doing off by one by offering the C option on whiteboard, haha you didnt initialize one variable on whiteboard, haha I have bad mood therefore you fail, etc.

>I recently came across your name as a _possible world class Engineer_

That right here is the cancer.
https://archive.vn/VSb2Y
Show HN: Find easily what your co-workers share with you
> Further, others were hurt substantially due to these decisions.

If anything the US government failed to act to attenuate the expected economic impact that emergency anti-epidemic policies would naturally have on the most vulnerable elements of society.

It's also very ironic, if not hipocritical, to abuse the most vulnerable and victimized elements of society, who have been systematically ignored and sacrificed , to argue against undoing policies aimed at defending society's best interests.
They reduced CSS by 80% but the new site looks like garbage! On the desktop, It looks like a mobile app just really stretched out.
I think the article leaves a bit of a blind spot where the dreaded "in-house framework" lives. Those are always the worst of frameworks when evaluated like you would evaluate a "proper" framework, but they can make up a lot by being used exclusively by their original authors or at least under their personal supervision (then it all depends on people skills). The biggest drawback is that they can cut you off from a lot of upstream innovation, so maybe don't go that way in client side front-end dev... (but sometimes even that can be good, a properly fossilized pure servlet source tree can be nicer to work with than one that has gone through every hype since struts2)
I agree, traditional virtual screens are a horrible usability nightmare. Wouldn't ever use it on my main screen. But on a secondary monitor that is used for a narrow set of specific tasks, it's a brilliant way to jump between stuff.

Think of it like Cmd-Tab for your side monitor.
You are a carricature of a superiority-complex-infected SJW. Attack the content, not my spelling ad Hominom: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Some liberties with title for conciseness, clarity, and translation.

Deepl translation of original:

The president says, "Everyone who goes back to work will have to download the Care app. It's a geolocation app. There is still no consensus in the world about the use of this app. The problem is, will the data be removed once the pandemic is over?

https://www.deepl.com/Translator#es/en/%3A%20“Todo%20el%20qu...
Vers une généralisation du télétravail après la crise du coronavirus?
That's not good.

Imagine how you'd feel. Imagine people would generally claim that someone who looks like you is a bad engineer (say, someone with your hair color). And then imagine that people would expect you to constantly disprove that assumption, just because of your hair color.

You'd be on the edge all the time. You'd never feel at home in the field. And whenever you interact with someone who doesn't have past work experience with you, they'd still assume you're a bad engineer.
A lot. I came across an article which points to Sundar Pichai having said over a thousand engineers work on core search but didn't go into details of what constitutes 'core search'.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-thousands-working-core-s...

For reference, search Ads pulled in $24.5B (60% of total revenue) as per the Q1 2020 earnings call.
Cornershop enters United States, plans to expand further in Brazil
‘Chilean-Mexican Cornershop continues its expansion. Yesterday, the grocery delivery startup announced the official launch of operations in Dallas and Miami. This marks the first time the startup enters the United States.’

‘All this scaling up only sweetens the deal for Uber, who announced its intention to buy Cornershop last year for US$459 million. But this transaction still hangs in the balance as Mexico’s antitrust body, Cofece, has yet to announce its approval.‘
> He said on average women do not prefer the field, and optimizing to change that observable fact is a fool's errand.

Yes, it still leaves open whether the following is true:

> when women do prefer the field, they tend to be amazing engineers

Hence I'd say there is nothing wrong with the statement.
Same here, at the beginning I thought that "recovery" would mean to "we have obtained physical access to the satellite".
Do you have support for Pushbullet?

https://www.pushbullet.com
Pi-Hole :)
First you need to know/remember how analog clocks looked like back in the day.
This hits home for me right now. I'm currently battling some performance problems related to a lot of "magic" that happens when using the Apollo GraphQL framework and am strongly considering ripping it apart and taking back control of what happens and when.
Show HN: This app makes ignoring messages impossible
The practicality rests on two open questions, I guess:

1. How much power could a satellite generate, realistically?
2. How many targets could it serve simultaneously?

I imagine there is a huge difference between being able to support a single, ultra lightweight drone and, say, hundreds of reapers.
Well, there's a new alternative on the market:
http://sigmetic.io

It's currently in beta, but it looks really cool!!

Kindest regard
Founder of Sigmetic ;p
Agreed. In one team I managed, we artificially created "red teams" to take opposing view points if we were getting into traps with too much group think. Leaves the teams with confidence in their choices and real buy in, as you said.
> How many years of poverty are you willing to endure?

I endure poverty much better than dead parents and loved ones.
Are you mainlining everything so a vanilla distro can install on this?
Just read this to my non-programmer girlfriend and she could barely stop laughing, especially at the ex-girlfriend jokes. I really feel sorry for all the people over-analyzing these things. Like, do you think the author ever killed his ex-girlfriend? Do you think he even knows anyone who killed their ex-girlfriend? It's a joke!
Single-purpose account.

You are neither a nym nor a Real Name™.

You are immaterial to any discussion.
Apple will reopen a handful of US stores next week
PHP library that detects users' mobile phone based on device OS
The problem however is it shows us that unprecedented shutting down of the economy has an effect below that needed to tackle climate change. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-co2-isnt-fall...

The figure I saw quoted is an estimated yearly reduction due to global lockdown of around 5% for CO2 emissions where about 7.5% yearly reduction is needed.

This isn't necessarily a cause for doom and gloom but it does show we need to move the focus back to transport, energy generation, etc and away from personal responsibility which on its own has minor benefits.
There's also the viciousness with which strikes are broken in the USA. We are no longer in the era of Pinkertons [0], exactly, but Reagan still fired the air traffic controllers [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Contr...
Not exactly a lie, but I guess a drawback: while having a source code is nice in a way people could know that the program is safe, in the same way open source is also more prone to getting hacked. The reason is because potential hackers could study the source code in-depth to figure out potential security loopholes/corner-cases, something that's a lot harder to do on proprietary software whom hackers don't have access to the source code.
Most roles at big advertising or taxi companies are unfulfilling.
Well they may for political reason, but for Israel military I guess they do not care. Terrorism, (il)legitimate war, occupation, etc. incoming and outgoing directions are just tactical concepts to them.
The dynamics here reminds me of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...
The problem is to install such a distractive application like Slack as an app on your computer. I leave these kind of solutions all in their website so I can control when I want to see messages. So neither accepting desktop notifications. That's nice thing about async messaging solutions, no expectation you respond within in a second.

If they need to talk straight away they can call :)
Bgfx is switching to IDL to generate API
I agree. Otherwise every library for languages with first class functions and callbacks would be frameworks.
Finnish-developed, open-source coronavirus vaccine nearly ready for testing
Show HN: Livin-in crowd sourced neighbourhood reviews
Does CPU's run queue include current running task on illumos?
All the article says is that "empty" isn't enough information.

If "empty" means "I can put electrons in there", then it takes more binding energy to pack more electrons into the same space. If you want to pack more electrons in, you have to squeeze harder.

Example: you can confine an electron to a tiny part of an atom (electrons in inner shells of heavy atoms, for example) but those electrons are very tightly bound (held in by very high ionization energies).

Or the "emptiness" of an atom could be measured using neutral particles, which don't interact with the electrons at all and sail right through as if the electrons were empty space.

For what it's worth this is normal sophomore physics. There's no way to just dismiss it. But there's also no way to claim it's less than a hundred years old.
Why not consider it? How much benefit would it offer? What would it take?

Consider these: why cant a rocket be reused? Why cant it just land? Why cant we just invent a new material?

"What if we just...?" Can be absurd, but it can be worth confirming that.
You first need to demonstrate that the path you wish to take is promising, e.g. by running simulations that take weeks but give better results than our current results which are fast.

Only then would it make sense to consider a different computational approach.
The DooM-chip: no CPU, no opcodes, no instruction counter
It's a trick question because it depends on the clock. :-P
What would it take to power an airliner?

Wireless power transmission would be ideal for a lot of applications, transportation (electric cars, planes, maybe trains, UAVs, boats) chief among them.

You could shave a lot of weight out of an electric plane by reducing its battery capacity to an emergency supply. This would also greatly reduce the carbon impact of flight transportation, while making a case for bootstraping a beamed power constellation and ecosystem.

I guess that's something Nikola Tesla first envisioned :)

Unfortunately, from what I know, microwaves are not really harmless, unless diffused over a large area, and you then need a large collector. An airliner could do, if big enough. I don't know either if a beam can be steered fast enough, and what would the economics behind be.
The issue with impostor syndrome is that your brain is good at finding excuses such as "I was lucky", "They did not catch me", and so on.

Personally, I had a lot of fun doing my interviews and learnt a lot while preparing them. I would recommend you to try them, it's gonna be interesting, even if you don't get the job.
some clocks do that though (move the clock hand in discrete steps)
They show the screenshot of the page loaded per region so if it did, you'd notice.
How would you suggest that companies interview and evaluate people like yourself?
This argument doesn't work because there were a significant number of woman devs back in the 70s and 80s. That claim is completely at odds with the history of programming.

And before people make the claim that programming was glorified hole punching as it seems to come up by that point in history we already saw the rise of modern abstractions and higher level development. It's controversial because it's trying to abstract some sort of universal biotruths by vaguely linking data with psuedoscience and correlation.
It saddens me that those who for some reasoning fall prey for this line of reasoning don't just hurt themselves in the process, and actively contribute to spread and worsen all problems to everyone they ever contact with.
I would have known. I only write number in base 10.
I think getting the correct answer in code is easier than solving the "trick question" about 3:15.

If I were the interviewer here, I would make sure the candidate states their assumptions and that the code they wrote follows those assumptions. You can make the hour hand stick right at the number for the entire hour, or you can have it smoothly sweep as the minutes (or seconds) increase. I would not care and consider both to be reasonable interpretations (but I've never seen a clock that sticks at the hours; it is harder to implement in hardware).

I honestly wouldn't even ask this question because it's too simple. It's two divisions, a subtraction, and then a modulo 360. It is awkward when your interview question only takes 5 minutes and you have to awkwardly fill 55 minutes with follow up questions ("and how would you test that?").
Ask HN: Not a startup, what do you think of the craft & techniques?
That's a red herring, and also the 60s - I started my career in the late 70s, 1/3 of my CS class was female, my first job in the US (as a kernel hack) was almost 50% female, still some of the best engineers I've ever worked with, all doing the same job I was.

I don't know what happened, by the time my daughter was doing CS the number of woman was < 10% and she and her compatriots were literally hounded out of the course by the bro-culture - personally I blame gamer culture, there's something terribly dysfunctional with kids these days
I just wish there was less of this “fierce competition” and the ambitious little pricks that just want money and power moved on to poison other wells... I’m into my work for the mysterious thrill of creating machines out of thin air - a little less so since several years, and you might guess why - and loathe these sycophants, assholes and delicate manchildren ruining it
I really enjoyed the presentation.

And yeah wow, Raft is dead simple.
Use Rust, then. Rust is like Go, except its binaries are small and fast (except string formatting, which is very runtime, horribly bloated and merely "fast-ish"). Anything C can do, Rust can do better (the string formatting excepted).
There is, but the spec changes every 3 ~ 12 months, so you have to keep rechecking and going back to edit.