skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Binary, Hanoi and Sierpinski (Part 1)
As someone who used to play magic, can you explain what "Elks for life" means?
I would advocate for as much simplicity as possible then. :)
There's a beautiful use of recursion here, to solve Towers of Hanoi.

It can sort of be summarized as "do the smallest, minimal bit of work here (in the function body), then call ("the recursive function"/"ourself") recursively to do all of the rest of it; that is, the "heavy lifting"...

(Which is, interestingly enough, related to Chicken-And-Egg problems, although this video doesn't make that connection.)

Also:

Binary, Hanoi, and Sierpinski, part 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdMfjfT0lKk
Does anybody know, why the rotary rocket body did not start spinning itself once it lifted off the ground? There’s only one propeller.
> I could be making more or doing splashier work at a FAANG, but I'm happy to compartmentalize software into that box, and spend the rest of my time on non-technical hobbies and interests.

Do you think FAANG people have no hobbies?

They are just like you and me.
Thanks, fixed it.

Fun fact: noncompete agreements have been void in California since the 1800s.
I really can't think of anything more fair than a small coding test. You can demonstrate your ability on an actual problem instead of ridiculous whiteboard algorithm questions or having to have stuff on github.
What recipe did you follow? Also did you cut up the ribs to fit in your sous vide? Like in 2s or 3s?
Presumably, the higher likelihood of prison time would then deter people from crimes that previously had a positive expected value.
Natalie Portman and Yuval Noah Harari in Conversation [video]
Though not the point of the article, it can indeed. I have created desktop GUI apps for Mac, Linux, and Windows in Dart using Flutter. It is still experimental and under development, but here's how: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Desktop-shells
Three problems with the post. First off I'm a little bit annoyed by contrasting systemic problems of misinformation on these platforms with anecdotes about long lost friends. Yes, that some person from Japan could message the author is nice, but it's not really relevant given the levels of the threat we're talking about here. It's just an emotional appeal, sort of a reverse "but think of the children". (it also doesn't really require Facebook)

Secondly, the algorithm isn't to be blamed for anything. Algorithms don't have agency (as of yet at least), they're tools and humans are responsible for deploying them or turning them off if they misbehave. We cannot offload responsibility on them, they're just machines.

Last point is the argument about due process. Due process is important within the context of the law, but not everything on the world runs on formalistic processes. That's not possible given how many micro-decisions we have to deal with that are ambiguous. Zuckerberg is not required to uphold any due process in any strong sense of the term when managing his platform. Norms might be a better term, or maybe guidelines. But at a company level, there is significant need for case-by-case decision making. Zuckerberg is not the state.
Isn't this the same for every software? How is debugging issues with Linux, NGINX, any complex framework any easier?
> This entire post is why I quit the interview circuit as a person with ample prior relevant work experience.

It is really bad. Removing yourself from it is probably a very healthy choice.

There's so much folklore, cult of personality, etc. behind all of this.

Hiring is REALLY hard. So exec's order a ramp up of head count. It falls on to managers to start the process. They either don't want to do it (why would they want to?), or they don't know how to do it...they are not technical, or technical enough, they don't have "hiring" skills, etc...

So the burden is typically dumped onto the rank & file "senior engineers" to do the dirty work. They don't know how to hire either. They don't like doing things in a "manual" way. Easy solution! Give them a coding test!
PHP has completed its 25th year
Do they really expect kids to keep 6 feet from each other? Even adults stop giving a shit once cases go down.
When you sample from a smaller pool you will make uninformed statements like this. Black/Dark people of the world are not limited to Black people in Atlanta. Bet many people here do not know that there are Black people in this world, some who have naturally blonde hair and some who have blue eyes, google it.

Moreover capturing Black/Dark skin and features requires more accurate light metering & lighting because dark skin absorb more light. There's a lot variance in cheekbones, nose and lips.

Humans' features in general, are more complicated then you realize.
> Unfortunately the free and easy ones in my county are diagnostic only.

Exactly, I just got tested for antibodies, and since my insurance has lapsed as my Industry was the worst hit in this pandemic I had to pay out of pocket. It was $99 for the visit, and $50 for the lab results.

They said there was a program where the State would pick up the tab but they'd need my credit card on file in case it doesn't get processed etc... I just opted to pay for it instead and keep the State out of this and pay those people who are currently risking their lives working at hospitals and clinics.

They were super busy, too. They said it would be a 30 min affair and turned into nearly 2 hours. I'm glad I opted for antibody test and not the swab (I'm no longer showing symptoms) because I can see why Human error is one of the biggest reasons its yielding less than ideal validity.
> it basically means that for young children there needs to be an at home adult most of the day even though children go into school for a few hours

Do kids in Massachusetts go to school at a younger age than in the rest of the world?
Well, science literate people working at the journal, I assume.

The point is that they did not have a conflict of interest.

In 2020 peer review, people are often asked to review the work of their rivals. So they're incentivized to (1) say that it's bad and demand many changes, and/or (2) steal their ideas.
I see a lot of posts on reddit which basically consist of the formula "My <other political gorup> relative keeps doing <behavior our side despises>. They make me so angry." Perhaps with some extra details of being an obvious two-dimensional jerk for good measure.

Always has lots of upvotes. Could be someone trying to affect opinion with fake upvotes, someone trying to fish for easy upvotes, or just organically motivated by the network's desire for anecdotes to rage about.
If you didn't finish watching Interstellar you missed out. It is one of the best phys-fi movies out there. The physics consultant on that movie was Kip Thorne [0], a giant of gravitational physics and a Noble laureate. Phys-fi movies don't get any better than this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kip_Thorne
It's suprising what an email from PyPi admins can do. After many emails from different people and countless GitHub issues over the past year, the only thing that got a reply from the maintainer was an email from the PyPi admins.
Essentially the same argument was used to complain about switching away from "Negro".

One way to recover is to try to understand the argument and reject it on its own terms, rather than call it a mantra.
Yes, that's the plan! I've long lamented that editors like Typora and Roam are closed-source, preventing users like me from tweaking them to my specific use-case. So I'm hoping to build something that others can modify if they need to.

My priorities are math support, citations/wikilinks and the ability to define custom document structure (theorems, etc.). I basically want users to be able to specify a ProseMirror schema with CSS to go along with it.

Can I ask about your specific use case? Any features you've been really missing? No promises they'll make it in, but I'm curious :)
I guess I should have been more clear: real-time but not live or automatically published. If it's automatically published then many people may be reticent to begin recording. For example, maybe you don't want the fact that your friend or family member is being arrested to immediately become public knowledge or otherwise shared, embarrassing video and all.[1][2] If in the end there's no police misconduct, the whole incident can remain relatively private. Yet if it turns out you're recording misconduct then it would be important that the footage be uploaded in real-time in case the cop (or anybody else) destroys your phone.

FWIW, I abstain from Facebook, Twitter, and social media in general. Apologies if Facebook Live or any other suggestion does support this.

[1] I'm white but grew up in home environments where the police were called many times, sometimes hauling someone away kicking and screaming. (Typical unintended consequence of alcohol abuse and otherwise bad life decisions, albeit all too common life decisions in poor America.) You have to be sensitive to such situations, especially in the modern electronic era where it's extremely difficult to escape past mistakes.

[2] The arrest could have been mistaken, in which case you definitely don't want a video of it getting out unless there was actual police misconduct or possibly even if there was police misconduct.
Thank you. I did not know about this. I've signed up and have an appointment.
> I think the problem is that in our industry you have many companies where you have 24yo, managers, or even folks under 26 with Director of Engineering titles, and they don't have either the experience or knowledge to sift through good candidates as they just don't have much real life experience.

That is a very real, common, and true scenario.
They didn't know about Checkhov's gun [1]:

>Checkhov's gun is a dramatic principle that states that every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed. Elements should not appear to make "false promises" by never coming into play.

If you put it in a game, and we can kill it, then we will kill it because we will assume that there must be some reason for us to kill it, otherwise it would not be here.

Shigeru Miyamoto understands this. In Super Mario 64 there is a star that you "can't" get. You can see that there is no other way to get it other than somehow jumping "really high". There is also an infinite heart to restore health as many times as you need. Why is it here? As you start trying every combination of jump, sometimes you fall far enough to take damage. The heart is there to tell you to keep going! If you do, you get a star, and you learn the wall jump.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun
I think there is a way to get all of the "good parts" of Typescript, mainly type checking, without introducing the bad, mainly transpiling. I recently started just running Typescript on Javascript files, where all of the types are specified via JSDocs. It was a refreshing experience, and I highly recommend. The Typescript website[1] has pretty good documentation for it.

[1]: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/jsdoc-supported...
These are commonly raised concerns, all of which have answers much simpler than "install this giant distributed system". I'll go ahead and answer them since I take the questions to be in good faith...

> How do you run an application on a cluster of plain old linux machines?

Build a package, install it in an image, run that image in an autoscaling group (or whatever equivalent your cloud of choice offers).

> How do you do load balancing?

An Elastic Load Balancer (v1 or v2), HAProxy, an F5 - this is deployment environment specific (just like in Kubernetes).

> How do you update your app without downtime?

Blue-green deployment, or phased rollout.

> How do you ensure all your servers are running the same version of dependencies?

Build them from a common image.

> How do you update those dependencies?

Update the Packer template that builds that image.

> How do you replicate your environment if you want to add a new server to your cluster?

Start the server from the same image.

> If your app has microservices how do services discover each other?

Consul, or DNS, depending on your appetite.

> How do you mount volumes from cloud storage?

It's a bit unclear exactly what you mean here, but I'll assume you mean either block devices (just attach them at machine boot, or on startup if they need a claim), or NFS.

> How do you update configuration?

Either update Consul and have it propagate configuration, or update a configuration package and push it out.

> How do you automatically restart failed applications?

Systemd restart policy.

> How do you monitor if your applications are working?

From outside - something like pingdom, and some kind of continuous testing. It's critical that this is measured from the perspective of a user.

> How do you make sure the right number of MongoDB replicas are running at all times?

Somewhat flippant answer here: the right number of MongoDB servers is zero. More generally, by limiting the size of an autoscaling group.

> How do you view your log files remotely?

Cloudwatch, Syslog, SSH (depending on requirements).

> How do you port-forward from localhost to your Linux server to test your app locally?

SSH.
I signed up for this one since I've been reading a lot about Angular on there and I appreciate it.
Lindy effect

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

Transpilers definitely aren't Lindy. CoffeeScript, GWT, Elm, among others form a huge graveyard of de facto defunct languages targeting JS.
their submission was incomplete. But then over the next three paragraphs, they explained what they would have done.

I would not hire this candidate for an IC role based on this submission. The main quality I'm looking for in an engineer is "gets things done". If this was a manager role, then sure. A manager could describe what they would have done or (preferably) what they did in a similar situation.

They were given two (!) weeks to complete a simple task. I saw no excuse for not delivering.
This was one of the reasoss for me to drop from graduate and quit my research assistant job.

I was working on a paper along with a professor. We sent a paper for review and one of the anonymous feedback from one of the reviewers was something like "these (a couple related papers to our subject) also would make good annotations". My professor said "this person is probably writer of those papers and asks for annotations for a good review". I was quite shocked how casual when he was talking about this
> We also know that China is willing and able to lock down whole swathes of the country to prevent viral spread.

They may have boarded up Wuhan, only after dissapearing journalists and citizens showing the severity of it as the CCP lied about its transmission, but the rest of the Mainland were free to rush into Hong Kong despite local opposition and Medical workers warning of spreading the virus. They overwhelmed the medical system and on were recorded on social media platforms sneezing and coughing directly into often touched areas in public spaces.

It is seriously not hyperbole that the CCP should face Crimes Against Humanity for biological warfare.
An incorrect statement with no evidence given.

And since when is test, trace and isolate a bad recommendation? Just because the US and many other countries failed to heed this advice doesn't mean it wasn't given.

There were some big mistakes, yes, maybe especially not recommending face masks. Should the head of the organization have better moderated his comments about the Chinese response? Sure. But for one thing, once China stopped pretending there was no problem their response was very effective, and second, such statements should be considered unimportant especially compared to the real work done by the WHO's scientists and doctors. A polite word to a large donor by the political head of a medical and scientific international organization matters more than the actual work they do?

https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/27-04-2020-who-timeline...
Most Chinese people don’t use Google. Not sure if you are aware but it is blocked in China.
It is a hosted server for a piece of free software (git) although obviously with a huge amount of proprietary software bolted on top.
AWS wants k8s to fail because it works against the significant lock-in AWS has tricked teams into building themselves into. They do not want people already in the AWS ecosystem to move to EKS, it is instead there to not lose potential customers.

And that is why pricing and features sit right at “good enough” and not great.
It depends on the objective of the coding test.

If you are expecting a candidate to have a certain skill-set, having a simple timed coding test as the first round is the easiest way to filter out a lot of unqualified candidates. Stripe does this quite well for example.

When I hire for my company, I do a live coding round with the candidate after an initial phone screen. Since I get far fewer applicants, this works out for me. The objective with the coding round is to understand more than their ability to write code in a particular language. It's a good way to learn how they communicate, how they approach a new problem, how they seek help, etc
This depends on the goal of the creator, whether it be a developer or a company. If they are selling a hosted version of the product, their incentive is to make the self hosting experience as bad as possible to incentivize potential customers to buy their product.
It's quite an interesting strategy and for all Amazon's "long-termism", it's a strategy that seems quite short-term focused.

It may make their current employees decide not to leave, but it may also lower morale and make future recruits not join.

Talk to decision makers deciding which database to buy and see their thoughts about Oracle. Many have been around for decades and have worked for or with the company and refuse to buy their products. This feels like a great way to cement your company as a new Oracle.

Your short-sighted mean-spirited moves helped inspire your most dangerous competitor[1].

From Jack Welch - "I have a phrase: love them on the way out — I teach this to my school — love ’em on the way out the way you love them on the way in. And I’ll tell you another one: a severance dollar is the cheapest dollar you’ll ever spend. Those two things, if you practice that religiously, you’ll stay out of trouble, you’ll be perceived as fair. Maybe not loved, initially, but people will come to respect you. That’s why I have an army of friends. Many people who I let go are some of my closest friends."

[1]https://observer.com/2019/07/walmart-ecommerce-strategy-amaz...
> Faster

Benchmarks?
This type of pandemic is heavily predicted. It’s not a coincidence that it is being researched. It’s no more coincidence than studying earthquakes near a fault line.
If an image-recognition algorithm training set omits black faces and results in black people being labelled "ape", is that racism?

If so, what's the motive?

If not, what term would you use?
> the company is not entirely to blame here...

I clearly hear what you're saying, and I understand your stance on it. But I can't agree with it.

The burden is on the folks hiring in my opinion.

This is not a "real life" scenario. It should be a SHORT assesment (for both parties). If you were employed within a company as an engineer and you received a nebulus spec (or no spec at all), the burden is then on you to identify, educate, and communicate.

Not during a pre-interview (for the chance and maybe being blessed enough to get a full interview with this world changing company).
Yep, gotcha. Thanks for the comprehensive response.
Anything to do with the Fermi paradox is going to be very broad speculation. We're discussing the probability of X thing happening when have exactly one instance available.
No - Blacks in America very clearly do better than Blacks in Africa. Middle class income in Nigeria is about $7,000/year.

https://resource-recycling.com/e-scrap/wp-content/uploads/si...

I don't understand how you could misinterpret my post to such a degree.
Over many years, I've come to know that "Design" is a very subjective field. There are efforts to make meaningful measurements, A/B testing, etc but the domain space of possibilities is so large that it is impossible to test all configurations - layout alone has endless possibilities and which layout is better? My guess is as good as the designer's. I need to be able to see either one of the following to consume the advice - 1) Deep logic that describes the fundamental problem, an unchained reasoning leading to the solution with little ambiguity or "gray areas". or 2) Concrete experimental or empirical data that a particular solution works while making sure things like accessibility are accounted for. Otherwise, how do I know that some authority in "Design" is correct and I should follow their advice?

I am just speaking my mind, what kind of things prevent me from trusting others despite of their benevolent intentions. Time and again, I've been bitten by bad subjective advice - there is a lot of bullshit out there. Tread carefully, adopt what makes sense to you and ignore others unless evidence shows otherwise. That said, there are a lot of gems out there as well.

If the thing I am making is art and is subjective, then why can't I just be original? If a particular activity is totally arbitrary, then all bets are off.

Blindly following advice is why we as a society get stuck in a local optimum and don't try other things. Domain exploration and experimention, originality and authenticity are paramount to getting out of the local optima. Every once in a while someone does and they revolutionize the world.
The Search for the World’s Simplest Animal
Some reasons I might not use Pawn:

The only benchmarks I could find claims that it is significantly slower than Luajit. The official docs claim that the fastest implementation is available on fewer platforms than Luajit.

Regarding the lack of structs, the official docs say "pawn has no "struct"s, but it extends arrays so that it can mimic light-weight structures with arrays; as an example of those extensions, pawn supports array assignment and array indices can be assigned an individual "identify" (or "purpose") and even form a sub-array." but the manual's mentions of array assignment make it seem like that's just memcpy. One could imagine having bullet objects and declaring BULLET_X=0, BULLET_Y=1, BULLET_SPRITE_IDX=2, and so on, just so that when one has a bullet object and they would like to draw it at the right location they could avoid writing draw(b[2], b[0], b[1]). Having an array of untyped cells and memcpy isn't really the same as having a struct with named members. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

A lot of useful patterns become less possible when one does not have a map or set type and when one does not have coroutines. It seems like instead of coroutines Pawn includes a syntactic sugar for a switch statement that depends on a single global state variable, in which the cases can be declared like functions. This is interesting but not particularly helpful. Why can one not have multiple different state machines, multiple instances of a state machine, and so on?