skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While it's true that China has poured billions upon billions of dollars into infrastructure projects in Africa, most of that has been done with the sole purpose of getting to and extracting natural resources to send back to China for manufacturing purposes. Just about every foreign investor in Africa does so in order to obtain value of some sort, either economic or political. A question which must be asked is whether the locals are truly better off after foreign investments by the US, EU, Russia, or China or if they end up more impoverished in the long run and with useless or dangerous infrastructure they cannot maintain. There might not be a good actor in all of this.
> It described a set of assumptions that are cultural.

Yes, but most social scientists would describe these as bourgeois values (or "bourgeois virtues"), not "Whiteness". Why bring race into it? I mean, I get it that they're looking at this from a US-centric point of view, but even then it makes zero sense other than as an intentionally provocative and sharply divisive statement. (But why would the Smithsonian Institution want to blatantly troll their patrons like that? It's mind-boggling.)
> I wonder what the motivation was. Maybe if there was someone trying to rethink the way pharmaceuticals or something, I could understand a CEO getting chopped into pieces by some shadowy figure, but ridesharing? It benefits everyone to carpool and use fewer cars to get people from place to place.

If I were a betting man, my money would be on he owed someone money from his part of the world and decided that because the law said that the debt evaporated his creditors would let it go.
At the current rate, Whatever you host will have a better uptime than Github.
In areas not close to Munich?
I agree with this. It really is putting on a show.

Ideally you get a problem that you are familiar with. Even more so if you know the exact problem and optimal solution. If not exactly, then at least similar to something you've solved before.

Then you put on a show acting as if this is the first time you're seeing the problem. With practiced confidence, you roughly outline a naive solution, then quickly and smoothly iterate your way to the ideal optimal solution. All the while explaining your "thought processes" as if you serendipitously saw the solution materialize before your eyes.

By practicing (say, grinding leetcode), you ensure that you have the confidence to smoothly put on this show, and also not waste your precious interview minutes meandering down suboptimal dead-end paths.
> yet OP didn't mention politics
> They simply stated that Bangladesh has issues

How is this not politics?

The article is about a young tech entrepreneur from New York, the article also hasn't mentioned bangladesh once. This is just getting laughable at this point.
I use and like github, but I can't help but be reminded of when Microsoft bought Hotmail and decided to switch it all to Windows-based servers...
You have a very focused elite building system in which the big universities creating the future members of the elite are heavily financed and influenced by pro-nuclear organizations. That goes especially for politicans, but includes engineers. The pro-nuclear propaganda repeated by the people that go through this is frightening, many of them are completely brainwashed.

In no way can the ASN be really independent, as it is staffed with the people that went through this system.
Google: Bringing internet access to millions more Indians with Jio
CDC reports masks prevented Covid spread at a hair salon
It's not taboo because you are not taking it seriously. Now, would a newspaper let me write this? Would my family treat me the same if I were serious with this opinion?
We can't expect everyone utterance to be rational and logical. We're all just human at the end of the day. We should expect job candidates to try their best to get the job.
IMO, in terms of features, the only practical alternative to Github is Gitlab.
Yes, if you can guarantee that the system that underpins it is stable. That means: political situation, economic situation, safety/checking mechanism, engineering ability, and the ability for none of these to be compromised. Then yes: nuclear energy.
Nuclear energy is dangerous, extractive, and wasteful. If Germany can make due without nuclear the world can.
It is absurdly racist. Hard work is the domain of white people? Valuing the nuclear family is somehow a trait of white people? What about thousands of years of Confucianism?
My understanding is that it's more of the cops withholding information than it is the media exercising restraint.
I think they may also ask them because they want to see how you do at the specific task of taking a problem you remember the pseudocode algorithm for, and actually turning that into working code in a real programming language. You know, the "schlep" part of programming.

I feel like they don't realize that this is the goal they're calibrating these questions toward, though. If they did, they wouldn't require the "from memory" component—instead, they'd break the question into two parts:

1. tell me what algorithm you would use to solve this problem; or, failing that, tell me what criteria you'd use to select the best algorithm for solving this problem out of a set of candidate algorithms.

2. Here's a journal paper, explaining a particular data structure + set of algorithms that can† be used to solve the problem we're talking about. All the algorithms in the journal paper are in that sort of declarative, math-proof-phrased pseudo-pseudo-code form. Now take this journal paper and turn it into an implementation in your language of choice. Explain your thinking as you go.

† The paper chosen is not the one corresponding to the algorithm the candidate chose; nor is it the one corresponding to the algorithm that's "right" to pick for solving the problem. It is, in fact, randomly-chosen from the pool of sub-optimal solutions to the problem, filtered for the ones that get rarely used in practice and so have no easy non-journal-paper presentations of a reference impl laying about on the web to study. Alternately—if the interviewer has enough time to explain a second problem—it could even be a paper randomly-chosen from the pool of all algorithms papers!

Benefits:

• Both task 1 and task 2 are things "senior" engineers do every day in the real world.

• There's no component of memorization; the step "between" step 1 and step 2, where you'd look up the journal paper corresponding to the algorithm you thought of, is dropped.

• You can't really "burn" either task.
Used to run interviews by putting candidates at a table with a laptop (typically their own). I'd give them a coding question and 45 minutes to solve it, and then spend 10 minutes walking through their solution together. I'd sit across the table from them and do my own work. They could stop me and ask questions all they wanted, just like we were teammates.

It worked great. It also gave me (the interviewer) some time back in the day.
It's just the kind of discussion that is very difficult to resolve without referring to "ought beliefs".

B: "Global warming is not real."
A: "It is real. Here are peer-reviewed articles, etc. etc."
B: "That research is fraudulent. There's selection bias in choosing which papers to publish, etc."

Now, A has a bit of a conundrum. He might like to say something like "Once there are 1000 published articles, studied this way and that way by so many different people, we can trust that it's actually happening", but this is an ought belief. I struggle to imagine how A can constructively respond with an "is statement."
There have been at least three major outages, e.g. git clone of a repo, in the past week alone. All three of which have been unreported (and NOT shown on their incident page), but I have email confirmation from GitHub support of these issues. It's almost time to switch to Gitlab. I have hundreds of repositories, organizations, and packages to transfer, while it will be daunting... I need reliability. I have several paid GitHub orgs and accounts as well.
So why not be mad at "kneejerk bosses" who are actually doing the cancelling? People use social media to complain and toss out accusations all the time. There will always be overreach but there are remedies for that. And the right to free speech (including outrage) seems important.

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...

> SDG&E said in a statement: “We hold all SDG&E employees to a high standard and expect them to live up to our values every day. We conducted a good faith and thorough investigation that included gathering relevant information and multiple interviews, and took appropriate action.”

If he was fired due to a falty or biased investigation he could sue. It's not ideal, but he's not powerless either. The Covington kid was a good example of that.
What is the lowers/raises approach? Google isn’t up to the job (pun was not initially intended, but here we are).
I don't understand this obsession with leetcode style questions specifically. I just got a job at a FAANG on an algorithm heavy team and all they asked me was linked lists, some basic graph questions, and some basic (and I mean really basic, high school non-calc level) vector math. I think just having a rock solid understanding of the basics will help much more than trying to grind questions and memorize patterns.
Sure, but that doesn't invalidate the racial part of it. Yes a white person who appears to be homeless or a meth addict will be looked at suspiciously. But a black person is much more likely to be profiled simply because of their skin color than a white person. That is white privilege.

White privilege doesn't mean all white people are born with trust funds from the left over plantation money.
I've written about this before.

I've become pretty much convinced that many of the leetcode tests are "young-pass filters."

I recently saw an ad for a two-month, intensive course on how to pass interview questions.

The heck with that. I want to learn relevant stuff.

If people don't want me working for them, then I'm not particularly interested in working for them. Too bad. We could have made beautiful music together. I'm no slouch.
Stress when interviewing is similar, but not the same as on the job stress.

One major factor, with a job: you're still getting paid. I think the economic anxiety one faces is pretty stark, if you fail a job interview you're going to be unemployed until you can pass the next one.
The IoT Radar – The Graphene Revolution
SH: WePickFlix.com – Recommendations For a Group (Couples, families, siblings)
Spyware attack on Catalan leaders’ cellphones triggers political storm in Spain
Yeah, this is sort of a silly statement from Verge. I suspect the point is to bring dedicated and high quality videoconferencing equipment into the home, so we don't have to deal with low quality, below face level webcams. I have to imagine the Cisco stuff you see in boardrooms costs quite a bit more.

Of course this hinges heavily on the quality of the user's WLAN / internet connection.
Given that women seem to be around twice as likely to suffer from anxiety as men, this is a result I was not at all surprised to see.

- https://www.webmd.com/women/news/20160606/women-more-prone-t...
if you don't want to rollback to the previous version you can also use safe mode (hold ctrl when you launch outlook)
> If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it.

I'm having a hard time parsing the logic in this sentance. Is there something like affirming the consequent going on here?
or Model U.N.
HI Guys, I am very excited to share my very alpha version of my COVID side-project. I've build a recommendation engine , with a "twist"

The twist being that, since TV/Movies is usually a "group" activity why not have a "group recommendation" engine. You can still use it for yourself as well.

Some key points and limitations:

0) Build with Svelte

1) No user accounts - we don't store user data. Yea 4 privacy !

2) Find similar movies after "adding" a few "seed movies" to the left.

3) "Group Sessions" automatically goes away after 45 minutes.

4) This is done all in memory and via Redis.

5) No TV shows yet (working in it)

6) Movies only up to 2019 used (working on adding more)

Looking for some good feedback or suggestions.
I assume from the post and the followup comments that this is just some sort of weird joke.
I'm white/mostly hetero/male etc, and in real life I tend to piss off friends by insisting that "mansplaining" is a rotten concept (as but one example). They tend to continue inviting me, so i don't quite belief their intolerance to be quite as extreme as people make it out to be.

I find term to be so broad as to be useless. And, like the linked article, and like the litany of generic complaints about free speech on HN in the last few years, I tend to see it as convenient stand-in for people who know their opinions cannot be uttered in polite company.

Nobody gets cancelled for proving p!=np, or finding a new antibiotic, or coming up with a melody that is impossible not to sing along. So the shtick about conflating the (sometimes apocryphal) hardships of innovators in the Middle Ages with the bland low-level hate today's young adults come up with to compensate for their mediocracy is getting tiring.
Current SWE interviews seem extraordinarily effective. They've produced corporations that dominate our lives, with systems that have unimaginable capabilities. Their profits currently dwarf other companies such that the S&P500 is basically a tech company index. More companies will adopt hiring practices like these as the applicants become more competitive. SpaceX has grueling all-day multiround tech-like interviews like this, whereas Boeing just does 1 hour with 2 managers. The effect on employee quality is clear.
From the original article, it sounds like the first round is only minimally effective, and the major boost comes from the second round.
> ...is there a feasible way to verify there aren't backdoors in infrastructure hardware like this other than manufacturers open sourcing (this doesn't mean open licensing) software, firmware, microcode, chip designs, board designs, and compilers so researchers can see what you did and verify production matches the source?

Even open sourcing all that wouldn't necessarily be enough to verify the non-existence of a backdoor. IIRC, clever back doors are deliberately designed to look like unintentional 0-day security flaws.
One more thing I'll add to Sarah's answer: in our case, the company was founded by - and run by - healthcare and fertility specialists. We are a healthcare company first, and a consumer company second, not the other way round.

This sounds minor but actually affects a lot of the way we do our work e.g. we ensure rigorous analysis, we take extra de-risking steps around cryostorage, we call clients to share bad results because it's more humane to do, we connect them to our urologist on staff, etc. etc.
Last I recall, they changed from collecting analytics without notifying the user to keeping it opt-out but explaining how to do so on first install. Has this changed?
> That and debate gave me the ability to just start a sentence without knowing where it will end ... it sounds like I've been thinking sensibly about it.

I've always structured my interviews to weed that kind of thing out.
I'd argue wars are generally won over resources, not markets.

Which is not to say China isn't interested in Africa's rich resources including rare-earth metals, but that's different from the nuclear question
I don't think it's outrageous to claim average speakers can comfortably emit 20-20khz.

I don't think it's outrageous to claim that this is the comfortable range for most adults who experience some kind of hearing loss over time with age.

Children most definitely can hear above 20khz. I at least have the anecdotal experience ("most" here is keyword to argue against) that I experimented with testing ultrasonic frequencies on multiple devices to see if audio file formats made any discernible difference in range performance. This involved "swooping" a frequency starting at 20hz to as high as you can emit it (which usually starts to sputter in consistency around 18kHz.
> explaining your work was most of the job and writing code was less important.

That's not what is being asked. It's explaining your thought process while actively doing the work in an "unnatural" environment.

> The whiteboard environment is a bit unnatural

I don't know anyone that codes on a whiteboard.

> but I don’t want to hire someone who gets the right answer if they can’t explain it to me.

Again, that's not what is being asked. They are being asked to explain their work before they get an answer.
Actually, in France, nuclear has to give way to renewables. And because they are intermittent, has to rapidly ramp up/down.

See https://twitter.com/TristanKamin/status/1247460245460443138?...
I really want to move to GitLab but its UI is atrocious... like too mobile phone looking on desktop
That’s really not a problem. If you think about it, everyone wants to help their network by default. And in startups, you care about outcomes. It doesn’t really matter if you’re shy or gregarious if you can make the crucial thing.

It’s a big company problem, not a startup problem.
Every power generation method causes death. If you want the lowest deaths per Watt you want nuclear power. That is a morbid measurement, but they measure it.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
I always care about explaining to the candidate how the interview will look like, and what are the most important elements I care about. When you skip this part, the candidate has no idea if for example during live coding, you care about the results, the code quality, IDE shortcuts fluency, etc. The feedback after the interviews proves it is a game-changer.
Zoom had pretty substantial market share pre-pandemic. It was essentially the incumbent best product when the pandemic hit. Having used a bunch, I think it's definitely the best enterprise product out there. It's superior to the old gen products like WebEx and has more features than things like Meet and better UX than Teams. I'm hoping the market gets more competition, but Zoom absolutely deserves it's spot at #1.
Unfortunately, it doesn't go into detail where exactly these samples come from.

It's seems plausible that animal coronaviruses induce an immune response in humans that can later help against SARS-CoV-2. If so, there should be a correlation between animal contact and COVID-19 severity.
I think the author is trying to set context that this is an upscale neighborhood and access to the building is difficult, so this is unlikely to be a random robbery or assault and more likely to a planned murder.
I think that the FBI and our government should use every tool at their disposal to find the killer(s) and their sponsor and bring them to justice. If the perpetrators are sheltered by an uncooperative country, then we should apply diplomatic pressure.

All murder is tragic and horrible. I think that assassination—of journalists, entrepreneurs, activists, and so on—to be an especially abhorrent category of murder, because it is intellectual terrorism and has an outsized impact. A single murder is a tragedy to a family, a community — but a single assassination is a tragedy to all of society. The plausible fear of being killed for challenging an industry incumbent, a corrupt politician, or an unscrupulous business places a sword of Damocles above any would-be upstart. It pre-emptively silences voices and minds and reduces a society's capacity for progress.
This article is misleading.

You can NOT replace nuclear with wind and solar. Because you can't choose when the sun shines and when the wind blows.

Hydro in France is already built-up everywhere it was feasible. There are no more spots to build meaningful hydro power capacity. Too bad since hydro is the only renewable that can really replace the nuclear power plants.
There is nothing uncomfortable about being told that you are genetically superior.
And wearing a mask in public is perfectly normalized in New York right now, so it doesn't even draw any unwanted attention.
Paircast Demo Output
I haven't been following this for a while but financial engineering/quant is a big thing where you can get high paying jobs doing C++. HFT as well.
Germany is not making it without nuclear. They are buying power from abroad (mostly coal sourced) and opening new coal (!) and gas (less bad, but still bad) powerplants. While they're a net exporter on average, averages mislead and Germany buys a lot of power during winter.

Nuclear is the least exploitative, least wasteful, least deadly and most safe power generation method. Every other method is at least 10 times less safe, more wasteful and more exploitative, going up to absurd amount of exploitation and waste in case of solar due to low conversion efficiency and the requirement of a large amount of rare elements and absolutely absurd amount of required land which should be nature and not solar panels - think about all the lost ecosystems when you drive past solar arrays (same goes for hydro, which completely destroys water ecosystems).

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
> You're hitting an unexpected condition then trying to handle the resultant exception intelligently, whereas you should have considered that possibility up-front and handled it non-exceptionally.

That is the inverse of the idea. The only possibility we consider up front is that we might need to restart the process of validating the timesheet from the scratch. Why we might need to restart it, and with what data we should restart the validation, we don't really know - we let the caller specify that. If they decide that they want to make use of that restart strategy, we have successfully delegated the responsibility of making that choice and providing data for that restart elsewhere - to the caller.

We are therefore capable of decoupling the handlers and restarts from the real validation code. This means that the caller of the validation function can specify their recovery strategies at the calling site of the function or higher in the stack above it, and also that they can decide to choose to make only some of these strategies available in a context where other strategies simply do not apply.
I suspect they're expecting enterprises to foot the bill, not individuals.
Are not liquid-coolers less noise? This is the bit I worry more.
That may be true. But then why hire someone with just look-up skills before hiring someone who really tries, and enjoys the challenge?

I'm interviewing engineers frequently and although I agree that the question asked by GP is maybe not the best it still gives the signal if someone is willing to power through a problem with minimal guidance and/or ambiguous constraints. Something I'm willing to find out at the peril of pissing off a few candidates.
If we approach that level, we can easily implement a mitigation: controlled burning (on a far greater scale than is currently practiced).
3:2 is the best. The Microsoft Surface line used 3:2 a lot (always?), and the Google Pixelbook. 16:10 is still better than 16:9, but I want more things to be 3:2.
The corollary may be that anyone with low social anxiety is likely to do better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Fox_effect

I'm genuinely curious - do whiteboarding and code exercises mititgate this at all?

Clearly there has be some minimal standard of ability. But given two similar performers, do performance-interviews favour those who project confidence? Or is there no influence on outcomes?
carbs weren't very common: wheat, rice and potatoes literally didn't exist, fruit were nothing like they are today (probably 5% carb content). all those frutarian theories are just crazy.

animals (fat and protein), on the other hand, were everywhere.