skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Coding interview advice or tuition/mentor
I have applied to large tech firms and do well in the interviews except fail at the hard coding interviews.

I am looking for resources, advice or even better a mentor/tutor that can help me improve and take me to the next stage (preferably someone who works at the top 4 tech firms and conducts interviews).

I have done a fair amount of practice on Leetcode and can do easy or medium questions including typical data structures and algorithms. However, I seem to fail at some hard questions which has stopped me passing at interviews. I would describe myself as a very competent programmer with good CS knowledge - though I have had no formal training.

You can directly contact me through my email which is in my HN profile.
Read a paper: Bringing the Web up to speed with WebAssembly
Or maybe, just maybe, it was and still is possible with public evidence and independent thinking to understand the importance of AGI and AI ethics.
Normally I would agree but Apache Arrow already has significant name-recognition to people who are likely to use it -- data engineers/scientists etc. It's a library that provides an in-memory columnar format, and supplies a data engine currently used in Apache Spark, Pandas, and libraries like turbodbc, which helps these tools achieve high performance on operations on tabular data.

Having a single high-performance in-memory format means different programs can read/write from the same source without serializing/copying/deserializing. For instance, if you wanted to pass a huge table of data from R to Java to Python (because your tools span different languages), normally you'd have to copy and serde (Protobuf? JSON?) to pass the data, which equals huge overheads. With Arrow, each of those languages can directly interact with the same copy of in-memory data, in-process -- with the highest possible performance.

You also get the performance of columnar databases without implementing your own columnar data structure.

But of course, no harm adding a short description to the title to broaden its audience. Arrow is truly something amazing and the more people know about it the better.[1] Folks who program against traditional databases might not know about it, and I think they should, especially if they need to generate analytics (i.e. fast filtering/aggregation for dashboarding or for data pipeline tasks).

[1] Overview: https://arrow.apache.org/overview/
"Flipping this argument on its head" = repurposing a detailed,
quantitative cost analysis to argue we're not in overhang.

"Not reading OP and spouting a non-quantitative conspiracy theory" = what you did.
Yes, it's intended for desktop/laptop - where you write code.
I'd love to see what could be done with GPT-3 as part of a GAN. Text compression/summary, maybe?
Coaching and mentoring turns out to be as valuable for the Teacher as it is for the Student. The good ones will take the time to do this - even if the original plan was to shape the thought process of their evil minions. :)
A lot of us were born in places that are no longer economically relevant. The retired are less geographically restrained - I wonder why they don’t more often follow their adult children. For example some of my Chinese coworkers don’t need to go back to China for childcare; their parents and in-laws rotate shifts here.

Also keep in mind, if both generations have kids at 30 (or even younger in a more traditional setting), grandparents are also still working age when the child is born.
Oh hello! (disclosure, I work on Fly.io).

We're more like Fargate than Lambda, but Fly apps scale and balance across regions. I wouldn't really call it "more edgy", it's just built specifically for running app servers close to users (vs emulating a traditional single region datacenter).

We actually started with a JS runtime like CloudFlare has, but it was wrong for our customers. They're better off just running Docker images.

There's a lot more in our HN launch thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616857
really? ever have to work on project split like that?

Its easy for key features to be lost - and a lot of time and $ to be wasted.

I wont mention any names but I found out today that our team should have been on a call about a major website rebuild - I have a suspicion that some key areas have been missed.
I'm the same as you, and it also took me a while to figure out why it was. The best explanation I could come up with is that it felt like I was moving the scroll bar with a scroll wheel, while that's clearly not the case when I'm using a trackpad or touch.
1 phase 16A is still not really good - only ~3.6 kW at best. But 230V still makes the cabling easier to handle and 3-phase power is common in residential buildings (at least in parts of Europe), so 11 kW (3x16A) or 22 kW (3x32A) are usual sizes for electric car chargers at homes.

Bigger restriction on that is how many people don't live in homes where they can just install a charger, but rather in apartments with either no charging or no dedicated parking at all.
> I'm lazy. But maybe not as lazy as I should be?

This was such an delightfully-unexpected response that I almost did a spit-take with my morning coffee. Thank you!
To_feather and from_feather are a wonderful addition if you use R and Python, or have a mixed language data science shop.
No one pays for prevention. Few pay for maintenance. Everyone pays for the fixes required from the lack of investment in the former.
The fastest way to bring temperature down in a medical setting is an ice bath, or injection of cold saline.

They also have cooling blankets, basically a human sized water cooled blanket connected to a compressor (for cooling the water).

Peltier tech is probably not very useful in this setting, since it's quite inefficient.
could that be the other way around? If you're more rowdy, you're more likely to have had a traumatic brain injury?
I believe it would be completely illegal (in the US) to not hire someone because you perceived them as a health expense risk.
> Thinking about money in mandarin biases people towards long term saving, while thinking about money in English biases people towards short term spending.

This sounds like absolute baloney. What is your basis for claiming this?
Bill Ackman's blank check company raises $4B to acquire 'mature unicorn'
> The problem with going back to one income is cultural

I think the problem is cultural and genetic. After all, we have thousands of generations where men were molded for the breadwinner role. Lots of scholarly articles on that topic: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=genetic+influence+on+br...
It's just rare to see a name which has as a prefix another famous name.
The docs are dire. Lots and lots about internals and how it works, and after a few minutes of searching, I've yet to see what it actually does or what I'd want to use it for. The "use cases" are even overly technical things that are building blocks for ... something. What is that something?
That's only true if if you consider SWE as "learning a JS framework".

The core methods and principles of SWE are almost timeless, other things are well documented and can be learned on the go.
I've never had such a serious ethical issue in front of me, I have code I'm ashamed of in a "Oh god we could have done so much better, what a fool I was at 22" kind of way. But so far my ethical conscience is largely clean. I can think of really only one ethical close call in my career, but still not as serious as the linked article -

"Hey developers, customer account manager here, just sold an upgrade to the customer on product X, they need capability Y"

"It already has that in the version they have, it's probably just misconfigured"

"Oh... well I've sold it now, can we just increase the version number and pass it over to them anyway?"

We laughed that guy out of the room, thankfully.
From my experience, Parquet files are a better alternative to CSV or SQLite files for data at rest. I've observed that parquet files tend to be smaller than Feather files (which is essentially the Arrow format in a file) for the same data. Arrow is great for in-memory data, but even with compression, the on-disk size of Feather files tend to be quite a bit bigger than Parquet files.
Thank you thank you thank you. Was literally looking for something like this earlier today!
I almost feel as though suburban living forces this in the modern era... the area my parents moved to when they left the small town where I was born to for the sake of raising children with cul-de-sac and good school district had almost nothing to offer for me as a young adult, so I left and moved across the country to a place which was more in line with what I was looking for. There were few jobs nearby in my chosen field (or really any field for an educated young professional, service industries dominated) so my peers all left, too.

We've chosen hyper-specialization of our living areas. The places which are good for raising children are mostly horrible for careers and social life. The places where young people can get ahead and be social aren't as traditionally convenient for raising children (unless you have lots of money).

You pretty much have to pick where you live based on what phase of your life you're in, and I think for most people the expectation is still that once you get married you'll just move out to the 'burbs. Personally, I hate the idea, but I'm both not in a place in life where I'm too worried about children and also fortunate to work in an industry where its at least theoretically viable to afford to raise city kids and maintain a career.

My parents are getting ready to retire and thinking of moving to the mountains somewhere because being retired is no fun in a place where everything is optimized around children and everything is developed family-size. They won't be a support system where they are for my hypothetical kids anyways, and are eager to escape the suburb I grew up in as it has declined over the decades, so I wouldn't want to be there either.

Wrapping up that rant... quite simply, I insisted on moving away from where I grew up because there was nothing for me there and I wouldn't want my kids to grow up in that place. The fact that my parents still live there for now is mostly incidental. (But I also generally think suburbs are a worst-of-both-worlds kind of thing, none of the cohesive culture or community of a small town but also none of the variety, walk/bikeability, or cultural diversity of big cities, so my bias might be showing).
I'm more thinking of states that have never voted by mail. We don't understand the protocol, and there's unlikely to be any feedback whether our vote counted. Likely to be many administrative snafus

An example recently is some of the New York primaries where up to 25% of ballots were rejected - https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1287416969231302658
Yep, except in the cases where the head hits the sled or ice, as mentioned in the article. I suspect these are responsible for large (and artifactual from the perspective of the brain) transient spikes in measured G-forces
_any_ sport at a high enough level will be bad for your body.
Patient Care Medical – Catheter supply and deliver
It's a shame that this paper uses a URL shortening service intermediary for its links. Eventually, those links will become useless at discretion of that service and you can't even use them in the WaybackMachine either when that happens. Not only because those URLs are unremarkable on their own (I doubt the bitly links are present elsewhere on the web so the WaybackMachine would be triggered into archiving them), but also because I doubt the WaybackMachine would scan PDFs for links.

I leave record of the URL redirections here:

https://bit.ly/2RKJW6S

-> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/22/google-pa...

https://bit.ly/2RIit5L

-> https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/boomers-30/201710/yo...

https://bit.ly/2yfZGYN

-> https://www.quora.com/Is-30-years-old-too-old-to-learn-compu...

https://bit.ly/2K7tolx

-> https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/ageing/

https://bit.ly/2z19eXW

-> https://empirical-software.engineering/assets/data/google-se...

https://bit.ly/2XEuWez

-> https://github.com/sbaltes/api-retriever

https://bit.ly/3agASwY

-> https://www1.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm

-> https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm

-> http://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination

-> https://www.eeoc.gov/age-discrimination

https://bit.ly/2Bcuc7y

-> https://www.zhihu.com/question/55618811
If it's just a small script you can throw it up on GitHub Gist. People can still leave comments there, but you might feel less obligated to spend your time on those than if you see "[x] open issues" on your project.
The one thing not discussed is how does one hold third party providers to any standard. Right now, Fedex Ground is basically contractors 10 layers deep. They have no incentive to deliver anything correctly but bumrush packages out.

When it comes to legal mail it's a huge disaster waiting to happen if Fedex was supposed to deliver a jury summons and the delivery guy being paid dirt just chucked it out and now you are in jail on a bench warrant. Sure they'll just slap Fedex with a fine and you got unemployed in the mean time.

The other issue is security. Many apartment complexes and even neighborhoods nowadays have locked central mailrooms but they provide a key for a USPS worker to enter. Those keys are tied to a keychain for the route. Are buildings and individuals now supposed to give out keys to every fly by night contractor in existence that changes every day?
If you're selling hosting, you can either sell CPU at close to cost and make money on bandwidth, or make your margins on CPU. If people are building things that don't stress the CPUs at all, you can load up servers and make ~$60-70/mo margins on CPUs.

When they expect dedicated CPUs and memory, they're suddenly going to price shop across cloud providers and won't pay enough to make those same margins.
Name of that highly competitive freelance platform?
On a more positive side to this technology.

I've been wondering about the possibility of using this sort of tech (or the API offerings from Azure or GCP) to provide voice overs in video games.

By that I mean for smaller budget Indie development, it would be certainly interesting to either be able to generate voice audio from transcripts in order to add voices to background NPCs and so on (or even the possibility of doing it at run time to produce much more dynamic worlds).

I guess the biggest blocker is the difficulty in conveying emotion with what is currently available as well as the difficulty in getting pronunciation correct (especially with nouns).
> so dropping $1bn or more on scaling GPT up by another factor of 100x is entirely plausible right now.

I'd note it's rare that cost of scaling a computing project is a linear growth function.

100x-ing an AI project could be 1100x cost.
> [office chair back pain, finger injuries] isn't that much better

But this generally doesn't case suicide

And can be treated, by going to the gym. (I had back, knee, elbow pain myself, from office work — and the gym, made it disappear. In my particular case)

> bad knees

Agreed, I'd be ok with bad knees.

But when it's the brain, it's ... to some extent, the end.
Sam Esmail's Homecoming comes to mind...
It doesn't like spelling mistakes.

Ask it to say " The Aristoocrats!" with Gilbert Goddfried.
On the same note, domain billing on cloudflare is broken. Transferring 10 domains to them at the same time (all in the same cart) created 10 separate transactions on my credit card, one after the other. This got my CC flagged and frozen and I had to call in and confirm I authorized the transaction.

I can only imagine transferring in more domains, or when they start to renew. All these individual charges will freeze any linked CC and the renewals for subsequent domains will fail. So there is a chance you might lose your domain if you experience this and don't check your account.

There are many people who have experienced the same and written on their cloudflare community forum, some posts dating back years, and still nothing has been done about it.

Just letting HN know about the billing side of things when using cloudflare as a domain registrar.
How can we tell whether or not GPT-3 has understanding of the data?
SoR1 is positively legendary for its soundtrack. On a good home hifi it sounded fantastic, and it contributed greatly to hammering-home the not-a-cartoon aesthetic of the gritty street brawler. Previous brawlers in that aesthetic were Final Fight and Double Dragon, but they lacked the neon glow, street punk clothing, and hard-thumping rave/dance sound track.

It's a shame that SoR4 sorta missed the mark on that. It just didn't really snag the simple clarity of SoR1's basslines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Lp0GJNTRV0
I miss when apps like this were built as preference panes.

An app that does nothing but change an OS setting—and whose user interface exists purely to adjust those settings—does not belong in my applications folder, and certainly not in my menu bar. Such apps ought to live in System Preferences, alongside other, well, system preferences. And what do you know, Apple built a way for third party developers to do just that!

Preference panes used to be the norm, but that seems to have changed over the last decade. It pains me to admit that an app is probably the right approach nowadays, because when everyone else is doing things one way, users will expect you to do that too.

One more way that OS X's UI metaphors have regressed...
> Their employers pay them to learn and gather the expertise needed for their future in the firm.

I think it very much depends on the company and culture. I always had jobs where learning and self improvement was encouraged and expected (also in Germany). With a budget for conferences and books and a fixed time frame (~20%) for that. These were all companies that primarily did software development -- either direct product development or project work for customers. On the other hand you have firms where software treated as an appendage. They might have other great products but an entirely different managerial background. A mindset like: "We need a software department, everyone else has one too" can easily lead to mismanagement -- and I think a lack of time and budget for self improvement is an aspect of mismanagement in the business of creating software.
The easy solution is to copy what the human brain does: just make up something plausible. There's pretty good evidence that we don't have great introspective access to much of our own internal processing. We just paper it over as "intuition" or "judgement."
Just in case this is a useful suggestion: try checking out auto racing suppliers. There are undershirts with tubing networks for cool water. They're meant to go under the fire resistant suit you have to wear under more serious racing's safety rules. The rigs I've seen have a reservoir with an ice pack and the equivalent of an aquarium pump that you put in a mini cooler bolted behind the driver's seat. You could probably macgyver up something similar with a small hydration bladder style backpack that might give you a few hours of substantial cooling on the go.
That's not always true. Turning an open source project into a stable business is difficult, but making a bit of money on the side isn't if you do something important and do it well. If you make the best breakfast in the morning people will come; If your library is the solution for (say) embedding python in COBOL and businesses use it, chances are they won't mind being able to pay for support. The first customer is the hardest to get but even relatively niche programming languages can have hundred dollar bug/feature bounties.

Slightly unrelated: I think the best way to encourage people to contribute is to have a well documented, time-specified, friendly path for contributors.

For example: (I won't name the project) I recently made a PR to a (definitely well known on HN) programming language's library and there was a fairly counterintuitive CI failure. A bunch of people turned up to provide completely useless advice that I had already tried, and promptly disappeared - it's now one of a 200 hundred ish PR queue that is largely full of things that people have wanted to work on but can't because the maintainers (as well as being busy) are dancing around doing a new thing every day rather than deciding whether to close or merge.

PR-hell is a situation where a process obviously helps, like in corporate projects (Look at how Microsoft deal with GitHub issues for example) where someone will actually go through and decide.
Often extensions make the language easier to understand, by removing arbitrary restrictions that you wouldn't have expected to be there in the first place.
No mention of the delusional, years-long coverage of the Russian collusion hoax by mainstream media, and those videos have stayed up on YouTube and Facebook — I suppose some “conspiracy theories” are more socially acceptable than others.
Ask HN: Any good alternative search engine not powered by Bing?
Ecosia, Qwant and the like seem like glorified Bing-wrappers to me (heck, I heard that even DuckDuckGo uses Bing results for some queries).

I understand that creating a search engine from scratch is very hard, but is there any engine that moderately succeeded? (in the Western world I mean)
Among the many other ways our system amplifies recidivism, it's horrifying how common it is for police and prison guards to strike people in the head during confrontations.
Some of us skip that and just go to Burning Man (except this year). But we do it because it's fun, not to look younger.
Isn't drug prescription under the control of doctors in Canada?
That is a great comparison. I actually got bad advice like this when I started a company 6 or so years ago. I spent way too much time learning stuff that was not important to get results. Now I focus on the basic stuff first, and it works better in all parts of life. That is why I put real advice here, even though, originally it was heavily downvoted
I've been working remotely for ~12 years now, it's working just fine for me thanks. I'm incredibly productive and I am producing good work.
Doctors around here don't do anything close and pay out of pocket. Most will take sponsored vacations paided for by drug companies for being the top subscription giver.

Same for dentists usually paided for by some whiting product they will push over the next year.