skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do I downvote? I downvote to do my part in making invisible the comments that I don’t want floating around here. Any voting system is meant for voters to help decide what’s important and what’s not. That’s the case with HN too.

It’s all fine and dandy to say that downvotes shouldn’t be used for disagreements (which, on the other hand, pg himself has said is fine to do), but no voting based system can prevent that. Voting by the masses by itself is a flawed system that depends on the attitude, mindset and knowledge of the voter.

There are many users on HN who downvote to express disagreement or dislike for certain comments. I too downvote some comments that I disagree with to prevent them from surfacing up because I do not value those comments. If upvoting is meant to help “useful content” (as perceived by the reader) surface to the top, then downvoting is meant for the opposite purpose. Whenever I see a downvoted comment whose content I believe I agree with or that others may have aggressively downvoted to express disagreement, I upvote them.

Nobody, in my recollection, has ever said that upvotes shouldn’t be used to express agreement. So using upvotes to express agreement while saying that downvotes shouldn’t be used for disagreement makes no sense. We don’t live in utopia. Not every comment is worthy enough to stay visible in a black font with text replies to express disagreement and go on with lengthy arguments. We are not objective beings who don’t care about that number on the top right that has no tangible value.

Looking only at the downvoted or flagged comments in this thread will show what the broader community wants or prefers.

Edit: After having said all this and admitting that I do downvote comments that I disagree with, I also believe that downvoting for this purpose is probably not a good idea for one’s mental health and emotional quotient. Most of the time, I browse HN comments without logging in (so no voting at all), and that’s a way to just observe and experience HN.
More than not won I think Google already lost. They wanted to empower individual creators but their automatic moderation algorithms are already at a level where they flag fair use and legal use of user generated content in a way that usually backfires on them with small PR fires within internet communities.

But I guess that's the price to pay to be able to be "friends" with big media.
Hi Ilya, I saw in your linked post that this started as an internal tool to assess candidates which you then spun out. Could you talk more about that? How many people did you screen and hire with this tool?
The trick is to find a common baseline format, like CSV or JSON, then you can leverage the bazillion of existing tools.

The second trick is to split the data in manageable chunks (a day of logs for example), then you can transfer one unit at a time to the new system.

Dump a chunk on one side, load on the other side, verify it's good. It will still take a while but you have a good indication of progress and don't need to start all over if one chunk fails.
Interesting way to put it
Maybe I'm an outlier in this, but I don't think Linux is for everybody, nor do I think it has any reason to try to be. Linux phones should be an option for enthusiasts and security researchers, IMO. At no point did I intend to imply that they were some sort of answer to the issue of security and privacy for the majority of people.

If anything I thought my comment implied the opposite, since the community is so heavily DIY that it's comparatively a Robinson Crusoe scenario.
WordPress does the take home assignment but they pay you for your time, which is very cool.
This strangely seems like the outcome of a successful dwarf fortress
Show HN: More Letters – An incremental crypto puzzle game
> "truly believe in the mission/goals of the company/project"

Well, first make sure there actually is some "mission" there to "believe in". In 99.9% of the cases people work on perhaps technically exciting but impactwise boring industry projects, whose main mission is to make money. Requiring passion is a euphemism for being over-workable. That you'll work outside working hours, you can be called during vacation etc, because of course this job is the mission of your life, right? Otherwise, you're not passionate...

In practice, these "passionate" people are often young and naive or just really ambitious and work their ass off to build their resume and will be on their way soon enough.

A good engineer contributes high value and knows this. And therefore will make the company pay up, and will not take any bullshit. And being that good, they will be picking where to work and you as the company compete to get them. In these cases the interview is about the engineer judging the company and looking for exactly things like the requirement to "believe in the mission" or whether the conversation is on a professional, adult level.
25% of the homeless are seriously mentally ill according to the most extensive survey ever done by HUD.

35% have a substance abuse problem.

Believing that these populations don't overlap involves some pretty magical thinking. Logically between 40-50% have one or the other problem and 10-20% have both problems.

This doesn't however paint a complete picture because its a chicken and egg situation. Did people end up homeless because they were ill or on drugs or did they end up ill and or on drugs after they were on the street.
> Ctrl+C works fine last time I tested GDocs

Well, it didn't work when I wrote my comment, sorry that it
seems to be inconsistent on my setup. Regardless it is still
very questionable of Google to make the "insert" menu item do
absolutely nothing but show a popup dialogue telling you to use
Ctrl-V. It is annoying and comes across as a bit condescending,
like some engineer at Google wanted to teach the noobs how it's
done properly.

> It also have offline support, and supports right clicking?

I was talking about web apps in general, not just Google. Many
web apps don't have any context menu or shortcuts, you have to
move the mouse back and forth all the time for the simplest
steps.

And what's even worse is that many JS-loaded websites mess with
the UI so much that you can't open links in new tabs anymore. I
don't even want to know how that can be done unintentionally.

> Adobe CC more or less requires the same login and authentication requirements as other web applications.

You are right there, maybe I conflated the web app trend with
the rising amount of user-unfriendly software design.
> ??? You still possess the glasses. Nothing was stolen from you. The company is merely turning off their servers on their property.

Which hypothetical are we talking about, in every hypothetical involving replacement cost the device was either

- Stolen, this would fall under your local theft statute.

- Destroyed via an over the air update, this would fall under your local destruction of property statute, and would arguably fall under the CFAA federally in the US (I assume there is a similar Canadian law).

Notably neither of these hypotheticals are the other hypothetical (and as I said previously likely what actually happened) of them turning off online services.

> Specific performance is a rare remedy, and would never be imposed when monetary damages are easy to calculate, as they are in this situation: you paid X for glasses, so X are your damages.

This is not the case. Specific performance is a common remedy for unique devices/services that cannot be repurchased. Moreover "you paid X so your damages are X" is simply incorrect. It is "you cannot repurchase the services at this time so your damages are entirely unclear". If the company sold the services at less than the cost of the services (which is the logical implication of them deciding it is cheaper to attempt to refund you instead of continuing to run the servers), that is their problem not yours (under the assumption that you have a contract requiring them to continue to provide it).
> 1) What about IP? Companies that do not work with land, but tech, science and ideas. This scheme would not be a barrier for Apple for example to appear.

What about it? Apple still needs factories to build their products, wants offices, and needs datacenters. For any of these their workers need to get a (fair) share of Apple. Apple could respond by having workers work remotely, but I doubt many workers would take that deal if they could go somewhere else and be a co-owner.

> 2) This (as well as the parent comment's) idea is similar to tariffs and trade wars. "Yeah, you are smart and efficient, but you work 200km from here? Fuck off."

Yeah pretty much, for land use. How can you possible use land if you live 200km away?

> 3) It confines businesses to think small. Big projects would have to be handled by governments and entities that are exempt from locality laws. Sometimes there are good reasons to own large swaths of land in multiple locations, without being a trillion dollar company.

Maybe somewhat, but it's still possible for companies to do this. They just have to have workers own a (fair) share of the business. Say there is a Walmart, and they want to open a new store in another town. Sure, they can do that, if all of the employees at that new store get a fair share of Walmart ownership.
The product looks cool but i seriously doubt if something like this can fly in any of our production services where changes can be made directly to a production database without an audit trail. Even the example on the website where the account credit is being increased is something that I've yet to see in a production system. To safely use it on a production system internally it would have to be deployed on premise.

In addition to that, the TOS clearly wash their hands if something goes wrong. I use airtable extensively in my personal projects and at work which seems to work fine.

One more thing i observed about the company structure is that they're based in Delaware in a virtual office. Now, i know that as startups go, this isn't unheard of but trying to get this past legal would be nightmare.

Congratulations on the launch though.
Very interesting! Looks like my perspective is very Western Europe-centric, where the data matches what I expected. Gmail is bigger than I expected in the US, and also in Eastern Europe.

I do wonder what "market share" means here, and how the domains are selected.
The massive market share of GoDaddy seems off, especially since from their website they seem to be reselling Microsoft Office 365, but could be explained by default email MX records on domains registered there (do they do that?).
This looks really great! I'm going on a cycling tour next week so I can directly compare this to my google maps route.

At first glance your site shows the local "cycle highways" which is really cool. However I accidentally clicked on the map twice while scrolling around, and then couldn't figure out how to clear the route so I had to reload the page.

On closer inspection I noticed a button called "close route" which seemed to do what I wanted, but I'm not sure if it has other side effects
I don’t think they are exclusive, you can be a great engineer that knows all about the algorithms in CS books and keeps up on the latest research in parts of the academic field. They aren’t even different skill sets, just different places to find the knowledge. Game development and cryptography bear this out well. The top engineers are the ones that read all the papers and that can build solid systems based on them.
This could be the nail in the coffin for Apple with regards to Spotify's antitrust complaint in Europe.
NIH halts trial of hydroxychloroquine: treatment does no harm, has no benefit
They should be the rare exceptions for when all else has failed, not the rule.

For everyone else, including the majority of stay at home parents, they should work toward self reliance (again, just my opinion. I think not being reliant on the government for your survival is a great boon to both the individual and society).
Thanks for looking it up. This was news to me, I always assumed Patreon charged whatever fee on the gross amount I pay every month.
Does anyone else feel like it should be illegal to make someone go through 3 or 4 interview stages, essentially making them work for free, only to not give them the job?

On another note, if your code base uses very niche software and there aren't too many people out there who know it, what's the process for hiring an engineer that will be able to learn it? What do you look for?
Didn't see that initially.
Came here for this comment. 4 years of traffic logs... is just plain brutal.
In addition, it would be the 5th largest state in the Union while being tied for the 12th lowest in population density.

Oddly enough, when you compare them to the 12 other states with lower than or equal population density, they are fairing significantly better.

https://offloop.net/covid19/?default=New%20Mexico;Montana;Wy...
This ended too soon! For me the real age of the Amiga started with the 500, which this article - wonderful as it is - stops exactly short of.
Tavis Ormandy is definitely a security professional, he works for Project Zero.
This is really, really bad for Apple.
probably includes spam emails too
Some of the best programmers I know were music majors turned programmer. There's something about the creativity or learning of another abstract "language" that music brings that seems to tie well into programming.
The Latest on Generics [audio]
This isn't really true - several members of the team have been contributing to GHC since before Cardano was a thing.
> Small and medium companies pick the crumbs of those rituals and fall into cargo culting. They want to reap the same promised benefits of the obscure interview rituals. Yet they miss the reasons behind these rituals and do not fully understand what trained interviewers exactly seek.

Just my opinion, but I think this line comes across as a little too condescending or perhaps paternalistic. I work at a small (40-50 ppl) unknown to you company and all of us (so far) are senior in our fields and largely have FAMGAN experience on our CVs. We’re not just cargo culting, but rather taking things from the FAMGAN hiring processes that make sense and using them.
Is there a way to get Zoom / Meeting , or even just Calendar, on my BitBar?
That is an oversight definitely. The payment flow requires we collect the payment method before the "checkout" page, but it should definitely show all prices prior to the payment method step. I will work on changing that.

Thank you for pointing that out!
> Imagine if people stayed home, avoided unnecessary gatherings, and the virus didn't spread uncontrolled. People with medical emergencies could get the care they need and the medical system wouldn't be overwhelmed.

Either you didn't read what I wrote, or you are being extremely disingenuous. The medical systems of NYC are ALWAYS overwhelmed. Why on earth would you suggest otherwise? What you describe here is exactly what we did in NYC, and none of those outcomes are what happened.

> The deaths are still rising fast, while other developed countries are doing far better now than they have been in months.

Oh go on, tell me about all those tiny little European countries and how it's their regulatory systems - not their puny surface areas - that make this the case.
Coding is not the only thing required to be an excellent developer and contributor to your team and company. Sometimes you must gather requirements from users / customers. Sometimes you have to work with other teams or products to integrate them into your product.

There’s also the aspect of working with the rest of your team on whatever problems you are solving and not siloing yourself to just the problems you’re working on.

That and when you’re hit with new and interesting problems that have never been solved before, you cannot look those up in the leetcode manual and memorize them to solve. You have to actually create something on your own and apply whatever you’ve learned from programming in the past.

It’s like playing a survival video game with the detailed how-to always at your fingertips versus being in the wilderness having to survive on your own wits without a guide.
Pot calling kettle black...
"The restaurant industry figured the hiring way better than the software engineering industry! They test both professional skills and cultural alignment! In other words, they test your ability to deliver. They do not ask you to explain a recipe by heart or describe how you would chop the onion. They ask you to do it. Live."

It's ironic that the article points out the error in blindly imitating others and then we get this entirely apples and oranges 'recipe for effective interviews'.

What are the fixed costs of having a 'live' chop the onions and shoot the breeze on slack for software companies? For a restaurant, they simply need a bit of tabletop for the 'new workstation'.

- All onions are pretty much the same in one industry; in our industry, we famously have 'a new way to slice onions' every other day! Let's not even discuss the variety of knives ..

- What 'secret sauce' info is disclosed during the 'live' getting to know each other? Can we just put candidates in company slack and check out how it works? Seems problematic.
I think

"Climate change is a hoax" - Exxon consultant with a phD in communications

is a lot more useful than

"Climate change is a hoax" - Professor that the media doesn't want you to hear from

If you include disingenuous views, you can counter them, and present your evidence for why you believe them to be disingenuous. If you ignore them, they will simply take their spiel to the next news outlet until one of them gives them a platform.
20 seconds is long enough that I will not wait that long in general. When something else happens in 3 seconds that seems like it could be right I might wait 5 more seconds when it doesn't work, but not 20.
Again, the nurses were simply asking for more pay, and when given a competitive package they asked for even more. The marketing of asking for better nurse to patient ratios is the same sort of bundling of concerns teacher unions perform, to gather support for their push.
As long as a lot of laws aren’t made from ethical principle but mainly for favored individuals or groups what do you want to do? I think most advances in society have been achieved by people breaking laws and effecting change that way. The whole civil rights and labor movements were about breaking immoral laws.
It's not an either-or. My argument was for making backups, not
cloud vs. local storage.
> you're not going to be productive with real code for a few months

I've hired several engineers who get productive within the first week. Most manage to get in a PR and deploy to production by the end of the first day.

If it's taking a few months before the candidate can get productive, something has gone horrifically wrong.
The Conan scene paid homage to by this quote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oo9buo9Mtos
They both get mushed together in this issue unless you are careful.
I once had the joy of working for a company that had rebranded its own products, sometimes multiple times, and was inconsistent about which name would call things by. Oh, and several products had similar names and would be abbreviated to the same thing. Helpdesk spent an insane amount of time just finding out what product any given ticket was actually for; they had a document that tried to to list all products and all the names that each product was known by and who a point of contact was for each product, but it was incomplete and didn't necessarily have enough information disambiguate many cases.
To save the unwashed masses (myself included) any further internet searches, this relates to the Boolean satisfiability problem, which according to Wikipiedia [0] is:

"the problem of determining if there exists an interpretation that satisfies a given Boolean formula. In other words, it asks whether the variables of a given Boolean formula can be consistently replaced by the values TRUE or FALSE in such a way that the formula evaluates to TRUE. If this is the case, the formula is called satisfiable."

I originally thought it was an AI to solve college placement tests, which would also have been cool but in a different way.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_satisfiability_problem
I'm old enough to remember being ostracized for defending a closeted lesbian couple in highschool, and the people today who attack for defending people with centrist/mildly conservative opinions seem very similar..

E.g. from "Omg you're queer too." to "Omg you're a hater too."
Sure they do. I’ve negotiated discounts on medical bills a few times.
I suppose an enterprising browser hacker could implement this such that the browser could accept URLs in this format and reorient them when it makes the requests. Even paths would be tab-completable from browser history, would they not? I would love this in my browser.
Do they have to be unique? Cause otherwise that’s pretty easy
How is this different than volume discounts for anything else?
fur arire gbyq ure gbnfgre pbzcnal sevraq nobhg gur pneqvzhz erpvcr. ure sevraq jnf fclvat ba ure.
Usually, I read papers and blogs of tech companies.
Not those famous magazines like Ars Technica or Engadget, but Red Hat, IBM, Microsoft, AWS, Cloudera (yes I'm a system engineer).
Taibbi’s been at this his whole career: everybody is dumb, this is all a big joke, I’m going to cover the 2004 election on acid and in a gorilla suit, I’m the bad boy frat guy of journalism, I will never wipe the smirk off my face.
I'd also add that you should reboot after updates--even if they haven't touched anything that requires a reboot to put in use.

The reason is that there is plenty of configuration information that is only read during startup, and plenty of programs either only used during startup or that do things during startup that they do not do later.

If an upgrade broke any of that you might not find out until the next reboot. It is a whole lot easier to deal with if you find out right away that the update broke booting than if your first reboot is six months and several intervening updates later.

We hit something like that once. An extended power failure took down several servers. When they came back up several of our things were messed up. We eventually tracked it down to some update months earlier had made a change to how network filesystems got mounted, making them show up later in the boot process--which turned out to be late enough to be after some of our stuff that expected the network drives to be available.
For the same reason I don't "just accept" that I'm going to die, or that there is no justice in the universe. I want to live longer than my parents, possibly forever. I want to impose my sense of order and justice in the world, because I don't like chaos.

I want live more comfortably than my parents and my kids more than me (and thus growth). Of course I accept anything, but why should I? Isn't being human making sure you always progress?
Patreon is a conduit that sends fee from donors to clients. It does not have siezable funds. It has funds in trust in transit from supporters to the clients.
So it can fold it's tent and go away, and a new 'Patreon' will emerge, leaving the litigators an empty tent to divide amongst themselves.
Director's obligations, ensured, I am sure.
> also looking for jobs while they currently have one

Thanks for mentioning this. Once you have a family at home it gets unrealistic to not work while looking for work. Especially in countries where your contract can usually require months of notice and preclude unemployment in case you quit.
I lived through this already, I already live in "civilization."

You know what Manhattan looks like today because of how seriously we took this dumb pandemic? [0] Yeah, real civilized.

Some people don't realize just how uncivilized NYC is without all the people walking around outside, making the grime, dysfunction, inefficiency, and disorder look acceptable and reasonable.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVSuz1gJkZg
the great thing about tech monopolies is that there are so many of them