skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really like the interview process the author lays out here. As someone who has been working for about 20 years in the industry, this feels like a better, more direct gauge of how well someone will fit in the role than of seeing if they know how to invert a binary tree. I do think it's still worth doing some sort of coding question, but it doesn't have to be some intricate algorithmic puzzle. It can be as simple as, "How would you design X?" for design and some data structure algorithm question, but something that does not take up the bulk of the interview. (Perhaps one interview in the loop could be devoted to hands-on coding.)

One of the best interviews I had, and I'm biased here since i hit out of the park, was one where the interviewer literally gave me a laptop and told me to code a simple iOS app. I was applying as a senior iOS developer with many years experience, so it was totally fair to ask it. Having written several apps on the side, I got straight to work and knew exactly how to set up data structures, algorithms, and trade-offs. Even with my experience, I was not able to finish the complete app in the time allotted, but I was able to breeze through all the elements of of what go into designing an app from scratch.

I had a few more interviews and later they offered me a job, but I ended up working elsewhere. Interestingly, the place I did take a job at had more traditional tech interviews, which I actually found too easy compared to larger tech companies, however there was more long-term growth available there and the pay was much better.
It's been estimated that self-replicating Von Neumann probes could populate our galaxy in 10 million years. I haven't seen an estimate about them populating multiple galaxies, but I assume many could be hit within some multiple of that, and the growth would be exponential. Even if most intelligent life generally doesn't decide to make self-replicating probes, it only takes one civilization in the history of the (observable) universe to do it to make a huge effect.

It's possible that life is just likely enough that none of them have yet chosen to or have been alive long enough to create self-replicating probes, but I don't think it's correct to assume that the likelihood value for life would be on the extreme upper end of the range that's compatible with our observations.
I love how people are completely missing your point and introducing Nintendo to the discussion.

Trying to equal a smartphone and a fucking gaming console (Switch).

A smartphone has become as you said an intersection, i.e. a bridge to the digital world and has become an absolute neccessity in today's world. And as such should also be regulated.

All these people who are comparing Nintendo to Apple, try going a month without your Switch and then a Month without using your Macbook, Ipad or iPhone. Hint:Good luck
How likely do you find that people will actually do this though? If people are not likely to do it that makes the proposition rather pointless.

Hello Fresh gave me something (I think it was a cooling pack) that was "recyclable" but really only the outside was, and the inside you had to toss in the trash anyways, and on top of that I'm pretty sure you couldn't touch what was inside it, and to me that pretty much makes it trash with all the "buts" involved.
Haha, hilarious! But yes, I don't want to do that.
I live in Portland, and Estacada and Molalla were evacuated. Oregon City is currently on level 2 warning. Level 3 is immediate evacuation. Mostly it's places in Clackamas Couny. Here's the most up to date info you're probably going to find. It's from Oregon Emergency Operations. https://www.oregon.gov/oem/emops/Pages/RAPTOR.aspx . Here's a list of resources that was put up by the office of one of the Oregon state reps https://bonamici.house.gov/media/media/statements/wildfire-r... . I found the Raptor link there.
> Return values are a million times better than checked exceptions because return values compose

No they don't, not even when they're monads (you need monad transformers to compose monads since they don't universally compose).
Not even counting the unprecedented attempt with North Korea, it's the third he has done. Here they are:

1. Kosovo and Serbia
2. Israel and UAE
3. Israel and Bahrain

There have been multiple nominations for that peace prize, but the committee will do anything to avoid awarding it.

Oh, LOL... Over at The Atlantic, staff writer Graeme Wood is now arguing to end the Nobel Peace Price because of this awkward development.
Mask Math
> this thing should be supported as a pivotal component of civic life

Covid shows us that a smartphone is a pivotal component of your literal life. At risk patients now can have doctor appointments over video and electronic prescriptions. This mostly happens on portable devices.

These portable devices, despite branding and marketing, work in the same way to enable citizens to actively participate in the democracy (access to information, discussion, governmental resources, etc), their personal life (healthcare, family and education) but also on their professional life (working in a Uber-for-X, using maps, search, etc)

Portable and relatively cheap, smartphones are a necessity, a utility. You can argue that "not exactly", but it is what it is. The bigger and more ubiquitous something is, the closer it is to a utility and a shared space. Being part of a private enterprise is secondary and shouldn't take precedence over society.

When you replace the town square with your big backyard, it then becomes the townsquare
If you’re throwing a seminar or training, there are witnesses that will likely reduce the chance of illegal behavior.

Unless, of course, you throw a gangbang, and Apple ends up eating 30% of the price of admission. Imagine the headline!
Is GB WhatsApp Worth It?
> That wasn't a personal attack whatsoever.

"You have become incredibly insincere in your arguments"

> Tiny, micro-boutiques that are a little sliver of marginal prosperity in a desolate wasteland of failure.

I would rephrase this to say you're talking about small businesses, which are not sexy or well known, but are both widespread and crucial to the entire economic foundation of the United States.

Unfortunately, App Store revenue is very top-heavy. A few big players, such as Epic, do extremely well on the App Store, but small businesses tend to suffer in the App Store. The total software revenue may be higher now, but the distribution of revenue matters a lot. If the rich get richer, and the rest are stagnant or get poorer, that's only good for the rich, and I wouldn't call it a healthy market, regardless of the totals.

In the App Store era, it's "easier" than before to become a wild success, like Epic. But it's a lot harder for indie developers to make a living. You can't "make it up in volume", and you don't have a huge marketing budget to get to the top of the App Store charts, so you need to charge sustainable prices for software. The App Store "race to the bottom", as well as other business and technical limitations, have really hurt smaller developers. I'm not sure we can, or want to live in a world with only BigCos.
I think you committed a bit of heresy there. When expressing ideas about political topics, you also have to give praise the correct Gods or people will think you're an enemy.
> OS X runs OpenGL 4.1 and is still available even if deprecated.

You are correct. I misspoke. I meant to say 4.Ancient since 4.1 is 10 years old now.

> Note that most of the newer OpenGL features are largely about sending stuff faster to the GPU, not enabling new GPU features

For shaders, I certainly find that not true. There are a lot of shader features that got added over 10 years.

And, I believe things even as important as Uniform Buffer Objects are later than 4.1.

OpenGL 4.1 just ... isn't good in this day and age.

> If OpenGL drivers on Linux are "laughably worse" (though in practice i haven't much of a difference) then the solution is to improve those drivers.

I totally disagree. There simply aren't enough people in the Linux ecosystem to maintain those drivers and Vulkan drivers. I'd rather those developers all work on the newer and better API.
Well put. Using it as an additional layer isn't bad.
Boeing drones are things like the MQ-25 [0]. They don't compete with DJI. I'm a researcher (US government contractor) in the aerospace field, and they've been trying to ban us from using DJI drones for years. They keep pushing it back and making exceptions because it has been incredibly hard for us to find anything comparable that's made by a US company (and even then the hardware is all Chinese, it's just assembled in the US and presumably running software that phones home to a server in the US rather than one in China.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_MQ-25_Stingray
And the accompanying notebook: https://github.com/aatishb/maskmath/blob/master/model/mathmo...
I agree, but the fact that there was a forest/logging road in that area as recently as 50 years ago does indicate that it is an environment recently impacted by humans.
Tape shows: ethically, CNN chief a little shaky
And those small companies would be able to compensate the difference in pay with "partner" status, i.e. making an employee an unfireable stakeholder that can live off profits by the time he or she turns say 45, but owners of said small companies are too greedy for that. I'd argue that opportunistic at-employement with 500k/year at Big4 is worse than guaranteed 250k/year that nobody, not even the company's owners can take from you.
> so the employer can compare

And why do we think this is objective? Ostensibly, the first one to clear some threshold of competence ought to be good enough to be hired (in fact there's even extensively studied algorithms[1] for this stuff). In the vast majority of cases, it's highly unlikely that you're going to find an underpriced genius via some misguided notion of test standardization.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
Not them but for my last job at a mid tier company i did 6 hours of onsite total, and amazon/fb both were 4 hours each not including the screen(s)
Villeneuve on Difference Between Directing Dune and Blade Runner
I mean this is the main argument against game streaming and HN seems to take the 100% opposite opinion.
Because it's not the exact same thing. Context matters.
But it's not like that is it. Try to guess the model number written on my monitor.

I'll wait...
The sentence "The passive voice is overused." illustrates this tension well. When you omit the subject, (implicitly we all know who that sentence is referring to), passive voice is more concise, but it's not clearer. It's actually less clear because there's less information available. I think this is the distinction most commentator miss.

In programming languages we often find better, we prefer explicitness over implicitness if the language is already designed to be very concise. Case in point: Python.
Absolutely. I already am charging a monthly fee for a simpler version of the app + coaching and was waiting for validation that the app works without my guidance to move to the next stage. Payment structure is TBD, but I really want to balance my need for sustainable income with removing barriers of entry for everyone. Likely going to charge more from those who can afford it and grant free licenses to those who can't.
>Knowing that modulus operation is one approach and knowing common approaches for dealing with collisions are part of that

Yes, expecting them to know that is reasonable. Expecting them to regurgitate that factoid unprompted is bullshit.

Don't inquire on a topic and expect a canidate speaking in generalities and off the cuff to overlap with your toy facts.

I'm fighting the urge to rant in the comments here on how to competently conduct a useful technical interview; but I'm more and more convinced it's a competitive advantage.
the cited article is much better:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-09/apple-des...

has a photo too
Part of the blame here should go to web browser developers. Self signed certificates pop up a huge warning while plaintext http connections do not, even though the former is more secure than the latter.
The double standard is Netflix is able to provide an app that does nothing out of the box until you register elsewhere. Other apps would get booted because they don't work without navigating elsewhere.
So you’re saying erlang can automatically distribute async tasks across nodes? Probably too much to comment, but how or where can I learn more about this way of thinking of it?
IMO the solution is to either:

* Use return values and let people deal with the boilerplate ala Optional in java. We use Optionals to replace null values and IMO the boilerplate is 100% worth it. I've also used return values that can encode possible errors in Java.

* Use unchecked exceptions and expect people to understand the methods they call and the exceptions those methods can throw, which should be documented in javadoc instead of a throws clause. This needs to happen regardless, as methods can throws unchecked exceptions the caller might need to be aware of, so this in reality doesn't involve extra work.

For me, either of these solutions is preferrable to checked exceptions.
“Shortage” is an economic term of art, so I won’t use it here. But it’s likely true that there is lot of valuable, economic-growth-producing work that could be profitable if a software engineer costs $100k/year instead of $500k/year. Businesses that lie on the margin of profitability are likely to feel that it’s hard to find good talent. Of course, it’s bad for us existing software engineers if the supply increases and the price goes down. It’s likely good for society overall though, if it enables a bunch of other businesses to exist. This is true in the same way that more trucks, more warehouses, and more conveyor belts would increase economic output, even if they were already available for the right price.
Did you try getting drunk?
This is an auto-generated story, not sure how it was written but definitely not human. For example:

'...it might be the primary time in historical past Mars and its moons are captured in such element.

To drag it off, the 2 organizations are teaming as much as develop the “Tremendous Hello-Imaginative and prescient Digicam...”

What software would write "to drag it off", obviously this is based on the idea behind "to pull it off" as no one ever says 'drag' in that context.

I feel like this kind of auto-article-spam is increasingly polluting the open web...
Lock it in the safe, hide it ... but then forget about the safe and make sure everyone else has as well.

Then it doesn't exist.
Part of the problem is that nickel deposits were introduced in the '70s but have not been adjusted for inflation. The inflation-adjusted value of a nickel in the '70s is closer to a quarter, and if the deposit on the bottle was a quarter people would certainly feel more strongly about collecting said deposit back.
I'll look into that. Feels a little too loose for me. I want people to only pay when they want to, but I also believe people value things more when they commit something to it. "Buy one for you, gift one to someone else" is a model I really like both for financials and for virality.
The funny thing is that Erlang is the Ericsson language. Go is the Google language.

Ericsson never had the Google "street cred" or K& not R. Ericsson is boring phone interchanges and boring radio. Google was hipster latte with software freedom before it turned out to be worse than MS, IBM and Oracle combined.

One might wonder what could have been without all the smoke and mirrors.
I mean, presumably the people who really cared about side-loading decided to buy alternative phones instead.

So, of iPhone buyers, you're left with two remaining groups:

1. People who care a little bit about side-loading but not enough to choose a difference device.

2. People who don't care about side-loading at all.
The governor just said that number was inaccurate. Here's a link to the coverage of the press conference. https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2020/09/with-oregonians-... .

Basically the 500,000 people was all the people in any sort of evacuation preparation zone. That includes everyone in a level 1 evacuation zone. That's the be ready level. There have been less than 100,000 people actually evacuated in a level 3 zone according to the press conference. That's still a lot of people, but not as many as had been reported. It's still horrific for everyone that's been displaced.
But you don't understand, Apple hAs aLwAyS bEeN tHiS wAy and don't forget my wAlLeD gArDeN.

( /s for the Apple cultists on HN)
Portland Protest News – News and Analysis on the Protests in Portland, Oregon
The biggest mistake of C# is not having checked exceptions. Your carefully written program can crash because someone modified a dependency to throw a new exception. So the only way to make your program resilient against such changes is to catch the base Exception class, which everyone agrees is wrong (because of "swallowed" exceptions). In Java the compiler alerts you if someone modifies a dependency to throw a new exception, which is good.

See long discussion here: https://forum.dlang.org/thread/hxhjcchsulqejwxywfbn@forum.dl...
When he inevitably asked you to code an algorithm as the next question I hope he also accepted using Google for the answer.
Merriam-Webster:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/address
>Yeah just to second this I think that a lot of us coming from software backgrounds like to think of laws as being code, fully definable, automatable and capable of covering all edge cases. This isn’t the case. Judgement is required.

problem arises when the method for achieving Judgement isn't codified.

Meaning, while laws and punishment are open to interpretation by the judges, the system by which we appoint judges, their permissions and abilities, are strictly codified, and they must be in order to subdue and reduce corruption.

OK: Your company decides to stop producing specific codified rules -- what is in place to prevent judgement bias and fair interpretation of 'crossing the line'?

The answer, in most cases, is that there is nothing to hold the 'judges' accountable. Nothing to insure fair unbiased decisions. Nothing to insure that they can't hold the position indefinitely without malice.

In other words : The shorter your Terms of Service become, the longer the Employee Handbook must become to prevent corruption and overall unfairness.

Besides that problem, there is the problem where the acceptable behaviors on a platform may wander with society -- this leads to issues where developers may be barred from a platform for behavior which was perfectly acceptable earlier that year without any real warning.

How does one avoid breaking rules if they can't know the rules?

Well, one might say "Play nice.", but the reality is that we all interpret it differently. That's one of the many nice features that comes along with codified law.
Good read. I never knew this existed, but now I can put a name to what i've been feeling.
The one where I can charge back any fraudulent charge with ease. I know how to do that without thinking about it. I've logged into Apple twice now and neither account areas provide a place for me to cancel subscriptions.
From the government itself[1]:

> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
A port of Ruby's liquid templates to .NET, yep.
The whole point of scylladb, which the author has extensively worked on, is that we can be a lot faster without garbage collection.
After our conversation I had a look around and I found Vampire, which rang a bell. This is what deep learning theorem provers must beat:

The World Championship for Automated Theorem Proving

http://www.tptp.org/CASC/

More to the point, they probably need to beat this:

https://vprover.github.io/trophies.html

Vampire is an automated theorem prover that has been winning some category of the world championship since 1999.

See, automated theorem provers can do pointless, stupid SOTA benchmarks, too.
Analyzing Variation Models in OpenType
The Evidence Keeps Piling Up: Lockdowns Don’t Work – Mises Wire
I think the idea is that once AI "solves" a game mode it becomes easier for humans to get better faster by learning from the AI and therefore less fun.

For example, chess players used to practice (or invent) novel openings to surprise their opponents. Now that AI has explored such a huge range of the game space it can simply show you the optimal moves for each opening. So for humans there's less exploration and more memorization. You're simply trying to follow a path that AI has paved rather than find a new path.

It's kind of like how tic tac toe is fun as a kid until you discover how you can tie everytime. Even with these new rules AI would rapidly find optimal strategies that humans would then race to replicate.
I've seen messy devs who absolutely can't articulate themselves, to the extent that when they tried, everybody else would keep awkward silence, and yet they made 60k/month.
Kind of. It doesn't actually solve this. At most, it makes it a race.

If you are using portreserve for the port, the portreserve daemon just holds it until your actual application calls portrelease and then binds to it. If all reserved ports are released, the daemon exits. For a service restart, you could add starting up the daemon as part of the process, however, it is still a race to try and bind to that port. If sshd crashes, there is no reason that portreserve would try to bind to that port. If you create a secondary service or script to monitor for sshd running and restarting portreserve if it isn't, then it's once again a race.
The other alternative is to use the error monad in combination with railroad style programming. Of course you also want infix operators like (>>), (>>?) aso.
Seems like this is never the type of issue discussed at Davos.
I truly hope the wearing of masks ceases to be a political issue. With COVID-19, every little bit helps. As much as we all hate wearing masks, when in large crowds or compact areas, we should all be wearing.
Man. I interviewed somewhere last week for a Scala position, advertising myself as a functional programmer.

In the interview, they asked me, "What's the difference between fold left and fold right?" I said "Um, one of them starts on the left side of the data structure, one of them starts on the right. I never remember which is which." They said essentially: "okay. The answer I was looking for was that fold right is not stack safe." I protested weakly, and they dug in, so I graciously let it go.

But it's patently not true. A naive implementation of fold right in Scala isn't stack safe, but the actual implementation is stack safe. It's been stack safe since like 2010. So rather than interrogating my knowledge of functional programming, they're just asking me bullshit language trivia, and dinging me when I don't come up with their arbitrary wrong answer.

I wanted to work there before that, but the interview made me a little ambivalent, and then they just ghosted me. So I guess I dodged a bullet. But man, that was frustrating.
Apple revises app stores rules to permit game streaming apps
Probably the genetic (as in algorithm) universe.