skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I ask everyone to bring their own project to work on!

It could be adding a feature to a side project, starting something new, or contributing to open source. (Or, we have some stock ideas if people need inspiration.) Rather than asking them to solve a problem they had never heard of before or use a codebase they're not familiar with, I get so much more out of watching them work in their own environment.

I can ask them questions about why they're doing something, and they tend to have much more detailed answers because they've been thinking about it for weeks. They're solving a problem they care about in a codebase they know, which mimics how working with them will be a few months in.

We can talk about tradeoffs and design decision, and I get a real sense for how they think. Plus, I've found most people are so much more comfortable and excited.

(If you're interested, I wrote a blog post about all the ways I've designed how we interview, to give everyone the chance to show off the best version of themselves: https://blog.readme.com/designing-a-candidate-focused-interv... And of course, I'm hiring!)
I have a PhD in physics but work on sustainability -- what I consider the most important role for someone who understands nature today. I constantly meet people who are surprised to find that turning on a light in their homes causes fossil fuels to be burned. Their ignorance is their business, but the greenhouse gases become everyone's.
If we are being completely frank here MOND doesn't gets as much love because it goes against GR, besides the fact that General Relativity is one of the most observationally validated theories we have there is quite a bit of dogma revolving around it as well.

MOND isn't a career ender as much as say cold fusion is, but it's pretty close.

And in all honesty if we look at Modified Gravity theories as a whole they shouldn't be anymore more offensive to one's career than say string theory and despite string theory being essentially a dead end for decades now it doesn't get anywhere near that level of stigma that MOND does and that's more for a cultural / dogmatic reason than purely scientific ones.
Only the 9th time that’s ever happened!
The embedded Rust ecosystem is actually pretty vibrant these days. The number and quality of #![no_std] crates is improving rapidly.

The main limitation is going to be if your MCU is supported by LLVM. If you're targetting ARM, RISC-V, MSP430 or Xtensa you might get further than you'd expect.

There's a hell of a lot of tooling built around C though. So nomatter what happens I don't think we'll ever be rid of it.
I feel the same way in that I wonder if maybe I would like it if I read it.

For the King book, my wife read it and we talked about it and I just don’t want to read it. For the Knight book, I read the first few pages and know the Nike story and don’t want to read it.

Maybe I’m missing out and they are truly amazing. But I can’t read all that they recommend just in case they suddenly get great at recommending.

It’s a challenging problem and the risk of missing out is there. But I don’t know of any way to truly eliminate the risk unless I read every book recommended. And my life isn’t long enough.
If you've been raised on a intellectual diet of breakfast television, lip-service superstition, patriotic exceptionalism, and checkbox pedagogy, then you may not inwardly digest that knowledge progresses by incrementally pushing back the boundaries of ignorance, or its key corollary, that leading-edge discovery is driven by people with the most nuanced understanding of their own ignorance.

The existential confrontation of research processes and discourse is such anathema to a prevailing mindset of certainty and explanation that a psychosis may develop.

So bring your kids up to be comfortable with doubt, to inoculate them against becoming conspiracy nuts.
For some reason hyper minimalism comes to mind :) http://www.cc.com/video-clips/2zifz2/upright-citizens-brigad...
Clones from the Dolly sheep were not identical. If I remember correctly it is thought that epigenetics played a role in their differences.
Indeed, and right after the author adds, To the end, he was a mental adventurer, not so much iconoclastic as intellectually fearless and relentlessly curious. Although I feel we should probably err on the side of caution with something like climate change, a mind like Dyson's will make me healthily slow down and revise my own beliefs, and not nullify him as a scientist or as a responsible citizen. I highly recommend this lengthy but wonderful article [1], which dives into the core of the issue. A relevant quote:

It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

[1] https://www.edge.org/conversation/freeman_dyson-heretical-th...
The many lives of Pauli Murray (2017)
Physics needs more data, this is not a single person effort. Actually i’m those who believe this a golden edge for Physics and the constraint is not having another single brilliant guy but resources that could help us validate even further or break what its already known.
To make it clear, there is no NYT article. Some combination of things (likely including the shutdown of the blog) has prevented it from being published.
That’s an interesting one. I think most peoples’ gut reactions, on hearing the sort of thing they believe, would be to say, yes, of course they’re mentally ill.

But there is precedent for this, for convincing very large numbers of normal (albeit not generally very smart) people to believe completely insane things.
How about experiments with the 1-bit microprocessor?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_MC14500B
Isn't this a problem with all voting? Even if you do it in a secluded booth, you could just take a picture with a discrete camera.
The numbers don’t work at all.

She wouldn't have stopped spending, negating much (most?) of her payments. There is very likely a lot of missing information in the article. The figures aren't important per se, they're likely just for illustration purposes.

She doesn't have to prove her point, she's just giving us her insights into the unexpectedly high costs of living.

We've all been there, done that. As in "Right! Who's going to win this month's lottery to get my outstanding debts paid?"
I'm neither 'excusing' for anyone nor talking about CI and CD. But if you want to talk about it; how about you talk about MSBuild. Or the lack of sources in Windows.

The point is that someone makes an invalid statement about availability and/or cost. Just because you wish something doesn't mean every company in the world is bad for not supplying exactly that. (they are of course bad, but for other reasons)

Not everything can be the same happy build systems we're used to. That's not a bad thing in itself as a mono-culture has plenty of problems all by itself.
There are no Dyson spheres or nuclear powered spaceships, but there are a hell of a lot of climate deniers. If we’re weighing what part of his legacy, the part that had a negative effect on a very real crisis of human suffering is going to weigh heavier than some cool thought experiments that only showed up in scifi
To be fair, Einstein did not know about (or even had a need in) the Michelson-Morley experiment when he created SR.
> C++ gives you more tools for avoiding them

A direct link, for the curious: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/array

As an aside, the C’s Biggest Mistake article cropped up in HN discussion 8 days ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24373728
Yeah, asking me to spend 5+ hours building a powerpoint deck is a lot more annoying than asking me to spend 5+ hours on some code project. I'd probably just bow out of the process if asked to do that.
If your electricity is 10 cents per kWh it would be that much.

Since they said NYC we can bump that to 21 cents and then $150-$200 becomes 980-1300 watts, or 8-11 amps. That's something most people could plug in to their bedroom or living room circuit without a sweat.
Examples from the company website if anyone is interested:

https://snapshot.parabon-nanolabs.com/examples (TV/Media volunteers)

https://snapshot.parabon-nanolabs.com/posters (Actual cases from the looks of it)

These seems to be for the most part on the same level as some good police sketches, what surprised me is that the few renders where they showed a tooth gap that matched the photo quite well, the seem also to be pretty good at predicting some facial features like the nose but overall fail quite poorly at eyebrows (i'm not sure if it's because of the neutral expression or the algo itself).

Dystopian indeed but if these examples are actually representative I'm almost astounded by the resutls.
> Saying that these questions are forbidden just because you are sometimes tired of doing them strikes me as unreasonable.

You know what's unreasonable? Interviewing a bricklayer and asking them to describe how they lay bricks over the phone. And this is why your comparison to singing is hugely flawed. The phone is literally designed for carrying and hearing voices, not for more complex things.

You act as if it's literally impossible to figure out if someone can code unless you're trying to do it over the phone.

> This line from your comment is interesting to me though: "I've seen people actively be wrong in what they're looking for, as in technically wrong and therefore I failed". I frequently ask questions where I expect the candidate to want to clarifications or challenge what I'm saying.

I once had someone ask me what _type_ was returned from a controller in asp.net MVC, and when I gave the technically correct response this person told me I was wrong, a view is returned, then immediately ended the call. The number of times I've seen stuff like this happen is way too high.

But more than that, I want to address the attitude in that last point. This is a _HUGE_ problem with interviewers. They often come to conclusions they ought not come to based upon the circumstances. And the defenseless interviewee's are left trying to suss out hidden requirements like "expects them to ask clarifying questions". Interviewee's come in and have to try and navigate these byzantine, hidden requirements. And the question is, why do interviewers have hidden requirements like this? Because they know if they're _HONEST_ and communicate what they're looking for, the candidate will give it to them. That by itself should be a wake up call that interview's are hostile and un-real.

I'm just in a position in my career that I have the leverage to refuse to play those games. If you do something like that, you fundamentally have no clue how to actually hire people, and I refuse to bring any value to you or your company.
> One of the niceties of C is that I can get anything done pretty damn quickly, without anything getting in my way.

not saying you're necessarily wrong (c is definitely simpler than rust), but I think most people would write a similar comment for whatever language they feel most comfortable with. I write c++ most days. even though it's the most verbose and complicated language I've ever used, I can still probably get stuff done way faster than in another language I happen to pick up.

if I'm just throwing something together really fast, I do mostly use the old school C functions though. scanf is way nicer than streams.
Unless I am unaware of something, CRISPR is not yet ready for medical usage. Sure, it is an amazing research tool. But every gene editing trick built on the back of this incredibly useful protein (Cas9, that is) has "off-target" effects. These mean that not only do you mutate your target, you cause a whole bunch of other mutations. The future of human genome engineering is almost certainly going to feature CRISPR genes in some capacity, but we just don't have the precision, reliability, and ability to avoid other deleterious mutations yet to do so.

Also, as someone working with CRISPR, it isn't quite as easy as it is made to sound. It is relatively easy, but still a lot of work! I guess that is a footnote when it makes the impossible, possible though. We need to keep having these ethics conversations though, so we can use this tool wisely.

For further reading I would recommend Jennifer Doudna's "A crack in creation". She is one of the founders of CRISPR as a gene editing tool, and her book is good reading on the topic.
I dunno, Openssl CLI is one hairy beast. To be honest I don't really know the best solution to such problems. Smaller, more specialized binaries? I mean, s_client is so vastly different than say, rsa.
and asking for academic background is an argument from authority...

No it isn't. It isn't even an argument of any sort. I think most reasonable people would interpret that as an attempt to gather evidence to support applying a heuristic filter to the question of "is it worth my time to continue engaging with this person or not?"
Lots of cities in the southeast are still undervalued IMO. I'm a North Carolinian, and there's been no shortage of northern transplants over the years. Charlotte and Raleigh have grown like crazy, and show no sign of stopping. Tons of young people moving here despite the well-deserved reputation of this area being pretty boring. I guess boring is a plus these days. West coasters largely haven't caught on, but I don't think the migrations will stop, especially with COVID.

Charlotte and Raleigh are fairly safe bets, but Winston-Salem seems like it might be on a similar path (but much earlier on in that path if so).
On the contrary, I think that's exactly what most people do.

Have you personally verified TLS? I have not, but I still use it.
I lost interest in the city as soon as the article pointed out that the city's "environmentalism" was rooted in opposition to a nuclear power plant. This kind of thinking is backwards and self-destructive.
That's an interesting interview approach - I really like it. Do you find the lack of context (about the interviewees project) on the part of the interviewer to ever be an issue?
Show HN: NERD – SPA Starter Kit
Hey, this is my first post - I wanted to see if there some feedback I could get from the community. I have been doing some interviews lately and its seems the popular thing to do is have a take-home challenge. I have been struggling to keep up with all of them, so I have decided to start making templates to help speed up the process.

My first template is a NERD stack. (Nginx, Express, React, Docker) alongside an MySQL Database.

Let me know what you think, I would love the feedback. Cheers!
How do you compensate for the fact that you don't know the codebase that well? I feel like a lot of the value of interviews is that you see how a candidate thinks through a problem that you have also thought deeply about, which gives more fruitful discussions.
Perhaps presentation is the wrong word, lets say "talk" instead. Not even a requirement to have anything graphical, just a long form discussion followed by Q&A afterwards.
I’ve had this same thing happen with so many large purchases. If I’ve just bought a washing machine the odds of me wanting another one the next day are astronomically small, unless they think I’m in the process of starting a small laundromat.
The test can be open source and dynamic. It can be a test the applicant can take over and over again every day to practice. When she applies for the job, she takes that very same test under controlled conditions so we know she is taking it and not someone else.

Why can't we write a test to see if she can code in Python at an appropriate level of expertise without mixing it in with algorithm gotchas? What are the algorithms she needs to know? Why can't we provide her with a list of those algorithms and show her how we will test for mastery of them?
That's the whiteboard interview in a nutshell. Standard problems given to everyone and asked to answer them in a standard way. Done in person to lower the chance of cheating.

The same reasons whiteboard interviews are problematic will apply to any test done at scale.
If you can do it with infrared then yes is the JWT rule of thumb.
I think there's a very important distinction to be made between the notion of an alternative and a replacement.

I think many of us (in the Open Library community) want to see many players in the space and as much creativity as possible. We love books and we love giving book lovers options. Inventaire, LibraryThing, Goodreads, and fivebooks are all amazing services which have pioneered different, amazing experiences. And each brings something unique to the table. Goodreads is loved by 90M people.

It's also true that it's challenging for any single application (e.g. Goodreads) to serve 90M diverse users in all the ways they may prefer.

We see opportunities for the community to be better included in helping cultivate a more inclusive and diverse book ecosystem. Will it be better than service X? I don't care as much, so long as it allows researchers, students, enthusiasts, parents, and other patrons (who may be left behind by current solutions) to achieve their goals.

In order to support this mission, our primary objective at Open Library is making sure useful book and author metadata is as accessible as possible via APIs, data dumps so the community can build the right solution for their use cases. And of course, doing the best we can to build basic, useful tools to help connect readers to their reading experience and to each other.

We're a very small team (staff of 2 eng -> 4M patrons) so without the community being excited and driving, what we're able to accomplish is very limited, beyond keeping the lights on and the book data happily flowing.

So I want to echo your sentiments olah_1. As a non-profit, our goal isn't to out-complete or replace any existing service. But it very much is to provide an "alternative".

An alternative where every netizen and book lover has the opportunity to shape the future of their library. Where there are books which represent everyone. Where everyone's use cases may be served (if people are willing to put in the work). And where the limit of what's possible is bound only by one's creativity and a shared vested interest in being a good neighbor.
JSON Numbers cannot represent all possible values of an IEEE754 Double (IE Javascript numbers) since it's missing all of the NANs and infinities.

JSON Numbers cannot all be represented in an IEEE754 Double, since they're arbitrary precision sequences of unbounded size.

This bit me recently, and so I'm slightly bitter about it.
I don’t use it to vote though.
Read "The Ballad of Lost C'mell" (Cordwainer Smith, 1962) to see how that plays out.
Even went I deleted the preset glyph patterns and spent 5 minutes re-training it for 1-9 my training pattern for '4' still didn't work. I tried drawing it 2 different ways. It's neat that you can train it so quickly with the hold-shift feature though.
Anyone that has to rely on their name for an argument isn't worth listening to.
>The test can be open source and dynamic. It can be a test the applicant can take over and over again every day to practice.

>Why can't we provide her with a list of those algorithms and show her how we will test for mastery of them?

That's exactly what is done, it's called leetcode.com, recruiters send you a link to it and tell you to study. I don't see how anything you're describing isn't covered by the existing whiteboard interview dynamic.
Lol love how we're talking about the core cities of silicon valley as towns... have you guys even been there?

They have a town vibe only because they have essentially made development outside of office buildings impossible for decades. There is a ton of pent up demand to live there (meaning it's super, super expensive) and there is a lot of traffic and a surprising population density given the development pattern (because there are a LOT of people working there relative to living there). They're really all a contiguous metropolitan region of the Bay Area from SF-SJ-Oakland, the fact that they're separate political entities is at this point a historical relic
> ^note1: I don't use rg due to dependency on PCRE2 which doesn't play nice on my OpenBSD machine.

FWIW, PCRE2 seems to be an optional dependency, and disabled by default (unless you build it with `--feature pcre2`).
I spent 2 weeks in another Freiburg, in Switzerland. German cities look to me to be too sleepy, and boring. Can't think of that being considered futuristic.

They are still building buildings out of wood, and plaster...

Preference for stone paving over asphalt feel anachronistic.
You only interview at companies that support remote (or with hiring managers who will support you being remote in an org that isn’t fully committed to remote) and you keep a large emergency fund to give you substantial runway between jobs (~1 year expenses). Very easy to do on a tech salary and you moved to a low cost of living area with cheap housing (<$1k/month mortgage, reasonable property taxes).
Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia (1984)
This is a great question. Guess OPs approach only works if they are hiring someone much more junior than themselves so that experience trumps code/domain familiarity.
While I agree with your main sentiment, comments like this don't really belong on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In MA ($0.195/kWh), that’s only about 1400W, or 12A which is supportable on a single 15A circuit.
It's still strange coincidence even if the id's aren't determistic, they still should be random.

Here is the prediction [1], there was also a post shortly before his death that referenced this and hinted that the month [30] and minute [:28] will be relevant in the future, but it seems to be missing in all archives. Only the QAnon post [2] mentioning this additional info after the death is avaiable.

[1] https://qposts.online/post/1706
[2] https://qposts.online/post/1933
And for good reason.. many of those requests involve a much higher level of maintenance (moderating content like reviews, building a social network, etc)

I like that OpenLibrary is trying to be a source of open book data. But I am a bit concerned about the quality of the data (just a feeling as I am still digging into it but there are open questions on how to handle things like multiple authors, etc)
Maybe management keeps saying this to scare the operations people into working harder. Lots of arsehole managers think this is the way to hold onto staff and make them work harder. Of course it really doesn't work that way, but maybe some managers benefit from this shitty tactic in orthogonal ways.
Is that necessary anymore though? Consoles have been x86 and effectively almost identical to commodity PCs for 7+ years (and the original (pre-release) Xbox One devkit was a PC: just a souped-up HP Z-series workstation, if I remember correctly).
> Physics is stuck

I agree.

> needs another Einstein to revolutionize it

Nope. The smartest minds today need to work on two topics: AI/AGI, and anti-aging/longevity

Once these two problems are cracked, we'd be on a smoother transition path towards Type-1 Kardashev civilization.

Then the smartest (long-living) minds can sit down with their favorite AGI collaborators in their ivory towers and have all the fun they want to have.
If you want something that runs 100% locally with a persistent environment, take a look at macOS-Simple-KVM [0]. With some trivial tweaks in virt-manager as well as the guest OS, you can easily create a local macOS VM that you can SSH into from the host machine (EULA concerns still apply). This also allows you to pass-through devices such as USB devices or a secondary GPU to achieve near-native graphics performance in your macOS VM.

[0] https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM