skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why should it seem absurd or obviously wrong? It seems like the author wants a certain kind of programmer and wants to minimize false positives. If you want the top 1% (according to your own measurements about what "top" means) then it only makes sense that you'd have an interview process that more than 99% of applicants couldn't pass. "More than" because you're also making cuts to avoid false positives which will reject some good candidates.

In my view this strikes people as unfair because it excludes most people. It probably excludes them. I think I'd struggle with the tic tac toe problem and would probably need 30-60 minutes on it (hope to try this afternoon to see). It feels bad to see people say the bar is something you can't reach, and that makes people upset at the author. The author is an elitist and people don't like that.

Furthermore, the bar is arbitrary. No good programmer needs to implement a tictactoe counting program rapidly so it feels dumb to judge on that. This is like saying though that IQ tests are meaningless because I seldom need to guess which shape comes next in a sequence. However, just like predicting a sequence tells us something about the quality of your cognition (probably) quickly writing an arbitrary program tells us that you have some level of coding, thinking, intelligence, etc.

You may have that level of talent and fail the test, but you can't lack that level of talent and pass the test. At least, that's the theory in this essay. It seems mostly correct to me, barring an otherwise incompetent person who just coincidentally practices lots of tic tac toe problems.

Given that hiring a bad person is a lot costlier than failing to hire a good one, it seems logical that some people would need to structure hiring like this.

I don't think this is a good bar for FAANG companies. They need too many people. I don't think this is a good bar for companies where software is mundane not core competency stuff, you don't need high speed hackers. I'd doubt this is a good strategy for underfunded startups, you probably can't afford extensive interview processes with high bars or to hire the folks who would pass them. This seems like it might be a good pattern for a well funded software startup that needs to move fast.
Exploring an African approach and strategies to cybersecurity
I'm not sure why the downvotes (or at least I don't think they're warranted). I love the project, but the name is ridiculous and honestly makes it a tough sell to bring in new members to the community.

It's simply initially off-putting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiiwish

1. Crack open the shell and pull out the inner part of the acorn.
2. Mash with mortar and pestle until it has a flour-like consistency.
3. Soak several times with water to leach out the tannins.
You could argue that traffic fatalities tend to be younger victims, at least compared to COVID victims. So the number of life-years might be a better comparison. But this still doesn't resolve fundamental questions, like how much "disability" does a young person experience in lockdown? Or how much suffering does an older COVID victim experience?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability-adjusted_life_year
I have made acorn bread. You just grind them up the rinse them under water with a cloth for some time until it is not bitter anymore. Also, there are some varieties of acorns that have very low tannin, to the point that you don't even have to rinse them I believe.
Interesting post. I don't necessarily agree 100%, but I think it's a useful perspective in addition to the counter-idea that side projects and meetups will get you jobs.

It's not every company or set of interviewers, but there are lots of interviewers and recruiters who don't care at all about your side projects. I've done plenty of interviews, and don't really ask about them much, or really have time to check them out in any detail before the interview.

Lots of tech meetups are also jammed with aggressive recruiter-bros and newbies who need a paycheck and aren't all that interested in tech. Keep your expectations in check for finding good employers or employees at them.

For side projects, I wouldn't say not to do them. But don't do "hello world" level side projects in a trendy language in the expectation that anybody will care or it will get you a job. Do a side project to accomplish something that you are actually interested in. If you don't feel like it or don't have any interesting ideas, then by all means do something else instead. Half-hearted projects to fill a perceived recruiting checkbox definitely won't get you anything. Doing something interesting, or even doing something kind of boring in an interesting way, might help. Or doing something and taking it into Production enough to feel some of the pain points of maintenance, uptime, marketing, etc.
Yeah, that's been my theory for awhile: that IPv4 addresses are effectively a currency, and that a move to IPv6 would devalue that currency. A disproportionate amount of that currency is held by companies and institutions based in the United States, and in many cases they're the same companies and institutions that one might otherwise would expect to be responsible for much of the work of transitioning to IPv6.

Meanwhile, Asia has a relative scarcity of IPv4 addresses and so is (as far as I know) ahead of the curve because their incumbents have less to lose.
Saying "empirically, emphatically, demonstrably, masks do work" in the context of talking about N95 masks might make sense. I hope you aren't implying that because hospital workers are protected by N95 masks that we therefore know beyond a shadow of a doubt that all the other masks people are wearing are effective. After all, the bigger context is the question about gators.
More than that. 23%. This announcement made me $9k today.
Yeah I guess I assumed the replies to my comment were on topic to a thread about Unity on a post about Unity...

Due diligence on an external engine is planning ahead instead of acting like a deer in headlights when a new release comes breaking changes, because that's what you should expect.

That's what my comments have said thus far, nothing more nothing less.

People are acting like it's a problem specific to one engine that yes... an external engine is not marching to your personal timeline and will have breaking changes on major releases so you need to adjust your own schedule to theirs...

If you did your due diligence the cost of having to conform to their schedule should lower than the value that they provide is. Otherwise you shouldn't have used the engine.

Honestly it's surprising I've had to spend this many comments explaining that... that's kind if the basic math before you should even use a game engine
1) I'm not a researcher and I can't claim to have a comprehensive view of the evidence, but I think there have been enough high-quality studies based on seroprevalence to give a good estimate. This one https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.06.20169722v... found an IFR of 0.83% in spain, or 1.07% if counting excess deaths. This one https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.27.20141689v... found an estimate of 1.39% in NYC. The WHO has estimated 0.6%. These studies are based on representative antibody surveys with good statistical power, they should be accurate. There are factors like demographics and comorbidities that can push the number much higher or lower in a given community, but the range does not seem that wide to me.

2) I haven't been tracking hospitalization data very closely, you may be right that this has changed ... I've seen little discussion of it.

I agree that mask use in particular was controversial for a rather long time, with bodies like the CDC seemingly dragging their feet on recommending the use of masks. Still, I think that it's been a pretty settled question since April (CDC recommended masks from April 3 https://www.livescience.com/cdc-recommends-face-masks-corona...).
If you think the S&P will hold up until the day you retire, sure.

In that case, I wouldn't use a TDF (because you have no target date); I'd move to a balanced fund such as Vanguard LifeStrategy.

But a pure equity portfolio is considered very aggressive and risky for someone close to retirement. What if another 2008 happens?

Bonds reduce volatility. Look at the mid-March 2020 drop. At the lowest, the S&P was -32% YTD. BND's lowest point was -4% and was positive 2 weeks later. S&P didn't pass zero until August, more than 5 months later.

Bonds also allow you to lock in your gains. Being less volatile, the bond portion is much safer than stocks. Your main enemy there is inflation, which is why many TDFs supplement with US TIPS.

I understand if you want to be aggressive. That's fine, and you don't have to use a TDF. I know J. L. Collins (who's retired) caps his bond allocation to 20%.

But I don't think strategy is for everyone.
A large mistake this article makes is assuming that knowledge is forking, like a tree. Instead, knowledge is a graph. Or even a map.
To further my confusion on this point, I notice that the Wikipedia article on Pliny's Naturalis Historia mentions: 'Some technical advances he discusses are the only sources for those inventions, such as hushing in mining technology or the use of water mills for crushing or grinding corn.'
The CTO is active on HN and the CEO commented on elsethread here, though I can't speak to the PMs.
Yes, that’s it. The link is included on the website.
8 hours later, still:

403 ERROR
The request could not be satisfied.
Bad request. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner.
If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation.

Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront)
Request ID: CYfM2liDaLwK2Mu8q7vnSE5rn89Fg8HmUSY6jIrL_5iTxe2dU1ADyw==
Doesn't it also mean the opposite? This person was at a better company now this person wants to work here. Why? What went wrong? Did big company make a mistake hiring. Vs this person seems to be on the rise. Each company is a bigger and each position is more senior.
You're probably not addressing me specifically, but there is no yelling in my comment.

I do think we have to ground any interesting discussion by what is possible within the limits of science. Otherwise we're just talking fantasy.

For the most part, I do not think we should discuss the limits of engineering, that is what's practical or not, because we're nobody to say what is practical to a type II or type III civilization.

My dad's astronomy professor told the class it's impossible by the laws of physics to create a telescope that can see exoplanets. He went through the equations to show you could never build a telescope mirror to accomplish that. What he didn't think of is we found other ways to create bigger telescopes and we used gravitational lensing to zoom in on a distant star. Nothing in our understanding of physics changed to allow that, merely a change in how we looked at the problem. That's why it's so arrogant. We don't know everything about what is possible or not, and one day we might just see a way around limitations that seem absolute today. Our short history is filled with us doing that again and again.
Show HN: aioupnp, pure Python alternative to miniupnpc with more device support
My sister is a recruiter. I’ll be sure to tell her that you think she’s a bottom-of-the-totem-pole, lowest-common-denominator bottom-feeder. That’ll brighten up her day. And when she doesn’t take it to heart, I’ll be sure to add a ‘Let’s be frank...’.
Eh, this is not exactly true. Digital traffic, even encrypted, is easily recognizable unless the protocol is explicitly designed to look like noise (which is very uncommon/unheard of). It's true that encrypted data is (ideally) distributed like noise, but digital noise doesn't necessarily look or sound at all like ambient RF noise and there is also usually some non-encrypted packet structure wrapping the encrypted payload by necessity. You can very easily identify on e.g. DMR or P25 by ear if you know what to listen for, encrypted or not.

The restrictions have nothing to do with preventing people from transmitting noise. Transmitting encrypted on amateur radio stations was originally not allowed because of espionage concerns in the earlier days of amateur radio, and has stuck around largely to prevent abuse. Allowing unencrypted but encoded transmissions makes sense in that context, as long as the protocol is published.
The Woolworths Poltergeist
You assume Nadella had the choice to switch companies freely. You have to keep in mind what it is like to be an immigrant in this country.

Nadella gave up his Greencard to switch to the H-1B program in 1994 to bring his wife to the US (and surely this unprecedented switch was some time in the making). Subsequently he relied on Microsoft to sponsor him once again for permanent residency.

In that situation no immigrants switches employers regardless of their ethics. It often isn't even possible to make such a switch.
"Do they want to reduce infections or do they want to prevent overwhelming emergency services?"

How do those two policies differ?

Well, I mean, there's the obvious: don't treat people with COVID. But that seems sub-optimal.
Making SSMS Pretty: My Dark Theme
I had been wondering about using Python as my shell, but always rejected it, because regular shell operations would be to complicated, compared to the relative fewer times having Python directly available would be helpful.

Mostly I'm just sticking with bash, not because it's best, but because it's available everywhere. I don't really feel setting up something like Xonsh, zsh or ksh on every server I ssh into, to much work. The time is honestly better invested in getting better at bash, if you spend your day on multiple different systems. It's a little sad actually.
Interesting question, useless article.
Almost universally these types of behaviors emerge from self-interest. So it's pretty safe to assume that whatever approach recruiters tend to follow, they do so because it is the optimum for them. That means either that the incentives are a problem, or that the seemingly foolish recruiting techniques you've been exposed to are more effective than you might realize, not being a recruiter yourself. Probably a mix.
I'm an introvert and miss face to face interactions with my (small) team precisely because of that. I liked having meetings in person, eating lunch together and the occasional chats. All of that is now gone. Sitting by myself all day at home is soul-crushing. But maybe it's because I like the people in my team and have known them for a long time.

What I don't miss is the company events or meeting random people on the hallway...
Starlink already threatens optical astronomy. Now, radio astronomers are worried
Extremely common in cities, that's how I grew up in the 90s.

However, the kids I met in college who grew up in rural areas had to be driven everywhere. Looking at their faces when I'd mention taking the bus to a concert as a teen, you'd think I was talking about performing wizardry.

As a city kid I could literally go anywhere I wanted at any time, just walk, hop on my bike, or the bus. My parents left dollar bills in a designated spot for bus fare if we wanted to go somewhere.

There was even "wilderness" in the city I grew up in. I grew up building tree forts of dubious structural integrity and swimming in streams. Without adults being involved, just the neighborhood kids. I loved that there were always neighborhood kids, there was always a playmate around - just walk outside and see who was out and about. This was all elementary school age.

The good part about "neighborhood kids" is you don't get to choose them, they were just whoever lived in your area - so you learn to get along with people you'd otherwise not hang out with.
> the thing that's the complete opposite of vacuum

Solid matter is very nearly entirely empty space, and the vacuum state is not truly empty but instead contains fleeting electromagnetic waves and particles that pop into and out of existence.
Impossible Word: Toward a Poetics of Aphasia
Well I might be too knee-deep in academia to be a fair judge, but every university is a bunch of independent researchers of variable quality with wide latitude to pursue whatever and it seems silly to judge a university's reputation based on some individual researcher (or alumni, or whatever). I think any conflation is more the fault of media articles about the research than anything else. Yes, you write your affiliation on papers, but that does not really construe any sort of endorsement. I'm sure one can find many Stanford faculty expressing contrary viewpoints, but those are not (for whatever reason) being amplified by the media.

I can put a crazy paper on the arXiV tomorrow with my affiliation and if some media report says "The University of Chicago is claiming a perpetual motion machine" or whatever, that's the media's fault for misrepresenting the situation.
Yeah I would split the issue raised in this post along two axes. The first is junior vs senior positions. For a junior position a half-baked github project or a little meetup presentation does wonders for you. At the senior level unless you did something incredible or highly relevant in your side-projects no one cares, it can even be a negative.

The other is how are you getting the job. Are you sending in your resume through a jobs site or are you calling your old friend the startup CTO to see if you can help out? Side-projects, failed startups, and networking will make the latter strategy easier for you but won't help much with the former.

Looking for a senior role through an impersonal application process depends very heavily on your primary, full-time employment track record. Otherwise I think there is still real value in developing along other lines.
If you say "vast majority of Americans" a few more times, we might believe you, random HN commenter. 10+ should do it.
I grew up in Africa.

One of my favorite games was to catch African chameleons, and run around with them on my finger, pointing them at flies.

That's a game that you won't find too easily in the US.

But it was really dangerous. We had some very nasty snakes, thereabout, half the bugs could give you bites that would take a month to heal, and violent crime was quite prevalent. I learned to be quite careful.

I survived. Not sure I'd want to put my kids through the same risks, but my parents didn't seem to have a problem with it (good or bad? I dunno. They were quite fascinating people, in their own right).

It did give me a unique perspective, though. In my mind, I'm glad to have had it.
It's about principles, not money.
The Problem of Legacy IT Systems
Just by the way, "corn" in british english is a generic term meaning "cereal crop" -- usually "wheat". They'd refer to what we call "corn" as "maize".
Taking jabs at people that took jobs at Microsoft because you have a grudge says more about you than them. Microsoft never did anything so horrible that someone should have their ethics called into question for working there. Such poor taste.
HFT is not the problem - the pricing is. Hear me out....

Today, you could have bought AMZN stock for $3442.93 at some point during the day. AMZN nominally has $0.01 price increments. To put that in perspective, 0.01 divided by the share price is 344,293 which means we can affect price in 1/344,293 of a share. That’s nuts, and actually removes liquidity.

Instead, pricing change minimums should be a percentage of a share. I would think 1/10,000th of a share would be more than enough.

Honestly, for most stocks, a nickel difference wouldn’t matter and the liquidity would be better.

—-

EDIT : meant to also add that change the time minimums to also be larger (say 1/10 of a second) would also help liquidity and remove the need for HFT. So, timing/pricing deltas can either increase or decrease the need for HFT.
Says the man who can afford to spend 3 years in court losing 15k :)
As PHP discovered, JIT is not a magic button. If you don't have efficient data structures and memory use, JIT won't do much for code that isn't just raw number-crunching.
I don't recall. Sometimes doing a full rebuilt takes more a while, so my process goes something like this:

1) build with "-O0 -ggdb"

2) In a debug session, notice that a variable I want to inspect has supposedly been optimized away. Get extremely frustrated.

3) Rebuild with every debug-friendly flag I can conceive of "-O0 -ggdb -fno-inline -gdwarf-4 -fno-omit-frame-pointer ..."

4) IIRC, step 3 usually (but not always?) addresses the issue.

But long story short, I don't think I've ever pinned down the minimal requirements for avoiding the issue. Usually when I encounter this, I have bigger issues to deal with.
I mean, the REAL truth is that I don't do side projects to impress recruiters... I do them because of my intellectual curiosity. That said, they HAVE helped me make a pretty successful career shift.
This is cool but doesn't use my most frequent use of Google Maps or Apple Maps: checking to see where traffic accidents are before leaving.

Portland has freeways running north/south (more or less) on the West side (I5) and East side (I205). Sometimes, one of them will be significantly slowed because of accidents or some other unspecified cause.

After being stuck on the freeway once or twice, it's now our habit to check the route for traffic. What's normally the fastest route can be the slowest because of traffic.
In England you'll find references to 'the corn laws' and 'the corn exchange'. Corn meant any kind of grain. I believe it still does in some places, and what is called 'Corn' in the New World is called 'Maize' everywhere else.

More on this subject from actual historians: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2tn77o/what_...
My main job used to be a side project while my main job was working at some company. And I still have side projects because they keep my interest in programming alive even if they turn into total failures.
I read it as returning to that feeling of normality. I won't think it'll go back to as it was before but when we as a society have high confidence in generally what we expect the near/medium term future to look likw, then it's a the new normal.
Depends where you are. The company that built pre-fab parts for the 10-day 1,000 bed hospital in China is building a Huoshenshan equivalent hospital in Korea too.

11% of global CO2 emissions are from construction. Using pre-fab steel modules are not only more recyclable but the building process emits about 50% less CO2 as well. Building in earthquake resistance is much easier than steel-reinforced concrete. So it's not just an optimization on on-site time.

Unfortunately no translated captions in https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1mK411p7X4 but the wall-to-wall robot in the factory gives you an idea of what the future looks like.
> That giant button taking up so much space on most keyboards

The spacebar!? ;-)
Android Studio 4.1
While I would also not presume to know how different our understanding of the universe may look in hundreds (or thousands!) of years, I do draw some exception to the following comment:

>Quantum entanglement, for example, breaks many of our assumptions about the impossibility of FTL travel.

Quantum entanglement can produce correlated measurements between systems, even when the entangled systems are separated by large distances. In a sense, this can be used to measure the state of an entangled system at great displacement "faster" than it would take light to travel from that distant system to the observer. However, the state of the entangled systems is prepared before the systems are separated from one another (at much less than the speed of light.) Any attempt to change the state of one of the entangled systems (at a distance) breaks the entanglement. Entanglement cannot be used to communicate information from one point to another faster than the speed of light. It certainly doesn't allow FTL transfer of matter/energy.