skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Diversity. We really, really suck at diversity. We’re getting better, but we have a long way to go. Most of the industry chases the same candidates and assesses them in the same way.

What about neurodiversity and hiring neuroatypicals? "Culture fit" is often a euphemism for discrimination against them and others with poor social skills.

Also, call me cynical, but I've come to view blogposts like this as little more than marketing for the author and whatever company they started/work for. They're always vague, self-congratulatory, studiously avoid saying anything genuinely controversial, and to the extent that they're critical, it's often just as a way of contrasting themselves with the competition.
Sounds rather like the application of the Forth philosophy to conventional imperative programming.

(Curiously I was saying just the same thing yesterday about Tcl - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24898886 )
Your numbers are a bit high, wired chargers have become more efficient and barely waste any energy, see here: (14wh spent to charge a 13wh battery) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309917872_Improving...

The last bit is also wrong, 6wh * 10M = 600 Teslas. You can also read as “600 Teslas can provide phone charging for ten million people for an entire year”, take it as you wish...

Your fridge can easily use 100kWh a month. You’ll save far more energy by closing the door a couple seconds early every time you open it. Phone charging is a drop in the bucket.
https://archive.is/V0uzc
Why push 1 child policy in Africa? Start with USA, where the pollution per person ratio is much higher.
The post is from March, and the product ended in June (see the awkward tense flash across the top).. this seems.. untimely
Yeah, this doesn't seem believable at all. East and South Asians are definitely overrepresented (compared to US population) in tech but not by these numbers. Luckily some big companies do publish diversity reports which will easily give information about the actual stats.

FB's diversity report. https://diversity.fb.com/read-report/ White Americans make up 37% in tech, 63% in leadership positions in Facebook.

GitHub is 70% White and 15% Asian. https://github.com/about/diversity/report

Apple is 50% White and 23% Asian. https://www.apple.com/diversity/
The laptop is real. George Mesires, Hunter's lawyer, called the repair shop and asked for the laptop back. The biden campaign has not denied that the laptop is real.

The real question is will it change anything? I don't vote because my guy is an angel. I vote because my guy is the lesser of two evils. Who are these voters who think they are electing saints?
I'd say the energy used to charge phones is inconsequential.

The iPhone 12 has a 11 Wh battery. Assume it's fully charged daily, that's 11Wh * 365 ~ 4kwh per year. It's about 50 cents of electricity to charge the phone for a year. It's imperceptible given other household electricity items.

If people are concerned about electricity usage, they should give away LED lightbulbs.
Our counterintuitive fix for Android path normalization – Dropbox
Minority of the overall population in SV that went to schools here? Yeah, probably. Minority of the people who end up in tech in SV and grew up here? No. I've met too many people in SV that are in tech and who grew up here to come to that conclusion.
I've done this for several years (also after seeing a video about Japanese railway operations). It doesn't seem to catch on.

It's also not perfect; it does not catch mistakes concerning "non-local" state, e.g. configuration files in /etc merging with one in . merging with some command line options. (Personally I try to avoid writing tools with defaults of this sort, but especially Java developers seem have different opinions.)

Unfortunately if you do P&C and still make the mistake due to the aforementioned tooling, you look even stupider.
I share this thought. I have worked in different industries and the hyper sensitivity of a modern office just makes me withdraw from all social activity. I'm in constant fear of doing the wrong thing which seems to change day by day.

I'm a decent person and I treat people with respect. The reality is this isn't the goal of PC, I have to be socially submissive to the trend of the month.
I'm going to guess that 15% missing on the wired is the brick itself. I'm not sure how 5% more losses can make my phone heat up quite hot and also charge very slow. Are you sure it isn't 15% lost at the brick powering the wireless charger and then another 20-25% on the charging pad itself?
It's rather sad how pervasive think kind of wink-wink-nod bribery is in our political system. Be it politicians retiring and getting $100,000s per speaking arrangement from special interests they benefited during their governance, setting up charities to use as slush funds, or taking money for influence while hardly masquerading it as business deals like Biden was caught doing.

Perhaps if we paid politicians on par with CEOs there would be less temptation to find other ways to monetize their positions of power.
Which just means that your 1200$ iPad Pro will be slow in a year because the treadmill will continue.
Gravitrax Marble Run with 1000 marbles
2%? There is no way unless you were specifically setup for that by advertising exceptionally low pay and willingness to sponsor visas, and even then that seems off by 10x or more from my experience.
I've spent the past couple years acquiring USB-C chargers for my MacBook and my iPad so it really doesn't play out in my household. While I don't have the "Puck" style charger, I do have a 29w USB-C charger I've used for fast charging my iPad for some time.

While I agree with this guys article on a large part, I suspect the amount of extra waste here is over-stated. There will be fair number of people (like me) who saw the USB-C writing on the wall years ago. There are also a fair number of people who will just use the same cable they use on their current phone.

I do think they should have either shipped a USB-A cable in the box since it's still the norm. Or at better, they should have switched to a USB-C brick a couple years ago then people would have them around.
Fun fact: this used to be named Postwoman as a play on Postman being a popular API client.

source: https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch/pull/1111
Repo packages moved slowly, pip or building from source was often the only way of reliably getting it to work.
It's not uncommon for different components to scale differently.

They're often literally made out of different metals that have different resistance characteristics at different wire gauges, for example.

Interconnects was a very famous case, but many aspects of electrical engineering change when you get that small, because hey if you shrink the diameter of a wire by half guess what happens to the volume.

Semiconductor engineering is the field of dealing with a thousand of these tiny problems, and an improvement in the photolithography wavelengths is actually an abstraction of solving the thousands of tiny problems involved with all the different materials.
While the abstractions is lesser for a spacecraft, I don't think any one is hand compiling or writing machine code directly. There will always be some abstraction layers.
Faster CPUs certainly help everything go faster, but what you're asking of the CPU may matter much more than how fast the CPU is.

RAW processing is actually a really interesting application, and rendering time depends heavily on what you do with the bits from the sensor.

If you use non-linear interpolation, 2-50x the time to build.

If you do highlight recovery, 2-5x the time to build.

If you only need half the native resolution, build time may be reduced 2-4x.

Basically "viewing a RAW image" can take 100 milliseconds or 15 seconds (on the same hardware!), depending on how you're interpreting the sensor data.

(Source: playing with dcraw and libraw to rasterize raw images for PhotoStructure)
Why doesn't each client pick a random number and then send it to each other client? When you receive a message add it to your total. Once everyone gets all the messages they all have the same number.
And P5.play is an expansion library for P5.js that gives you sprites, collision detection and a virtual camera, while still being unminified and reasonably easy to read. https://molleindustria.github.io/p5.play/

I did have to pin p5.js to v0.5.4 as apparently p5.play hasn't been updated and didn't play nicely with newer versions of p5.
> find a friend who’s spent time on hiring, and ask them for their favorite battle story.

Anyone here have good hiring stories?
In case you've forgotten correlation does not imply causation
The Vikings knew about climate change.

Icebergs they used to navigate went AWOL causing much confusion
SAP Shares Collapse After Lockdowns Force Cuts to Revenue
Non-white is an interesting definition of diverse.
Well, what exactly should NYU do instead? There is no API with fine-grained permissions that they can use: To get the data they are interested in (ads), they have to resort to scraping - and a scraper will always have access to all data on the page.

So there is no way for NYU to not have access to friend data if they want access to ad data.
How much code do you normally write on whiteboards in front of people? It is such an artificial and for some, confrontational, way of problem solving, that it just filters for people who can stand in-front of whiteboards. It's a discriminatory process that shows pretty much nothing about the individual's capacity to function as a software engineer in a team.
Feels like it. Don’t get me wrong, I think sketch is great, but no way i’m going into apple’s walled garden voluntarily. Very happy that figma works on linux.
Explaining things as problems of lower-income students doesn't really work, and "solutions" built around this assumption will fail, because even if you consider higher-income subsets of the racial demographics, or otherwise control for parental income, you still get huge disparities in the numbers of high-performance students.
War story time. Long ago, I worked for an interesting company that insisted on running its entire business on Linux desktops, all the way back between 1999-2002. Imagine running StarOffice/OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Netscape Navigator, etc, for your entire business back in 2000, including your executive team, marketing teams, everyone, most of whom had never even heard of Linux before.

Anyway, this being Linux, everyone's home directory was mounted on NFS. All our builds were standardized with a tool called SystemImager, which we could use to push out updates to everyone's desktop whenever we wanted. If there was a new version of KDE, we could pretty easily push that change out.

Sometimes it was convenient for me to work on updates to these images by chrooting into a directory containing the "image," which was really just an rsync tree. And sometimes, when updating these images, it was convenient to mount our NFS home directories in this chroot environment, so I could access things like an archive I had just downloaded on my own desktop.

And eventually we had lots of different images, and the old ones were using up a lot of disk space, so I decide to clean up some space removing the old images. And these are fairly large images, with lots of small files, and this was before SSDs were a thing, so it made sense that deleting them was taking a while, and I stepped out to grab something to eat.

As I was eating lunch, I started getting the tech support escalations. But this wasn't that unusual, our users routinely had problems with the environment we had provided. They hated it, because it was in many ways terrible, and they made sure we knew it. So I wasn't terribly alarmed. I didn't think any major changes had been made, so I didn't hurry back.

By the time I leisurely returned from lunch, half the NFS home directories for our users were gone, along with all their documents, emails, bookmarks, or whatever else. Suddenly it hit me what had happened: at some point, perhaps months earlier, I had left our NFS home directories mounted within one of these image chroots. And now I had sudo rm -rf'd it.

We had backups, but they were on tape, and it took several days to restore, with about a day of data loss.
Great question. If I delete my Google account, will I lose access to websites that I logged into them with? Especially if its a Gmail account, I can't even retrieve with Forgot your Pass, huh?
Covid-19 patient data is not population based.
> read up the complexities that being able to piggyback on a destructor brings. It gets bad.

Here's the Wikipedia page on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_resurrection
Presumably - Sketch is great software, well built, but the fact that in late 2020 they still have to write "And soon, the ability to collaborate in real-time" is the the best counter-argument to building native for me personally.
Ant Group to raise $34.5B, valuing it at over $313B
How do you feel about it when anyone who has you in their phone's contacts list hands over all that personal information about you when they install WhatsApp or any other app that requests contacts data? Seems like the same thing.
Well, all that said, it's been interesting that no one has wanted to work with me. Frankly, it was shocking, as I definitely have the skills, experience and "soft" skills, like Accountability and Responsibility, as well as years of experience at selling difficult projects to real hard-nosed, empirical managers.

I also would have been quite willing to work for a fraction of what people that don't have my chops would want.

The worst was working with recruiters. They are downright insulting. Quite jarring.

Whiteboard/LeetCode tests are a flat-out insult to me. I won't do well at them, and I'm quite aware that people spend huge amounts of time, practicing for them, so I don't have a chance.

I do have a few hundred thousand lines of code, dozens of blog articles, dozens of repos, and a decade or more of checkin history. I've been told that I "faked" it, which would be hilarious, if it weren't so insulting.

In the end, I just decided to stop looking for work, and I'm working in a small startup team, writing some fairly powerful software, for free; because I enjoy doing this stuff.

It's pretty odd that the current scene is actively hostile towards folks like me. I feel that it's fairly self-destructive.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24899391

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24899970
In a sufficiently complex product/company there is absolutely no way to work where costs went. Yes the SE without a doubt just become worse value but we have no way of knowing where the money went. Likely it didn't just vanish in to a wormhole but it instead will be invested in to R&D giving a better value for money product in the future.

The only thing consumers need to think about is "Does this product provide enough value to me for its cost". For me personally a charging brick and earpods provides no value since I would just leave them in the box.
Are you suggesting that up voting a beheading should be a crime? That would be a pretty terrible take.
Just a stray thought from someone who knows little about vitamin D, but is there any way that vitamin D could be used up by cells with replicating viruses, and that's why the levels are low in patients?
> I assert that life is about meaning

For some people yes, for others not.

> Frankl points to research indicating a strong relationship between “meaninglessness” and criminal behavior, addiction and depression. He argues that in the absence of meaning, people fill the resultant void with hedonistic pleasures, power, materialism, hatred, boredom, or neurotic obsessions and compulsions (Frankl 1992, p. 143).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl

https://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/vi...
Fiddling While Rome Converts
>Trucks are subject to the PR of the almighty dollar. They don't have to make people feel warm and fuzzy

as long as the regulatory situation allows it, yes. but until they're seeking approval to have them actually allowed on the roads, making people feel warm and fuzzy is pretty important.
Back in the '80s I worked on a financial system (SWIFT interface) for an Italian bank. It went operational and we observed 2 operators effectively doing "pair operating". We just thought it was weird Italian style socialising - one had the keyboard and the other was chattering away with a commentary.
But they were surprisingly effective!

I accidentally learned when teaching a course at a site with too many people for the available machines, that pair exercises was very effective - I got lots more questions and overall learning went way up. If the pair discussed it and couldn't find an answer they would have the confidence to ask. On their own, neither would probably bother and just wait for me to go through things.
I think not having a package manager was pretty intentional and unlikely to change. I personally like the new import from url functionality, especially when combined with the ability to alias some of those away.
AMD Girds for compute war with Xilinx Deal
For me, a lot of that is the fact that my "rest days" are really days where I gotta do work I don't get paid for :D adult life, huh...
Thanks for this very helpful comment which I've bookmarked for the links. Could I ask you for any more recommendations?!

I have background in standard undergrad math (linear algebra, calculus, real analysis, etc) and some basic undergrad CS, and I work as a software engineer (backend web stuff). However I've never really studied formal logic, or theoretical CS, or formal methods / verification, or type theory, and I was thinking of doing so. I enjoy studying math/theoretical things for its own sake, but I am of course also interested in techniques which might touch upon software engineering in practice.

Do you have any opinions on whether I am proposing something at all sensible for myself, and if so what sort of order to take things in?

Any recommended sources of exercises to work on (with solutions? seeing as I might well be self-studying)

Or lecture courses, or anything available online (even if it costs money)

Online communities you'd recommend for asking for help, e.g. with problems encountered in self-study?

And any more recommended books/lecture notes of course.
You're telling him not to care about their costs, but Apple is straight up telling him to care about their savings, but don't pass it on to the consumer.

Generally speaking, people care about saving more of their money, they care much less about how much money the company they are purchasing goods or services for is able to retain by providing less for the same (or more) price.
It says 'patients', feeling a bit squiffy and calling in sick doesn't make you a patient (not even an out-patient), medical treatment or attention does.
I just switched to an iphone recently and the brick would have been a non issue for me. I already have a bunch of USB C bricks from my android phones going back to the Nexus 5X
Those candies are regularly advertised around the holiday.
The theory I've heard is that they're planning to remove the charge port entirely in the iPhone 13, and therefore it would be a massive engineering waste to make only a single generation of phones with USB-C.

But yeah, I really wanted USB-C. Bought the phone anyway though.
> There's an even higher probability of Perl being installed

You're showing your ignorance there, champ. Make is one of the utilities that's required by the UNIX specification,which means that each and every single UNIX or UNIX-like OS is required to make Make available to users in order to be considered an UNIX.

So to make this quite explicit, for starters each and every install of macOS ships with make.
In this particular case, I think what really happened is that ad network(s) have guessed when your kid(s) birthdays are, probably due to searches at or around the same time last year, browsing the toys section on amazon, then visiting Party City, that kind of stuff.

No less creepy, but can understand why you'd think that.
CLI refers to interacting with a program by typing commands. Commands need not come from a terminal (a terminal need not even exist). They might be just passed in from a different program.

TUI refers to interacting with a program via the terminal—the terminal is the program's user interface (think 'nano', which you can't really run without a terminal). The terminal need not interact via commands, although many TUI programs also accept commands.
I wish this gained adoption faster but unlikely that it'll surpass Node.js anytime soon...
...and so, we reach Cucumber, the apex of programming
Atmospheric sciences were already very advanced in 1970 and models published in the 70s were quite accurate on warming through the year 2000. Models published in the 80s and later have been very accurate up to the present day.
UK announces ban on sale of network-locked phones
First off, simply because you don't like the people that support a position doesn't mean that position is incorrect.

And overpopulation? Um... because draconian population control tactics and policies are evil? China's one child policy was unconscionable.

German energy is costly not due to production costs, but instead due to taxes on energy utilization in general to subsidize a more rapid transition to environmentally sound energy. Other countries, i.e. France, have chosen to lower costs substantially. (France is unwise, IMHO. Lower costs increases utilization which offsets carbon gains, see rebound effects [0]. Germany is doing the right thing) [1]

Nuclear: Has always been on the table. Environmentalists are not a unified block. The Gates foundation is substantially funding nuclear.

Most of what you think of as "environmental support" is actually funding from petroleum based business. The whole personal recycling movement? paid for by the petroleum industry. [2]

Finally, the petroleum industry hired the exact same goons that the tobacco industry did to peddle pseudoscientific nonsense. [3]

There are coherent, comprehensive, effective plans for fighting climate change. You are just unlikely to hear about in the news because they are deeply wonky. There are paths out, they are neither easy (there will be losers) nor simple (it's a complex system).

However, most of what we hear are the voices of very, very, very rich and powerful oil industries trying to muddy the waters. And lets be clear: they will be the losers, if the rest of us have any hope of not either having to bear terrible austerity or the horrors of climate change.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/02/05...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tobacco-and-oil-i...
Why is my unused Vizio TV sending gigabytes of traffic every day?
Here is a forceful talk by Margaret Thatcher to the UN General Assembly imploring world leaders to take seriously the threat of climate change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnAzoDtwCBg

That was 17 years before An Inconvenient Truth, and three years before the Kyoto Protocol was written up. Thatcher was a hard core conservative, who also happened to have a degree in Chemistry from Oxford.
John McAfee Developed One of the First Social Networks
Given the amount of discussion USB-C gets here on HN, maybe it's not such a clear decision?

I think the biggest risk in USB-C, for me, it makes me really nervous when I buy a cable, and even then I'm not 100% confident. When I buy a lightning cable, I have no fears. And they're not even more expensive anymore. Some of those USB-C cables are just as expensive.
What is a non-hospitalised patient?
In my corner of the tech industry there's not been an expectation anyone will return until next year. I think this will be extended until early summer. Though the worldview on covid could change somewhat dramatically after next week.