skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's your bosses job to make sure there aren't single points of failures. If you try hard to become one, they might start trying hard to make you not one. You're now a bottleneck, after all.

Some places have toxic cultures so that's the norm, but if you're fortunate to be at a better place, don't force their hand to go down that route!

(There's also the aspect where if you're the only person who can do X, but now someone needs to do Y which will actually be ten times more valuable to the company than X, you've closed off that opportunity for yourself!)
“Treating X as uniform widgets” (where X are not uniform widgets) and “scientific management” are not only not the same thing, they are anticorrelated.
This sounds like a really interesting experiment. I hope you share your results here on HN.

This approach reminds me a bit of the saying in neuroscience "if it fires together, it wires together"
Probably because of British influence, private tutors are a commonplace in India. Being raised there, my parents though encouraged me to just work hard myself and not rely on external tutors. There were, however, a few years where I did get tutoring for a few subjects that I needed help with- and my experience has been great! Especially, for the 12th standard (high school) Physics where I got >90% in the board exam. The tutor knew his stuff and the pattern of the 'board exam' well.

On the other hand, I have had peers who rely on private tutoring almost entirely and almost neglect what is being taught in schools. And I have known parents who see schools as a necessary evil.

There is also, the world of preparing for 'entrance exams' (including IIT-JEE) which is where I have seen tutoring to the extreme. Students who 'drop-out' (still enrolled on paper but not attending in-person) of regular school starting as early as 8th standard (grade) and move to cities where there are mini-economies based on such preparatory institutes. They only go back to their home-towns to write the final exams which is usually subset of what they would learn at the institutes anyway. But the sacrifice they make to be away from family for most parts of the year and the hours they spend staring at a book is admirable.

Note: Please don't take this as a generalization of what happens in India- just what I saw growing up in New Delhi.
You know something is wrong with patents when the suggestions are

- Don't read patents.

- Hope whoever 'invented' it first isn't litigious to sue.

- Do it anyway and maybe you will find more things to patent along the way.
Well... I'm in embedded systems. There, software can be part of the machine, performing concrete, physical actions. Would the same thing be patentable if you implemented it as an FPGA? How about as discrete logic? If so, then it should be patentable if you implement it as software.

But this is very far from a software-only patent, or a "doing X, but with a computer" patent. I guess the difference might be that, if it's part of the functioning of an embedded system, then it's not math (or at least not just math) in the same sense that a mechanical machine is not just physics.
I could see a combo approach.

Ideally, I'd like to see tech patents see a sunset of something like 5 years. The current 20 year hold is bonkers.

However, if we keep the 20 year lifetime, then having an exponential cost of ownership would serve to ward off patent trolling companies. They could still exist to some extent but their operational expenses would be a lot higher than they are now. It'd put a number of them out of business (or at very least free up a bunch of patents).

The trick is coming up with good numbers here. Too low and you might as well not add it. Too high and you might as well eliminate patents all together as they've lost their original purpose (to protect the little inventor).
Interesting the figure 1 shows productivity per hour worked (rather than absolute productivty). So in the UK the line is flat, so the more hours worked the more "production" there is. So just work the workers harder.

In Iceland by comparison (and taking the report at face value), productivity per hour increases from ~1880 to ~1980 (~5%) for a 5 hour (12.5%) reduction in hours.So - assuming there is a plentiful labour supply - better to work lots of people for fewer hours than to work fewer people for lots of hours. Not a bad strategy from an overall absolute producttivity point of view - assuming, of course, that labourers are plentiful and interchangeable.

So where do we end? Clearly we can work people harder over shorter periods than we can over longer periods (hello young doctors). Economists generally agree on this as increasing productivty (barring some quibbling ove incidentals) - but at what cost?
This is the advice of "Never say no, say yes with conditions."

Of course if the whole thing gives you a bad taste in your mouth and you basically never want to work for Amazon, I'm going to echo LadyCailin's advice. It does send a message, but it also allows you get in some more interviewing experience. Something that will hopefully make your next interview go even smoother.

Also, if you really want to send a message as well as get in some practice asking for absurd things ...

Say yes, but ask for the exception AND ask for indemnity from any legal action that Amazon (or anyone else) takes against you with respect to any software you develop on your own time AND ask that $50,000 be put in escrow that you're allowed to use in the event that Amazon gets cold feet in paying for your legal defense.

I can't really imagine that anyone would ever say yes to that, but it means that the next time you ask something that's a bit of a reach for an employer that you actually might want to work for, then you'll have had some experience asking for things that feel like a lot.
> My conclusion is basically "there's nothing viable".

How is this possible given that the Rust language was created to write the rendering engine of Firefox?
Twitter was already using it in 2019.

https://jeeconf.com/program/performance-tuning-twitter-servi...
Yeah, most central heat pumps installed now are inverter models (also referred to as variable speed). More efficient and more comfortable since you've got a continuous flow of cool air, rather than blasts of cold interspersed with nothing.
Sure but they filter out (almost?) everything besides the water & alcohol. I'm quite confident legal, tax, & cost factors are the reason why they don't use a food-grade distilled ethanol as the alcohol base.
Technical Test Should Take No More Than 2 Hours
I recently just failed a technical task, it's the second one I've failed in the last month. First one took me 4 hours and got rejected due to not being production ready.

Usually I get failed for the following reasons

* Didn't split code into separate files (helper functions, single use components etc)

* Expected more tests (1 hour extra)

* Not doing the stretch goals

* Rudimentary XXX

* Would have liked to seen use of XXX (technology not
included in the starting template)

* Didn't use GitHub (publicly broadcasting my job search)

* Didn't <insert personal preference here>

* Didn't use a linter (5-30 minutes depending on codebase to set up)

I'm just wondering how common practice it is to lie about how long these tasks take?

In my most recent test, I included a time breakdown of how long various parts of the task took me, and still got rejected based on a 'rudimentary' submission. There was literally no more time left to implement the feedback. I left the computer once to go to the toilet, and I took a minute to plug in my monitor, and other than that, flat out coding.

I see 'should take no more than 2 hours', on web-apps that include multiple components, responsive design, asynchronous state management and reading/understanding the brief.

It's at the stage I would prefer hacker rank tests now, as there is at least transparency and honesty about how long things should take and do take.

This feels a bit ranty, but I've been trying to find out if this is the norm, or the exception. UK based Front-End Dev. Do I need to start lying, or just accept that I'm going to have to spend 40 hours doing the same basic task over and over until I get the next job?
Anyone know if this policy would be enforceable under California law? (I realize Amazon HQ.) I know California has labor protection about non-competes, does it also have protection for people doing work on their own time with their own equipment? I vaguely remember it does but can't find a reference.
Hiring is another problem entirely. If you need lots of people very quickly it'll be hard for F# to compete with something else, but for every other case I don't think it's so clear cut. People that use and like F# really want to work with it, and are usually more experience programmers than people that know only C#. Thus, hiring for F# makes a great filter. Considering how hard interviewing and hiring is, having another signal is a good thing.

Maybe building your startup that needs 100 new people every year on F# is a bad idea, but for enterprise projects that don't move much, it seems a reasonable choice.
I'm curious. Do you think that if your grandmother had more wealth, then she'd be able to walk with less pain? Or is it a case where the treatment/cure might be worse than the disease?

It's very immoral to allow (force) people to die, when they otherwise could live if they have more money.

It's less egregious, but still immoral to allow (force) people to live in pain.

I think it is a much more complicated issue to balance medical "expertise" with patient desires. If your grandmother wants a treatment and her healthcare providers believe she should not have it, not because it affects their profits, but because it's medically ill-advised, then what?
We've come around to something like the "imperative shell, functional core" pattern. All the business logic is purely functional (so no database calls or side effects), and any data needs are done as close to the edge of the system as possible.

You can do it in any language, FP languages can help enforce the distinction. For going even more functional, in FP languages that support it, free monads and effect systems allow you to define interpreters for effects and you can write code more or less like you would non-functionally, but the interpretation can be pure (say hardcoded results for a query) for tests, and impure for actually running. Basically fancy dependency injection, but for everything.
+2 on that! would love to know about what you think is worth investigating @zippy5
justwatch.com lets you search and discover what services have what movies.

Alternatively, DIY. As streaming became more popular, optical media and hard drives became far more cheap. Over the last 10-15 years I've ended up with more than 500 movies, all of which I own legally and most of which cost me $5 or less. They get to all of my devices through Plex (I used to use Kodi, which is fine over a LAN if that's all you care about).

A significant number of them aren't available for streaming anywhere at the moment, and plenty more would require obscure services I don't feel a need to pay for. It was a gradual upfront cost, but not that extravagent compared to the cost of paying for a couple of streaming services over that time - to say nothing of the 6-10 I'd have to subscribe to to actually have access to all of it.
Open two windows. Only if needed, put the fan somewhere in between the two windows to facilitate airflow.
Also Ultimae Records
The Cultural Implications of Silence Around the World
This is still a first-gen product. It's like saying that you don't get why the first iPhone had 32GB+ of storage or 3G at launch.... it will be refined and improved over time.
Thanks for telling about it
> In my experience and other on the team share it too, static types really haven't (or wouldn't have) prevented any bugs.

In my experience, having written Clojure professionally in three different organizations over a period of close to a decade, static typing would have helped tremendously in producing maintainable software that allowed new developers to come into a project and get up to speed quickly, and build out more features without struggling to overcome the burden of endless boilerplate and incoherent abstractions, which Clojure makes easy. Which is to say, every Clojure codebase I inherited was a mess, and the tools Clojure provides to mitigate the problems of sharing a big codebase among a team of programmers are insufficient and place a tremendous burden of manual labor on industrial programmers--especially spec, which ironically produces exactly the kind of boilerplate pain and maintenance labor that Clojure apologists blanket-accuse statically-typed languages of producing. This directly and meaningfully impacts productivity and efficiency, and of course helps amplify bug creation as well.

> If I pass garbage to a clearly named function, I get garbage out as with the static type system.

Yep, and for the most part the only way to figure out what functions receive or return in Clojure is to either read the code, or actually call them. Relying on other programmers to be consistent and coherent in their naming is not really a great long-term approach...go figure. And, note that a side effect of this is that you often don't find out until some code is in production that you are passing garbage data around. AND that's leaving aside how badly most libraries are documented--even core libraries, how type information is rarely if ever shared in library documentation, and how Clojure doesn't enforce any kind of purity on functions so that basically, any function called anywhere can be doing basically anything.

Really it's not even about not having static typing--which is not a silver bullet, and absolutely has tradeoffs--but the fact that the community seems fundamentally immature and unable to discuss software engineering topics (static typing especially) without turning it into an emotionally laden battle between tribes, vs. a comparison between different tradeoffs. Simple vs. easy indeed.

I really did enjoy the language at one point, and credit it and RH for introducing me to the world of functional programming, but at this point I doubt I'll ever write Clojure professionally again. However if I do, it will be with a team that understands its strengths and weaknesses without attachment to emotionally-driven arguments about static typing, or whatever.
Most successful companies I know are constantly recruiting and trying to keep people onboard - why would they be trying to actively get rid of people?
This isn't that different from what probably happened an Nortel in the early 2000s. While their network was completely compromised by Chinese attackers, the C suite people downplayed the threat, and there are theories that this only happened because there were enough moles keeping everyone complacent so they wouldn't get too excited about the existential threat they faced. And now, after the most hostile of takeovers, they go by the name Huawei.

Edit: if you want a thorough version of the Nortel story, I recommend this podcast: https://malicious.life/chinas-unrestricted-warfare-part-1/
Sometimes. A previous employer of mine fired a colleague for breaking his leg in a football game. Well, actually, they fired him for calling in sick with a supposed fever and going off to play football. The broken leg was just a smoking gun.
The Lansing page says: earthfile = makefile + dockerfile

There is also an easy to understand example with several targets with dependencies between them.

You can more or less achieve the same with multiple stages in a docker file, with named targets etc, but it get complicated fast.
Past related posts:

Spritestack – 3D pixelart editor based on sprite stacking technique - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19325331 - March 2019 (36 comments)

SpriteStack: A Sprite Stacking 3D Pixel Art Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19283781 - March 2019 (1 comment)
Hello there. I just spoke to your colleague in sales and she tells me that Cloudflare Tunnel is only available to Enterprise customers. I forget the exact price but it included the word "thousand". (I almost fainted.)

My needs are very similar to Cliff's. I have (or going to have) a home server on a residential ISP which can't accept incomming connections. I need a public-facing server that will return from the cache if I'm ever on the HN front page or my home server is down, TLS handling, and routing to my home server's port 80 when needed.

I mostly serve personal websites but I have aspirations of building a small business. Is there anything in Cloudflare's range that would work for my kind of needs?

Hoping you follow-up on nine-day-old threads, Bill.
I basically have it set up to where you basically just start up your Ubuntu Laptop, startup the software, and then plug in the leads for your EEG cap (which are labelled--both on the wires of the EEG cap and the 3D printed case) into the case. After that, you just connect the case (the "device") to the Ubuntu laptop and then go to sleep.

See this case: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2085981

But to your question: no, unfortunately. The guides on it are not the friendliest, either. I have been thinking about writing a guide, as I have a unique ability for breaking down complex concepts.

The compiling of the software (not required--however it is useful and you will want to do this versus using a USB stick or the pre-compiled software [which also requires special steps for use] available on the GitHub page) and the wiring are the trickiest parts.

The wiring can take a couple of nights to learn, even with experience.
microsoft/L: Sample code for the L Programming Language
Hah. Grass is always greener right? Best not to look backward in a serious way.
No they wouldn’t be solved. And there was actually an incident like that with a plastic bag.
> Or, just maybe, we could have a system which doesn't need to involve the legal system every time, and protects consumers anyway.

You omitted the part where this solution requires a surcharge of ~3% on every single transaction we make with our credit cards.

In a civilized society, this is how transactions work:

You research the merchant and judge whether they are trustworthy. You decide they are, and purchase an item from them. If you have a problem with the item, you request a refund. They ask for the product back, and then they send you the refund.

Nothing in the above paragraph requires a credit card processor to enable a reversal of funds.

If they refuse to provide a refund, that is their choice, but relying upon a central god-like money authority to judge whether they made the "correct" one is bonkers. That's under jurisdiction of the law.
It can be even more defensive than that. "We're patenting the things we're doing, so that nobody else can patent those things and then sue us for them."

That's, um, not "promoting the progress of science and useful arts". It's at least not trying to exploit others, but it's sheer waste, having to protect yourself from being exploited.
Patents encourage innovation because without them, the moment an inventor's idea gets out, it will be copied and monetized by some corporation with the resources to bring it to market, without compensating the inventor in any way.

Now idiotically evaluated and granted patents (in particular software patents, but not necessarily just software patents) stifle innovation.

Crowd-sourcing this kind of question just seems like ploy for the USPTO to make even less of an effort.

Suppose that the answer from the crowd is "yes": patents in those areas kill innovation. What can the USPTO do with the information, other than just not hand out patents in that area? Summarily tossing a patent application takes even less effort than slightly thinking about its merit.
Is the policy most places that all your IP belongs to them?
Willingness to try a language or framework is an extremely poor selection criteria for being able to use it well or even being willing to learn how to use it well. I've seen enough shit-ass Ruby or Kotlin or Scala from people who were like "awesome, I love learning new languages!" but never got past "oh, what's the fastest hack I can find to do this in a similar way to how I'd do it in the last language I used?"
I think my early PDP-11 programs were FORTRAN and Pascal, with a little assembler thrown in. The PDP-11 instruction set was fantastic.
If it's a direct competition, I can see how that makes sense. But your argument is essentially that no one can take side work. Salaried photographers can't work a wedding; illustrators can't help with a friend's book; SWEs can't write a script for a friend.

There has to be a limit, and it seems like the limit that makes sense is: you did this on company time using company resources.
> your old android phone working well is the exception

[citation needed]

This isn't supported at all by the article you linked. It's your own hypothesis, and I simply can't find any basis for it.

The peer reviewed article I linked explicitly shows that behavior (like how long a phone gets used for) is being driven by primarily nontangibles like brand equity rather than hardware and software durability.

The fact that you're ignoring that and still pushing your hypothesis makes it feel like you're clinging to Apple for some reason. I've never understood this kind of brand loyalty. I've stated a couple reasons for my decision to use android, but I'm not attached to Samsung, and I'm even thinking of picking up one of Sony's new phones. Hell, I've used Apple phones in the past, and even tried a Windows phone for a while (that tile interface they had was excellent BTW)
This is my interpretation, yes. The language you are quoting is largely legal boilerplate. In practice, how it works out is that (a) if you want to do a game, there's a very good chance (though not a guarantee) the answer is simply "yes", and (b) the questions of who owns what IP are all very clear, and often in favor of the individual. For example, if you go the Apache 2 license, that actually comes with a patent grant as well.

In any case, the specific claim I made is that it's more enlightened than the Amazon policy, and I don't think that can really be questioned. Just the fact that large parts of the policy is public is itself relevant here - other discussion threads are arguing whether the posted text is authentic.
> Which will impact the QUANTITY of movies produced, but not necessarily the QUALITY.

Absolutely.

We have a signal/noise issue. We need to figure out how to find the signal.

I think one of the issues we really need to come to terms with is our absolute overReliance on algorithmic recommendations when it comes to completely subjective areas like film, music, fashion, food, art, etc… We’re just unable to reduce these things to algorithmic recommendations without the content being… algorithmic.

When discussing this I have to often repeat to people, I’m absolutely not a luddite–I work, live, and breathe-in technology. I firmly believe science and technology are part of the key fundamentals to carry us forward. However, one area where I consistently get much better results is when these things are recommended by other humans. It really is no contest in how much better human curation is when it comes to recommendations.

Obviously untested and obviously just pulling numbers out, but for me, I think algorithmic recommendations are just plain wrong about 95% of the time. Friend’s recommendations are close/spot-on about 75+% of the time. And human curation (from online reviews, real life DJs, critics, etc…) are decent maybe 60+% of the time. Far better results from humans.

I think you’re correct that we’ll have a lot more quantity and we’re going to need human curation in there if we have any hope for the quality to gain footholds, to find the signal in the ever growing noise.