skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, for a pure engineering role, nobody seems to care. I had credits at large companies, posted talks online (interviewers rarely looked at them), but if I forgot how to write binary search in 10 minutes in an interview it didn’t matter.

This actually made me realize being just an IC wasn’t actually my goal though. Once I started interviewing for management and sales, all of those things _really_ mattered. Now that I’m running workshops and talks professionally, posting publicly is _critical_.

Moral of the story: if you enjoy posting in public and teaching in public, but you feel like its getting you nowhere career wise, maybe you are in the wrong career like I was. Once I decided to double down on my strengths and spent nights and weekends at public speaking training instead of grinding leetcode things started to click.
I don't think the Scanimate was used for this. This video shows a digital computer being used to create the animated trench sequence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMeSw00n3Ac
It is crazy complex.

Task bar items don't represent exe files, they represent windows spawned by process started from exe files. Excel has many different behaviors depending on how you open a file. In fact, you can get excel into a state where double clicking a file opens in a hidden instance of excel that you can never see.

If you drag a file to a notepad window taskbar item, should it open in that window? should it open a new window in that process? Should it start a new process with that file? Should users have control over how that happens or should application developers? Or both? Or Microsoft?

On macos, theres only ever one instance of an application open so these questions are easy answer. On windows, they arent.
sun had plenty of valuable assets in addition to mysql - don't think one can reasonably claim they bought sun just for mysql without inside knowledge
Presumably the folks regularly involved in the closing of 11 figure deals are capable of sniffing out deception. Though maybe the HP board cheaped out and hired the B team instead?
People have been using both for thousands of years.

Feel free to be wary. Many of the rest of us will enjoy our lives otherwise without perpetuating unnecessary and by and large scientifically unfounded, culturally-based fears of reasonably innocuous substances.

Beware the “Snoop Dogg pool party” indeed.
can you even imagine that being worth all the bad press and ill will this’ll cost them
He also called it the "Kung Flu."
It depends a lot on the place and the role.

I'm hiring for a relatively small cross-functional team that has to deal with a variety of work. One of the characteristics we need is people who are willing to step outside their technological comfort zone and just make something work. We have no mobile code and probably won't, but I was still happy to talk with somebody who'd built a couple of iOS apps for fun. It was a sign they were enough of a self-starter that I could trust them to learn on the job when that was necessary, and also that they could think about user needs and how to solve them.

It's true that some places basically take the resume of a current engineer and try to clone them by hiring an exact technology match. I'm not sure if that gets them better results or it's just something that's easier for a cumbersome recruiting process. But consider that maybe those are places you wouldn't be very happy anyhow.
That discussion was part of my inspiration for writing about this.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the idea that you need to invest vast amounts of effort into side projects in order to increase your chances of being hired is misleading.

But... putting just a small amount of effort into having e.g. a couple of blog posts and a single public project on GitHub CAN give you most of that value.

Hiring managers faced with five candidates, one of whom has a blog post about the technology they are hiring for, are more likely to bump that candidate through to a phone screen or interview round.
I'm off for a couple hours, it's 2AM here, but will get back to this as soon as I wake up.

Thanks a lot for the candid feedback HN, learned a lot from talking to you all!

I've already gone ahead and implemented most suggested changes in the thread, and will be implementing the others soon.
I know very few people who have paid for excel specifically. everyone pays for MS office, albeit because it includes excel, but in an workplace setting the main thing you're paying for is outlook/exchange the fact that word/excel/powerpoint are bundled is a plus.

The main point I'm making is that no one has to go to their manager and justify paying for it. It's already bought and paid for, and because of its ubiquity most people have a pretty good idea of how to use it.
Alternative headline: Eric Clapton refuses to play venues that aren't open to all concertgoers. Nothing to prevent a vaccinated concertgoer from attending, so what's the problem?
While technically true, the office coffee costs more usually. It is generally just there, and no one usually is thinking of the costs, because it’s too small to care about.
"No clinically severe COVID-19 (1) was observed, and no patient was hospitalized"

In other words, this case study is a relatively ordinary result in line with what we know: that the major COVID-19 vaccines greatly reduce the chance of severe illness but leave nontrivial chance of infection and transmission.
The opposite is also true. I work in system engineering (sometimes it's called sysops. Hybrid programming/administration, often production stuff) and I've learned to I hide my creativity.

A lot of employers want people they can understand and they can trust.

The companies I work for generally don't want someone that's creative. They want someone that's dull and reliable. Show your creative side and they'll look for someone else, even if you've got 10x more skills than someone else.

Given that creativity doesn't pay anyway (there's a cap on pay and I've already reached that cap), there's no point to show it. I can get hired based on what's on my resume alone and by answering the same set of questions they always ask.

Then I get hired, I automate everything in under 6 months and I go sit on my ass or do something else. Flaw in the capitalistic system. I know what I'm worth, I can bring across what I'm worth, but it's simply outside the bounds of what's expected or needed.

And I know that sounds weird, but think of it like this:

No one is going to pay the fastest cashier in the world 3x minimum wage. Not even if they check out customers 6x faster than the next person. And claiming you're the fastest cashier in the world during the hiring process just gets you thrown on the discard pile.

The same goes for a lot of other professions, including mine.
In the case of video, videos take up a lot of space and transcoding (I believe) is complicated and resource-intensive. I understand people not wanting to roll that themselves, especially when there are free options
You sound like a good engineer, but I’m afraid many of the people reading your resume would rather hire someone who can navigate their way through the administrative process instead of being stopped by it. Maybe that’s a good thing, because it will filter out jobs that aren’t a good fit for you, but it probably includes many of the top employers.
As an employee you do what is assigned plus administrative things. That is incredibly limiting. On a personal project you accomplish whatever you want, regardless of demand or ambition or challenge.

You are your own principle audience. You aren’t trying to prove anything. You are trying to build something. Unless you are the kind of person just likes building things I suspect it will be impossible to understand.
Not sure how old you are, but at least here in Norway, people still use it. Though I myself haven't used it in probably 15 years.

Pr. Wikipedia, in 2015 9% of the Norwegian population used teletext. In 2017, that number had reduced to 7.5% - I suspect those are mostly old folks.

But to be fair, it was incredibly handy to look up specific things fast. If you wanted sports / betting results, TV-program, currencies, or whatever, you probably had memorized the page number.

(The Norwegian Teletext, or "Text TV" as it's called here: https://www.nrk.no/tekst-tv/100/)
Michael H. Goldhaber foresaw this in 1997, in his presentation, The attention economy and the Net[1], see the section "Further Expectations"

1 https://firstmonday.org/article/view/519/440
https://web.archive.org/web/20210722231119/https://games.gre...

Edit: For anyone seeing this much later in time, the website got flooded when it hit the Hacker News main page. I grabbed the archive mirror of it from earlier today.
I think it depends a lot on the place. I'm hiring now and we actively appreciate things like mentoring and doing public work.

I agree that people not feeling appreciated should try other things, but I think that includes different kinds of employers as well as different kinds of job.
Tossing a huge range of different properties in a blender is fine, ripping off a single property is just lazy. Which sounds more original pure Harry Potter fan fiction or ER the TV show + Harry Potter + Cheers the TV show.

Draw evenly from M*A*S*H + Dresden Files + Mass Effect + Dexter and your going to end up in some strange and interesting places. Play through Starcraft 1+2 on the other hand and the story is fine if a bit bland.
By the time you've gotten someone in an interview you've already committed a huge amount of effort towards them. Seeing a cool project someone made is a very strong signal that interviewing them won't be a waste of time.
Of course. Even modest people text their friends and colleagues and say “You gotta see this, look at this testing library I just found!”

Just copy that text and paste it in LinkedIn or Twitter too.
ABC rejects FOIA request for details on data sharing with big tech
Great article. I agree with rereading. When I got into hardware part of networking which I am allergic to it took months of rereading until something clicked

BTW. I was surprised how sensitive this topic is at reddit.
They are calling anything and everything gatekeeping.
So even telling people how to retain more knowledge will get them to start screaming how you are putting pressure on people and killing the joy of reading. You get 10 downvotes instantly.

My problem with reading non-fiction books, esp while I worked in bookstore where I read book a day, is retaining knowledge. So I reinvented college syllabus like a dumbass I am.

Basically I went on to creating my own reading list of related books so I have this data cloud in my head that makes retaining what I read faster and better. I wasted months on this until I realised I am doing what universities are for in the first place and yep, after checking I found my reading list is bad version of collage syllabus that includes better books and way more current white-papers. And it is easier to shop around for better syllabus then spend months creating and reading books just to find something better later like how you skip patterns in programming while reading more and more workbook type programming books.
That's a really interesting perspective.

I've been in interview debriefs where the fact that the candidate speaks at dozens of conferences a year has been raised as a potential problem, since it suggests they may not be as dedicated to the work that needs to be done.
> The problem with having every creator opt-in is that that we'd never be able to launch the profiles

So... I feel that's a somewhat disingenuous perspective. You've created a problem for others (e.g. xena's concern that their deliberate efforts to distribute their output and mitigate stalking) while suggesting that your need to "launch" is more important.

I see that you've asked for suggestions for alternative models, but did you consider asking this before launching?

A cynical perspective might be that you're aiming to exploit popular content without the hassle of attracting authors to your platform. Perhaps you want to take on substack while avoiding the hosting responsibility?

You suggest you might deign to allow authors to "opt out". What about the reverse: given the choice, why would they opt in?

Sorry to be so negative, but this really looks like a land-grab. Maybe I'm wrong.

I actually really like the idea of "everything in one place", but an RSS aggregator and some curated social media feeds surely work just as well?
The difference is that athlete actually has a plan to at least try for the Olympics, and could conceivably get to the goal.

The 100 billion dollar market will never be conquered by one company, and the pain point they are trying to solve often only applies to 1%-10% of that market and they know that, or they're BSing themselves.
Fully vaccinated individuals getting infected shouldn't be all that surprising. The phase 3 trials of Pfizer and Moderna saw a 95% reduction in severe symptoms. No routine testing for infection was done, only testing if someone showed symptoms.

Singapore's gov't is tracking all of their infections and 80% of the population has had 1 shot, 50% fully vaccinated (Pfizer and Moderna).

They've had 1096 cases in the last 28 days, 484 are in fully vaccinated people [1]. The key difference is that 100% were asymptomatic/mild cases.[2]

[1]https://www.moh.gov.sg/news-highlights/details/update-on-loc...
[2]https://www.moh.gov.sg/images/librariesprovider5/covid-19-ch...
Glocks are still not unpredictable by my metric. Yes, the margins of safety might be narrower than you’d prefer, but it’s not going to go bang without a trigger press. It’s a very predictable firearm in that way.

That being said the first generation was prone to slam fires, where chambering a round sets the firearm off. Now that is an unpredictable tool.

Also, historically snagging the trigger on clothing has always been a source of negligent discharges, even before Gaston Glock was around. The allied army in WW2 officially required that most soldiers issued a handgun carry it with an empty chamber due to the prevalence of injuries, and the M1911 has a grip and manual safety.
What is a good example of a well-designed file format. It seems like file formats are often designed according to subjective opinions and tastes. Is there "universally-accepted" guidance to designing them.
I'm sorry to hear it, but it's definitely true for certain kinds of employer. I once met somebody doing similar work to yours. Like you, he would bust his ass early on to automate everything and then be kind of bored. At one point he had two full-time jobs where he had done that and he still had time to play a lot of video games.

I hope he found an employer who could really challenge him, as he was happier during the initial phase of hard work. But I wouldn't be surprised if he never did.
That’s a good mentality to have, working on hard things because they are hard. Have there been any major roadblocks that required a change in direction, or at least reevluation of goals?
Testability and a better understanding of how resource limitations impact intraspecific competition is one of the big questions of community ecology.

Sorry, sometimes the convenient hypothesis is a good one. It's just hard to test, since we cannot spin up Earth 2. That's one of the hard parts of ecology.
People do multi-million dollar deals with Excel spreadsheets. I know personally of one deal involving multiple multi-national petrochemical companies, pipelines, and refineries in the US. The whole deal was done on a spreadsheet, the rest of the legal paperwork was just formalities.
How to Simulate I/O Faults at Runtime?
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15314486
OMG.. finally! I have waited so long for an article like this. Praise the lord, the day has come :D, no but seriously, this article is amazing.
Hey, who are those people?

We’re indexing new people every single day and I can try to bump them up the queue!
Yep. I basically made the same remark. For a lot of positions they're just not looking for creative people, just chairs to fill. They want "good enough" and nothing more.
There is this: "Cannabis use is associated with 2–4 times the likelihood of developing psychosis in healthy individuals:

That sure seems causative.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7255842/
This! As programmers, it is easy to list N reasons why spreadsheets suck and deserve to die. But the reality is that it is the most ubiquitous business software and the non-tech/business users would rather be in a spreadsheet than anywhere else. Companies run on spreadsheets, even if they have the best "data stack" and tools. Because few, if any, software can beat the

* flexibility (throw data anywhere and link it to each other, make edits, write notes),

* power (formulas, etc), and

* familiarity (the most underrated factor) of spreadsheets.

Nothing else allows the non-tech user to feel empowered like spreadsheets do.

Spreadsheet evolution has been slow though. Google Sheets added cloud + collaboration 10 years ago. We (https://coefficient.io) are adding the layer of connectivity to sheets so they can remain in sync with the actual sources of data (Cloud apps like Salesforce, DBs, BI tools, etc) so sheets actually become "live" (even though they have been in the cloud for a while) and to reduce manual work and increase trust/accuracy. There is so much more that can be done to leverage this largest software platform that is out there.
I'd mostly settle for "documented well". Like the Sqlite file format: https://www.sqlite.org/fileformat.html

Also nice that it's platform independent. Same file works on big/small endian machines.
They're generally banned or blocked for "antispam" purposes unless you are an enterprise social media management company or whatever else.

Free API use is pretty neglected, and things change often enough and policy changes often enough that there's not too much point building one without wanting to maintain it all the time or be arbitrarily shut down without notice
I just wrote to Dick's about it.
Do you genuinely think that 43% of self-taught programmers or students in introductory CS classes are women?
Yep, changing the password UX is high friction because you need to teach everyone how it works and nobody's existing tools will work with it.

If you're going to change this up it would make more sense to move to a better protocol than "provide this fixed shared secret".

It's also useful to think about what the "root of trust" is in authentication flows. That is, the thing that can reset the password.

This might reasonably be email, an OIDC provider or a cloud account linked to your device vendor.

IMHO what would be really nice would be a decent ecosystem around WebAuthn. So ways to plug different providers into your browser / operating system. This would let you choose some combination of hardware keys, your preferred password manager or keys linked to your icloud/google account, for 1-click auth everywhere.
Yeah if you cure aging, fuck the FDA, sell it to billionaires for $1B/year until they are broke, then buy congress so you control the FDA
The Pros and Cons of America’s (Extreme) Individualism
It's still miles above the e.g. non-interaction of neighbors in the same cookie cutter subdivision.

The fact that people fight over how to divy up a budget vs have completely separate revenue and accounts says a lot, despite all the stuff you talk about.
Still waiting for Lumen to get cross-platform support. Maybe someday.
It is odd specifically because the inundation of Doggerland and of those other, overwhelmingly larger areas were identically the same event.

Science is an integrative activity. It matters that the same phenomenon describes an apple's fall and the moon's orbit. It matters that the Morning Star and the Evening Star are both Venus. It matters that light, radio, x-rays and radiated heat are all electromagnetic waves that propagate at a fixed rate. It matters that electromagnetics, the nuclear strong force, and the nuclear weak force trace to the same root. It matters that polar and rectangular coordinate systems, and wave propagation and exponential growth and decay, are all concisely related via exponentiation of the base of the natural logarithm.

It probably matters that Mesopotamian and Indus river valley civilizations arose at the same time.

"Atlantis" is just a name for a wholly plausible phenomenon that, if something like it existed, could be found with enough investigation. Fear of a name is not science. Excoriating people for wanting to see evidence sought for is the antithesis of science.
Nondeletable content is another form of problem. IPFS addresses are also not human-readable / interprable, which presents other risks.

Though that might help, yes.

Content-addressiblity is another possible option.
Django Takeoff Course (2021) – Resource to Learn Django
I was looking at the details of the ZIP format just last week when I discovered that a major performance issue was being caused by quirks of a ZIP implementation. Some knowledge of the ZIP format on the developer's part would have saved massive I/O loads (and WAN traffic).

There were various "archive" ZIP files that had grown to several gigabytes each. The developer was using Info-ZIP "zip.exe" to "append" files to the archives multiple times per hour (>100). Like virtually every ZIP implementation, Info-ZIP just re-writes the entire file when appending. As a result, I was seeing multiple terabytes of I/O churn each day as new ZIP files were being created to replace the old ones (which was killing VM replication across a 500Mbps pipe, and is what drew my attention to begin with).

While I would have loved to find a ZIP implementation that just appended the file and a new central directory I found it easier to just rename the ZIP files every day to minimize the churn. Still, I can't believe there isn't a ZIP implementation out there that can do this.
The biggest concern I have is that with current societal expectations an infinite life span would mean working for thousands of years for someone else with little to no retirement phase of life. Effectively, infinite slavery.
No, we require major societal change for this to be attractive.

Regards compounding interest, the economic markets have a basis in reality and so can't keep compounding forever.

Also even if it does compound forever, your trifling savings compounded for 100 years means very little compared to all the elder around you who have also compounded their much larger wealth(having compounded across previous centuries too) across that time. Which means you will still be significantly outbid by most of the customer base for anything you could want.
I agree, I was in the California market for 7ish years so my experience is heavily skewed for that culture.

That being said, I’m NOT bashing those interviews. I’ve been a hiring manager too, if I was able to offer double money and high prestige like a FAANG company I would have had a high filter too. I focused more on sourcing people through friends of friends so the interviews were more of a soft sale on my end than a leetcode grind.
It’s worth noting that the bar for severe illness is set incredibly high. [1]

All of the major symptoms including high fever, cough, severe fatigue, loss of taste/smell, and shortness of breath still count as mild under their definition. This is very much a disease you don’t want to get, even the so called mild version that happens in vaccinated people.

1. https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/overview/clin...
Always interesting to see how another artist works.

The technique they demostrarte is very stroke dependent. My preference is for sharper edges and less uniformity. Though my uni professor taught us to exercise a lot of different styles to avoid getting stuck on one.
Sure. And if you read HN as an outsider, you'll find a metric buttload of such terms.

The people reacting badly to this are just being somewhere between parochial and bigoted.