skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do you hire engineers whose job you know nothing about?
I'm the sole technical cofounder of a medical device company, and we're currently on the path to raise our Series A (have bootstrapped to human trials). Once those funds come in, we're going to make a few hires, mostly in engineering. My background is in electrical engineering and software engineering, and we'll be looking to hire an additional senior software engineer, an electrical engineer, and a mechanical engineer, whose main jobs will be to take ownership of their components and engage critically with our contract manufacturer, who will be taking on the majority of the actual engineering work.

My problem is that, in the case of the mechanical engineer, or really any technical discipline which I've not personally done before (for example, project management), I wouldn't know the first thing about how to evaluate their skills, and at our stage, the wrong hire can be a disaster.

Do most startups use talent agencies for this kind of work? I worry that our team's lack of technical prowess in certain aspects will lead to botched requirements and the wrong hires.
Whoever downvoted my comment must admire Comic Book Guy. I remember the scene, but not every single line.
Amazon Kindles with 3G will start to lose cellular network access in December
We have an ssl endpoint product that’s stuck in classic And requires our customers to make a DNS change to fix/migrate.
I don’t think the lies are of the same type. Lying (or charitably, being unreasonably optimistic) about future timelines seems less egregious than faking a demo.
On the other side of the spectrum (compared what other have written) are e.g. constants in control loops. This could e.g. be a PID controller and the values for P, I and D, may have been chosen very carefully. Changing them slightly may render the application useless.
If climate change happens, the UK may get colder rather than warmer - the UK and many nordic countries will really freeze over when the North Atlantic Current or Norwegian Current shift or disappear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Current
I am by no means an economic expert, far from it. To me it seems so, that there is way to much money flowing around, looking for an outlet. And with interest rates being all time lows since 2008 parking that money at a bank doesn't work anymore. Before 2007/8, the problem was too much money being made too easily. We solved that by creating more money. And we repeated that with Covid.
The violence of red text on a blue background made me understand how serious the CIA is on this topic.
The deadly second wave of the Spanish flu is attributed to the perverse effect on viral spread of World War I. Mildly ill soldiers stayed put in the trenches, while those with a more serious strain were put on trains and sent to crowded field hospitals, which preferentially selected for the more lethal form of the virus.

So far I wouldn't say we have a parallel situation with Covid, although if the vaccines just suppress symptoms while allowing the virus to breed and spread, it could have some bad effects.
I wasn't implying that there isn't a price list - just that for the overwhelming majority of cases it is irrelevant to both patients and medical staff.

Also, as far as I understand it there are only prescription charges in England and not in the rest of the UK. Certainly here in Scotland there are no prescription charges anywhere.
That's "getting a stupid answer" because of the kind of question. The problem is you can't rank bicycles under $500; they are all undifferentiated. The search results on Google for this question strike me as fairly reasonable, given the impossibility of the question and the deluge of affiliate spam they have to index.
There's lots of labor-intensive ways to boost yields without monocultures, fertilizers, and pesticides, right? Planting complementary crops together, planting trap crops at the edges of fields to catch pests, things like that.

How long till robots can do that sort of work? At that point, you can have super-green-bio gardens (fields) worked and pruned 24/7 at the cost-over-time of the robots (and whoever/whatever oversees them, plus manure I guess).

We already have a version of this- called a combine harvester- but the more sophisticated farming tech gets, the more it can reduce reliance on e.g. pesticides without reducing yields.
Any test that uses mocks is therefore "bad testing".
Also interested in this. I prefer a first pass with a physical copy and having a pdf to use as a reference/search
There is also a "smart assistant" rescheduling service by the same name[1] that I used to great effect at my last employer

1: https://www.getclockwise.com/
Ya, that's a good point, and I never thought about the selection bias.
> SO's "innovations" were mostly just efforts to game the system.

That a very reductive view on innovation. Most innovations are not some fancy new technology. They are new way to do deals and partnerships and improve overall process efficiently. That doesn't change the fact that they are real.

Interdicting standardized testing and quality control, is an innovation. Making deals with railroads to have an overall more efficient and cheaper distribution model is an innovation. The railroads agree to it as it allowed them to have higher utilization.

Would you say for example slaughter houses using refrigerated rail-cars is not a real innovation? Its just evil slaughter houses trying to 'game' the system?

At some point in time, doing things a certain way is just more efficient and those companies that can not adopt new processes will be less successful. Had all such innovations been prevented we would be much worse of overall.

Often it actually makes sense for most companies to go out of business, as for overall efficiency it doesn't really make sense to be differentiated into 100s of companies.

> The federal courts took a clear-eyed view on this and did not see it kindly.

No they didn't. Courts didn't create these laws, politicians did. And the enforcement was often very selective and politically driven.

The whole history of Anti-Trust went very strongly along with political interest in it until the 70s.

Anti-Trust lacked a clear definition and eventually the courts, lead by jurist Richard Posner, created a Anti-Trust definition that requires showing that consumers were harmed. Not only some vague accusations of 'market power'. Under that definition things like Standard Oil would not have gone threw.
The Church of American Startups and Capitalism
I wonder if using RLE encoding would not have been but vastly simpler and more compact that the huffman encoding used. Just frequency + duration.
I wonder if anyone wrote a book about this!
I've been waiting for the print version before diving in, so I'm excited to see it's now available. For what it's worth, I'd be willing to spend more money on an all-format package. I need to hold a book in my hand and not stare at an illuminated screen to absorb the material, but sometimes carry a big book around is not practical so having a Kindle copy is handy. A PDF copy is good for referencing stuff I've already read. Since the book is printed on-demand, such a package might not really be practical, but I thought I'd mention it.

Congrats on getting over the finish line, by the way. It's a huge accomplishment.
I see reviews of best X under $Y that I would have some trust in their conclusions on websites that also do news about the subject area. I don't see why these websites should not be able to use affiliate links.

Some examples: Cycling Weekly for bicycles and AnandTech for computing stuff.

I don't go to their websites via Google search though.
> Weren't there VCs who put money into this?

Definitely, but worse than that, real companies that really should have known better.

GM associated themselves. For what reason I can’t figure out. It must have been high up because the GM engineers I know all knew it was a 100% scam.

It’s like anything else that confuses me in business. Some idiot made a mistake, sure, but then their boss approved that, and all the other people required approved it, and at no point did anyone say “Hey, wait, no, stop”.
Relevant PR (merged): https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/82834
> compelled experimental vaccinations

What exactly seems to be experimental, considering the published clinical trials? You’ve got to have a hypothesis, like “In 5 years mRNA-vaccinated subjects develop chronic explosive diarrhea because of X, Y, and Z.” Then you can go ahead and test the hypothesis, that’s how science works.
Blizzard confirms developer named in lawsuit was removed for “misconduct”
If I was coding a screen reader I would detect homoglyphs[0] and map things like Fraktur 'fonts' to their ASCII equivalent. Also if I was coding a search engine I would scan for homoglyphs and map Unicode homoglyphs to their ASCII equivalent.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoglyph
Rio Tinto expected to destroy 124 more Aboriginal sites (2020)
Tesla's name is somewhat original because the connection between electricty and Tesla is certainly obvious and understandable, yet also rare enough in the US compared to Edison that it wasn't already taken.

A second company then copying exactly the same association? Different thing entirely.
What's more surprising is the incompetence to come up with a working prototype over years with so much funding!

It's not like there are no electric motors or large batteries on the market. It just have to work for a good hour and they can't even do that. It's theranos level of embarrassment and fraud, maybe even worse, because theranos might have been an physical impossibility but Tesla already demonstrated that it is entirely possible to do what Nikola claims to (at least in prototyping).
If you have DuckDuckGo in your browser search bar, then you get their bang functionality automatically, which replicates this. E.g. "bicycle !w" searches wikipedia. Includes !so (stackoverflow), !g (google), !yt (youtube), !a (amazon), !twitter, !reddit, many others.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang
I don't have any automated way of bundling stuff. But if you email me with some proof of purchase (I don't know, a picture of you holding the book, or an order screenshot or something), I'm happy to email you the PDF.
In my age group of Germans (born 1966) it's basically dogma that our generation is responsible for studying the Holocaust (movies, literature, art in addition to documentaries, etc.) and then turning around and preventing it from happening again. For the most part I think it's been a success but it backfired with a small but steady percentage of people. In addition, Germans can come across as sanctimonious when picking who their favored victim group is, often being accused as being antisemitic when siding with Palestinians, for example.

The other problem was that the discussion basically happened in a vacuum, hardly any of us interacted with Jews. Since I emigrated to the US I've had more productive conversations with actual victims, or rather their children.
Sure it was. But it was a good example, because the person helpfully starts with "I'm trying to do X."

But they still say. "I'm trying to do X. To do this, I'm doing this complicated Y. How come Y doesn't work?"

This is still XY because they're asking about Y. But in the bad cases, they'd only mention the Y part, and omit that they're trying to do X.
Also an only child and I don’t think that makes things boring at all. I hate that narrative. I look at people with siblings and I am disgusted at the amount of fighting involved.
APWU Statement on Mandatory Vaccination for Federal Employees
At this point, we are talking about a really high education of a certain language on a thread about a tool to help people going from zero to say basic sentences on another language.

They are two different things. I mean, I am sure that there are academics with superior knowledge than me on my own native language.
Congratulations!

I was just wondering when I'll get to have a physical copy while I was working through chapter 8 in Crafting Interpreters. Thank you so much for your contribution.
That's correct. The entire build system is:

https://github.com/munificent/craftinginterpreters/tree/mast...
Just "Copying Tesla" is not a fraud by a mile, the whole point of capitalism is that enterprises compete by offering alternative solutions[1]. It is actually surprising it took so long for someone to copy the "electric car company with Tesla characteristics", given the insanely attractive cost of equity capital that Tesla is enjoying.

Matt Levine wrote a section on this, about how Elon said good-bye to earnings calls since his funding is coming mostly from retail investors, to whom he speaks via Twitter and memes, they don't listen to the call anyhow so why bother :)

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-07-27/matt-l...

[1] Well unless (unless! unless!) it eventually turns out that Tesla is a fraud and you're copying that too.
All European countries pay massive amounts of money for their high speed rail. The prices costumers reflect do not cover the cost.

Of course we can make some of the same assumptions about highways.

If there was actual competition between these systems we might have a more accurate picture.

But private highways do actually seem to be profitable in some countries.

China invest untold billions in that system, and I don't know enough to say if this is defensible on commercial bases.
Such a silly way to think about it. You could frame every service as having this conflict. Does Google want to obfuscate results so I'll spend longer looking for results?

Duolingo is extremely popular because people get use out of it and like it. You've taken a tiny perverse incentive and jumped to the conclusion that it trumps all the other more important incentives.
Tesla also reopened their Freemont plant within days against health department orders saying they were producing ventilators and then delivering expired bipap machines bought in bulk while really working on luxury cars. The pandemic didn't slow them much because they just violated the orders.
If you're an inexperienced junior developer, you probably should not assume you know better than everyone else what meetings are useful.
Tesla invented the AC motor which was used in the first roadster so thats why they named it that. Very logical…
Unfortunately it's never that easy.

Should you be able to blast music at high volume outdoors if you pay a nuisance tax? If your wood burning stove heater makes the nearby aqi shoot up, is that ok if you pay for someone else to upgrade to a efficient furnace?

What about embedded manufacturing energy? Should the government not only tax CO2 within it's borders but also somehow audit CO2 for the entire supply chain? If not, some nation will make the call that fossil fuel burning is an externality that they can avoid paying.

Let's also admit that none of us can build an computer or a car from raw materials. Even if you would pay a premium for an efficient machine, most consumers don't understand what the future energy costs to them are going to be, will not demand efficiency, and thus suppliers will not build it. Apartments are rarely well insulated because the renters are rarely willing to pay more in rent to save more on energy costs.

As much as we'd like everyone to make rational decisions about complex transactions, most people will not. Im not arguing for stupidity even. At the level of the individual, the savings available by analyzing the options are smaller than the cost of the analysis. Its not worth much of my research time save $1 / yr in extra power efficiency. But across an industry it is.
I think the interesting question here is whether AI can be involved in what's non-trivial to a "person having ordinary skill in the art"?

If the point of this stunt is that the owner (operator?) of an AI may not understand how specifically the AI produced a solution ... fine I guess. But if we have black-ish box AIs that let us find good solutions we don't ourselves understand, surely those tools will be available to other practitioners as well.

Does everything that is findable by a common AI architecture become "obvious" b/c a person with ordinary skill can launch the AI which finds it in from a colab notebook?
You can equally well use foamed concrete for geoengineering.

The biggest plus it doesn't turn into a chemical weapon if there is fire, and it can be poured right on site.
I read everything about this game I can get my hands on. I don’t fully understand why I find dwarf fortress so intriguing. It’s such a pure passion project… that actually made it.
FSF-calls for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot
That’s just grasping at straws. If you try to get a holistic overview, no single measure is 100% effective. But you can combine masks, vaccinations, social distancing, etc. till pandemic stops to be a problem.
The disclosure of the secret and the limited time are key features of a patent. Comparing making something I bought able to be repaired without encrypted keys has really nothing to do with patents or trade secrets. John Deere cannot patent mathematics. How to encrypt firmware is not a trade secret.

JD is using the DMCA to try blocking this. Their legal argument is that the firmware in the tractor or harvester is copyrighted and that locking down the firmware is a copyright control. Therefore, the DMCA can be used as a cudgel to sue people who bypass the controls to let people maintain the physical equipment they have purchased.

IANAL, but the courts have long maintained that making copies of minimal portions of a work or distributing slightly modified copies of parts of a work for the purposes of compatibility fall under fair use.

https://www.publicknowledge.org/press-release/supreme-court-...

Lexmark v. Static Control Components would appear to be relevant. So would Atari Games Corp v. Nintendo of America, Inc. Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp. seems relevant.

If there is no way to make something compatible but the way the vendor has used, US copyright doctrine suggests that way is not protected by copyright or that it is a fair use infringement upon copyright to do things the same way. If, however, there is some creative creative decision made in implementation of an expression of an idea, then the expression and implementation retain full copyright protection. Some other expression of the same thing for the purpose of compatibility, though, would be fair. This is why Franklin could not copy Apple's firmware but could reverse engineer it. It's why Eagle couldn't copy the IBM BIOS but Compaq could reverse engineer it.

The only way to use a third-party part or even to reset the tracking of a first-party sensor for some of these John Deere products is to circumvent the protections on the firmware.

I would expect John Deere to try to use Vernor v. Autodesk in which it's determined that some fine print about software being licensed vs. sold means you can't resell the software after taking possession of it. However, firmware for a tractor is not remotely the same as a CAD or video editing application. It's not a useful thing in its own right and is not the product. It is simply a necessary part of the physical device which was sold.

Hopefully the Librarian of Congress or the Congress itself addresses this intentional crippling of physical goods. It's a troublesome loophole in the DMCA and it's being abused. If the courts take it up, I'm hoping an appeals court or the Supreme Court realizes the difference between a commercial application for installation on a general-purpose computer and the firmware in a tractor, Bluetooth speaker, car, smartphone, or whatever and choose common sense.
People were complaining about the supposed shortage of developers for many years now. However the very same people who complain are building multi-stage obstacle courses that one candidate out of hundred is supposed to clear.
I think we should make a distinction here.

Client, prospect and customer meetings are absolutely necessary and you should prioritize those no matter what.

Internal time wasting meetings are the pinnacle of the art of not working and should be avoided at all costs.
Weren’t we speaking about the EU? Anyway, look at the statistics from your own country for example the imbalance between university professors between left and right and how that increased in the last 30 years, specially with the cancel culture (bullying or censorship)
My point still holds true. Down 15 per over 32 year period and inflation of the Yen is down 16%. This is one famous example of how speculative investing ends poorly. 3 decades of flatline at best. Look up Japanese lost decade. It's fascinating to read about and the eerily similar to current day US.

[1] https://www.inflationtool.com/japanese-yen/1989-to-present-v...
They had a video on their website for years (taken down very recently, I believe) that showed a FSD "self-driving" Tesla with the narrator saying something like "the driver is only present for legal reasons".
Of course. I've seen that headline in plenty of places. But as soon as you scroll past the headline you see:

"However, the two-dose vaccine still works very well in preventing people from getting seriously sick, demonstrating 88% effectiveness against hospitalization and 91% effectiveness against severe illness, according to the Israeli data published Thursday."
Great memory. When GTE merged with Bell Atlantic to form Verizon, they had to spin out their Internet assets which became Genuity. Genuity was a large publicly traded ISP but ultimately went Ch 11 when Verizon did not buy them. Level 3 bought their assets, Qwest (now Lumen) bought Level 3 .

We always liked the name and did check on the mark.
I think I'd find the uncertainty that seem inherent in your system completely terrifying - its bad enough being sick but then to not know what that would cost seems crazy.

I can't help thinking of the book title by Aneurin Bevan, founder of the UK NHS: "In Place of Fear":

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2042463.In_Place_of_Fear

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurin_Bevan
> M4 syntax looks that way because it has to work for arbitrary text files.

That seems like an odd assertion given the existence of other templating systems which have friendlier syntax while being capable of generating arbitrary output. Is there a reason why you think on the M4 approach is valid?
Of course, in the long run our goal should be to destroy the ecosphere. But yes, we need to survive till we get there.
You could always use bufferi.ng
Excellent. Useful for being on a chromebook, offline and not logged in, so only opening local html files for tools is an option (no Chrome extensions). Will add file saving to my copy.
The term "subspecie" implies that the two populations cannot interbreed unless artificially forced to. E.g. two populations living in isolation. Sometimes it also implies that the offspring has lower fitness (e.g. half of the descendency is sterile). Usually two subspecies show phenotipical differences, but it's not enough.

The term doesn't apply to humans because through all history black people has been in contact with non-black people, and interbreeding without any trouble. Having a bit more melatonine in your skin doesn't make you a new subspecie.

But if your head size is huge (like Neanderthal), so huge that half your iterbreed newborns die or kill the mother, you are on the path of speciation but still the same specie because interbreeding is possible.
Remote Site Reliability Engineer – EMEA