skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To me competitive programming doesn't make you a good software engineer.

It will teach you bad practices, like abusing of dangerous programming constructs or data structures to optimized the code or just save some typing while writing the code (like one letter variable names, macros, etc), global variables and state in the program, not using common design patterns, not using OOP, not documenting the code and in general writing code that is difficult to maintain because it's not well engineered. You would say that a person would do that only in competition, but in my experience I saw that is not true, because if you learn to program a particular way, you would do the same also in other contexts.

Also, the competences that you will acquire by doing competitive programming are next than useless: in the real life I've yet to encounter a situation in which I have to use an algorithm used in a competitive programming competition (yes, I did them with even good results). And if you need them, you don't implement them yourself, but you use a library that manages all the work. The Dijkstra implementation that most competitive programmers use is a toy implementation, not something that you would never use in any sort of enterprise software.

The fundamental skill that competitive programming doesn't teach you, that to me is the most important thing for a good software engineer, is using Google to find documentation online. Most of the errors I see by young software engineers could easily been prevented if they did a simple Google search and read the official documentation (not a random blog post)! And yet in competitive programming you are forbid to use the internet, to me it's stupid, it's like requiring to write code with a typewriter just because in the past keyboards and monitors didn't exist.
Probably the coal promoter who handed it to them had washed it, and maybe waxed it or covered it in fixative to make the publicity stunt work better. Bit of a metaphor for the whole process.
There are literal quotes from governors, senators, and Congressional representatives talking about herd via infection. Suggesting seniors should do their part and die in order to save the economy.

Depending on where you live and who your political alignment is, the government is absolutely compelling you to get COVID.
> I think Node.JS is the dumbest thing to ever happen in IT history

Did you already forget about PHP? :p
"all of crypto" has a soft landing as gold bugs and others diversify trillions into crypto.

NFTs have a soft landing if/as crypto whales diversify into NFTs. Traditionally, collectibles are a much smaller market than commodities and currencies because their uniqueness reduces their liquidity. The "huge" art market ($50B) is dwarfed by precious metals ($10+T).
Without an FDA commissioner this is worse than not approving as far as I’m concerned. Seriously, this is -1 for me.
> Almost everything you will ever need is already implemented in a library for you to reuse, and even reaching for that library is pretty rare.

This undercuts your claim a bit as someone has to be able to write the library in the first place. Yes it’s rare, but the software engineering industry is big enough that “rare” can be a “this happens all the time in domain X”.

Overall though I’d agree that it’s not useful for the majority of engineers and isn’t a good judge of programming ability just like math competitions aren’t either. They are “something” though.
I think competitive programming is useful as an interview style if you want to learn a language and gain that development intuition of stop, think, clarify, design, code and test. But do I think people are taking it too far? Definitely.

A typical comment or interview experience on Leetcode is that they take 3 months to prepare and do algorithms questions for FAANG interviews to pass the interview. In the process, some individuals skip class or other things. I don't think that is right personally.
Foam is pretty good for this as well: https://foambubble.github.io/foam/
> [*] Assuming it's true - I must admit this sort of unnamed perpetrator, unverifiable story does strike me as a bit suspect. But I think that's fine anyway even if so, the specifics aren't really important, it can be a parable for how she feels generally on other (real) occasions.

You're right, I refuse to believe any sitting member of a governing body that [recently put out a report][1] saying Britain is the least racist country in the world could have deliberately tried to make a black MP feel unwelcome

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-of-the...
"I don't really care if they know my location" is the same as "I don't really care about privacy, I have nothing to hide". The problem with this argument is that this information is being fed into systems such as PRISM and XKEYSCORE, being used to build behavioral profiles of millions of individuals, and then weaponized in order to sell you products and manipulate your political opinions. This is not a conspiracy theory anymore and a great reason to care about privacy.
Yes.

So DESTROY their market by finding and using substitutes or even substituting with being mostly off-grid in a social media sense. We lived just fine before and without the internet. It was far less exhausting, frustrating and crazy.
I think Tesla's "battery day" from last year addressed almost all these concerns.
A lot of comments here about the need for more public transportation or other transportation options I think come from projecting one’s personal lifestyle on the rest of the country. Property in dense walkable urban areas is expensive and transporting anything more than yourself and some personal items is difficult. For most of the population and especially those with families or who’s occupation requires it personal vehicles will be the status quo in the US for the foreseeable future.
Yes and I'd say the same for my previous job. Prior to these positions I spent years in the CATV industry and I still feel bad when I see people living their lives in front of the boob-tube.
From my point of view, if the code being shipped performs badly, then it may as well not exist.
If it were e2e encrypted or had the same rules as the post office has to follow about when they can spy on your mail I would be fine with it.
I’m surprised we haven’t seen more from health insurers - unless they’re gambling on being able to get out of paying for any long term care costs for COVID complications by claiming ‘preexisting condition’ or ‘government said they’d pay for COVID treatment’ they should surely be interested in incentivizing group plan holders (ie employers) to have vaccination programs. When having a vaccination mandate policy shows up as an actual tangible cut in your insurance bill, that will drive some real behavior changes in employers.
dude I buy my drugs with BTC, what problem you tryin to search?
Grocery curbside pickup and delivery are readily available in my non-major city.
Maybe the solution is “more” pedestrian focused zoning and public transit
Yes, i would expect a lot of announcements this week.

Looks like NYC Public Schools are going to mandate all staff be vaccinated (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/nyregion/nyc-schools-empl...). I would expect most hospitals/health care organizations to pretty quickly mandate it as well.

There is very little incentive for a large organization to take on the added costs of allowing a large percent of their staff/members to remain unvaccinated now.

And despite all the stories/articles about the desperate, angry anti-vax people, they are really just a small minority who are good at being noisy, and the rest of us are becoming increasingly impatient with them.
It's a similar mechanism, right? You're just using a virus to carry the genetic material, which also involves an extra transcription step in the cell (what is theorized as causing mutations in the spike and thus the stroke/clotting issues). Still quite different from the traditional inactive or protein based ones.
Several major carmakers produce cars that run on natural gas. I have yet to see a good comparison (eco & other) of EVs versus NG cars.
FDA approval is mostly meaningless. Just this year they approved an Alzheimer's treatment which ended clinical trials early because it didn't work.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/06/08/th...
> When competitive programming hits the tier where you need to memorize all of the advanced data structures and algorithms to do better, that's where further improvement in the leaderboards no longer translates to better programmers IMHO.

I found this post [1] by the current rank 5 competitive programmer on codeforces to be an interesting take on this perspective. It's not as much about knowing the fancy algorithms, as being able to derive their ideas when needed, that makes you really move up.

[1] https://codeforces.com/blog/entry/92248
Agree, connected smart charging is the way to go. But the fact is if a car needs to be charged by the morning you are going to see spikes in the evening. I am rather ignorant about how often people with plug ins actually change, maybe you don't need to charge every evening.
You're saying society should keep wearing masks everywhere literally forever? That's so insane I can't tell whether you're even serious.
YouTube boasts $30B in payments as creator wars heat up
Weird. Phase 3 trials usually last year's.

This only lasted 6 months.

Seems legit...
It's also a form of Jevon's Paradox... efficiencies are always consumed and grown beyond.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
I didn't like TypeScript when writing frontend only code, because the the iteration speed is just so fast in the browser.

But when I started using it for backend and infra, the iteration speed is much slower, so even TS only saves a few % of deploys, it's still a noticeable amount of absolute time.
Why do you need crypto for that? Just make a standard ticket ecommerce site and add some functionalities for ticket resale.
Believe it or not, _statistically_ speaking, top tier STEM schools do have way more smarter students per my experience. Prestigious Universities earned their fame for the most part.
If you value your time, the convenience of a car cannot be beaten, especially for unplanned trips. Even most of those who ride buses aspire to own a car one day.
Doesn’t this mean the Intel is done? Intel has never designed chips with innovation that matches the quality of AMD, Apple, and Nvidia.

That's frankly not true, for example see them along with a few others not including the above companies reviving the out-of-order technology IBM first developed for its System 360 supercomputers, for Intel first in the Pentium Pro.

Culturally I doubt they can shift to fabless although we'll be able to tell if they're really trying by seeing mass layoffs of managers, and I've very concerned they didn't recruit a fab guy to be their CEO although I wonder if no one qualified was willing to take the position. Another argument against that is their placeholder CEO who'd previously been their CFO actually had a clue, I suppose wasn't part of one of the factions involved in the fab debacles, decided to go fabless, and his strategy was junked by the new CEO.

In general I don't see a path to victory for them given my guess that they won't be able to regain their ability to move to new nodes that can make economical chips. Although I haven't investigated their third iteration of their 10 nm node, now Intel 7, need to spend more time reading Semiwiki etc. and also see if there's any sign they're going to get their first EUV node, Intel 4, working in any practical time frame, it's already delayed.

On the other hand, AMD has done it again, spent a huge amount of their capital on this time an FPGA company; at best that means they believe they don't have anything better to devote resources to, which is bad news for their AMD64 ecosystem. If you've followed their history going back decades, it was said a while ago over the long term they've never made money for their stockholders, and they've repeatedly gained serious leads only to blow them, raise your hand if you once used one of the 100MHz 486DX4s. Just like Intel's cultural problems, I suspect this aspect of AMD's culture will give Intel breathing room sooner or later, as it did when K8 got long in the tooth.

Apple isn't even in the running unless they decide to start selling their ARM SoCs to third parties. Who gives a damn about those if you're not in the Apple ecosystem, which has it's own problems. Nvidia if allowed to buy ARM will I expect destroy that ecosystem, certainly make it uncompetitive, including eliminating competition they would be facing thus likely making them complacent.
> The 3rd party mouse situation on Macs is totally out of control.

Agreed. I have a 3Dconnexion CadMouse Pro Wireless, which is the only mouse I could find with [an actual middle mouse button in addition to a clickable scroll wheel]. After upgrading to Big Sur, physically clicking any mouse button doesn't register click events with the operating system. So I can move the cursor but not click it. The recommended workaround is to plug it in with the USB cable and use it that way.

Is it 3Dconnexion's or Apple's fault? No idea, but this is just insane. When was the last time an OS upgrade caused your _mouse_ to stop working!? It's like taking a time warp back to the 90s.
I think they mean in the sense you shouldn’t need to drive everywhere for everything. Or possibly there could be a system to share or rent electric cars so you don’t need to own one.
"But Covid is something natural, while the vaccine is man-made."
I have zero troubles shipping Windows and Linux user end GUI made in Lazarus. Single tiny exe. Does not gobble up RAM either.
At the moment there are two other responses to my comment, and they both interpret the parent comment in completely opposite ways, so I'd offer that as support for my argument that the parent comment wasn't clear.

I'm using the term "dog whistle" here to mean a comment that appears to be innocuous, ambiguous, or harmless to anyone who doesn't already understand the reference, but which in fact has meaning or acts as a placeholder for a longer, well-tread narrative to people familiar with a particular subculture.
In this case, the two ways it can be interpreted are spelled out pretty concisely by the first two responses here:

"The point he's making is that despite lip service by the media little has changed", which I take to mean, "Media still considers the deaths of black people to be cheap and therefore not worth reporting."

Then we have, "The point is black lives seem to matter only if taken by a white police officer", which is the dog-whistle version I was talking about. If that's the message someone is taking from the ambiguous phrase "google Chicago shootings", well, I can't think of a better illustration of the term "dog whistle".
New Post Office EasyID app to replace documents for proof of identification
They also compel you to do things such as wear clothes and shoes in order to get service.

If you want to take part in exchange, you must do it in terms acceptable to both parties. You are not entitled to take from society on whatever terms you dictate on your own.
> Pacifism = "if you attack me, I will not stop you"

Yeah but the Taliban (or the the Afghanis in general, for that matter) didn't attack anyone.

A bunch of radicals made 9/11 happen, and as it happens, the main guy behind it happened to be in Afghanistan and on somewhat okay-ish terms with the Taliban, but the Taliban themselves were perfectly okay to negotiate his extradition if my understanding is correct. That is, they were, until the first bombs started to drop.

For all I care, Afghanistan was a bloody revenge war, nothing but catharsis for the bruised American soul. It was never about the women or democracy or the well-being of the Afghanis in general, because if that was the case, the US might as well have started with Saudi Arabia (which had probably more to do with al Qaeda than Afghanistan to begin with). In my opinion, it wasn't even about OBL, because otherwise the US would've taken the Pakistani coddling with extremists (and ultimately the sheltering thereof) more serious than they did.

Anyway, I'm already ranting again... I just sometimes wish everyone on this planet was a bit more naive, you know, and just believed in the general good of the people. Yes, there are always a few crazy outliers, yes, there are always those who try to gain advantage and power by manipulating the masses by abusing their fear and primal instincts, but in general, most human beings just want to live a peaceful live, not having to worry about drones and bombs and stray bullets and whatnot. And by believing all together in this common good, I think the world might just be a little bit a better place. At least in my pipe dreams...
sure! think of how we currently use cookies in web2. Imagine being able to issue a unique token that does the same thing, but it's stored on the ethereum blockchain. So it can be traded, sold, bought, etc. And there's no clearing the cache. Only invalidation on the server side.

The possibilities are both horrifying and wonderful.
> Do I FUCKING LOVE BEYOND BELIEF that it means linux support is native and present at first release?

Not me.

From my point of view, if the Linux version is Electron-based, then there is no Linux version.
1. Those who are vaccinated have a significant reduction in risk of death (not to mention that the risk is very minute for young people anyway), so that's a moot point

2. Some vaccinated people have been found to carry the same levels of the virus as unvaccinated people, so stating that unvaccinated people could be increasing risk to others is also a moot point

3. Once the so called "R" rate is below one, the virus is on a path to fizzling out

It's not as though unvaccinated people will be dying in their thousands for centuries to come. Herd immunity just needs to kick in which many countries have already achieved.
Mathpix and MonsterWriter for Scientific Writing
> my point is that MIT will have a higher percentage of mathematically gifted students, because it isn't something that can be prepped for.

What are you talking about? The requirements to get into MIT are not mathematical genius. It's above average quantitative skills. And you can prep for the standardize math requirements quite easily. All of my high school friends did, and some managed to get into MIT.
> I'm sure the US military

I don't think this post is about the US military though. Uniforms look Singaporean.
Or just reverse their stupid ass USB protocol, and don't run their software stack at all. No legal threats with that, because RE for interoperability is legal.

Controlling USB devices is rather simple, once you know the format of "packets" they send to their interface endpoints, to control the device. Format can often times be deduced from observing the URBs in wireshark while clicking around the vendor's app.
how does the government response to you not being vaccinated interfere with you getting groceries?
> My chief takeaway after doing all of them: even my native code resembled the patterns found in JavaScript based UI developments.

> (native programming for UI) requires an order of magnitude of very niche programming that will only be useful for this purpose

that seems contradictory
> He sued for $1.5 million for being jailed for a week?

> That seems completely unreasonable.

Here's [0] another article.

He showed up in the location (Google) and his ownership of same make/color vehicle (surveillance video) added to his suspectibility. So he was arrested. A week later he was released. A year later he's suing for defamation, gross negligence, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

In that one week:

> the arrest causes him to fail background checks

> news coverage prominently features in Google searches of his name

> forced to drop out of school, having missing too many classes of the accelerated college program he was enrolled in

So, he lost his job and his school. In one week he easily could have missed rent -- and this is before the pandemic so there's no moratorium on evictions.

$1.5 million definitely isn't unreasonable for problems caused from being in jail for a week despite innocence.

[0]: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10760055/innocent-man-23-sues-...
That's great if you've got a vehicle and/or can pay the extra cost for delivery. The urban groups statistically most likely to be unvaccinated (blacks and hispanics) are also those statistically least likely to have a vehicle or be able to pay for delivery.
> if the hospitals get over capacity and that's not happening

It’s happening in quite a few places.
Marc Benioff's grand strategy: Salesforce, Slack, and the future of work
> I envy your idealistic take on Scott Morrison's impartiality towards his largest donors.

What, are solar farms banned from making political donations? Bankers can do sums, the price of electricity is common across the market. If solar is honestly cheaper then they can move fairly quickly to make more profit and afford a better class of political influence than the coal mines. That is how the game is played.

I was talking to a friend the other day about how to invest in coal mines, because I think the survivors might be in a pretty good position. But if someone has an idea for a solar plant with better margins than a coal mine then I'll invest there instead. The idea that anyone is pro-coal because they have a thing for carbon is absurd. The last 50 years have proven conclusively that not that many people care about where the electricity is coming from. Everyone cares about profit margins.
>No, its not. While the rates are somewhat higher with Delta, breakthrough infections were always expected. The accines reduce the probability of getting COVID with similar exposure, they don't 100% prevent it.

That's not my understanding, I'm in IT and not a biologist or whatever. So perhaps you can explain to me.

A vaccine is something that boosts/helps the immune system develop protection against the disease.

Measles vaccine means nobody got measles until antivaxers started spreading measles.

Yes there can be a portion of society which does not have an immune system for the vaccine to help or boost and therefore the vaccines aren't useful and doesn't work. Percentages will change per country/society. However, someone fully vaccinated in my mind is someone who is never going to be infectious. Therefore prevents it.

>Yes, you can. Even if schools weren't full of unvaccinated people, which they are, the existence of breakthrough infections would underline why banning mask mandates is a culpablr error.

The problem with covid is that it clearly divides directly down political lines. Perhaps Texas guy is politically motivated and making bad decisions. The problem is the opposite as well. CNBC is clearly attacking when it's clearly unreasonable to do so.

I have no pity at all for anti-vaxxers who get covid. I'm not in the USA, nor do I care about Texas.
There isn't much of a difference between the science behind this approval and that of an EUA. Its largely red-tape and bureaucracy.
> Ban crypto mining waste for instance.

Yes ...

> That's 10% of global electricity these days.

No, this isn't true at all. Although if it was it would make the ban more urgent.
Trying to cultivate a "billion-dollar bets" is like trying to cultivate GROWN-UP SEQUOIAS. First of all you have to start with seeds and probably if you are new gardener you should start with something smaller and easier.
People want to copy the Silicon Valley of today without the decades of smaller and organic growth. Rome wasn't built in a day. Rome started as a bunch of farmers on a hill next to a river. The Silicon Valley started around a tech university where geeks really wanted to build stuff so much they did in their parents garage. The money is only the petrol added to an existing flame.