skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i've had similar experiences over the phone.

"How would you pull in data from an arbitrarily long -- maybe never-ending -- source of data in Python?"

me : "What kind of data? What is it used for? How should it be represented afterwards?"

Silence on the other end , followed by "Well that's up to you."

I then fumble out a few ways to do it (verbally), to a recruiter that doesn't seem to understand anything that i'm saying -- he's probably reading a question from a script and pattern-matching what I say to the supposedly correct answer given to him in the same script.

Finally it ends with "Oh, that's interesting. ...We'll get back to you." , and the interviews that go this direction -- they never get back to you; you've already lost.

I'm not spouting gibberish, i've been at this for a long time; i'm just not spouting out whatever tech-jargon that their company supports and is needed to conform to his script, and quite honestly the person on the other end of the phone call seems to be universally under-equipped to judge anything remotely CS related.

It's a really weird/ephemeral/surreal experience. Imagine a surgeon being appointed to a position at a hospital because the secretary quizzed him on some flash cards (flash cards provided by Acme Sharp Scalpels), and the surgeon -- by chance -- prefers Acme Sharp Scalpels, and so mentions that brand. Instant hire according to the flash cards.

That's a lot like what it's like when a technically-accurate developer gets passed over for one that blithely mentions popular software packages (pandas/tensorflow/whatever is popular this week) without any real technical knowledge on how to achieve the goals wanted by the hiring party.
I'm not shocked. I went spelunking [0] in my Honda's head unit and found only terrible things.

[0]: https://gist.github.com/ryjones/73739f6a7e662b9ed9ba64d9141f...
Honda (and any well established OEM) has rolling code on their newer models for sure. There are 2 scenarios possible here regarding this article.

1st - message is recorded while key is outside of the vehicle range.
Rolling Code does not help here since the vehicle never received the original signal from the key.
The point of rolling code is that same signal cannot be used twice to open the vehicle.
There is no protection against this with unidirectional RF keys, but requires physical access to the key and your recorded message needs to be first one sent to the vehicle.

2nd - it's fake. This I say because the key gets out of the frame in the video when the signal is replayed...
> or socializing

Perhaps by joining a gang…
> hard to truly tease out quality during interviews

I'm not sure I agree here. I doubt most interviewers have actually given much thought to what they are actually trying to look for in a potential candidate. The widespread practice of over-focusing on algorithmic whiteboard questions is a symptom.

There's got to be better processes in assessing candidates' qualities beyond solving algorithmic puzzles (which perhaps is 5% of a software engineer's job at best).
Yes.

There are also magnetic anomaly detectors (MAD) and various wake detection approaches.

Do these work all always? Probably not. But they work often enough to be researched and used.

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC9bMgCQyFNaMPsK9GtzM5dQ is a good starting point.
Which currency has been the most profitable
In this part, I will analyze which currency (Bitcoin, Ethereum or Litecoin) has been the most profitable in the last two months using the buy and hold strategy. And buy cardano with credit card from https://uphold.com/en/assets/crypto/buy-cardano . Although many of us have only heard of four or five of them, currently there are more than 6700 cryptocurrencies that can be traded publicly, and their number continues to grow as if from day to day . The total value of the crypto market is estimated at $ 1.5 trillion, or $ 1.5 trillion. We think it's no surprise that Bitcoin is the most popular virtual currency of all.
Isn't NFS also dead? It basically believes you are root if you say you are.

And NFSv4 apparently requires Kerberos? WTF? Was it designed only for MIT use? Why can't they support simple things like SSH keys?
The waste I've become most sensitized to is excessive ceremony - things that you have to keep doing but don't actually contribute much to real velocity. Bad CI/CD and review processes are good examples. Even though I'm generally a huge proponent of testing and even formal methods, I've seen so much time wasted on types of testing that consume lots of developer time (not to mention machine time) but have provably never surfaced any real bugs and couldn't reasonably be expected to.
> it will recommend you interview people with male, white-sounding names, because it turns out that's what your HR department already does

His linked article (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automatio...) says nothing about white or white-sounding names. And I sincerely doubt that anybody's HR department is screening out non-white sounding names for technical roles. Certainly nowhere I've ever worked - I can't remember the last time I saw a resume that wasn't Indian, male or female.
> playing with a ball in a field might be better

I categorize this as "maybe". If you're a physically fit child with good hand/eye coordination, playing ball is fun. If you're not, due to genetics, weight, or illness, it's closer to torment.

Also, playing ball is almost always going to be competitive - there are no bots and only rarely cooperative objectives involved.
Because developers want it both ways... they want the benefits of a job that makes money while also not wanting the requirements that those jobs usually require.

CS Degrees from local universities can be had for far less cost than a 250k law degree and less time than a 13 year MD.
Unsurprising since most dairy-free milks have more salt/sodium than regular milk.
This was a neat set of slides.

Apparently here in the US they use beads of glass sprayed onto the wet paint for reflection. It kinda works; but for the longest time I wondered why the paint here is nowhere near as reflective as the kind used in Europe which has little bumps for sound but also better visibility with rain.

https://www.morenoconseil.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/SER...
TLDs – Putting the '.fun' in the top of the DNS
> That being said, I wouldn't want to move here either. You get paid more, the homes are nicer and more private, and you fit a big SUV down any road.

Which is a thoroughly unsustainable way of living. I like walking and biking, and I wouldn't want to sacrifice them and the practicality of having everything within a walking/biking/public transit distance for more house and yard maintenance.

> But the medical system sucks, and really takes a toll on take home $$. Especially with kids.

And takes a mental toll having to worry about that kind of thing. I don't want to be afraid to go to the doctor.
Not reliable research alas: https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia
Silicon Valley gives up on reality – wants us to use their terrible alternative
For whatever it's worth -- this person "pjmlp", is probably one of the most fascinating and knowledgeable personalities I've ever stumbled across on the internet.

I've run across him everywhere. From places like the D-lang forums, /r/java, /r/dotnet, /r/cpp, Hacker News, decades old mailing lists for Oberon development, etc.

I wish he would write more, in blog form. He seems to have been around for decades and to know many obscure things which the world has forgotten.

There's also not a programming language I've ever seen him not intimately know the history and nuances of.

He's like some sort of omnipresent hacker-sage. I don't write or keep a blog myself because I feel like I've got nothing useful to add to the world, but I've considered trying to interview certain obscure programmers and other people I've come across that I find really impressive and fascinating, to share their stories with the world.

This person would be very on high on that list.
I think a big part of why I can quickly scan information on a page is from playing way too much Final Fantasy as a kid. To grind you need to do lots of combat, so I slowly dialed the "Response Rate" (i.e. speed at which text appears) until I could read all of the post-combat messages at the maximum setting.
Dude, come on: after I've bought a new dinner table, I am not going to buy another one just because. Or buy it for my friend. Seriously. It's similar to how people don't generally go around recommending OSes to their friends and relatives.
Love how they have this in the said page:
"Get 24/7 Google support from real humans."

Amazing.
Microsoft is bringing support for the Open Document Format ODF 1.3 to Office
I take yearly backups on to Blu-Ray M-DISC discs. They're ceramic instead of organic so they're not susceptible to the same kind of oxidation issues most regular optical media has. I make a few copies of the last couple of years of important documents and images (I get some overlap) and store those at a few different locations. Usually other family members I trust.

The amount of important documents and images that I really care about is only a small percentage of all my data. Most of the two year combinations fit on a single 25GB disc but its not terribly expensive to get a 50GB or 100GB disc if needed.

Of course, there's a chance I won't be able to find a Blu-Ray reader in 20-30 years but I imagine there will be some other way to transfer over this dataset when that time comes.

As to the durability of these M-DISCs, I have three 25GB discs I've been testing durability of over the last several years. One sits somewhere outside, often somewhere around the patio table or on a cart under some shade unprotected. Another kicks around on my desk unprotected and gets moved around a lot. Finally a third one sits in the same disc case with the actual data I'm trying to preserve. All of the discs have the exact same data. Every now and then I compare them. The outside one has definitely had a bit of corruption but is still mostly readable. The desk one has a couple of files that it does some retries on (the seek time to the file is higher than expected) but has no corruption. The one in the sleeve is practically perfect after several years.
We live in interesting times, indeed. All the devices we own now become bricks in the walls government wants to build around us. Make no mistake, China is just the first state to implement such a measure and video gaming is just the first use case.

It's really obvious by now that more and more policies like this will be embedded into software. There are so many applications: Cars (how much, where, and how do you drive), TVs (what do you watch and when), personal assistants (what do you talk about with your children)...
Probably not? They most likely want you to know they've been in other interviews in the past, and this one was particularly egregious?
Probably has little to do with China.
> Why do you assume so strongly that they're not doing both.

That's a good question. I guess I do assume they're doing both, but the extreme degree to which they lean on repeat targeting, to the point where it's this noticeable, and to the point where repeat targeting overwhelms other advertisers to this degree, still means that they're incredibly bad at expanding their market.

Let's look at Youtube again. Youtube can both recommend new videos and old videos. It can do both at the same time. But if the majority of my feed is recommending repeat videos, that signifies to me that they're not very confident about the main part I care about as a consumer: showing me knew things.

Looking back at what OP says in the linked article:

> I don't mind letting your programs see my private data as long as I get something useful in exchange. But that's not what happens.

> the dirty secret of the machine learning movement: almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand, because mostly the ML is trained by feeding it examples of what humans did while following a very dumb heuristic. There's no magic here.

I still don't think it's all that impressive to increase ROI using this kind of simplistic heuristic. More than that, I don't think it justifies the incredibly large amount of money and infrastructure that gets devoted to ad targeting online. If some of the most prominent parts of a gigantic system can be replicated by a couple of purchasing history lookups in a database.

It would be impressive for them to increase advertising ROI in a way that increases value for consumers, or that justifies the tracking mechanisms or the extensive research and AI poured into the system, or in a way that is giving better ROI than ridiculously naive approaches, but repeat targeting doesn't seem to do any of that as far as I can tell.

TLDR I assume they're trying to do both, but the proportion of repeat advertising indicates to me that it's giving them a lot better results than more sophisticated methods, which (to me) indicates that their sophisticated methods are all bad. If better targeting methods existed, repeat targeting wouldn't be so prominent and obvious because it would be getting crowded out by other targeting techniques.
I disagree. Children deserve a lot of protection, and anybody can become a parent. A lot of people are far too bad at parenting to leave the decisions to them completely. Some intervention is needed.
yep, agree. So simply preventing all the re-work (on the vendor side) of everyone having to implement account management, payments, etc + the resulting confusion (on the user side) would be a start
In UK you can't buy alcohol if you're below 18. You can drink alcohol in a public place if you're 16 and there is an accompanying adult buying it for you.

It's not quite a "free for all", but anyway, I doubt it relates to the issue at hand.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age#Europe
Huh, that's curious.

30 km/h is what residential streets in Germany are pretty much by default [0].

In busy pedestrian areas, we're getting down to 20 km/h [1] and <low, technically undefined, but around 4-10> km/h [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_km/h_zone#Europe
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begegnungszone
[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrittgeschwindigkeit
Do they grow almonds in Northern Europe? Also, Cattle in Northern Europe are not cattle in California.

These two places are not comparable.
> If you start with Common Lisp it is not "pretty easy" to write a DSL that provides the constraints of Rust.

It's a lot easier than writing Rust.

> you now have an ecosystem of one person

Do you think it would have even been possible for one person to write Rust? Imagine if all the effort that went into writing Rust -- and Haskell and Swift and C-sharp and Python and Java and Javascript all the other myriad balkanized languages that have come along since CL was standardized -- had gone instead into improving CL. Do you really think we would be behind where we are today?

Inventing a new and different syntax for every new language you design is a choice, not a technical necessity. The fact that languages have communities is survivorship bias. It's a bug, not a feature. In Common Lisp, it is possible for a single person to write something truly useful. In other languages, it is not. This is not to say that Lisp's lone-wolf culture is desirable; it's not. But that is NOT a reflection of any technical problem with Lisp. It's a political and cultural problem. And the first step to solving that problem is getting more people to recognize it for what it is.
That seems...sensible. When you start using a new product there's a lot of hidden costs associated with it (backup, failover, load balancing, support, incident management) so you need to take the time to explain why the benefits of that shiny new thing outweigh the costs of all that other stuff.
This took a while for me to get used to coming from Java/Python to Go but I'm very much a convert now - or at least it makes perfect sense for the sorta of Go services we write. It always forces me to think, can this thing fail in normal operation or is this exceptional. If former, it's an error value that eventually should be returned to the client in some form. If latter, it's a panic and I'll see it in Sentry and know I probably have something to fix.
Both are western power countries. Blame gets assigned when the others are a part of it. The headline also would've read: Disaster averted as our forces save the day..
Honestly, it sounds like your current attitude is as extreme as your former one.
If you live in a town that does city composting, you're going to find a lot of vegetable stickers in your 'finished' compost, and it's small enough that it gets through their sifters, so it will probably go through yours too. Some of those stickers are really hard to get off as well, and more of my compostables end up in the garbage bin than I would like.

I really want someone to petition the USDA or FDA or whoever is in charge of this to require that produce be labelled only with biodegradable stickers. I think that would go a long way to answering your concerns as well.
If you really want an extension that requires that, and if it has a repo, you could vet the code a bit (it's JavaScript, so somewhat accessible), and load it as an extension from a file after packaging it up.

Alternatively, you can install it, look in your profile dir until you find that extension, and look through all the code it's using, and turn off automatically update extensions in Firefox when you're happy you want to keep it.

People can say what they will about the great extension convergence where Firefox switched to Chrome style extensions, but having everything just be JavaScript that you can easily review yourself is pretty nice.
When I was a kid, I learned a tremendous amount from playing complex games like SimCity, Civilization, and Ultima. I feel like they opened my horizons to feel empowered to do interesting and meaningful things in the world, and they basically substituted for time I would've spent with GI Joe.

Now, as an adult, when I do game, it substitutes for time I would've spent exercising, working on coding/ML side projects, or hanging out with the family. Hence, I'd like to flip this policy - please cap me at 3 hours a week but allow my kids to play!
Yeah, Spain is a tax hell and the goverment keeps telling us they are actually lower than the European median, which is kind of true but also a big lie.

Some European countries have higher taxes (VAT and income) but also many exemptions to help new businesses which will end up generating wealth and paying taxes.

I don't know if you've heard about our last "startup law". New companies will pay a corporate tax of 15% instead of 25% the first years, which is stupid because no company makes money their first years so they don't actually have to pay anything. As a piece of propaganda it looks well but it's useless.

Then we have our broken pension system which eats almost 40% of the annual budget and everybody I know under 55 knows for a fact that they won't get one when they retire.
Pie in the sky ideas here... but how far is active sonar effective for? Can you launch a probe that enables active sonar some 50-100 miles away, and radios the results back? Or would the depth prevent any type of radio communication...or is active sonar not that long-range?

This whole field is really fascinating to think about.
That was done because the EU demanded it (I think as an outcome of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Commission)
Luke was a pretty decent historian. Writing him off because he was a Christian seems rather narrow-minded.
> Apprenticeships in a trade tend to be such that with sufficient hard work and determination, anyone can fill the trade requirements. The problem solving skills of software development don't seem to fit that model - there are some people, no matter how much you train them, don't seem to be able to move beyond "follow instructions" to "give tasks" when it comes to developing software.

The trades face the same challenge. Over the past decade, I've gotten along well enough with my HVAC guy (one-man shop who brings on a rotating cast of apprentices) to talk with him about this. He reports the same experience ("no matter how much you train them, don't seem to be able to move beyond...").

This isn't a case of "can / cannot solve problems", either. For hobbies they delve in, that cohort appears to problem solve extremely well. I suspect the challenge is finding ways to communicate a mental model of the same problem domain that "clicks" with different personalities.
It's because in software engineering your work product is confidential/proprietary and work samples take a very long time to produce.

If you could review someone's code from their previous jobs, I think it would be quite easy to vet applicants. And it would be much easier to move from job to job.

Instead we have to simulate work samples through whiteboard coding, pair programming sessions, take home coding projects, coding knowledge tests, etc. We know that none of these methods are particularly good, so we err on the side of failing candidates when we are on the fence. They also take a long time to complete, so software engineers are reluctant to change jobs because they know how much of a pain it will be to go through interviews again.

It is much easier for product designers and product managers to pass interviews. You can see their work product.

At my company we're working on a way to create standardized coding projects that can't be faked so you can use them across job applications. If you are interested in this space, shoot me a message: robert at facet dot net.
But it will solve the housing shortage
Did the French government ask for source code or seek to do anything else the GPL allows only to have Orange refuse or block the move?

That doesn't seem to be asserted in the article.
Ford has keypad entry on a number of models, for example.
My reading skills were nurtured by books. My history interest was nurtured by video games. My tech interest was nurtured by finagling with goddamn interrupt priorities and boot disks to get games to run.
I also interviewed with Reddit, although it was a few years back at this point.

I thought I nailed their code challenge and expected to continue through the process, but after that session that was pretty much the last I heard from them. It was pretty disappointing.
The restriction is specifically "online games". Not offline games. Which is interesting because it implies that offline games are somehow less addictive - but in my experience, offline games can be very engaging, too. But perhaps it's in a more wholesome, problem-solving way?

It's kinda impressive that the CCP can make decisions that affect 1B+ humans like this, overnight. I hope it's the right thing to do, for the kids' sake.
> Ad targeting for stuff that I've just bought. Worst offender: Remarkable

In all honesty Remarkable isn't at fault for your ad targeting, Google and Facebook are.

If you stop buying Remarkable and start buying farm fresh produce online you'll start getting ads for local produce.
Samba versions don't correlate with the protocol versions.

The latest SMB protocol versions is 3.1.1.
They try to create a very tight net to control people. This works quite „well“ in North Korea, China is trying to create a „better“ version of that, by using technology. Creating a social scoring system, rating every move you make and everything you say.

If people can’t express their resent at all, at some point they even stop thinking about it.
Haha, that's what makes it exciting to see what I can come up with
Don’t mention the fact cattle and cattle feed is the largest cause of deforestation in the Amazon.