skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey Colin!

Thanks for the feedback and kind words! Really looking forward to making authentication and account management easier for developers and end-users with you!
Show HN: Daily for Mac – The simplest way to track your time
It depends on the exam. I would be at least somewhat insulted at this point to deal with l33tcode, brain teasers, and CS questions. A simple take home project can be okay depending on what it is. If it's a generic "JavaScript" quiz, I'd just walk out. Although this is tooting my own horn, I have enough of a background, enough references, and enough code on GitHub that the idea that I could somehow be lying to a company is more of a conspiracy theory than anything else.
There is a difference between a program with a specification/documentation outlining what it should do, and one that doesn't have a spec.

AFAIK, hello.c doesn't have a spec, so the code is the spec. If I am using it, I have to read the code to know what it does.
Well, that's kind of the point.

The people making the decisions, whether they listened to the presentation or not, perhaps gave too much credence to what was on the slide. The audio portion is temporal, even if recorded. You're there in the moment listening, but it doesn't necessarily last.

But the slide is "eternal". Always there to be referenced, or passed along. The slide was going to be viewed repeatedly over a longer time frame. Biasing the memory of those who may have been at the presentation, and serving as a "single" source of truth for those who did not.

As much as PP is meant to be a visual AID, most folks are actually pretty lousy at using it that way, and PP has morphed, even if unintentionally, as an artifact of record.

I'm as guilty as the next guy wanting to skim the PP deck rather than listening to the presentation. I can skim a deck in 5m, vs sitting for 60m listening.

Similarly for technical papers. Read the intro, the summary, skip to the end, read the conclusion. Only if any of what I read is actually interesting will I dig deeper in to the paper.
This is some black mirror shit.

Yikes.
Don't dare try to question the narrative with physics and science. A Feynman and an O ring in ice water or a Tufte on visualizations will always be hired in at certain levels. For heaven's sake never go down the rabbit hole about how often the shuttles lost heat tiles. It was the foam, unforeseen and unforeseeable.
I did the same thing. I use a twilio number that calls a GCP cloud function. Super handy utility, and I haven't had to pay a dime for it.
Don’t use Python if you’re starting a big project
I can't even imagine the anger on the HN post.

"Google kicked my app off Play because it was too big. WTF?"
> Also, hiring managers... Do you find these kind of tests useful? Why? How?

Former hiring manager.

It's unfortunate because it is a bit insulting. However, there are some people who lie. They lie about being able to code. I don't want to hire a senior dev who I then have to fire shortly thereafter.

A simple, short coding test that any senior dev should be able to do quickly in their language of choice or a longer project that they get paid for are my two favorite options to filter out folks who say they are senior devs but can't code.
Amazon and Energy Dept. team up to change how we recycle plastic
Fake fact-checks are being used to spread disinformation
That’s surely a problem but I try to avoid closed source software for this very reason. Obviously there are a million and one ways closed source software can leave you high and dry, and static linking is one of those but really I think the operative word driving the sadness here is “closed” rather than “static”.
Make a calendar entry with a link to the comment you want to remember
have my git in my CV, and the minute I hear I'm supposed to go through a technical vetting that includes coding I'm out.
Just a few days ago I had the need to implement a random function with a niche proprietary language, where you have no binary data type. Only strings, integers, and floats. Thats fun! I instead used a Lehmer generator with 32-bit arithmetics. I also wondered if there are any better solutions.
I believe this is sarcasm taken to heights. We have $50K+ designs where people are not allowed to touch and use because the aesthetics will be broken :)
Not for the intended audience. Pixel density > refresh rate outside of gaming.
Where does he advocate his novel writing style for science writing? His use, or rather lack thereof, of punctuation in his fiction writing is an artistic choice. As far as I know, Cormac McCarthy is the only writer who is a member of the Santa Fe Institute, so apparently the scientists there appreciate his perspectives.
Ha, sort of ironic to me as a Kiwi - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior

We are still nuclear free too - and we still don't have many military visits to our ports or marine territory considering it's illegal to have a ship or submarine with nuclear weapons or reactor. most navies won't tell you if they have nuclear weapons/reactors so basically they're not allowed here.

(but really, what are we gonna do? we have like two boats.) ;-)
> The Biological Threat Reduction Program’s priorities in Ukraine are to consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern

Where would these pathogens and toxins that need to be secured be coming from?
I buy that Putin has a good deal of support, even if I don't buy zdragnar's "all is lost" fatalist analysis.
> Do you find these kind of tests useful?

I’ve hired dozens of Sr. engineers and given coding tests to almost all of them (after a 2nd round interview, never earlier).

However, my tests are time-boxes (1hr) and are about greenfielding an app (like a ToDo app) to see how they approach a problem rather than programming knowledge.

> Why?

About 33-50% of devs that pass the two interviews fail the coding test. Of the ones that fail, they’re great at interviewing but probably oversold their skills. Some are really poor at time management. Some are really poor at simplifying problems. And some are really poor at following directions.

It’s possible that they were on teams that carried their weight or possible they were exaggerating their capabilities or prior responsibilities.

The opposite has happened too where I’ve been blown away by the code quality and approach.

But overall it’s been a very helpful datapoint in hiring.
I don’t think this is a bug. The program writes to stdout which is guaranteed by *ix to be there. If it is full, it would block until the kernel serviced it. In your examples, the user asked the shell to redirect to a full file and it reported the error.
We had a similar governmentally organized system in our country during the first vaccination round where people could book an appointment. The website fell over and the devs introduced a queuing system and had you waiting in line. Except that it was badly implemented and only enforced client-side (through JavaScript) and hence very easy to circumpass. It also had a similar API which could be polled to see when a slot freed up.

This actually happens quite often. As another example, there is a particular country visa centre which requires you to make an appointment and is typically fully booked for weeks on end. The calendar info is loaded in through an API call and the selected date then form POSTed with a hidden field's value set to an identifier representing the date and time. Not in plaintext, but easy enough so that it can be guessed. Once you spoof the value, no further server-side validation happens and no one at the centre will check it.

I wanted to book a restaurant a couple of weeks ago. As I was discussing options with a friend, the booking provider already forced a refresh and our desired time slot was gone. Again, taking a look in the Network tab of the browser and spoofing a value led to a confirmation at the desired time. I expected a call saying that they were overbooked, though strangely enough the place was not packed (I guess they kept some tables open for social distancing / walk-ins / phone reservations).

This is really security 101 on the same level as SQL injection. Strange how every dev seems to know how to hook up something to an API but still makes the same mistakes.
Resellers pay less than direct customers, so as long as Apple is supply constrained and has more orders than they can fulfil it makes sense that they prioritise the more profitable orders.
It’s a Thunderbolt limitation at 5K.

https://www.datapro.net/techinfo/thunderbolt_info.html#q26
Hello,

This is a fantastic idea and the value it creates in the right situation is huge. Can I ask, how is it different than Pipe? At face value their solution appeared great but the terms for qualification seemed to be unaligned with companies.
>Alice wants out. She proposes that Bob buys her shares for 50k. Bob may either accept the purchase, if he thinks the price is correct, or he must sell his own shares to Alice if he thinks the proposal is over-valued.

"I want out now, at $1,000,000 a share. What? You think my stake is only worth $50,000? Well then, sell me the company!"
Tangentially, I recently used mouse emulation on a timer to manipulate Firefox into sending a push notification with a URL to a mobile device for a partially faked out internal demo.
So as a part of my daily activities, I have to use a portal that has an absolutely terrible interface, with text reflowing on every click, parsing and loading a 1 MB JSON file from an internal API taking about 5 minutes (of course, its a janky SPA with developers filling it with useless JS).

Irritated, one day, I fired up dev tools, opened the Networks tab and copied the relevant API request that was being fired as a bash command, converted it to Python [1]. After that, I merely parsed the JSON, dumped it into a HTML file, and saved it on my hard drive so I wouldn't need to login to the portal again.

[1]: https://curlconverter.com/
Apple can put any price stick on their monitors, until enough idiots accept to buy them.
Yes. I refuse to take them.
Because medical research is useful?
It's not "surprising" that things running on your computer can see what else is running, or that network monitoring can ... monitor a network. I fail to see what either has to do with being flagged as a fraud risk.

Bridges don't connect to exit nodes.
Revocation of all human rights? You aren’t mistaking China and North Korea, are you?

Also, we don’t need to look 150 years back. It’s enough to look at current statistics from American penitentiary system to notice continued race-based mass oppression, and to some extent (fortunately slowly winding down) literal slavery in private prisons.
I’d rather smash out a four hour coding assignment than do a brain teaser at 8am, followed by another one.
This industry has no professional standards or relevant certification - what does a senior developer mean ?

You say you have relevant experience - will you show them your work so they can review it ?

I have a friend that has >7 years of experience - which was spent on obsolete stack in huge corporate contexts - you put him on a new project to bootstrap a generic app and he's basically a junior/mid with some debugging experience and knowledge of SCRUM.

And this was made obvious to him by multiple interviews/tasks he had to do - after which he basically had to spend 6 months getting up to date to be able to work on modern projects.
In cases like this, surviving 2 weeks means it worked out, if not for that individual, but for future individuals. Same thing happened with first heart transplant (18 days). I guess you can call it a dancing bear result; the bear dances, not that it dances well.
1-on-1s are one of my most valuable meetings. You have a direct line to your manager (and often "skip level" where you talking to their boss). That's phenomenal time to push your agenda, build consensus, stuff like that. But if you are just a Jira ticket finisher (and you like it, which is cool!) then I can see how it is less useful.
Fireship Video Made with React
The Apple TV (A12 chip) is currently $199.
The new iPad Air with the M1 chip costs $599.

They also don't need the display, camera, microphone. And could sell it at a loss and make the margins with TV+ and game sales.

But they would need their own bundled controller/accessories and get serious about AAA gaming.
The details not sure but you know they use graphite in those days that get into big trouble. Just melt down is problem. But explosion then spread out. Not sure these cool down of rods of 21 years have year. Hope not.
Did you deal with recruiters? A lot of (but not all of) my bad interview experiences were for jobs that contacted me through a 3rd party recruiter.
It’s 5K. My understanding is there isn’t enough bandwidth on a TB4 cable to do more than 5K @ 60hz.
I am coding for 40+ years...

My experience:
* out of college people remember theory, cannot code.
* mid-level engineers start to forget theory, can code, begin system-wide design.
* senior engineers can design, forget how to code.

If the position of senior engineer expects hands-on coding (mine does), coding exercise during interview is quite revealing (sadly). Personally I do not believe in engineers who cannot code.
As someone who takes video conferences from my desk pretty often I would buy this monitor for the audio/camera (VESA mount version since I already have an ergotron for my monitor) but I don't think I can go back to non-high refresh rate monitor.
You keep avoiding explicitly saying what you mean. By scamming, do you mean the houses bought by Patrice Cullors? The ones she bought with the profits from her bestselling book, where there's no evidence donations were involved?

The idea that progressives are creating a newly racialised world where before everything was meritocratic and equal opportunity /is/ the modern conservative line, and it's a lie. The whole reason for outreach programs is to counteract lack of opportunities that are race based - what exactly do you think racism is?

Actively opposing programs designed to counteract racism, is supporting racism, you do realise that?
I did this early in my career and ended up underpaid in an unfulfilling job. As a candidate (especially one without sufficient experience in the industry), it's difficult to tell if a recruiter is good or if they're just looking to place people as quickly as possible, fit be damned.

If you don't know what to look out for, bad recruiters can frequently come off as better from a candidate's perspective. They get you more interviews, and they won't tell you to pass on an offer because the compensation is too low. You generally don't find out that the job would be a poor fit until you interview, and you won't find out that you're being underpaid until you've already started (if ever).
mRNA vaccine technology was funded out of a DARPA program (from memory, ADEPTS?) to rapidly develop and deploy vaccines to novel pathogens. Circa 2015 or earlier?

At the time, pandemic influenza was the best guess, but the point of the platform and the program was to rapidly address any pathogen.
But a $400 premium?

I work in a "nice" office (with a chair and motorized standing desk that each cost several thousand) and we use nearly bezel-less 4k monitors with brushed aluminum tilt-and-raise stands that aren't made by Apple.

There's a huge range between Apple and AmazonBasics industrial-design-wise now, especially when you're bidding for enterprise-level equipment contracts.
Oh, but yes, that PP slide was bad. Symantic's More on a Mac Plus would have allowed a better job 15 years earlier.
That makes sense. The only bioweapon we were routinely trained on is tear gas, so if they're building stuff on level with tear gas I wouldn't be surprised. The other type of bioweapon that your second link mentioned is microbes that eat through structural material. This looks like it's purposed for breaching, which makes sense given how dangerous breaching is today.
You're being downvoted because the entire process that lead to this decision has been massively analyzed and the root causes were determined.
> Everything just works properly

Not to mention the drastically lower CPU usage compared to its predecessor [1] and general lack of bugs.

> There is a lot of REALLY good software coming out

Agreed, but I would still single out PipeWire as being particularly outstanding. None of the other examples are as new, or as uncontroversial. Anecdotically, when I look at the comment section of any PipeWire article here, I see basically universal (and enthusiastic) praise.

In my case, it comes from the fact that so many sound servers have existed before, and none were even close to satisfactory, until now. It seems genuinely like a hard problem.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28502614
Zirconium can split hydrogen from H2O, but only if exposed to H2O while between about 1000 and 1500 C. You can tell by looking if the rods are this hot, because they will be emitting orange light: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1000%20Celsius%20black%...

If the fuel rods are stored indoors, that building will already be on fire before the rods get that hot.

If the rods aren’t in an enclosed volume, any hydrogen would rapidly diffuse. Eventually it would either oxidise (too spread out for “burn” to feel like the right word) or escape into space.

If they’re in a building which is on fire and while it’s on fire someone sprays water on them, then they’ll produce hydrogen.

IDK if that hydrogen would burn away fast enough to not be an explosion hazard or build up enough that it is, but it shouldn’t come up anyway because any firefighters on site ought to know not to use water in that situation.
Part of why it is mysterious is that there has been a news blackout.

It's not in the interest of Ukraine for the outside world to be getting unfiltered news about conditions on the ground. Consider this problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_damage_assessment

If somebody gets bombed out of their house and shoots some footage of the neighborhood and uploads it to YouTube or TikTok the Russians can view that and know their weapons are effective and know they can bomb some other neighborhood. Similarly if there is footage showing an area is undamaged that area could become a target.

In the first two days of the war I saw a lot of really fascinating footage from which I drew numerous conjectures which could be correct or not. For instance I saw a Ukrainian vehicle that had a letter on it that wasn't a "Z". I saw a Buk scooting around a neighborhood with soviet era "big block" apartments. I saw a big block apartment that got hit by a missile. (I'd conjecture that the Ukrainians turned the Buk's radar on, the Russians shot one of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-radiation_missile which got confused in the urban environment... Yes, a city could be a better place to hide an anti-aircraft radar than an open plain)

There is some propaganda benefit to be had from that kind of footage but it reveals things the Russians shouldn't know (really their bombs and missiles should disappear into the fog of war, the Russians shouldn't know anything about Ukranian Buks) and that is why the newsfeed has turned to reports about "things government officials said"

https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/ukraine-russia-putin-ne...

The world is very curious about that convoy but neither Ukraine or Russia benefits from us knowing.
They ditched the TOSLINK port for the 2016 models.
I can recommend the Ergotron monitor arms.
PractRand seems to have [1] last had a (pre-)release in 2019, and seems to have basic I/O problems that haven't been fixed [2]. There seem to be forks [3] and patches (mentioned in [2]) floating around, to fix such issues ad-hoc. But it seems unlikely that the rest of the code is free of bugs that need fixing too.

And yet, it seems to be the tool that comes up in any discussion of tests of PRNG, and seems to be a fixture of the field. It's always a bit sad (and kind of weird) when core tools that a community depends upon are taken for granted and not given the support and attention they need.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/pracrand/files/
[2] https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2020/02/05/using-practrand-to...
[3] https://github.com/MartyMacGyver/PractRand
Russians Are Finding Ways Around Putin’s Internet Blockade
Only if heated above 1000C, and if there is enough steam. 20 y.o. spent fuel will not heat this much
I came in knowing the outcome, and roughly the point being made, but still found the conclusion of the slide hard to suss out. There were other failures in the chain as well for sure, but I don't think this is just a hit job on NASA vendors.
Yeah, I don't really trust any of these people, because somehow they're all too dumb to install uBlock Origin.
Because it concerned my clients — the musicians.

Apple says “we want to sell all of your clients’ music now”.

I post something on the company blog, read mainly by my clients, saying Apple wants to sell your music now.
It is intentional. Lunduke spends most of his time doling out hate towards trans people now. There's a (now deleted) twitter exchange between him and someone he calls "a man in a dress".

He is a very hateful person these days.
You're wrong only once, but assuming:

1) Putin is crazy enough to launch nukes; and
2) that Russian nukes work in the first place

Which decision is more likely to trigger Putin to launch nukes is still an open question.

My tactical analysis says appeasement is most likely to avoid nukes tomorrow. My strategic analysis says that containment is the right strategy to avoid nukes in my lifetime. Aggression can't be rewarded.
Maybe, but I don't think anyone can deny that it is an appalling slide. I count 3 spelling and grammatical errors alone.

It looks like the bad "before" example in a presentation skills workshop. This was created by engineers working on life and death issues involving billions of dollars of hardware.
How to get the most out of your 1:1s: cancel them. ;) You almost never need a recurring one and talking about something if/when it's relevant and in context is always better.
https://archive.ph/7w0aZ
This is a hypothetical, but how would you suggest engineers that have issues with simplifying problems, managing time or maybe don't realize they're overselling their skills work in a positive direction to correct some of these things?

I've noticed many companies will give technical feedback if you don't pass a round, but seems like there has to be some kind of path to help people like this. Always been curious to me that "ideal" practices for managing time, communicating technically / in a business context never seem to really be written down. I learned some of this (albeit badly) at a few internships, but if there'd been some source to read even if it was only the first 25% that would've been immensely helpful out of college.
> We say it's a four hour assignment, but in truth people who do well take around 6-8.

Speaking of insults. You are wasting people's time and treating them without respect.

I say this as an applicant who has also wasted an entire day on an outrageously complex take-home assignment "estimated" to only take a couple of hours. It left a bitter taste.

In my view, anybody who phones in one of your assignments, or walks away altogether, is dodging a bullet.
I agree. I think there is a disconnect on what was known at the time vs what this retrospective article is assuming was known at the time.
Hey Colin

> We also support auth across N subdomains

I read this to mean you support a session on a.domain.com being valid for b.domain.com -- but you still don't support the same email address tied to different users at different subdomains, correct?
Repo has Apache license, but is loaded with binary blobs and requires paid access keys.