skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An aircraft autopilot controls speed and direction, within limits.

This is false, and I don't know why Tesla stans keep bringing this BS up like it's some sort of justification.

A modern aircraft autopilot is fully capable of taking a plane from takeoff to landing without any pilot intervention required. Pilots frequently use autopilot in flight, but rarely do so for takeoff or landing because it's more stressful to monitor the craft's autopilot system at those moments than it is to simply handle those parts of the flight themselves (and at least for autoland functions, the airport must be certified for autolanding).
Did you know you can create polls here on HN instead of linking to Twitter?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
I'm pretty sure the man will stick it back to you if you follow this advice.
You’d dramatically raise your risk of cancer from x-ray exposure for almost zero clinical benefit.
>That's why not one startup has hacked healthcare in America, not one.

This post makes a lot of points, but in general I think they boil down to the above statement : the belief that large, complex systems are just run by stupid and/or malicious people and that a sufficiently clever 'hack' will fix all the problems. I think that is an attitude that is common on HN, but wrong.

Most big problems are not technology problems, they are People problems with a capital P. Technology problems can be fixed with 'one simple hack they don't want you to know about!!!' People problems are complex and messy and cause and effect can be intermingled vertically and horizontally with other seemingly unrelated factors as well as temporally with things that don't even exist yet or used to exist but don't anymore!

The way we fix these messy, complex People problems is by respecting that they are real problems, that the people acting on those systems are (mostly) reasonable people just doing what reasonable people do, and slogging through solutions a day at a time with the oldest technology around - political power. These problems resolve if you can get enough people to agree they need solved.
They are exaggerating but not all wrong. As hiring manager my job is not to train you for your next job. I'm hiring for productivity and that takes time. If you are going to jump ship before you "pay" back the company then I'd rather skip on you. There is no test but I want 2-3 years if you take 9 months or more to get going and I'd be foolish if I didn't want more.

Lots of programmers think they are 10x but few are. Even my best senior engineers took 2-3 months to settle in and contribute more than they take and juniors are bigger gamble.

The best proxy now is will you spend 1 hour on a simple set of tests, if not you are not serious or are shopping for counteroffers.
> if that's the case, it doesn't explain why Google's software and product quality has been declining steadily.

Why do you assume that poor products are poor products chiefly because of code?
Likely because one would “applaud the effort”. If I can’t prove to the interviewer that I’m capable of going beyond leetcode, by building my own language to solve the same problem, then I might as well memorize a thousand solutions to cheat my way into FAANG. The latter will guarantee entrance, but I can’t stand the memorization process. I’m a professional, and like an undergrad or grad, I shouldn’t have to memorize homework problems to pass exams
'find' is slow to the point of being useless for me. It can never find the file I'm looking for before I give up waiting for it to finish running. So I'm excited if fd can provide the same functionality but run much faster.
A couple years ago I worked for a different federal agency and RHEL was used extensively, but was being replaced with OpenShift. The base images being used were all over the map and the whole process was quite a convoluted mess.
The south will rise again! and get its ass beat again!
>Both tables and indexes use the same b+-tree implementation based on Lehman and Yao (prev/next links on internal nodes).

Tables in Postgres are not btree's they are unordered heaps. The row id in the b-tree index points to a page number + item index in the heap.

A true clustered index would simply expose the index itself as a table without secondary heap storage, reducing I/O and storage space. Row visibility seems to complicate this in PG as index only scans may require checking the heap for visibility.
The Silver Searcher appears to be if not dead then certainly resting.
Yes. From the article:

> To learn more about the scale of the global arachnid trade, the authors of the new paper used a handful of search terms — “spider,” “scorpion,” “arachnid” — in nine languages to identify websites that might be selling the animals.
> Japan will face a national health crisis within a month.

(spoiler: they didn't)
Woodworking is also a learnable skill that's completely unrelated to on-the-job activity.

Why not ask candidates to build a desk? As a take-home project! If you're truly kind, you'll let them keep the desk even if they don't get the job.
> You can't have your cake and eat it, too.

But the thing is... you can

Most of us are not designing algorithms, most of the time, or any of the time

Many engineers are just filling seats in places that are just in the business of sucking up talent from the market instead of having a bunch of entreprenuers running around

Rest and vest
Super fair, lol. We'll work on optimizing it - just a tiny team and lots of things on our plate rn. The main issue is our images / video, which I have tried compressing but can't do so while maintaining the quality. Any tips are greatly appreciated!

Believe it or not, the last version of this website was even heavier...
I agree with what they’re doing, but the messaging around it is odd.

What they’re trying to do is diversify their curriculum from western-dominant culture to include other, lesser-mentioned cultures. That’s fine and honestly a refreshing take from higher education.

The messaging is inflammatory and ridiculous though. The problem is not white or colonizer culture. The problem is Western-centric education excluding other interesting literary movements around the globe.

As usual, this sounds like a reasonable move branded terribly by the woke mob (or a media outlet trying to find their next outrage piece).

I don’t find it patronizing at all — what I do find patronizing is the interpretation by the quoted author on the article.
* and that transferred wealth is mostly spent on an enormous military budget

FTFY. It's not done out of philanthropy.
You could save some time and keystrokes by just typing out "too big to fail."
My advice is to get good at leetcode "the right way". Don't memorize problems. Instead, learn the underlying algorithms.

Learn heapsort, quicksort, how to find medians, how to derandomize and calculate the running time of the quicksort/median algorithms.

Learn how hash tables, red-black trees, and b trees work. Learn why vectors allow O(1) append but only if you amortize the analysis.

Learn depth-first and breadth-first search, learn A*, learn all-pairs-shortest-paths. Learn enough dynamic programming that you could implement a memoize decorator.

All of this is valuable knowledge. It'll pay off to learn this in the long run. Yeah, interviews overrate its importance. It's good to learn it anyway. If you learn that stuff and you are good at the basics of practical programming like string and array manipulation, you'll be able to do well at interviews.
Try from a private browser window.
Yes, exactly this. Leetcode isn't just an irrelevant skill in these situations, it's the wrong skill. Algorithmic optimisations are pointless if you can't assess how much value they generate.

MAANG seems to use Leetcode as a legal proxy for conscientiousness and IQ without testing for other relevant qualities such as strategic insight, creativity, and other skills that are essential for a successful business.

There's no problem with testing for basic coding ability, but if you're not selecting for broader skills - preferably with some diversity - you get the same old leet monoculture causing the same familiar delivery and stability issues.
It's more than cynical: https://www.britannica.com/event/Griggs-v-Duke-Power-Co outlines that IQ tests are unconstitutional due to racial biases.

It was out of that judgement, that companies started to require degrees for office jobs of all sorts, as you could discriminate based on education but couldn't on an arbitrary IQ test. And naturally, tests on the topic of a job can also be administered.

And I do think you're right - Leetcode does select for recent graduates who likely were taught in a throwaway language for academic purposes. And selecting for young college graduates are highly likely what they're searching for, as they also do not know their worth.
I like the idea of this list but in practice there seems to be a lot of 'hiring without witheboards *if you happen to interview with the same team that I did and if the hiring manager for that team hasn't moved on since I interviewed there 4 years ago.'
Mostly two things at the moment. Both game related.

The first is try to make a website for small, quick games I develop. I'm going to try to make some light scaffolding to help facilitate this. In particular, one of my games I've come up with so many small tweaks to over the years, that I'd like them to actually get out in the world instead of just living in a notebook.

The game is called Proximity[1], it's a simple turn-based game I initially released 18 years ago that I've been working on sequels off and on since) and I was thinking I could call the site 'Proximity Variations', kind of like the composer Elgar did 'Enigma Variations' (name might be a bit pretentious, but it was the inspiration for the idea). I need to make a really lightweight version of the game first for that though.

The other is the heavyweight sequel to the game (technically Proximity 3, I released Proximity 2 a while back) I'm working on in Unity. I've got a lot of ideas for new and interlocking mechanisms to make it a game that's still pretty simple to understand, but has deeper strategy.

I was actually relatively far along in developing a sequel to the game using Monogame, but giving modern VR a try managed to shake my brain off the design guard rails and I came up with so many cool ideas to deepen the core system without it getting too complicated I felt I might as well switch engines since I was already fighting Monogame to do anything more than some basic 3D anyway. Game already looks prettier in Unity.

I also think it might be a good idea to build in support for VR at some point, maybe not for the initial release, but keep it in mind as I'm building the game.

There's also a board game design I kind of want to get polished up for pitching to publishers at Gen Con later this year, but I haven't done too much with it recently. It's an area control game about building pyramids. Basic theme, but a clever core mechanism. I took it to a Protospiel convention (for board game designers and playtesters) and got a lot of positive feedback and some good ideas for making it better.

[1]: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/183428
It's faster than find in that I don't need to read the manpage every time I use it.
Sonic toothbrush

Macbook Air with M1

Ebook reader with Android

Phone with USB-C and USB 3.0+ (can be connected to a hub, display + mouse + keyboard works) - I run full Node.js and use coder-server to code on it using browser as my access into the dev env

Unlimited mobile internet plan
Yeah, if I was going far, I'd allow extra time, for sure.

I don't actually live in Germany, so I don't really know how frequent these trains run.

I have really only one example, where I missed a train from Frankfurt to Bingen, and had to pay a fortune for a cab ride because the next train was 3h later and I'd miss my planned day.

But if that's a common frequency, the train can work out to be inconvenient, because you will have only a very few times you can plan on without building in lots of waiting.

If you're going a far distance with an hourly service, it's probably convenient enough for most things, provided you never miss a train.
In the Netherlands, almost all train stations have bicycles for rent for 4.15 euro per day. You have one in minutes (uses the same card as paying for the train does). And there are bicycle paths everywhere. No need to take a taxi after taking a train.
How do I find them? Or how do these companies find me?

I kid you not, I’ve received messages from 200+ companies over the past 3 months and all of them have the leetcode round as their first round.
People who say they are bad at leetcode sound like the people who say they are bad at math. Sure, right now you might be worse at learning math than someone else, but there are strategies to learning math better

If you are memorizing leetcode you are doing it wrong.

If you are doing more than 60-80 problems, and not applying to the most competitive companies, you are doing it wrong.

There is a strategy to learning how to study leetcode, and yes, studying leetcode is hard. But you need to make sure you are not blindly memorizing solutions or else you're doing it wrong and wasting time.

Let's say you are doing an array problem and there is some trick that is necessary for the problem that you didn't know. When you get the problem wrong, learn what the trick is, but don't "memorize" it. Learn it and learn how it works. Then think deeply on what other problems might use this trick. Does it involve a loop that goes until `i <= someVar.length` ? What happens if you change the code to < instead of <= ? What happens if some other edge case happens?

I've seen this happen with binary search. Someone learns the algorithm by finding the algorithm online in their language of choice, but doesn't spent time fiddling with the code or thinking about edge cases.
"The bank in Margin Call was packaging MBS out of mortgages, not speculating on the price of commodities using derivatives to gain leverage."

Correct. That's my point.

It's not merely that you can't have one without the other ... it's that you very likely wouldn't want to eliminate the (margin call guys) even if you could.
Okay, but whatever the geographical/cultural/racial criteria is, it would be extremely surprising to me if a college-age population was stymied by contradiction of authority in a totally abstract, gamified context like OP describes. The whole "study hard to find the lie in the lecture" thing does not seem like some radical Western counter culture teaching method. Adult students will understand the intent and play along, yes, even first generation immigrants from Asia.

I think what you've described in your anecdote is a clash over a contradiction of real authority, opining that a judge was incorrect. I wouldn't be surprised if upbringing was a good predictor of the likelihood that a student question a teacher who questions somebody perceived as an even higher authority.
The discussion here isn't about code. It's about quality of engineers hired. If their software and product quality is steadily declining then that says something about their team. Perhaps they are incredible coders but don't have good business skills or "customer obsession".
It is odd that you think of crypto as a ponzi while promoting a referral network in your HN profile.
> I've always felt the "could be harmful" was a rationalization by radiologists worried about their job security

Surely concern for the well-being of the patient figures in there somewhere...

Or imagine this: A liver lesion is incidentally discovered on your abdominal CT performed for unrelated reasons. Its radiographic characteristics are equivocal. Additional imaging studies fail to completely exclude the possibility of a liver malignancy. You undergo a biopsy. But the biopsy is complicated by hemorrhage. Surgery is required. You develop a post-operative nosocomial infection. etc. etc.

To the extent that risks along this chain of unfortunate events is known, yes, warnings could put some of the quantified decision making in the patient's hands. Well, except for the rampant innumeracy in the general population...
In memory of Vernon “Vern” D. Buerg
Two-headed sharks becoming increasingly common (2016)
> I think I have seen a study that says that in the situations where Teslas can self-drive, they are on the same level as a human driver.

Maybe link to those studies. The one plus Tesla (and other ACC+lane keep systems that are obvious, as in 'loud beep when the system disengages'; my Honda notoriously gave the quietest beep whenever it lost its tracking of lane lines) has is that they don't look at their phone, don't get drowsy, and don't get distracted. So while many situations come up where a human could've prevented a crash, eg running into an overturned semi[0], it leads to about 3x less crashes compared to only passive safety features [1].

0: https://electrek.co/2020/06/01/tesla-model-3-crashing-truck-...

1:

> one crash for every 4.31 million miles driven in which drivers were using Autopilot technology (Autosteer and active safety features). For drivers who were not using Autopilot technology (no Autosteer and active safety features), we recorded one crash for every 1.59 million miles driven.

> we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before impact, and we count all crashes in which the incident alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed.

https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
I don't think "refined carbs are bad for you" is correct. Consider that many of the healthiest, least obese, longest lived societies on earth (e.g. Japan) have diets heavy in refined carbs (e.g. white rice).
> Really the answer is either commit to the grind or go for a job at a non-tech company.

There is quite a world outside these mammoths Google/Facebook/Amazon/(MS, depending on how their IBMization is going these days) and their minions/wannabes. Personally I would not work for any of these even if they paid me in gold bars.
The algorithm test is standardized. If you make up your own weird test, candidates won’t play ball. Personally I’ve turned down companies that had a strange interview process that required extra preparation. It’s not worth it when I’m trying to churn through a dozen interviews (without my current employer noticing). The leetcode prep process is unpleasant, but since I have to do it anyway, adding one more company doesn’t take any extra studying.
He’s unreasonable and delusional.
Just keep in mind that the interview is two-way.

They're judging you on your 1337-coding skillz.

It's ok to judge them on their poor judgement. And seek employment elsewhere.

You can even be more helpful than most employers are to job candidates. Tell them that's why you're not interested. Maybe they'll learn from it. Maybe.
This doesn't seem right at all. I can kludge together a solution to an arbitrarily complex problem in any language, but that doesn't mean I'm writing it in a way that can be extended and developed upon by other people. The latter is also what takes up the majority of development time.
Show HN: Sell and delegate visually, distraction free with Whatboard
Whatboard: https://www.whatboard.app

After a year using Whatboard internally to visually close & manage over $4m in sales and complex projects, its with great trepidation we birth this thing on HN to face our missteps. We tried many solutions over the years and apart from the long ago FB consumed and discarded drop.io, nothing fit our needs.

How we sell with Whatboard (at our sister company): https://whatboard.app/b/singleviewselling

How we delegate with Whatboard (at a related entity): https://whatboard.app/b/singleviewdelegation

Thank you in advance to anyone in the HN community interested in providing feedback, and to a certain 14 year old Gracklflint whose QA participation with our dev team made this even more enjoyable.
find with its built-in -delete action would have avoided executing the external rm command millions of times.
> if a language has False/None/Null/Nil as first class values, then the only sane path is for everything else to be True

I very much disagree.

Every type should have a false value.

Note that False is a bool while None/Null are pointers/references and Nil is Lisp's empty list. (Python's empty list is [] and it also has empty tuples.) Why should those types and no others have a false?
My key takeaways:

* Miller and Chesney’s lectures describe the course of the war up to that point, with Chesney focussing first on fighting in Virginia and then on operations in the west and south, such as Sherman’s March to the Sea

* In his lectures, Chesney laments that Sherman, in his March to the Sea near the end of the war, ‘has given no voucher or note anywhere for the supplies he has seized [from civilians]’ and expresses concern about whether the North and South could be reconciled, given the brutality of the conflict

* The combat between the Monitor and the Merrimac, notable for being the first clash between ironclad ships, is referenced but purposely not discussed because ‘the result has not influenced the military progress of the war’

* In some cases, the conduct of the Civil War was used by British officers to justify their own opinions of how the UK should prepare its military for future wars

* The RUSI lectures demonstrate the challenges of following a war as it is occurring from a distance, the disappointment with the Union’s military performance early in the war and the manner in which foreign conflicts were mobilised to justify the policies of people like the Duke of Cambridge
Lawful interception is precisely not made for "three letter agencies", since the latter derive the majority of their power from not spying on the law subjects of their own country. Although the US have of course intentionally muddled this with FISC and at times outright disregard for that simple principle.
Here is a neat way to try it out without having to install it locally: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1o7SoVlQ-2SxjqKL7A1D...
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa1102873

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3762603/

What I found mind blowing when I first read these studies (particularly the second link) is that the positive-predictive value of the CT screen was only 3.8% for lung nodules that were 4mm or larger in size. Basically just means we find all kinds of lung abnormalities all the time that "could be cancer" but aren't.

Keep in mind, that the screening criteria was people over age 65 who had a 30+ pack-year smoking history (1 pack-year = smoking 1 pack of cigarettes per day in one year), and had to have smoked within the last 15 years.

I can also tell you from doing CT lung biopsies that it's not a procedure to take lightly. Lot of important structures in the chest.
For the multiple brain mets SRS project, we will be presenting at this year's AAPM annual meeting.
I am thankful that fuel prices are high because it makes the cost of my regular car maintenance seem remarkably inexpensive.
> The old saying that the 1st Amendment doesn’t apply to “yelling fire in a crowded theater” was an argument a Supreme Court justice used to justify jailing a man for handing out anti-draft pamphlets.

This whole 'you can't yell fire in a crowded theater' thing is not a real thing.

Per @popehat:

5/ '"shout fire in a theater" is a rhetorical device used in 1919 to justify jailing people for writing anti-draft pamphlets in World War I. The First Amendment standard (to use the term generously) applied in that case has been dead for more than a half-century.'

6/ 'The same judge went on to smirk "three generations of imbeciles are enough" to justify forcible government sterilization of persons deemed undesirable by the state, so you know, he had a way with words.'

7/ 'So when you trot out "you can't shout fire in a theater" in response to a First Amendment question, you're using the catchphrase a eugenicist used to support jailing people for criticizing the draft in a case that hasn't been good law for a half century.' [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1356670918706089985