skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> what's more important is how dedicated you are when it comes to reaching a goal. Essentially, they are testing your will power. You know the rules. Can you achieve success and not give up in the middle of the road by skipping, say, Dynamic Programming?

That's an interesting theory. And they pick the goal that happens to be best suited to fresh/current undergrads from Stanford who weren't working a draining job to put themselves through school, so can afford the additional person-months to achieve the gatekeeping that was set up by people like them, for people like them.

I and many other experienced software engineers have demonstrated perseverance and rising to the occasion of extremely challenging goals. But that theory suggests they're not interested in that. Maybe they're interested in the class shibboleth that was established when computers became less of a meritocracy for people with a passion for it, and more of a go-to status job for the upper middle class?
Fukishima was a giant 1960's era GE nuclear plant. Like everything else in the technology world there has been huge evolution since then.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-hope...
Happy to. I’ve done well into the hundreds of interviews at FAANG or whatever the acronym du jour is. We didn’t even look at resumes except to see if they were obviously self-disqualifying. Google SteveY’s rants on the subject if you want more corroboration. Also it’s obvious to anyone that isn’t stupid that “daddy bought me into Stanford” doesn’t indicate an ability to do top tier engineering work.
The size of python packages is becoming an increasingly worrying issue.

A lot of maintainers don't pay attention to excluding test cases and artifacts from their packages, leading to ridiculous package size growth.

Last I checked numpy was close to 100MB, a huge chunk of that being test case artifacts.

Django packages all translations for all languages to ever exist.

Pandas bundles pre-built dynamic libraries with debug symbols.

Etc.

Most of my "production" virtualenvs are close to a GB nowadays, which is insane.
So you do like it. That is unlike the poster I was responding to.
Seems a bit cynical of a take. Cheating prevents you from learning, otherwise you wouldn't need to. Also, college is very limited in how much it can prepare you for a real job. It only offers a subset of knowledge that is needed to be good at any given job. Cheating is basically showing up to class and avoiding the whole point of being there. Why would you show up to a training, to then ignore the training part.

I think it's a combination of culture and every person's upbringing which sets priorities on students to waste time cheating. They have to be there because of expectations either from parents or society, but they don't really want to be there. Students who aren't trying are just going through the motions and will take the path of least resistance which is cheating.
I used something similar when I was a TA 20 years ago and while your assumption seems reasonable, there are actually a lot of different ways to solve even quite simple tasks and most cheating is very obvious on manual inspection.
In my degree (Comp Eng) we overlapped with the Comp Sci program a fair amount. Comp Sci was part of the college of mathematics and Comp Eng was part of the college of engineering, which were on opposite sides of campus and organizationally were very separate.

The cultures could not have been any more different. The engineering labs were loud, full of collaboration and discussion. The professors would sometimes find out a student copied some code and would simply ask "Well, do you understand it?".

The computer science labs were dead quiet. Strict policies around code plagiarism were posted at every door (instant fail and a 1 year ban from any CS class). People were terrified of helping each other and so everyone just worked in isolation.

I learned more in the engineering labs and made deeper connections with people. The coursework was frankly harder, we built more complex things completely from scratch, but because of the collaborative culture I was able to learn from my peers, tackle hard problems, and retain the information.
How exactly do you imagine a server in space can be an economical option, even for a latency-sensitive application?

There are huge anti-economies of scale: the more clients it serves, the more heat it dissipates, which is extremely hard to do in space.

Furthermore, to get any advantage you would need to either run your server in its own constellation, or on a significant fraction of Starlink satellites - otherwise, you server will only have good latency a few dozen minutes a day for any particular point on Earth.
Honestly, I would rather go for that specific info instead. CVEs for security, network graph and PRs for activity, CI maturity for security and maintenance, etc. Stars give you mostly popularity which is not necessarily correlated. But yeah, I agree they can be a single-number-proxy for the above.
I've had to deal with cheating in multiple classes I've taught. The second worst was when someone took their friend's code and just change the name in the header comment. They tried to claim they didn't copy but I had timestamps.

The worst was when a student turned my own solutions back into me with a few variable names changed.
That's cute. I considered doing that back when I was doing steampunk props.

I'd like to see someone revive Scophony.[1] That was the best of the mechanical television systems. It's a much brighter system, because a whole line is illuminated once, not just one pixel at a time. 9' x 12' projectors were built, at 405 lines. The "super-sonic light valve" is the only hard part. That's a long, narrow liquid tank with a transducer at one end. You could probably use a prism from an old laser printer for the fast scanning direction, and 3-phase drone motors to drive the mirrors. Keeping the mechanics in sync would not be hard with modern motor controllers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scophony
The submitter is Jason Donenfeld, aka zx2c4, creator of Wireguard (and the `pass` password manager). This is an impressive record.
> I know there's one game out there sorta like it

The game you're referring to is called One Step From Eden, and it's worth checking out if you want MMBN's battle system wrapped up in a Slay The Spire package.
https://openlearning.mit.edu/courses-programs/mitx-courses

There's good stuff there!
You're a good person and this made me think I should star some smaller project I use. Thank you. Let's show the maintainers some love.
I have to disagree. Professional certification, degrees, etc are not the same as licensing and responsibility for reviewing and approving a specific project. In most jurisdictions I can use the title of Doctor and it is easily determined that I am not a medical doctor but have a PhD in Computer Science.

The abuse that professional engineers have received for various freedom of speech actions are chilling and disgusting. When some one earns the title of PE they don't lose their rights to have and publicly express opinions. https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2017/04/28/...

Sometimes the only way to get things fixed is through political activism. And some times the things that need fixing overlap with decisions and solutions that engineers implement. Leaded gas wasn't just invented, produced, distributed, legalized, transported, sold, burned, by one person.
It’s not unusable, just a bit slow to load.
Yup this is true for the most part, although someone bad will be harder to justify.

It’s hilarious listening to people review candidates on third coding interviews. Usually it’s “this person didn’t know this one thing I think makes me really smart”.

This is why I lean so heavy in OSS to review candidates. I can see how they interact with people, and whether they are actually able to build software that _people want_

I find with this approach it’s a lot harder to justify nonsense.

I hear people say maybe they don’t have time for OSS and then hand them a Leetcode interview, which as we all know is just about memorizing problems. OSS is such a better metric and has the added benefit of improving the world.
It’s called Chord Melody and it’s pretty advanced. Great musicians such as Elton John make it seem so easy to write. Add in Voice Leading, another music composition tool, and you have yourself some sophisticated music. What’s great about Elton John is he does all this complicated stuff yet it seems so natural, it never sounds forced or contrived. That’s why Elton John is a master, and it’s all part of what makes this song great.
How exactly do you imagine running software somewhere heat can't be dissipated, expensive shielded electronics are required, and software needs to be redesigned so that it handles the constant random bit flips is a "killer advantage"?
I like A) simply because sometime during college I became a terrible test taker. I realized that I'm very good at projects and actually understanding the concepts, but I couldn't articulate that in the traditional exam or problem sets.

When it came time to anything that involved presentations or demonstration of a project, I was exceptionally better at the topic. Maybe it was a better way of learning since I was more engaged, or the types of professors that heavily believe cheating is going to happen any way and try to mitigate it actually give a damn.
If you went to college 20 years (or more) ago, things have changed a bit. Everything is more expensive and income hasn't risen to catch up. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co...
Maybe?

Or it could be that stepping on toes makes it important to keep all your I's crossed and your T's dotted.

Or it could be that using your status in non-standard ways (like to give weight to activism) is still using it and means you need to keep it up.

Or it could be that power corrupts and authorities need to be sued every so often to keep them honest.
Most of the time this quantifying is impossible as you say. But sometimes half a dozen well-paid professionals do spend two hours discussing the colour of a bike shed.
Just ask yourself. Did you learn the course well enough that you could have done as well without those questions saved?

As others have said, we go to college these days for a fastpass to middle class. If you haven’t needed the knowledge since, maybe you got what you needed out of the class and you worked the system in a legal way. Or maybe you paid a lot of money for that class and yet cheated yourself out of the knowledge you were paying to be taught. On some level it comes down to how you feel about it.
Ask HN: How to Explain HTAP(Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing)?
Some databases claim the HTAP feature they have, and the feature sounds complex. What is the best/simplest example or demo to explain HTAP?
Do you need a special addon to do so? Or does it show up if you have both apps installed?
Sure, but it’s more challenging to keep the bundle size very low for no reasons if you want to use modern tooling and work in a team. It’s fine for your personal hobby website, but people at work shouldn’t waste times and create problems to avoid a small and rare problem.
having detected traces says that we are very good at detecting traces. It does not mean "threaten all of Europe and Africa".

The death and destruction from tsunami itself was several orders of magnitude more than from nuclear station malfunction. [1]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/11...
I learned them. They changed nasty* differential equations into simple algebra problems. Oh boy did I learn them.

*Or rather I thought at the time they were nasty. Later I learned about nonlinear differential equations, where Laplace transforms don't help.
Politics is war, and everything is politics.
Thanks. I know that all the raw material is available to me, but it's just not the same. It's different when you can completely focus on studying, be part of a community with a bit of peer pressure, and have a social circle that goes through the same experience. You don't get the this from online courses, reading books, or MOOCs.

I think a big part of this is split attention, but I also don't feel comfortable taking 1-2 years off my job in the middle of my career just to study.
For those new to Strong Towns, I feel this article is most representative of what they’re about: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
All tech companies put most of their engineering under “research and development”. It lets you capitalize your expenses and smear them out over many years.
I wouldn’t say clearly, it could be a reference to Ludovico Sforza… or maybe just to the meaning of “ famous fighter “, which Ludwig also has a similar meaning.

In which case, it is a very clever reference in a way
> Either you pass this hurdle by hook or by crook, or you spend the rest of your life flipping burgers. It's not a hard choice.

Yes, but the assumption is you're passing with the knowledge in your head. Having the career knowledge is what in theory allows you to get the job, and then not flip burgers. I'm not sure how students end up thinking it's literally the number of your grade that makes the difference.

Maybe it differs from career to career, because I guess some careers it's a matter of getting your foot in the door and that's it. With more technical careers it's already the case your grade is not as important as demonstrating expertise in the first few months on the job.
I don't understand what's so misterious about this. It's pretty obvious from the message that the problem is that program tried to run illegal instruction. Looking at opcode the instruction is part of AVX extensions.

I'm surprised we still encounter CPUs that don't have those these days. I'm pretty sure every CPU these days has AVX extensions (fact check this :) ).

By the way, title is somewhat click beauty. This is not a python crash. It's one of the shared libraries that were loaded by matplot lib that trigged the problem.
And the Titanic was also considered an unsinkable ship...

Sure technology has improved and it is safer, but you know can make it even safer still? Not putting them on places with lots of seismic activity.
Well, that's a really great sign you don't want to work there. If I don't have a good interview experience I don't want the job.
I just "say" I'm an engineer like all the coders here. I don't hold a certification nor do I have an engineering degree. But I sure enjoy saying I'm an engineer. Like many of you fellow coders I'm getting close to claiming I'm a doctor too. Just call me Dr. Code. I have a license to precribe additional billable hours.
An empty glass

That last cigarette

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grash9Kv1_M
Interesting, I've never met or encountered someone from the Navajo Nation so that's good to know! I always wondered how it was resolved there.
Yeah, Poetry is definitely slow. This issue covers things:

https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/issues/2094
This already exists. See https://RustJobs.dev and http://rust.careers/
You can not solve that problem. You can not even guarantee font size, it's useless to worry about a font's width. Part of your job as a web developer is to make your employer understand the realities of the web platform.
1. Remember that a bloom filter only answers yes/no questions. So it can't cache hash table values, but it can cache set membership (is X in the hash table?).

2. Rather than speed per se, a better reason is space. You have a small bloom filter that lives close to the query. The query asks "is this entry in the hash table?" and get a local answer from the bloom filter, either "no" or "maybe yes". The answer is fast not because the hashing is fast, but because the small size allows it to be local and fast. Only for the "maybe yes" answers do you look it up in the hash table which is large and lives far away. This saves a lot of time if most answers are "no".
Look at it this way. Cheating and not cheating has its own risks associated. And when the risk/reward of cheating vastly outperforms on average compared to the risk/reward of not cheating, every single rational actor will cheat. In fact, not cheating is a purely irrational thing to do given that you know these odds - it's based on a belief that your individual action will make any sort of meaningful difference.

And why should any young person think that? Just observing the world around them definitely says the opposite.
> perf characteristics of different iteration styles are often significant to the task at hand.

This ridiculously untrue.

It's also a great example of how dumb current interviews are. Someone like this poster could easily interview you, and now what? Do you just play along or begin to explain how incredibly wrong they are?
I don't like it when people touch the RNG and I think Wireguard glows.
And? Electron can use chrome or edge components, the latter aren't based on electron, it is based (in part) on them.
Why put it there if it is an avoidable risk?
Coding interviews are because of cheaters and frauds:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31544634
Nor is it even relevant.
Yeah, I had a blast attending “lockdown university” during the deepest part of covid in 2020. Grades only for fun points and just taking classes and doing assignments that I thought would be beneficial.
I noticed a swap in your prose (still comprehensible), but just realized that cheating and teaching are semi-spoonerisms (swapping the sound order of a single word)... how appropos!
> Many earthworm and soil experts have settled on a version of this explanation: Moving around the soil is relatively slow and difficult, even for earthworms. They can cover a lot more ground on the surface...when it rains, the surface is moist enough for worms to survive and remain hydrated. For a few species, they can more easily move about and find mates. For other earthworms, it may well just be a way to disperse and move into new territory.

Makes sense to me especially with other notes about the absence of young worms. And it feels like predators might be at least a little less active during the rain.

Anyway as a sucker who always helps a worm on the sidewalk out this article was super helpful :)
Google isn't turning up anything - mind linking SteveY?
The uber/swift rewrite thread from a couple years ago is highly informative of the company "engineering" culture.

The kinds of decisions taken for granted by the hacker news thread/etc are the kinds of decisions that could sink a self funded company, starting with the fact that they are basically writing multiple copies of the application for each platform (ios vs android) and going from there. This is maybe the problem with VC funded companies (like government contracts) the money just keeps flowing independent of all the bad decisions being made. Also, having enough engineers that whole teams can be split off to rewrite the application for no appreciable benefit except to peoples resume's is itself an upper mgmt problem. If the goal was a single unified application I might see how something like that could be justified, but they choose technology stacks that are to native for that to work.
They have a good YouTube channel but you’d have to watch a bit to get an idea. Basically they’re advocating for building towns and cities that aren’t car-centric. Talking about overhauling planning standards to stop single-dwelling only suburbs that are only accessible by car, proper transit planning, not just enlarging freeways and then finding induced demand makes them even slower over time, etc.
> https://jsfiddle.net/vbd3fok5/ looks fine to me

No, it doesn't. Here's the screenshot with a line I added:

https://i.imgur.com/6pLiasn.png

> if you insist on ignoring that, https://jsfiddle.net/qpb0d45n/

And now you have blocks of different heights. Which cause other issues.
https://www.google.com/search?&q=android+ios+cross+platform

Wow that was easy.
To all "professors" (so-called) - you are not there to TEST people, you are there to EDUCATE them. Cheating in this context becomes impossible.
I prefer that my browser show me the fonts that I prefer, so I tell it to do that instead of using web fonts and CSS font suggestions.
Statements like this make me distinctly angry because I do everything I can to remove myself from the interview, of sorts.

If they come up with, or start walking with an interesting solution, I listen to them.

Tabs and spaces don't matter.

I actively work against the biases of "whether I like the person or not" because I'm aware of that as a factor.

We can absolutely minimize all of those peripherals when we explicitly train against it and a good programming interview doesn't have to be about that.
Good read, but man those gifs are distracting.
EVM based deterministic execution has proven to be a resilient model for smart contracts. The other major inventions are not Ethereum itself, but it led to, to name a few, PoS consensus and zero knowledge proofs which I particularly admired. It has grown into a huge ecosystem of practical cryptographic schemes. Ponzi schemes are possible with just Bitcoin, and yeah Ethereum is full of crypto ponzis at the moment, but all these useful cryptographic inventions may not have been made practical without Ethereum.
There are number of areas where scalability issues can come up. Most of them are usually due to not well optimized database queries. There was time when real-time data subscriptions were too slow for me with Mongo but now you can seamlessly add Redis for that and bottleneck goes away.
Any particular area you are concerned about?
> It’s hilarious listening to people review candidates on third coding interviews. Usually it’s “this person didn’t know this one thing I think makes me really smart”.

Yup. I just went through a round of interviews at multiple companies. In the past I successfully interviewed at a FAANG.

I agree completely.
If you're augering for a $250,000 job, and the gate is a leetcode interview, just spend a couple weeks prepping for it. It'll be the biggest bang for the buck effort you'll ever make.
The $200M/year figure for the launch is also wrong - that's the estimated cost from one month of launches, not one year. It's not fair to call it a monthly cost either, but it's definitely not a once per year event.

According to Wikipedia [0], they have had 53 successful non-test launches so far, starting in November of 2019. So 53 launches divided by 31 months = ~1.7 launches/month. At Soyuz costs, that's 1.7*$40M = $68M/month to launch the satellite fleet that they have today, which they would have to repeat every 5 years. Note that this is only an estimate of the launch cost, not the satellites, ground stations, or the cost of the individual devices. It also doesn't include bandwidth and other peering costs, personnel, sales and marketing, insurance etc.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_launches
I upvoted at the time but I just wanted to mention that I've scrolled through my comments/replies a few times and I've been chuckling every time I read it. ;)

been kind of a crappy couple weeks for me due to family illnesses and it did bring a smile to my face. feels like a "the matrix has you" sketch from the flash player days...
> His point is that engineering licensing boards should be more than just a government-sponsored cartel for rubber stamping conforming license requests

And I explicitly stated how that should be done in my comment. That is not "a piece of bark on the tree". It's the forest. As long as "professions" depend on governments to license them, the problem will continue.
UK politics is essentially run by Whitehall mandarins with elected pols as hood ornaments on the political machines. (Current PM Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson's bizarre life and political 'career' is a particularly good example of this)
California is rapidly heading down the same path, not least because the giant bureaucracy has been staffed with layers of supermajority appointments, all headed up by a Getty family hood ornament