skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The driver thing is absurd because unless the OS is 100% identical, they will not be compatible causing random crashes. Imagine how unstable your system will be if you are running a driver that wasn't tested on your system? I don't want buggy drivers form 2003 on my computer! If this was my requirement I would install Windows XP.

How I see it, it's not really intended for general purpose use. Instead imagine a situation where you have some very expensive equipment connected to a PC and the only drivers available for that equipment are for Win2k. Then imagine that old PC breaking down and the replacement isn't compatible with Win2k. But you could plop in ReactOS and continue using that equipment with Win2k driver. And because it's open-source you can just kludge it until that proprietary driver works just like you want.
Patent trolls seldom go after foreign businesses, or do anything else that even remotely looks like actual work.
Ignoring a properly filed lawsuit is pretty much the dumbest thing you can do. If they win by default (which is what happens if you ignore it) they can still successfully come after assets.
I support the project as well.

But, if it were very popular how would MS respond? I'm pretty sure they wouldn't ignore it.
The lookup time of a binary search tree is also in O(n). Personally, regardless of the algorithm, I prefer to just say that it is in O(Ackermann(n,n)).
Its not so much that the image is pornographic, the interesting part is that most computer graphics group is male. If there was a 50/50 male to female split, I doubt this image would have become the de facto test case.
> Engineers are paid way too much

but

> you should be fired for not treating your engineers like solid gold

The former is a good way to do the latter.
This.

A "simple" thing like the kind of language you used to learn first have a huge impact in how you code or solve problems.

And if, for example, people learn first C, then try to workaround the limitations of it... in python.

I learn first foxpro. And my personal experience is that it give me a huge boost in database/data manipulation than the regular developer. To this day (I do integrations between several ERPs made with different languages and databases) the system that I have meet with people with strong C-like and algorithmic stuff are qualitative worse, by a LOT (take in account, is not normal to meet GREAT GREAT developers, so YMMV), that people that start with DBase languages (yes, DBase/Fox was HUGE in my country ;)).

Is like this. If a person that learn by the CS path have a problem, inside his C/C++/Java:= Amazing. But when the same problem is inside a database engine :=Not amazing.

Is weird! Some folks have tell me I'm a great developer (I know I'm not. I'm very average) because I know SQL! I could figure how solve stuff with Sql/Sql languages naturally, but then... I'm inside C/C++/Java and I lost if need to do a black tree...
> "But I do not completely agree that candidate is at a loss."

How is the candidate not at a loss?

Under the current system, a candidate can ask any number of questions about the company, their culture, their technology, and other things that are of extreme importance to the candidate in deciding which opportunities to pursue.

Under your system, none of this can be meaningfully answered except the "brochure" facts that are trivial to discover anyways.

Under the current system, a candidate immediately meets with a member of the company.

Under your system, he/she will meet the employer "eventually".

Everything about this system is a net negative compared to the status quo, for the candidate.

In the current employment climate for (good) software engineers, where demand massively outstrips supply, I simply do not see a system that penalizes candidates going anywhere. I really hate whipping this card out, but the last two times I've been actively seeking a job I've had no less than a dozen companies respond positively within a single day. I would be severely disinclined to do anything through an intermediary.

This goes double if I'm only passively looking. I'm not looking to jump ship, so I have zero desire to spin my wheels on opportunities without any information on whether this is interesting to me or not.

The climate favors the candidate, not the employer, unless the employer is exceptional. IMO your idea can only be viable if it brings something to the table for both sides.
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When I go to a bar, I want some human interaction for a change. Ordering drinks is part of the experience. But that's just me.

I am sure this was a fantastic learning experience for the founders.

Best of luck next time!
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Along with other responders to your post, I have dealt with plenty of really smart people that cannot program. I don't mean 'pick up a framework' - learning an API is right up a clever person's alley (I frequently carefully distinguish between clever and smart, and am doing so now). But, can they string together nested logic, design in a way to minimize dependencies, is their code readable, is it testable, and so on? So often, no. I think the ability to craft high quality code and to act as a empirically oriented engineer is a somewhat rare skill, and one that is quite orthogonal to proving the correctness of Prim's algorithm, or remembering how to implement Union Find efficiently.

Furthermore, it is not necessary. I have worked with plenty of people that I would work with any day, in any project, that had no real algorithmic chops. Oh, they may know that databases use something like B+ trees, but they'd be hard pressed to describe the data structure, let alone implement an operation on it. But they could, if they needed to. Half an hour with a book, a few experiments, and they'd be off to the races.
In college an old physics professor of mine once told me that you don't really know something until you can clearly explain it to other people. And you can't explain things to other people unless you have the basic concepts memorized. I think about that every time people complain that it's not fair for interviewers to ask them to explain basic programming concepts.
Agreed. If I were the job candidate, I'd be less than thrilled to find out that the company that was trying to recruit me was "too busy" to interview me themselves. With companies complaining about how hard it is to get qualified candidates, they shouldn't be adding extra layers of bureaucracy between the candidate and the company.
This exact topic came up yesterday in the HN post "Bullshit Interviews": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6304911 (https://coderwall.com/p/yn9g2a)

I repeat now what I said then: I think there's a very simple rule anyone can and should follow to not fuck up interviews: Don't ask people to do things in the interview you wouldn't expect them to do in the job.
Examples:

(1) Do people in this job regularly write code on the whiteboard? Lack access to a search engine? No. Then don't do it in the interview.

(2) Do people in the job design spice racks for blind people? No. Then don't ask them to do this in the interview.

(3) Do people in the job regularly find themselves coding something on the level of fizz buzz? Yes? Go ahead and ask!

(4) Do people in the job regularly find themselves writing code to find loops in a graph? Yes? Go ahead and ask (though, let's be honest - this is exceedingly rare in comparison to how often it is deployed in interviews)

Verify people have the skills they need to do the job you're hiring for. It really is as simple as that.
Yep, Thats the idea. Make it consistent.
It's a big IF. I've talked to a handful of recruiting companies and imo it's a perfect fit, but none of them have been interested - certainly not as a paid service. I think the turnover in tech recruiting may be too high for companies to consider paying for this, but... I may be wrong.

EDIT: Not IF as in - can you do it - but IF they'll buy it.
It's not the dumbest thing you can do when acting on it costs more. They cannot come after your personal assets in the case I described, and the business is not worth much. They are smart enough to not spend more money than they can seize in assets, so it's unlikely to happen.
> Avoid SQL joins in your website code

That's none sense. There is nothing wrong with SQL joins in your code so long as you've properly indexed and understand the query execution plan. Table joins are also not going to be a likely culprit of deadlocks either (varies depending on database platform, but generally true)
Then we might be able to use it for compression research.

Unless they got the negative from playboy, I don't think it's an appropriate image to use anymore.
A patent is a deal the public makes with an inventor: publish your invention and we'll grant you a time-limited monopoly on it. In order for this to be a good trade, the invention has to make a real intellectual contribution to the art. The problem we have is that no one is unambiguously empowered to ensure that it does so. The PTO does some of this, but has neither the bandwidth to do a good job nor a clear mandate to be hard-ass about it. And then once a patent is granted, the courts tend to defer to the PTO on its validity.

I haven't read the patents in question here, but I nonetheless feel safe in saying that "technologies for tracking vehicles and providing users with electronic updates" cannot possibly make a contribution to the art significant enough to counterbalance the societal cost of the monopoly the patent holder has been granted. I'm sure there are thousands of engineers here on HN that could design and build such a system using well-known techniques.

In some domains, the determination of how much of an intellectual contribution an invention makes is fairly straightforward. If a novel molecule is synthesized -- the chemical and pharmaceutical industries keep a record, I gather, of all molecules whose structures have been worked out, so it's possible to know when a new one appears -- and then proves useful for some medical purpose, it's pretty clear that a contribution has been made, and what that contribution consists of. In software, it's much harder. The field is massive and sprawling, and no one can keep up with all of it.

That's why I'm convinced the only solution is to amend the patent laws to require objective evidence of nonobviousness -- objective evidence that the invention makes a real intellectual contribution -- in order for a patent holder to successfully sue for infringement. Such evidence could come, for example, in the form of publication in a peer-reviewed journal or conference proceedings. Absent such evidence, the law should direct the court to invalidate the patent.

An advantage of this approach is that it requires no special-case rule for software patents, which run into the difficulty of defining the term "software patent" precisely. Rather, in domains other than software, the required evidence is generally not hard to come by. So the rule is domain-independent in definition -- and defensible as such, I believe -- but would have by far the greatest impact in the software domain.
Extortion? No. Please. We have a legal process. It was created and it is constantly being developed and reformed. I am supporting our legal process which is not perfect but it is the best we have at the moment.

Love it or not - it is the rules of the game. Someone came up with the idea before you and they registered that idea before you. Vague or not - they had the foresight - and they are indeed entitled to being proprietary.

If you do not like it - challenge it. If you can not afford to challenge it - negotiate for 'fair-use'.

If you think otherwise - you are an amateur.
The side of the coin: Why are we wasting time re-writing software that is already done? How is that progress?
Surely playboy keeps the negatives for all their materials. Might be possible to reach out to them for a high quality scan.

Anyways, you're absolutely right, people's brains are very very very much optimized for evaluating the microfeatures in a person's appearance, so its actually the right perceptual way to benchmark lossy compression (or at least one very good way).
I love this fact about this idea that I am getting paid either ways so I do not have any conflict of interest. About the results shown online idea, I think candidates would not like that for the interviews gone bad. Correct me if I got it wrong.
Again - words - not facts.

"American patent trolls don't seem..." where did you pull that out of... sounds pretty but you got nothing to back up that statement.
So, if you force a polygraph engineer to submit to a polygraph test and then during the test ask them if the machine can accurately detect lies, would that cause a loop in the fabric of causality and could you then cook a burger with it?
Most people can become an average waiter very quickly, whereas most people hardly care to know how their computer works. The additional pay is for the huge amounts of time we've spent learning the craft, some of us being obsessed with it since childhood, and the mild rarity of the skill. Also because writing some code has the possibility of affecting huge numbers of people and bringing in a decent sum of money for a company, whereas you can only wait on so many tables per day for an industry known for its low margins.

That's not to say that the proportions are balanced, or that all good waiters are getting what they deserve, or that there aren't shoddy engineers who are getting far more than they deserve. There's just a lot more money in computers than foodservice.
I would argue that, say, a recent graduate who can absolutely nail algorithmic questions would be the most likely to screw up on the big ticket items that matter (infrastructure, taste, independent thought) precisely because they have zero real world experience.
Wasn't really looking for a place to learn. And yes, that's why I've largely worked in startup companies. Was just wondering if there was anything else out there I was missing.
again - words... not facts...

Buying and litigating patents is A LOT of work.

I am not supporting them - but you can't discredit their work just because you don't believe in what they legally are entitled to do.

I don't support big oil or old-school-energy monopolies - but that doesn't mean I discredit what they do.
It's a 'company' from 1996, right?
mm, I agree with you there. I guess it's because sorts come up so much in a CS curriculum that they're considered to be magnificently important. In other words, they're just really handy bodies for imparting central ideas (like complexity), and people mix up the messenger with the message.
Everything you have here is debatable... obviously. But interesting perspective.
I think you are right. The turnover is high and hence little incentive to change the status quo. But if a recruiting company takes this approach, it will definitely have an edge. About the big IF, yes it is and I do not like to boast but I think I can do this very very well if not excellent.
I know I've been downvoted for such a short reply, but it was a genuine question - I wanted to know what danmaz was curious about.
No - it is the dumbest thing you can do. They can win by default... you lose... you don't get to be 're-heard'
I don't agree 100% with the author on not asking them algorithmic questions. Its a process on how they go about solving it rather than just the outcome.
Maybe for the web developer position, you might not need such type of questions, but for a full stack developer the answer is unequivocally yes.

I made a mistake by hiring someone who knew django [who originally wrote plugins in WP] and the coding was just plain horrible. One such example.

`for foo in queryset:
foo.prop = 'i m bar'
foo.save()
`
Simple things like this, where a good engineer would know because of O(n) nature of the code, the so called programmer didn't.

And then there are guys who fork every possible repo, have blogs about how-tos, etc but really can't code for nuts.
Eh, as a graphics researcher, I'd say it's not a gender issue. Anyone who spends a significant amount of time researching the human visual system in a fair an unbiased way is inexorably pulled to the conclusion that comparing pictures of nude bodies is one of the major tests of whether you're achieving acceptable results, whether you're making a painting or developing a compression algorithm. Humans are hardwired to notice details in naked bodies, possibly moreso than faces (or at least we notice a different set of details than faces). They were onto something important when they chose the Lenna picture, and it's a shame that the original had to be cropped due to technical limitations. And it shouldn't be taboo to use a male model any more than a female one -- both are equally important.
If I understood correctly, this included the whole MUNI bus system.
There is an area around 2.4.36.5 where the fall and rise of "fuck" and "shit" closely resemble each other. I'm guessing it's a macro which concatenates the two expletives for use in the code.
Yes, you lose, but less than you'd lose if you fight it.
You're asking me to prove a negative. I can't find any instances of a US-based patent troll suing, say, a British or Irish or German software company that has no offices, etc in the US, and this is what I'm basing my non-absolute statements on.

Anyway, you appear to be a troll of the internet variety, so I'll leave you in peace because you're in no way trying to debate, but antagonize.
Sorry that I don't find references, in the middle of a tech article, to killing people in brutal, vicious ways all that appealing. Sure, I'll happily watch a slasher flick, but that's the time and the place for that. This is completely the wrong context, and exactly the kind of thing driving women out of tech.
Possibly, but that is just isolating the topic of motivation. A company with an indirect strategy with a world-changing mission and great corporate culture is likely to attract better talent in the first place which will perform better when on fire.
Your statement only makes sense if you make the logical leap that Google does the things you are implying they do. The fact that none of Google's 100k+ employees and former employees have ever leaked anything of this nature is a strong indicator that it's not actually happening.
The thing is that the WINE project currently does and will continue to provide the userspace logic to allow this. ReactOS is a heavy user of WINE, and differentiates itself in that they are recreating the most basic components of Windows, including the kernel in hopes of getting a binary-compatible driver layer.

Long-term compatibility will be provided by the WINE project. ReactOS is only necessary if you need to run Windows-specific drivers, and I don't see that being useful in 10, 15, or 20 years. We have other systems that can provide kernels, driver, and other low-level interfaces (like a basic shell) and depend on WINE in userspace to preserve compatibility.
Secretaries are different because their job is to work with someone else. All the others you mention should be able to work from home the same as programmers, imo - are you saying they shouldn't and therefore programmers shouldn't, or asking why people here care about programmers and not social media reps?
Yes, and no. ;) These are important things to know. But, they are also easy to know. I don't care too much if somebody doesn't know them, it's just knowledge. All I care is if they can learn and understand it.

I am not always on my A game, but when I interview I basically probe until I find an area where they are not strong or familiar. I don't care too much about the questions they get right (they've already been vetted as to actually knowing the language they claim to know). It's just knowledge. But, when they get to something they don't know, that is when it is interesting, and telling. If they can't give you the time of search on a binary tree, awesome! Awesome because now you can actually measure how they think and take on new info, rather than regurgitate stuff (some people have prodigious memory, and can mirror back almost anything, after all). Ask them how they would figure it out. Ask what the structure of a tree is. Ask for the math for # of leafs vs depth, that sort of thing. Help them out when they get the deer in the headlight look. Once they get an answer, immediately change the question and see if they can derive the answer for that new question (say, switch from binary tree to trie).

In some ways college was hard for me - for whatever reason I didn't internalize a lot of the algorithm stuff until I got to grad school, where I ended up TAing for the grad level algorithms course after awhile.

Of course, a common thought is that the algorithms question are meant to test thinking, not memory. I claim that is hogwash. Most of these classic algorithms were invented by giants in the field, alongside other giants that did not think of the algorithm. And some random person, off the street, is supposed to just re-invent a classic algorithm off the cuff? Right. Chances are great that unless you are Google, if that person actually did do it they'd end up so bored at your company that they'd leave in a few months anyway.

Look for what the candidate doesn't know, give them the info, and see if they can synthesize it and do something with it. Don't try to see if they are CAR Hoare - they aren't, and you don't need to hire him anyway. IMO, of course.
Really? That's very interesting. What terms should I search for in order to find out for more about why negatives are so important?

Or is it just the fact that photography back then was done with negatives, and anything but the original photo is unsuitable for compression research?
There's some interesting discussion here at the previous (now dead) post of this article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6308316

In particular, this comment about using the scientific method to diagnose bugs is valuable:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6308826

It's much more productive to formulate hypotheses and then gather evidence to prove/disprove them than to jump in with the debugger and start trying things at random. It's also worthwhile to spend some time trying to isolate the simplest possible reproduction of the bug.

There are actually books that have been written about how to debug in a systematic way (sorry, I don't remember the titles offhand).
Watermarked would probably be a good idea. Though it is annoying for free users, it does serve the purpose of letting everyone who watches the video know what software was used to create it, and where to get it to try it out for themselves.

If you do add a watermark, I would suggest putting in in one of the corners, and making it slightly transparent, in order to reduce annoyance to the viewer.

You might put it in the corner, and stylize it so it looks like a TV Station logo (of course you would have your own branding and url). That might prove less annoying, then just a normal watermark.
Fun read. You do have a point in that engineers are paid way too much, what we do is actually fun and we sit and code most of the time where as the wait staff have to deal with bad tippers and be on their feet all the time.
Agreed. I'm going to have to remember that one.
User's don't know what they want
Well, lookup is a valid operation on any dataset.
Polymorphic Streams in ML