skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the article starts to highlight the real issue, when it compares with other industries, but then ducks out at the last moment. So I will try my best to fill in:

In all industries, in all professions, there are a range of abilities for those working within it. From the truly gifted, to the hard-working reliable folk who mostly deliver consistently, to those who need support and guidance to deliver well consistently, to those who deliver sometimes, to those who frankly cannot and will not deliver despite support time and guidance.

I have met incompetent doctors, unreliable engineers, lawyers you would not trust to compile a shopping list, and programmers you would not ask to develop any kind of program beyond hello world.

I have also met people I could always learn from, and they too remain fixed on the idea they too are always learning, improving, on a knowledge and experience journey, without a fixed endpoint.

A final point - no one is truly useless, you just cannot find a good match for their skills and experience within your team at that point in time.
Be careful there. Chrome is based on Chromium.
''On the other, you have people who are still linked to real-life identities bring forced to censor everything they say out of fear''

This is no different to real life.
Federated twitter blocking where people can choose to outsource the blocking to people they trust would be pretty cool. Kind of like AdBlockPlus lists.
Before looking at arbitrary visualization patterns, have a look at some useful precedents. Truecar, for example, (https://www.truecar.com/prices-new/honda/fit-pricing/) visualizes similar data in a clean and readable way. Google Flights might be another (https://www.google.com/flights/#search;f=SFO;t=JFK;d=2015-03...).

There are some visualization patterns that might be useful to you for this exercise, like interactive small multiples (http://projects.flowingdata.com/tut/linked_small_multiples_d...) to compare suppliers' prices over time. Think a bit about the trends in the data you tease out (as you say, thinks like prices over time and comparing alternatives) and go in search of examples that try to achieve similar goals.
Stephen Few's website isn't much better: http://www.perceptualedge.com/
This is why I find rust intriguing. It tracks the lifetimes using the type system, so it would be obvious to the programmer that the large strings would need to live as long as the list holding the small substrings.

I'm not a rust expert, but I believe that it's basically impossible to write something like the code in the bug report without getting a compile time error in rust. You'd either need to use a version of substring that makes a copy, or explicitly keep the large strings around.
Nice, looks like a fun book!
I'm not sure I'd go that far, but it's definitely not a surprise to see it fizzle out. It's particularly uninteresting here because a real solution is either impossible, or only possible because Mike's random source isn't entirely random (which is kinda boring).

Then again, the purpose apparently was to make crackpots put their money where their mouth is rather than spam the usegroup, so perhaps fairness isn't the best success criterium.
SugarCRM Buys Mobile Startup Stitch, Shuts It Down
Game Over for Storybricks
Why not fish (friendly interactive shell)?
Windows 7

Vivaldi 1.0.118.19 (Developer Build)

Empty startup: 217 MB

Tab with http://redwolf.de : 28 MB
Tab with https://github.com/wchristian/Microidium : 41 MB

Every new tab opened takes at least 28 MB, and pages with higher complexity use more. The progression is linear.

Simply put, they can put in as many features as they like, if they don't get the memory use in check, it'll be even less of an alternative.

However, since it is based on Blink, they're stuck with the memory profile of the exact same rendering engine as in Chrome/Opera 15, and can barely differentiate themselves by providing a different UI.

This is just the same thing as 10 years ago when everyone was making "browsers" based on an iexplore engine webview. As much as i want someone to take up the baton of Opera 12, this is not done by repeating the mistake Opera ASA did and forking Chromium.
In the U.S., that's also true. If you ever get fired or laid off or suspected of leaking confidential information, they'll want their machine back on the spot. You won't have a chance to get your own files back. (If you refuse to give it back, they can prosecute you for theft.) At that point they'll have access to your browsing history and any other information that forensic software can find.

Same is true of a company-owned cell phone.

Also, you should also avoid using your employee e-mail account for personal stuff, since that content is also your company's property.
> Lawyers and doctors are asked trivial questions just a handful of times in their careers during their bar examinations and boards.

Of course, this obviously means there are examinations and governing boards that certify laywers and doctors as fit to practice. I doubt most people in the industry would prefer that we start moving towards that.

Or maybe not. I dunno. Those of us who went through traditional CS programs would certainly benefit from such a system greatly. But the lack of formal entry barriers is part of what makes the industry fantastic, and perhaps the very fluid and sometimes irritating interview process is just part of keeping those entry barriers away from tech.
Who said that? I could not agree less. Butterflies are beautiful for their color, not their death.
They're all listed in the 'Showcase' part of http://jmonkeyengine.org.

The top 2 are on Steam, and many of the others are too (or on Greenlight).
I wasn't making that point in this specific post, but I agree. It's a 'tough on crime' measure that doesn't actually help things.
Where I work, we have a two-step process.

The first is called "Rob's Pairing Interview", or RPI. We go through a very simple problem. Takes 30-60 minutes. Nothing fancy is required, nobody is getting an algo pop quiz. Just a basic smoke test to see if you have, at some point in your life, programmed at all.

The second is pairing interviews. You come in and pair with us. At work. On real software.

When I got hired I kept waiting for the shoe to drop. It was just like the interview. Exactly like the interview.

The shoe never dropped. That's just ... how we work. The pairing session were a 1:1 example of daily life. And in a pairing situation there are no Secretly Terrible Engineers. And only a few Secretly Awesome Engineers, which is why we do it that way.
...and re-reading mine, I probably should have left this bit out:

"Who wrote this exactly? An actual programmer? "
It is, regrettably, not the case that all people who work as software engineers can e.g. code a for loop which counts the numbers of lower-case As in a string. This is true even if you spot them the syntax for a for loop and finding the Nth character in a string. It is equally true if you allow them to complete the task in isolation, at their own computer, given an arbitrary amount of time to complete it.

I am, naturally, constrained from saying "Here's a list of three of them." It would not be difficult.

It is also, regretfully, not the case that all applications one receives to an advertised position of Senior Ruby on Rails Programmer would be from people who had ever opened a command line.

Both of these are very difficult things to accept. They may be even more difficult to accept if one is extraordinarily smart/diligent and one studies/works solely in organizations which apply brutal IQ/diligence filters before one is granted even a scintilla of the admission committee's time.

I remember, rather vividly, the first time I figured out that an engineer couldn't program. I was attempting to tell him where a value was being assigned in a program. After failing to do so over email, I went over to his desk and asked him to navigate to the file at issue. He was unable to do so. I told him I would do it, assuming that he was unfamiliar with the directory structure in that part of the program, and opened the file. I then said "So you see, the assignment is made in the fooBar subroutine." He couldn't find the fooBar subroutine. I said "It is the third method on your screen." He couldn't find it. I said "It is this one, here, which I am pointing to with my finger." He said "OK, that one. Where is the assignment?"

The fooBar subroutine was one statement long.

A coworker, having overheard the conversation, stopped at my desk later, and explained to me that, if I had pressing engineering issues, coworkers X and Y would be excellent senior systems engineers to address them to, but that Z should be allowed to "continue to devote his full attention to work which he is well-suited for."

The industry has many destructively untrue beliefs about hiring practices. That there exist at least some people who are not presently capable of doing productive engineering work is not one of these beliefs.
Great, we're gonna go from coolname.io to b0593290-370e-4710-8fba-a6b00cde400d.io

Just imagine trying to keep up with the latest javascript frameworks. "Was that b0593290-370e-4710-8fba-a6b00cde400d or b0593290-370e-4710-8fba-a6b00cdd400d?"
Lisboa? Really? Even the chap who tried to pick my pocket last time I visited there asked me how things were in my home country.

We employ a lot of folks from Portugal here, and none seem to miss the employers back there.
Virtually no teams are made of 100% incompetent people. If you've got a 20 person team with two worthless people on it, it's barely even noticeable from the outside.
> Can you show that [generating a number of records to skip instead of a yes/no for each record] will still maintain a uniform probability distribution?

That should work if you pull the skip count from the appropriate distribution (negative binomial, I think).
The idea that there are lots of great engineers out there who just need mentoring and guidance to excel sounds great, but the reality of the industry seems to be that people dont stay in one place very long.

I think there is an opportunity there, but you would need to use contracts or something to make sure the time and effort you are putting into making this person great isnt just a gift you are giving to the company they move to next year. Also, I dont think startups are at all well placed to do this, given their time pressures. Google, Apple and Facebook could totally be doing this though.
Their VPN is very restrictive (no Google, several CDNs are blocked so half the internet is broken) and hard to configure. So they just use the supplied machines.

They learnt it from us because we have our own machines.
Many who are experts in an area are eunuchs, "they know how to do it".
Even better - installing java on the mac install the ask toolbar that actually adds garbage into my search results, let alone garbage collection. Howzabout then?
GP's questions are (respectfully) being skirted around. The same reasoning applies to compiled, client-side code. Recent events show that open source code is as vulnerable as closed source. App stores may mitigate things somewhat, but not completely. It's probably easier to verify client-side encryption in a browser than it is to audit a thick client app, no?
Can you use the Unreal source to create a non-Unreal project?

Say, your own engine?

I haven't read the whole EULA but I'd guess the answer is 'no'.
Nice! I'll never forget how to use tar again.
> I had a client once who had something similar, although unintentionally.

I did that too. I was aware of the problem, but at the time (1996) I did not know how to fix it.

So I just documented it and warned that they should keep the site away from altavista.

This was back before cookies had wide support, so login state was in the URL. If you allowed a search spider to know that URL it would have deleted the entire site by spidering it.

I did eventually fix it by switching to forms, and strengthening the URL token to expire if unused for a while. And then eventually switching to cookies (at one point it supported both url tokens and cookies).

I have not thought about those days in such a long time.
Are you suggesting that individual women being (justifiably) suspicious of strange men hassling them on the street is analogous to police officers and other agents of the state disproportionately arresting racial minorities? What would make you think is a sensible or illuminating analogy?

As with your other comment in this thread comparing feminists with Saudi Muftis, this is a shallow and superficial analogy that obscures more than it reveals.
Oh, go away! These links are hardly credible.
I'm not saying that the country if perfect, far from it. But is a great country to leave while working remotely for a company outside of Portugal for example.

Portugal produces great talent in a lot of areas, but all the top talent leaves and it's impossible to revert the situation.
Rapid Prototyping in JavaScript
> Anyone that's been in a position of power where they could have stopped harassment without much risk, and didn't, is a part of the problem.

You don't get to tell victims they have an obligation to work against victimization. It doesn't matter what they're a victim of, it doesn't matter what position they're in, and it doesn't matter how easy it would be for them to do. Victimization is not the victim's fault, it's the perpetrator's.

Amount of harassment is relevant, because the amount is enormous. There are huge drawbacks to spending all of your time addressing harassment in the workplace. Most women don't aim for professional success so they can spend all their time calling out bad male behavior.

Fundamentally, our difference is that you are equating women in positions of power with men. Their experiences are vastly different; women must overcome far more obstacles than men in order to achieve the same success. You can't then say they're equally obligated to fight against bad male behavior. They've been doing it their whole life. It's up to men and the male community to fix our own behavior, and to make it right. Women simply have no obligation here, no matter how powerful they are or how easy it would be for them to act.
Glad to hear it. Let me know if you find any problems.
Great episode. It seems to really work for a short period. Kind of like a reboot for the brain. A pretty large community has sprung up around this.

Love Radiolab, they always bring these kinds of things to me while I fall asleep. Podcasts are the greatest sleepaid ever, learn things while you fall asleep.
If someone told me to build a recommendation engine, I'd basically use a knn-approach.

You'd need to define

- a similarity measure for users (based on, e.g., what they bought and what they looked at) and

- you just recommend the top items the k nearest users bought (weighted by distance), possibly subtracted by the items already bought by the user in question and cleaned from explicit items.

Of course, the system would start really bad but it would get gradually better. This doesn't sound too complicated nor too simplistic nor "heavy data science".

Unfortunately there are no real technical insights in the article justifying why I shouldn't do this, so anyone can tell me why my approach would be bad or good?
Yes, it always baffled me, too! Especially because I have been studying from his books and they are exceptional both in terms of visual design and content!
Which books did you look at exactly?
Amid comments that imply she wants the(ir) D, that comment says she'll be slutting around with him, first.
- OpenBSD didn't handle anything yet. They do not support UEFI or GPT. You have to boot in BIOS-emulation mode.

- BIOS emulation is not a required by the UEFI spec. You can buy laptops today that are UEFI-only.
"can't program" is such a sweeping generalisation as to necessarily be null and void. I don't really think there is such a magic binary quality. Most everyone can learn programming and it's just a matter of patience and guidance. The only hopeless cases I've seen is folks who are poor coders but are convinced otherwise.
That's perfectly understandable
Side point: The author throughout nearly all of the article uses engineer (without any further qualification) and programmer interchangeably. A vast range of engineering has nothing to do with the design of software, and engineering is not programming.
Being unfair to others while being generous
You should add entries for java, javac, etc.
> There were dozens of posts, most demeaning, many using crude, sexually explicit language and imagery.

A little misleading; to be clear, there are no image posts on Yik Yak.
Akka Cluster Load Balancing
Linux Kodachi the Free Secure Operating System
Here's the fun regex we use to find some initial candidates in our analysis:

val = str.match(/probate|trust.sale|short.sale|auction|cash.offers|all.cash|(sold|sale|sell|offered|purchase|comes)[^.]+as.is|as.is[^.]+(condition|sale|contract|clause)|tear.down|damage|rehab|tlc|flip|fixer|needs[^.]+work|bring[^.]+(contractor|architect|builder|decorat|designer|developer|ideas|paint|brush|investor|hammer|handy|imagination|vision|tool|plans)/i)
nval = str.match(/(beautiful|ly|ng|has been|was|just|being|100%|just been) (rehab|remodell?ed)|^Rehabbed|rehabbed [^.]* ?(home|cottage|house|property|unit|apartment|condo)|rehab center|rehab [^.]* ?complete|flip [^.]*switch|not an? ['"\w,]*\s*(flip|fix|probate|reo|repo|short sale|foreclosure)|flip on |flipped|not looking for a \w* flip|flip ?flops|tooth ?brush|Rehabilitation of Historic Buildings/i)
It reminds me of a lightweight Kafka which makes it convenient to use local cli processes as inputs and outputs.
The State of Enterprise Tech in NYC
+1 totally agree
Not the OP, but I was under the impression that fish de-emphasizes shell scripting/programming and puts more emphasis on the interactive experience.

It feels like bish is trying to make using bash as a programming language tolerable.
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=define:...

"visually descriptive or figurative language"
In summary: If it's a low value item that doesn't offer much in the way of customization, it's often best to publish your prices to reduce the difficulty of sales.

As more customization comes into play and larger amounts of value are delivered, you'll want to think more and more about hiding prices so that they can be adjusted on a per-user basis.

I wrote a blog post about that a while ago... http://taprun.com/articles/should-consultants-hide-their-pri...
It often seems to me that we get caught up in the rhetoric on either side. We are either talking about how the NSA or Google is spying on us or how sharing information is essentially changing the world.

I agree, where is the debate in which we have a discussion about security without giving up all our rights to privacy for example? Surely we can have the best minds sit together and talk about these things without going on a diatribe about how the other side is either a clueless ideologue or is pure evil.

I haven't read the book yet, but it looks like Schneier is attempting to do so. Hopefully it lives upto its expectations.
Completely irrelevant. If you told me that my daughter was "slutting around", then I'd assume she was being forced. I'd be even more likely to consider you a rapist.
As opposed to the credible links you have provided?
I have obvious bias as a member of the Assembly team, but I think it would be a perfect place to build lots of these ideas collaboratively – and I'd love to help facilitate/participate.

Here's where to start: https://assembly.com/start

And if you mention @awwstn anywhere on Assembly I'm more than happy to help out.
How frequently do those people move to those universities after they've made the scientific breakthrough for which they receive the award?
My argument is that open source is what it is. Read the license and you'll find that there's nothing about free support; and if for some reason it breaks... you keep both pieces.

I know this puts distributions in a bad situation, but unless the users can force the upstream project to be more user friendly, I think the only option is to switch to a different software (hint: Firefox).

You seem to think I endorse Chrome team's behaviour on this, and I don't. That doesn't change reality though.
Tomorrow another day and chance quote
"there should be money in the budget to hire people with expertise in efficient algorithms"

1. Wouldn't you rather be the developer who built the scalable software that drives your company toward its IPO rather than the developer whose skills suddenly became useless just as the company was getting really profitable? Why should they even keep the first developer around after they hire someone else to clean up their mess?

2. Does your company really want to have to re-write all its critical code just as that code is starting to make money for them? It's OK for an MVP to be lacking features; features can always be added later. But if its fundamental architecture isn't efficient and scalable, you're going to run into a brick wall at the most inconvenient time.
The article spends most of its time criticizing interview techniques that focus on knowledge of particular facts, which is fine - I agree that's generally not a good predictor of job success. But somehow the article concludes that since bad interviews can exclude good candidates, there's no such thing as a truly bad candidates.

The existence of bad interview techniques at some companies doesn't preclude the simultaneous existence of bad candidates in the market.

Yes, good people can fall through the cracks, and otherwise-talented people may not be good at being interviewed. Those are unfortunate realities that you should be aware of and vigilant about if you're involved in hiring. But there are also bad candidates out there, and they're capable of doing a huge amount of damage (anyone who has worked on even a medium-sized engineering team can verify this) so the ugly truth is that being conservative with hiring makes a lot of sense.
I need to provide credible links to prove that someone didn't do something?
The "double the hourly rate" rule works from the employee's perspective -- $30 hr x ~2000 hrs worked in a year = $60k, but not from the employers, because the fully loaded cost of an employee with a $60k salary is probably over $100k.
Hey look: It's GPL3. Thanks dude.
In France, a Baby Switch and a Lesson in Maternal Love
I felt very jumpy looking at the output of `gg s` -- what's staged? What are the changes? What am i going to commit? Maybe it's for people who routinely do `git commit -am $MSG` but sometimes it's best to be a little more nuanced. But i'm a complainy geezer who likes magit.
Let me tell you about a little game called American McGee's Grimm. This was a short and sweet, episodic little game with a lot of quirky-fun visuals and gameplay dynamics. You played a little gnome going around spreading darkness and mayhem inside a fairytale world and once you've covered the world in enough darkness and grossness, the fairytale ending would play out in a much more violent and gruesome way than how it began. OK, so far, so good. Nice casual game, would even be a decent mobile game.

The problem is that American McGee has an ego so huge it interferes with his ability to properly market and position his ideas, and for some reason thought this was AAA title material or it should be worthy of a AAA development process. So step one was "license the Unreal Engine". Except the Unreal Engine, with its support for shaders and all that crap, made the game run intolerably slow even on PCs with on-mobo NVIDIA parts, let alone the shitty Intel graphics parts many PCs had at the time. Porting to Wii would have been fucking impossible; arguably, the game would have thrived on Wii as an interesting counterpoint to Hannah Montana's Wiggle-Your-Stick Concert Bash and the usual Wii fare.

So yes, there's room in this business for all sorts of game engines. And if you don't know how to write an engine that fits your game, or at least choose a fit from a wide market, maybe you don't know enough about the kind of game you're making and who would be playing it.