skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From what I've read, there had been plenty of warnings all day.

>The group was on East 17th Street about halfway down the block when police took a stand and ordered protesters to get on the sidewalk. Before the march, while the group was in Union Square, police handed out flyers and used loudspeakers to warn protesters that they would be arrested if they didn't stay on the sidewalk.

http://7online.com/news/more-than-140-protesters-arrested-in...

Here is the flyer that they were handing out: https://twitter.com/Azi/status/593536703324905473/photo/1

I mean, look at it that other way. People should not be able to openly obstruct traffic. If I were to go run out in the middle of Broadway and block traffic, I would probably be arrested. Just because someone is "protesting" doesn't give them free reign to violate the laws.

This is why public marches/protests require a permit. These guys did not have a permit to do so. See: http://www.nyclu.org/content/know-your-rights-demonstrating-...

> You may be able to march in a public street (as opposed to on a sidewalk) in some circumstances. To march in a street, you must obtain a permit from the Police Department. If you expect to have fewer than 1,000 people in your march, you can apply for a permit at the precinct in which the march will originate. If you expect 1,000 people or more or you prefer to use mail, send your application to: NYPD Investigation Review Section, 300 Gold St., Room 305, Brooklyn 11201. You can download a permit application from the front of the NYPD’s website
> "My second point was that this — streaming a "non-lossy" database as a change log into one or more "lossy" ones — is such a common operation that it should be a solved problem. It certainly requires something more than a queue."

This is almost exactly the cross-DC replication problem, which is a subject of active research.

A changelog on the source side is only sort of helpful. It's useful to advise which rows may have changed, but given that you don't trust the target database, you also need to do repair.

Correct repair is impossible without full syncs (or at least partial sync since known-perfectly-synced snapshot), unless your data model is idempotent and commutative. On-the-fly repair requires out-of-order re-application of previous operations.

The easiest way to reason about commutivity is to just make everything in your database immutable. So this is a solved problem, but it requires compromises in the data model that people are mostly unwilling to live with.

You can do pretty well if your target database supports idempotent operations.

If you're trying to do pretty well, then you can do a Merkle Tree comparison of both sides at some time (T0 = now() - epsilon) to efficiently search into which records have been lost or misplaced. Then you re-sync them. Here, for efficency, your merkle tree implementation will ideally to span field(s) that are related to the updated_at time, so that only a small subset of the tree is changing all the time. This is a tricky thing to tune.

You'll still be "open to odd inconsistencies when updates are applied out of order" if you haven't made your data model immutable, but I think this is mostly inline with your hopes.
Why? Those are core subjects for a military officer.
It appears that it is only necessary when there is going to be questioning/interrogation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_warning

Though, it seems as though the police can skip the miranda rights bit and interrogate, if they don't want to use subsequent statements or information in court. There's also the "public safety exception", which doesn't seem to apply for the situation in this particular account.
Low turnout is an acceptable response to an inefficient system where majoritarianism, gerrymandered districts, ballot access laws, etc. culminate in a meticulous engineering of the odds being stacked against the voters.

Though, for some reason, voting and "democracy" elicit such warm conditioned feelings that people are willing to desperately scrape for examples of whatever small local victories they've secured in order to justify that it's worth going through the whole jungle. Electoral reform, though? Dead end.
Interviewer said it would converge either to one or infinitely:

'The next sentence of English is where the problem started. I _thought_ he said:

“The sequence will either go to one or to infinity.”

but he actually said:

“The sequence will either go to one or infinite_ly_.”'
[My emphasis]

(Firing's also a bit harsh for getting an interview question wrong)
Seems to me like an artificial general intelligence would have to be able to solve problems harder than either of those in order to be classified as such. Being able to build paper clip factories alone doesn't sound at all like artificial intelligence to me.
It would be extremely difficult for one single person to do this. But we're talking about a wealthy minority, not a wealthy individual. If 25% of the population is significantly wealthier than the other 75%, does that mean the 25% should be able to pay on average 9x more than the 75% in order to get their way on an issue?
In Superintelligence, Bostrom does not presume to know the path via which we will arrive at AGI.

One hypothetical path discussed is that of tool AI. That is, robust search processes - things we are already quite adept at (genetic algorithms, deep learning, etc) - purposed towards AGI-related goals.

It's not hard to imagine these existing methods being used in the pursuit of a recursively self-optimizing agent (seed AI) that then snowballs into AGI.

Such an approach may not require any fundamental knowledge concerning the nature or architecture of AGI. It would simply be an application of brute computational force using existing tools and knowledge.
... the interviewee misunderstood the question. The interviewer understood it just fine.
Keep in mind we're talking about C-level communications software, not an autopilot system. And the code was eventually tested heavily, just in a very inefficient and expensive manner. But I don't completely disagree with your assessment.
Where Rust really shines
Well, if it would stand for go+monad, I would actually have found it quite funny.
I strongly believe any real AI breakthroughs are going to come through philosophy, via a theory of mind, rather than through CS.
Looks like more of an advertisement against Clojure than anything else.
LightTable has an insta-REPL if that's what you mean by that last bit :)
If you aren't prioritizing for code quality and beauty, do you also explicitly tell candidates that? I think it's very difficult for candidates to understand exactly what the interviewer wants—and, of course, all interviewers are different. I think that, for better or worse, many people worry that they need to perform perfectly during the interview and actually deliver a perfect solution—instead of just approaching and developing a solution.

I'm a designer, not a programmer, but I've found that I interview best when I get explicit guidance from the interviewer. "I want to hear more about x, don't worry about y. What I want to learn about you is z." It makes the interview feel like a collaborative process (especially helpful when interviewing people you will work directly with, as you're pre-selling them on the team dynamic they'll experience!). It allows me to provide the information the interviewer needs most, in order to effectively evaluate my abilities and fit. It also clarifies for the applicant what things are actually worth stressing out about.
I'm not from the States - when this kind of thing happens, does it affect your future employment opportunities? Will it turn up on background checks?
"Yesterday I went to a job interview, at a company in New York that had once built their stack (for managing online advertising) in Ruby but who are now transitioning all of their stuff to Clojure."

I would have probably walked out or at least snarkily asked them if these types of algorithms are what's done day to day. The answer more than likely being no.
Ah yes DOORS! I remember using that on one of our projects. Pretty sure it was 787. I had the feeling that if used properly it could be a powerful tool. But I also remember the whole IBM Rational suite being incredibly slow...
+1 for interactive demo
Can I ask your age? I am in my early 30's and thinking of getting a colonoscopy, not necessarily without merit but potentially for the reason you did.
Call me old fashioned, but I'm not persuaded democracy is improved either by requiring that votes are either paid for or so complicated for the voter they require an instruction manual to avoid inadvertently spoiling their ballot paper.
That was a joke ;)
That also is incorrect - the sequence either converges to one or a stable cycle - not infinitely.

That's also a horrible question for illustrating functional programming style. It would be much more efficient to have a simple loop caching the array n->f(n) and then finding the ones that converge to 1.
> Do you always spar with headgear

Sparring gloves (bigger, heavier, softer) or not is the question, really, not headgear and groin protector.
I brought Bostrom's book Superintelligence and got about halfway through it before I moved into something else - it was a little disappointing. Throughout it seems that he just doesn't get what makes something 'intelligent' - while a machine that optimises paper clip production might be an application of artificial intelligence, it's not artificial general intelligent, and it's hardly any more advanced than some particularly well automated factories that already exist today. Artificial general intelligence at s human level implied to me that such a machine can think and consider things at least as much as a person - and therefore probably understands that making lots of paper clips isn't the be all and end all of existing.
Technology being a third thing
I think the world wide web has become commercialized and monetized, and quality has suffered because of this.
Is this your first exposure to the paperclip thought experiment? You can find lots of things to read about it here: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

The general reply for you is that the generally intelligent paperclip machine can understand law, can weigh consequences of potential actions, and can, if it wanted to, make paperclips without harming others. The key phrase is "if it wanted to". Its only goal is to make more paperclips, it simply doesn't care about anything else. When it recursively improves itself (makes itself smarter), the only thing it cares about for its successor version to do is to also care about making paperclips, and to make them more efficiently.

The problem of programming general intelligence seems to be orthogonal to the problem of programming goal selection, goal preservation, and beneficial goal changes, and making sure goals lead to actions which benefit humanity. That's the main point of the thought experiment.
Doing Democracy right? I recall that worker bees will kill a co-worker if the co-worker doesn't do a good enough dance that tells where pollen can be found.

I'd hate to think what would have happened to some of my co-workers based on the code they checked in. Or maybe the guy has a point...
Visual Studio is awesome. I'm really excited to see how Code turns out on Linux, especially for things like building GUI apps and 3D stuff.
The quotes are missing. For example, #22 is "find -name .sh" but the .sh will expand in the shell, rather than in the find.

There are several other typos, like I don't think "passw" is the way to change the password but rather "passwd".
For some companies/teams/hiring managers/interviews, having someone who can reason about big-O complexity and design their own algorithms is important and necessary. There won't always be problems that have a preexisting algorithmic solution.
I'm also kind of concerned at how we're willing to give up understanding the specifics of cognition by just throwing data into differently shaped statistical bags and using whatever model seems to kinda work the best.
I've used this forever, i love it.

You can setup pandas and ipython and write automatic data anlysis scripts that pump out absolutely beautiful graphs with hardly any effort at all.

Thanks so much to all the people contributing to this awesome python project
Week 2 of my B2B startup
That 3x to do it yourself time seems excessive, but we once did exactly the same thing at a previous company. We chose problems we knew, worked with tools we knew, in a comfortable environment.

Even if you aren't intentionally trying to do the opposite, which unfortunately many interview techniques, like whiteboard coding effectively do, conducting interviews where a candidate is comfortable and at their best is ridiculously hard.
Your dislike for an interview question that tests knowledge of number theory instead of programming is what should have increased.

Writing Clojure functions under pressure is like gardening at 55 MPH. You're trying to make something still and beautiful and overdoing it (or missing entirely) as you drive by.
I think this is in part an admission that actually understanding the specifics of cognition is a lot harder than was originally thought and the wholesale methods yield results.
I'm 43 and for the last and a half year I started to have difficulty in learning new subjects. And one day in last February after I finished lunch which included 2 slices of bread, I decided to solve that problem and began an intensive search on Internet. I read dozens of articles talkin about the bread's bad effects on brain and finally came across Perlmutter's videos on youtube. He was telling not to eat any bread even on breakfast! So the day after I ate no bread even on breakfast and guess what, starting from that day I started to learn new subjects again.

I know, not eating any bread leaves a feeling of hunger, it's almost as if I haven't eaten any food. But thats only because I've been eating bread all my life every single day and so the body got very accustomed to it. But after 3 months I also realized that body doesn't need it to feel full.

Friends in my vicinity get also disturbed by my saying bread is harmful to the body. But I am myself the evidence that bread is no good for the body.
Yes, so the only extra part is the boat in the middle. Boats are cheap. (OK, Australian unloading costs are crazy from what I've heard, because of the unions here..)
Every single one of those officers should have been fired on the spot. I'm no fan of de Blasio, but he's the democratically elected mayor of New York. Turning your back to him is turning your back to the people who elected him.
If someone breaks into my house, the police come into the house to investigate. I don't gather all of the evidence for them while preventing them from entering the premises. When has a theft occurred where the police just accepted all of the evidence from the victim, but didn't really do any evidence-gathering themselves?
Building an Android app with Sky is basically similar to using phonegap. i.e. You use HTML/CSS and web components, but it promises better performance and a more modern api.

The codebase is a forked version of chromium, but with a lot of legacy web cruft removed. The DOM api is replaced with a new more modern api. CSS has some important performance bottlenecks removed.

It also allows linking to off main thread code written in C++, Java, Go, JS, Python and Dart. Main thread code must be written in Dart.

They are aiming for the performance of native, but with a development toolset similar to the web.

IMHO a very worthwhile experiment.

Edit: The specs here give an idea of what the system is/does.

https://github.com/domokit/mojo/tree/master/sky/specs
Sure, wind, geothermal, nuclear etc.
I just thought I'd say, advanced in treating HIV have progressed immensely. And for people who test positive, if it's early enough, HIV no longer has to be the kind of withering death sentence it once was.

It's certainly no fun, but the prognosis is vastly improved.

https://www.aidsmap.com/Life-on-HIV-treatment-a-personal-per...
I'm Australian. I don't think whether or not the death penalty is good or bad is the discussion here. This is about sentencing people to death in an unfair justice system and a president who obviously has political motives (gains) to see these executions go ahead, regardless. I.e. corruption.

Before Widodo came to power the death sentence was rarely enforced.
> No. There are usually talking about 2 threads accessing the same code.

Don't you mean two threads accessing the same data?

Mutexes are about data protection. This usually manifests as exclusive exectution of code, but it is not the purpose.
How to Design Programs is awesome, but really very slow and pedestrian later. Feel free to either skim or switch to another book once you outgrow it.

Definitely, do all the exercises in any programming book you are trying to learn from. In some sense, the exercises are the meat of any such book, and the rest is just supporting material.

Some people even start a new chapter with a look at the end-of-chapter exercises, try their hands at them for a few minutes. They'll most likely fail, but one gets a better perspective of what to watch out for in the chapter.
There's not really time in a 30 minute interview to pose a real business problem, much less have any meaningful representative work done, by which to judge the candidate.
A binding to the CUPS server, lack of printing capabilities surprised me
I remember that my first interview was kind of similar. Though it was a phone interview on Hackerrank Codepair.

I was really nervous, and since it was a phone interview, I tried to speak my thought process, which didn't quite work out due to me constantly stammering. So I just took to typing all the time so that my interviewer wouldn't think I was taking too long coming up with a language or copying answers. I started making silly mistakes like using `int sum=0` in python. I took the input as a number, converted it to a string, and then further converted it back to a number, and did mathematical operations on it, trying to solve the problem. Every time I thought I did it, it would get stuck in another case.

Ultimately, the interviewer deleted 50 lines out of my 60-line code, and just added a print statement on a variable I was already using for storing things temporarily, which turned out to be the correct answer.

Needless to say, I blew the interview. I haven't done an interview since, and I'm gonna be up for it very soon. I'm not sure if I'd do better this time, but I'd be ready with a glass of water, and try to be as relaxed as possible.
“Taylor knew others would copy the soap-in-a-pump-bottle idea”
If you don't mind feeling stupid, Haskell will be very well suited for you. :)
While we're talking about stats and Python could I convince someone here to implement a fast medcouple for statsmodels? I can't do it myself because I read R's GPL'ed code in order to understand the algorithm. Using my understanding, I wrote the following high-level description of it:

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

This should be taken as the design spec of a clean-room reverse engineering, so that we can have a free, fast and non-copylefted implementation. It's not that I have a problem with copyleft (in fact, I prefer it), but I really want statsmodels to fix their implementation, and they're GPL-phobic.

Since Seaborn has boxplots, implementing an adjusted boxplot seems relevant.

edit: Oh, one more thing. I'd love any feedback on how to improve the "design spec", in case I wasn't able to make it clear enough.
It's the one true faith!
There's a very nice trend in gaming to try to recreate the Microsoft Intellimouse. There are a few examples, but I think the current best one is the Rival. Most likely my next mouse after my supply of Razer Abyssus run out (I replace my mice every 3-6 months).

http://www.amazon.com/SteelSeries-Rival-Optical-Gaming-Mouse...
I'm not an AI researcher so this is probably a naive question: Do we necessariliy need to mimic the architecture of the human brain to achieve AGI?

As someone (Chalmers?) once said about the problem of consciousness: we didn't need to replicate the flapping of wings or the locomotion of sea creatures before taking to the air or underwater. Might it not also be the case with AI that there's some fundamental principle we've yet to discover that just so happens to have expression in the substrate of 1200cc's of fatty tissue, but could possess the same fidelity (and greater) in silicon and looks nothing like the architecture of the human brain?
that he did not take this approach makes me think the candidate is inexperienced, and probably coming to clojure from an imperative mindset.
Estimate surveys have a poor record. Technologies tend to be perpetually 10-30 years away until they are 0 years away, or never happen at all.

ANI and AGI are qualitatively different. Progress in making cars faster will not lead to teleportation or warp drive. It's not even applicable.

There are many unknown unknowns in AGI. I could not even pretend to give you an estimate.
Join – SQL-style joins for Python iterables
Can you go into more detail backing up your assertion?
Such a young guy who has already contributed so much. My heart goes out to Sheryl and the children.
I'm not sure I agree with you on this.

Live programming interviews should not be the sole quality of judging someone, but if we've first given them a coding exercise to do on their own time and they passed that, then it's useful to have them come in and do some coding to show that they can walk through their code and add additions/fix bugs to it without problem.

Which on that same note, I'm not sure why you would say they can only test "algorithmic" when we can do like I just described and have them for instance code a new feature in an existing code project of theirs.

That said, I agree with everyone else that they shouldn't be rushed, should allow the interviewee any and all resources they care to look up, and should shoot for "real-world" exercises over made-up scenarios.
Nice to see other devs in the area — good luck with your search!
Interesting article, but ironically the interviewee's solution is still incorrect at the end of his post. You'll notice that he only squares the first digit, and then adds the second digit rather than squaring it.

E.g. when he calls (happy 97) it prints 88. However, that's 9^2 + 7, when in fact the answer is 9^2 + 7^2 = 130.
> This was super distressing for a lot of people, as those belongings usually included wallet, phone, and keys. So after you are done at Central Booking, you are basically left with no possessions or money, and no way to get into your home or contact anyone.

Please, someone tell me this is fucking illegal.
When will we find aliens?
Is it possible to write a gzip file like that from the command line?
Why do I hate myself and how do I stop?
Kim Dotcom has succeeded in getting more of his seized funds
Merkle trees (as used for anti-entropy in Cassandra, Riak etc.) are only practical when both sides of the replication can speak them, though.

I wonder, are Merkle trees viable for continuous streaming replication, not just repair?
I wish, I did a google code interview once. The guy said we had only a short amount of time. When I solved the first one really quickly he told me, 'oh, ok, can we do another puzzle we don't have much time'. Suffice to say I went down in flames somewhat like the topic.
The Medical Bill Mystery
"My arresting officer walked me out the door and down the street past the barricade, where there were volunteers from New York Lawyers Guild waiting to provide information on legal resources, as well as donuts and coffee."

That must've been a sight of relief. What a horrible experience everyone had to go through. This is nothing short of intimidation tactic.
And Wave was pretty cool. As a startup it might have even succeeded.