skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My father was a civil service EE at mare island naval shipyard in vallejo, on north-east san francisco bay. He told me that when they drain the reactor cooling water, there is a flange where they cut the hole in the hull, with a pipe running to there to a cement mixer. They make concrete out of the radioactive water, then haul the concrete and the mixer to hanford, to bury it.

But one time they neglected to bolt the flange together. When they pumped out the water, it poured down on a shipyard worker who was standing on the floor of the drydock.

While he was not injured, he exceeded his lifetime maximum dose of radiation. At the time Dad told me this story, the guy still worked at Mare Island but was no longer permitted in the nuclear yard.
Perhaps no advantage, but it's a good thing. As in the CPU market, there are Intel, AMD, even another architecture alternatives, eg. ARM. It's just an analogy. :-)
Yes, there is a negative utility on death. But if you spent 50% of your extra money and time on preparing for something that has a 1% chance of happening statistically you will lose. Not only the resources outlayed, but the opportunity cost associated with them.
As someone without a formal education in this path, I mostly agree...

It took almost a decade before I would have considered myself very good... And in fairness, many of those even with formal education I wouldn't consider good. Passion accounts for a lot. I didn't start getting really good until I actually started deeper reading into more conceptual bits of programming, and some of the hard math still isn't the easiest for me, fortunately a lot of real world work doesn't need it so much in practice.

In development, with sufficient drive and without formal education, you'll spend 4-5 years just mastering your tools (the languages you tend to use, your environment for development and deployment etc)... and another 4-5 years on deeper understanding of the craft itself... even then you'll be missing on some of the deeper more low-level understanding.

There's room in this world for both, but if you can get a formal education without amassing hundreds of thousands in debt, I'd say go for it. Just don't think you'll be done learning when you graduate (I still spend at least 10-20 hours a week reading on software/tech), and accept that you will have to break every rule in practice during a career.
Or you could just use Nim rather than Go or Rust, and get high performance, clean code, and extremely easy C FFI.
> I can't think of a single company who has reached a critical-mass consumer audience and not been able to monetize. Sure, winds change, MySpaces rise and fall, but it wasn't a monetization failure.

Twitter has been around for almost 10 years now, and while they have been able to monetize somewhat, they haven't been able to turn a profit, and they don't seem to make great progress in that direction.

It's not that they can't make money - it's just that so far, they haven't been able to make enough money to support the valuation.
The Sinking of the USS Guitarro (1994)
I actually like the analog parts of analog watches... the complications, as they are called. Its amazing engineering and design... Its one area where I just dont see the improvements as, well...improvements. Watches are actually beautiful objects.

I'm not a luddite...I just think this is a solution looking for a problem.
Actually, it's worse than that - theoretically, they should be doing an F-test, but those are essentially useless[0] except as exercises for unfortunate undergraduates.

This gets into the flaws with hypothesis testing (and p-values) as a tool altogether, though. And while I would love to see the natural sciences eschew these rather rudimentary heuristics in favor of the more sophisticated modeling tools that we already have, I'm not holding my breath on that happening anytime soon.

[0] http://andrewgelman.com/2009/05/18/noooooooooooooo/
I was not surprised that it was called a VM. I was surprised that I didn't know that!
Yes. But is there a more general (or specific, depending on one's point of view) term that applies to (public key) cryptography? Eg "some random, public, non-repeated stuff" is a nonce, a key is a parameter to an encryption function etc. Ecc keys are over a certain [ed]curve - so you need parameters for that too, but modulus while entirely correct mathematically, doesn't really capture the essence of N from a cryptographic point of view. Maybe just "public parameter"?
x % 32 === x & 31

So if they use a 5-bit number, they can just stick your second operand into that slot after it's been ANDed with 31 (which might even be implicit in how the x86 shift instructions work). To do otherwise would require them to branch (just like you did in your solution).
hmm... I would describe it as something like a '2D histogram square-bin plot' a 'categorical plot' or perhaps a variant of a 'mosaic plot' using color density instead of area.

http://www.math.yorku.ca/SCS/sugi/sugi17-paper.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_plot
Having "100+ million users" is a relatively new concept, period. It shouldn't be surprising that very few, if any, have failed. But that doesn't tell us anything about the future.

Before Enron, how many companies with $100+ billion in revenues went bankrupt?
Indeed, you're right. I forgot about step-function solutions, and thought interpolation/corrections were needed.

512 elements for 7 bits of accuracy sounds reasonable. The article mentioned a 2x improvement for 11 bits, but didn't get to that point.
> But all three of us are very reluctant to start interviewing because we all know how much interviewing really really SUCKS. Basically we are forced to write whiteboard code for 4-5 hours on topics that we may or may not know.

"reluctant to start interviewing" based off of stereotypes? Am I not understanding this?
It seems obvious to me that giant valuation means insanely high bar before you see upside. I am a bit skeptical of the idea that it should be as high as possible, since if it's fundamentally ridiculous and there's no way you will ever live up to it I fail to see how this is in anyone's interest.
Here is an interesting real world example that I think not many people know the details about. I don't think any of this information is privileged information. Most of this comes from my (probably faulty) memory with conversations I had with some of Corel's upper management (where I worked). Some of it comes from the public record. There are probably errors since it has been a long time and I didn't not double check the information. It is entirely possible that I was misled right from the beginning anyway, so it might just be fiction. But even if it is, it is entertaining fiction.

In 2000 Microst invested £135 million in Corel. At the time Corel was almost out of cash (if my memory serves they had about $2 million in the bank and with about 1500 employees was going to run into a problem with payroll sooner rather than later). Corel issued new stock to cover the deal and I think it represented about 25% of total equity. This stock was non-voting, but came with a veto over new acquisitions. The rationale was that since Microsoft and Corel were playing in the same office productivity software market, Corel didn't want them to be able to dictate what they were doing, but at the same time Microsoft wanted to protect their investment against acquisitions that they thought were poor judgement.

At that time, growing your business through acquisitions was all the rage and the Corel management team (led by it's relatively inexperienced CEO at the time) was quite keen to use some of the new capital to grow their business. Microsoft encouraged them and even brokered meetings, etc, etc. In the end Corel set up several acquisitions, which of course took some time to go through all the approval processes.

In around 2003 Microsoft sold their Corel stock to the venture capital firm Vector for about £13 million (10% of their original investment). It is possibly not a coincidence that this is a venture capital firm that Paul Allen was involved with, but who knows? According to what the then Corel CEO told me at the time, Vector then threatened to use their acquisition veto if the board did not agree to back a complete buyout by Vector. The problem was that the penalty clauses for backing out of the acquisitions would once again put Corel into a very difficult situation financially. Feeling like they had no choice in the matter, the board approved the buy out and recommended that the investors accept the deal.

Vector bought up all the remaining stock for $133 million, using about $80 million of Corel's remaining cash to finance the deal. Very soon afterwards they laid off a very large number of employees (including me ;-) ) and concentrated on profitability. As far as I know, Vector have managed the company exceptionally well since then.

I heard from trusted sources that Corel's CEO at the time gave up a multi-million dollar parachute to accept a job at Microsoft, so I suspected that there was never really any need to feel particularly sorry for him. But you can see that one seemingly innocuous condition from an investor who is saving your butt can lead to the most unimaginable outcomes.
I don't have the answer to your question, but I agree that interviewing has gotten really bad. It's not always whiteboard problems:

A few days before I moved to Portland, I applied for some iOS coding jobs from San Jose. I scored two interviews, on the day after I arrived, the other a few days later.

"iOS" coding, mind you.

At that second company, I interviewed for four hours with six people. There were no whiteboard questions, it was all talk. My last interviewer was the president of the company. He asked me what an "activity" was.

I had no clue. Quite unwisely, I pulled my answer right out of my ass.

I looked it up later: iOS Apps don't have activities, that's an Android concept.

I am dead certain that I didn't get that job, because I didn't know about an API that's only used for a platform that I would not be working with.
But... He probably went to Stanford or Harvard. That certainly means he's entitled to get rich by 30, right?
LOL.. at 16, it doesn't matter... you don't have much overhead.. do something you're passionate about.

When I was closer to that age, there wer 16yo running major pirate software networks, art groups, bulletin boards and even developing related software for the fun of it... if someone finds it useful, awesome, if it solves a problem you experience even better.

It doesn't have to be widely used for the experience to be beneficial, and to make a little money off of it.
Curious to know what you find obnoxious about their desktop UI (Mac or Windows?).
For a while, there never was a disassembly of that Integer BASIC. Woz hand assembled it, and typed it in. When it was done, it got burned to a ROM.
Almost none of these things are used in scientific computing though.
Maybe asyncio and yield from.
When I run my Linux app, it doesn't crash.
> $1 million as a note with a $5 million cap and a 20% discount.

This refers to an investment done on a "convertible note." These particular terms mean that the valuation at which their investment will "convert" from what is nominally a loan into equity will be at most $5m, but if a subsequent investor invests in an equity financing at less than 6.25m, their investment will convert to equity at 20% less than the valuation. Read up on convertible notes for more detail.

> senior liquidity preference of 1x to protect their downside since they feel the valuation is rich

Means that in a sale, the investor will get the full amount (1x) of what they invested before others (i.e. founders, employees) see anything.

> Peter, is stoked that he is getting his $1 million investment converted into roughly 20%

Since the valuation was > 6.25m his valuation was capped at $5m, whereas the investors who are investing got a valuation of $40m "pre-money" or $50m "post-money" which are much less favorable terms than what Peter invested at.

> the preference overhang of $211 million

Means that if the company is to be acquired, it would take an acquisition offer of at least $211 million for founders and employees to see even a penny. That is because that amount was invested with the "1x" preference.

> They ask prior investors to recap

I think this means they are asking previous investors to lower the amount of liquidity preference they have such that in the event of a sale under $211m the founders would see some return.

> the ‘overhang math’.

The wiser employees understand the math that says an acquisition has to be enormous for them to see anything. If they don't think that's likely they will see little motivation to continue working at the company.

> senior preference and a 2x guarantee.

2x guarantee means that they would be guaranteed twice the amount the invested in the event of a sale, possibly ahead of other investors, but I'm not sure.

> waterfall spreadsheet

Indicates how much each interested party would get in proceeds in the event of exits of various amounts. E.g. if company sells for X, investors get Y and founders get nothing. If company sells for Z, investors get X1 and founder gets Z. Etc.
Nice one. I've made something similar[1] in Go a while ago.

[1] : https://github.com/yelinaung/play-info
> One of the problems the author mentions - iMessage received and a notification coming to iPhone, iPad, Watch at the same time - actually doesn't happen

Is there anyway to make iOS and OS X work correctly like this? If somebody starts messaging me on iMessage and I'm at my desk I usually end up having to put my iPhone on DND so I don't get 'buzz buzz' every few seconds.
Doing a bit of in-my-head math... At 1A, that'd be about 50g/day.

I don't remember the voltage required for electroplating using CuSO4+acid, but I remember it being low. I suppose it probably has to do with electrode spacing too. As a guesstimate, let's go for 5 volts (which I have no idea of the accuracy).

If we're stepping household 120V down to 5V, we've got a factor of 60 reduction. With a (big ass) buck converter, we can in theory get 15A*60 = 900A = 900C/s out of a standard breaker. That works out to 49kg/day? That seems ridiculously large. I'd love for someone to point out what I did wrong though. I've assumed 100% efficiency everywhere, but even cutting it down to 10% still results in ~5kg/day.

Edit: I'm sure it's an expensive power supply, but it's nice to see that I got in the right ballpark: http://www.americanplatingpower.com/reverse-pulse-power-axd-...
why are VC's taking 200-300k+ as salaries when founders are expected to subsist on just above avg wage or around 100k?
On top of that, would take some time to spruce up code after even a year or so... if you don't have test coverage, add it. If you still use it, take what you've learned and refactor it.

There's always room to improve what you have out there... On the interviewer side, plenty of people only have 1-2 things on github that either don't work, are poorly documented or just plain don't reflect well on them. Do your best to make what you do put out there the best you can.

I should take my own advise more often.
Star Wars Article in Unseen UI
Find someone you trust that works somewhere and who can employ you or get you employed at somewhere you trust, that would be the easiest path for you.

Regardless of that, you should also contribute code to an open-source project you really like. This will also get you a good resume.
My pebble (one of the originals) had this as a native feature. It notifies you when you get out of bluetooth range.
Normal reactor coolant isn't nearly that radioactive. However, there is a continuous filtration system that gets flushed from time to time, and it is extremely nasty stuff. Its possible that the yard worker was actually doused with filter media.
Isn't Python the only one with breaking changes out of this group?
Maybe you didn't get it because you lied? What if you'd said you didn't know?
Most of the ones I've seen just scrape other job sites or feeds, like Monster or Indeed. Standalone ones are going to provide higher quality listings, like:

Authentic Jobs, although you have to provide search terms: https://authenticjobs.com/#onlyremote=1&search=ux%20or%20ui%...

We Work Remotely, formerly the 37signals job board: https://weworkremotely.com/categories/1/jobs

Slack at Work, for companies that use Slack, although you seem to have to search for terms one at a time: http://slackatwork.com/
> I sleep with mine, to use it as an alarm clock that doesn't wake my wife.

I sleep with mine as well. My Apple Watch takes ~60 minutes to charge so I'll normally set it to charge after I wake up and it's ready to go by the time I head out for work.
Maybe I don't use my iPhone as much as others, but most of my time is spent reading NYTimes/Instapaper, checking the weather, time, and email/iMessage.

And aside from reading articles, the watch has replaced most of my phone functions. Calls have been answered; text messages have been dictated via Siri; weather, time, and calendar are all on the modular face and extended views are a tap away. Not to mention the the heath perks, like heart rate monitoring and activity goals.

If I could use the watch with out my phone tethered I would probably leave my phone behind in a lot of instances. It's lighter, less distracting, and the stuff I care about is more accessible.
I'm an embedded developer, so this has been my first experience in HTML/CSS/JS/Websockets. Here's a general overview:

The Python server periodically reads the thermocouple chip over SPI and sends a JSON object over the websocket with temperature and time data.

The javascript websocket handler is a switch statement to parse the incoming JSON, which is data updates, log info, and graph data.

Each button on the webpage has a jQuery callback that sends a JSON command over the websocket.

The Python websocket handler has a class for each command, which is set point control, hysteresis control, fan on/off/auto, start log, finish log, delete log, fetch log info, fetch graph data. Incoming JSON is deserialized into a command object, and command.parse() processes the command through polymorphism.

The application is working well. What's holding me back is the general logistics of joe consumer connecting to the device. The system can act as a wifi access point, or it can join a network. The access point will be easier for a user to connect to, and I can run mDNS to give it an address like smoker.local, but it seems cumbersome to have to change your wifi every time you want to open the app. On the other hand, if it's on a network, there's no easy way to discover it without going into your router settings. Then you're going to 192.168.1.149. Building native Android and iOS apps would solve that, but I'd really like to keep it as a webapp.
If you think interviewing is bad now, wait until you're world-class.

Then either the interviewers "know" the wrong answers, or feel so threatened that you're "not a culture fit."
most of Spotify's traffic is P2P.

They shut that down last year; https://torrentfreak.com/spotify-starts-shutting-down-its-ma...
Seriously? How on earth is this not one of the major features that is used to market the Apple Watch. I've read about 30 reviews, and I don't recall a single one even hinting at that capability.

Am I the only one who leaves his phone behind?
Why not actually start interviewing. It may be that your fears don't match up with reality, and you'll do awesome and each get a handful of great offers.
Chrome extension pub/sub lib
...and you can easily be your own provider. The main issue is that pretty much nobody supports it now, I haven't seen a 'Login with OpenID' button for a while.

OpenID has gone the same way as XMPP, a good open and decentralised protocol lost to proprietary social networks.
I don't think all companies interview like that. In my honest opinion, the interviewing game is changing if you don't interview at any of the giants.

You can also ask about what the on-site interviews are like before you commit to them. If they mention white-board programming, just pass on them. I am super against horrible interview practices (I'm all for phone screens being you and the interviewer SSH'd and in the same screen session together), but you can find companies that have good ones, and part of that task lies on your shoulders.
An LG smartwatch was given to me as a thank you for a thing I did. I was a smartwatch hater. Under no circumstances would I have bought one for myself. I have begrudgingly come to appreciate some features of the concept.

I use Bluetooth headphones almost all day. Being able to see who was calling me without taking my phone out of my pocket is embarrassingly helpful. I appreciate that this is incredibly douchey. BUT it is reality. being able to stay sitting while making a decision to answer a call is actually useful.

Also, voice recognition has evolved to the point where I can respond to other people's texts without having to remove my phone.

So while I agree that they are not generally useful today, I do think there are opportunities that can come within the constraints of smart watches. Much like pechakucha can force better presentations.
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure where they've interviewed or read about interviewing. I guess Google and Microsoft might run interviews like that, but I've never had that experience. And I've interviewed in a lot of places (both in Silicon Valley and out of it!).

It seems like maybe they've spent too much time on HN and Reddit reading about interviewing without doing it. ;)
Tesla Powerwall Presentation by Elon Musk
Perhaps - but this is why trick questions are terrible in interviews. They tend to be around trivia, and encourage people to guess at a response.

If you want to test someone on whether they can admit they don't know, just ask increasingly tough questions and see how they handle it.
I feel your pain. This is what has always worked for me. Take about five minutes here and there through out your workday and learn something new. Specifically, something that will go into making you're more marketable. This way you add some positive flavor to your day. Makes getting through it a bit easier.