skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never understood this sentiment. C isn't assembly exactly because there isn't necessarily a direct correlation between the instructions the programmer writes and the resulting machine code. To me, this is as contrived as the idea that Javascript is "LISP in Java's clothing"

In what possible sense can it be described as an assembler?
The trick is not to be a low-end php dev.
Basically no! All custom to boost performances!
Do they also have right to money already in my wallet?

Because, rights and privileges (for example, developed country social safety net) is a kind of capital.
Community-based early detection for Ebola response
This. If this article was about China or Russia doing something to get off a US product or service, HN would be cheering. When the US protects its own interests, especially its world class space programs, suddenly the tone turns towards, "EVIL US NOT PLAYING NICE!" Sadly, that narrative is upvote heaven here on HN.
Wow, thanks Colin - really cool information. Where do you get the contents of 'records' from? Do you have a script that crawls occasionally?

If we merge bbc.com and bbc.co.uk, we end up with 125 / 10,000. I suppose that isn't that many compared to others, but it's still higher than I think it should be. ArsTechnica (which often runs the same articles, such as this SpaceX one) only has 68 / 10,000 and the articles are written with a lot more technical detail.

Nevertheless, I'm not really sure what can be done about it. We can't ban the BBC from HN, as with BuzzFeed, because that's over the top - there's some good content. A nice solution might be to remind people, on the submission page, that it's better to go to the source - or at least a good, technical write-up - rather than a news post that is written for the general public.
Just like getting a prenuptial agreement - don't worry about it if you don't plan on doing anything with your life.

It's easy to forget - but the information they collect can be used by the group that collects it, and by other parties (Gov't TLAs, hackers, insurance companies, banks, business associates, contractors, partner companies). This can happen now, or at some point in the future.

The data can be combined with other data, such as the National Insurance Database (which is illegal to publicly discuss), to draw conclusions about yourself - possibly based on untrue assumptions.

Master Data programs/systems/initiatives are consolidating, de-duping, and integrating data from disparate systems. It doesn't matter that you put down a fake address 100 times, you just have to put in a real address one time - these systems can collate all the data, validate each one against the USPS database, and toss the fakes.
Most companies that do this (unintentionally, I believe) are not benefiting from the actual work product, but from the consulting regarding their business problems.

How much do you think a consultant would charge to come in for a few hours and discuss their needs, not to mention put some working code together for their problem?
> "do your own benchmark" best practice

Is this a best practice? It seems like we've been delivered evidence that it is really hard to do good benchmarks unless you're already intimately familiar with what you're testing, which says something about how hard it is to make a good choice.

I don't know about other industries, but this sort of result is what stuff like the STAC M3 Benchmark suite was designed for: Typical usecases that experts can implement so you can get realistic performance comparisons.
It has to be a throw-away scenario and a throw-away code. Anything else is wildly unethical.
Thanks Patrick - a couple of shameless self promotional links I mention in the podcast: productizedconsulting.com (free course) as well as outreachsignals.com

The latter is a new recurring revenue service I just launched where the aim is to be super transparent about how I'm selling and closing each customer - see blog.outreachsignals.com - potentially of interest to people.
Hey, I'm interested in chatting with you about the opportunities you see... I'm not in SV and would be happy creating a sub-$1bn company.

What's a good way to get in touch with you?
Create more googles than just white people currently residing in the US of A will create.
Firefox Will Soon Get Sponsored Suggested Tiles Based on Your Browsing History
Actually, I read an interview with one of the Rust devs recently where he said that one of the meanings behind the name "Rust" is that they purposely chose not to use any ideas from programming language research within the past 10 years. IIRC it was because they wanted to use only ideas that had had some time to mature and be used in practice. So yes, Rust chose to willfully ignore at least some of the past 50 years of PL design research. :)
I had an interview at a company once which was basically pair programming with a few different engineers for a full day on real code written for real clients. The best part was the NDA they asked me to sign 6 months later.
I wonder about the copyright of such a thing. If you aren't an empployee and don't sign over rights, are they even allowed use it?
True. OP could have asked for advice without naming names.
The company Mandriva SA may be closing today but they stopped developping the Mandriva Linux distro in 2012. It is since called OpenMandriva and is managed by a non profit organization. So there's no reason for the Linux distro to die with its once eponym mother company. See https://www.openmandriva.org/
Expanding on that, I'd say that Nim is a "better" [1] Python [2], Rust is a better C, and D is a better C++.

[1] For some purposes. As a long-time Pythonista, I've looked at Nim, and I have no desire to replace Python with Nim in my daily use. But my uses for Python aren't the same as everyone else's, and Nim looks like it could be a fun language to play around with and learn, at least.

[2] Even more accurate, Nim is a better Object Pascal.
Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mageia#History
I think the point was that most Indians speak in their local languages at work. Which is actually true. It can be very annoying to Indians themselves, I wouldn't be surprised if its any different for other people.
> The site's already kind of embarrassingly styled

That's kinda subjective; it looks fine to me, although I do miss contextual linking and collapsible comments (a la reddit) - although, this is something they're working on.
Why?

Bret ships ideas. To reify them would provide artifacts for others to obsess over.

Bret ships memes.

You ship the implementation.
RIP Mandriva! I installed it in my desktop many years ago and used as a gateway for internet sharing at home.
Mandrake/Mandriva was my favorite distro for over 10 years.

My introduction to Linux came with Red Hat 4.2, it was very cool but my limited knowledge at the time made certain things difficult for me.

Next, I used Red Hat 5.0 and I liked that a lot but what really changed things for me was Mandrake 6.0. That distribution got me excited about digging into Linux and GNU to find out how things worked and how to customize things to my liking.

URPMI addresses so many of the issues with RPM that I was hooked. No more RPM dependency hell.

I finally switched from Mandriva to something else in 2009.

It was great, in its day.
Why don't you post your sample code on github? Maybe the CTO just wanted free work from you, but maybe he just wanted a candidate that was able to complete the assignment. He could have thought that you cherry-picked the easy cases and were unable to solve the tougher ones.

Coding tests unfortunately aren't just about demonstrating skill. Then people like me could just link to their github QED. It's also about completing assignments and doing stuff because you are being instructed to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CErUTpuDbd8
On a completely unrelated thought, the second I saw the first three words of your paragraph, I thought of the infamous Kanye's interrupt. Not that I agree/disagree with your statement.
Yes. I have seen models where all the "ongoing execution" is "hang out on slack and answer questions at $1000/month"

Yes a special case, but realize that information and ongoing access to expertise is a significant value add
So basically you're saying that because he cares and because he tried, and because the comments were dumb, nobody should criticize him? Do you really not care about getting accurate results?

Running benchmarks is an engineering practice. If you failed to get meaningful results, you failed. Yes, he cares, yes, he tried, yes, the comments are dumb, but he still failed. Sure, I'll give the guy kudos for trying, but I'm not going to pretend he didn't fail. As far as I'm concerned, telling someone they failed is a favor, because now they can change their methodology, try again, and maybe succeed. It's part of the process of achieving meaningful results. The entire point of what he's doing is to achieve meaningful results, not to get a participation medal.

Your response reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSjLiQxEZlM
Consider that such examples are often not about convincing, but teaching. That is, they often not trying to convince the reader, "Language X is better than language Y." Rather, the intent is more, "You already know language X, so here's some code in X. Now here's how you would do the same thing in Y." It's a pedagogical tool, rather than an argument tactic.
I'm not sure I understand. Care to elaborate? Pointers?
Like many already mentioned, Mandrake was the first distro to offer proper hardware detection to my computers.

Also being compiled for i586 architecture was a big plus to me back then, as I wanted to take advantage of my Pentium processors.
Holy Crop
Packetbeat joins Elastic
Selective Availability stopped in 2000. What alternative system would have been ready to go by then that was prevented from being ready by the actions of the US military? What entity would have paid for creating GPS if not the US military?
If your preferred book isn't available for free, it usually means you haven't tried at Library Genesis.
I think by far, the worst affected group is the Indians (and a close second, Chinese, Mexicans, and Filipinos). For a politician, from a macroeconomic perspective, it doesn't make sense to put these arbitrary bureaucratic roadblocks. There was an excellent write-up in this week's Economist on one section of the skilled immigration: Indian immigrants. http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21651331-india-...

Quoth:

Indians in America are the most promising. They are increasingly prominent in tech companies, on Wall Street and in government, especially in the state department. Around 1% of America’s population, over 3.3m people, are “Asian Indians”. Perhaps 150,000 more arrive each year, and 90% of them stay permanently. Devesh Kapur, who has studied them, talks of a “flood”. He says over half of all Indian-born people in America arrived there after 2000.

From a macroeconomic value addition perspective, this is an enormous tax base which also skews social indicators upwards.
That used to be true, but I rather not waste 100gb of my SSD in case I wanted the source code to VIM.
Yes, the CAFC would get the case.

The CAFC itself would be bound to apply 9th Circuit precedent, as it purported to do here. Again in principle, a prior copyright decision by the CAFC applying 9th Circuit law would not be binding precedent on a CAFC panel hearing some later copyright case arising out of the 9th Circuit.
Almost my same story. I still remember trying to learn as much as possible from the magazines, downloading a full distro with my connection was unthinkable back then. It was back when I lived in Mexico. I find it very interesting how technology enabled people growing in different backgrounds to share the same experience.
Mandrake was my first exposure to Linux.

My hats off to Mandriva for keeping it going for so long.
..and just a random thought for ongoing - could you wire up a white label version of eg cyfe.com and have that be the ongoing service?
iPhones have something very similar enabled by default as well: http://www.zdnet.com/article/four-privacy-settings-you-shoul...
I like the way the error handling works; it's a pattern I try and use in Python by creating custom exceptions that basically pass up whatever specific exception is caught.
This is a little much. Putin has great PR, but the reality is that he's in an ugly position considering the level of corruption he's encouraged and the dismal economy he now leads (2% shrink this quarter alone with many large firms unable for find financing due to sanctions). His foreign policy has only emboldened a previously declining NATO and set strict sanctions on Russia that no one wants to lift. Russians aren't stupid, they know this guy can't deliver the gravy train any longer and just like 1991 caught us by surprise we'll probably see a surprise change of leadership when enough parties are fed up. Putin's move towards a North Korean style government isn't from a position of strength, but a position of weakness. Its a desperate move from a desperate regime.
Nim requires a runtime to operate. Figuring out how to safely share the runtime between different Python extensions requires the cooperation of all of those extensions. You probably also need to move all nim code into a thread.
There's also 'Tinfoil for Facebook' https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danvelazco... which is opensource https://github.com/velazcod/Tinfoil-Facebook
7 Steps to Increase Affiliate Sales Like a Pro
> Would be nice to see some official benchmarks from RethinkDB.

Of some artificial scenario that people will claim does not reflect [their] reality?

> As this illustrates, there aren't any good ones out there.

The only good benchmarks are the ones that you define to be representative of something you'll actually see in reality.
Any output like this, unless maliciously fallacious, is contributing in some way to the general understanding of the software concerned and benchmarking best-practices, even through its mistakes.

It's the job of the reader to judge their sources wisely, and interrogate what they read, rather than the job of the author to conduct their explorations in private.

Understandably, it can be frustrating for people involved in the projects but that's just the nature of the beast. They can do things to help their cause by championing good examples of benchmarking, even those which don't look upon them favourably.
The Kindle Finally Gets Typography That Doesn't Suck
https://twitter.com/mongodbfacts
There's no comparison. The US is not trying to conquer the world and the US is not committing genocide.

Yes, the US government does lots of bad things. It also does lots of good things. It's a vast collection of sometimes loosely affiliated organizations with lots of competing interests and there's no reason to expect consistency. But there's no sensible comparison to the Nazis.
Anyone on the Oberon world should know that. :)

I was lucky enough to be able to use Native Oberon back in the day.
Is it possible the German company was trying to see how you react to failing tests?

I just ask because it seems like trying to get work done for free through code exercises is much more trouble than it's worth.
That's a good thing in this case. Start with 100 junk patents to the USPTO > one gets though.

Now take that one and threaten a company. Company says the is a BS patent. Take company to court demand injunction + damages. Company responds it's invalid!

Q: Does the court force an injunction anyway?

If it does there is huge incentives to settle even if it’s a BS patent.
I'm not sure what you mean. Absent some deduplication wizardry by the OS, if I have 60 processes using the "same" statically linked copy of libfoo, that's 60 copies of libfoo's instructions and static data fighting for cache and real memory. Dynamic linking & decades-old virtual memory technology cull that to a single copy.
Because this implies that every Swiss citizen is like him... that is usually what they try to say/joke about...
Have you been communicating with your client that the project scope exceeded your expectations? You'd be better off being honest earlier on rather than failing when they thought everything was going according to schedule.
If they're running your code against actual production data, that crosses the line into questionable territory.

I've been given programming tests before, but they were always for hypothetical problems that were open-ended. That way, each candidate solved the problem in a different way which was when discussed during the interview process. In your case, it sounds like they wanted you to solve a specific real world problem they are dealing with.
I disagree. I think coding tests are a great way to judge candidates. But only if they are given proper weight. Nothing worse than submitting and acing a big coding challenge and then being told they don't think you're a good culture fit. Some companies employ such hiring practices and I think it is very unethical.
Wait, you refuse technical interviews and you say the rest are top shelf? I'm curious to know what your ideal interview looks like. Or do you mean you just get hired through networking?
That smells a bit fishy. I think you've dodged a bullet.

I have to be a bit cautious here, because our company does something similar.

We have a little programming challenge that we ask candidates to submit. We don't use those submissions in production. We find it gives people with non-traditional backgrounds a chance to show their chops, and gives us some meat to discuss during an interview.

The challenge probably takes 4-8 hours, though. Part of me does think it's a little asymmetric for us as employers to be demanding this of candidates. We've also done week-long work tests, where we pay the person market rate to work with us on real-life code.

Anecdotally, people view the paid week-long trial as demeaning, but the (unpaid) challenge as exciting and fun. We live in a bizarre world.
I went through a couple of cases with him where a regular expression wouldn't work, how I might test my solutions, pros and cons of my proposed solutions, how it could scale in the future, etc.

That conversation was there. After we spoke he left me to work.
I'll just give you my take on the situation. You can back out and maybe offer up another developer you know to replace you as a gesture of good will. Or, since you mentioned feature/scope creep, sit down with your client and come up with some precise details for what they want and what you can deliver. Right now it's just this abstract mess of a project and that can seem daunting not knowing exactly where the boundaries are.
Version 44.0.2403.9 dev (64-bit)
Architectural Mad Scientist Einar Thorsteinn Passes Away at 73
Tyrant Unleashed Hack Tool 2015 No Survey
> The starting point is recognizing that this has been around for very long time and is harmless.
Very sad, that there is still no courage, to effectively limit weak patents.

Weak patents are a hindrance to innovations. In a better world, the patent offices should care for that -- but because they earn money from issuing them, standards have been continuously reduced in the past decades. It also looks better in the "innovation news" of the past year, when more patents can be listed ... but it is just eye-washing.
World's Largest Drone Company and Accel Partners – To Invest in Flying Robots
I made $40k (£26k) as a raw recruit, straight out of college, as a Java developer. I got bumped to $60k (£39k) the next year. Granted, this was before the dot-com bubble collapse of the early 2000s, and in a large US city, but considering 2-3% annual inflation and that Manchester is still the 2nd largest metropolis in the UK by population and 3rd largest by money, someone like OP should probably be looking for £45k per year with a software-relevant bachelor's degree, and £40k without. Jobs likely plateau around £60k there for more experienced developers, compared with £90k+ in London.

(I am not at all familiar with the European software labor market, so all this is based on the assumption that London is equivalent to New York City and Manchester equivalent to Chicago.)

In London, those top-paying jobs will mostly be in the financial industry and the internationals that only dip their toes into the "alpha" cities. PHP folks won't ever get that high, but the talent vacuum at the upper end will sort of pull up the salaries at the lower end, right along with the cost of living.

Avoid recruitment agencies wherever you can. In the US, they have never helped me one tiny little bit, and have wasted more of my time than I care to consider. And as the original poster has noted, they made a pretty bad match.

I think it very likely that OP should be able to find a better job, at higher pay, within eight weeks. But the search process is exhausting and stressful, and full of stupid hoops to jump through. Seekers are sorely tempted to let other people handle most of the leg work for them. Don't succumb. There's no one else on Earth that will be as invested in the decision to take a new job as the person who will actually be doing the work.

I wouldn't quit today. I would use the fact that I had a job to take the time to make a better decision this time around, and to be more selective with the advertisements, applications, and interviews. With a competitive offer in your back pocket, you can then have a conversation with your current bosses with greater confidence, knowing that they no longer have the power to keep you from making rent.

Edit: Note that the target numbers above are reasonable for your first offer in the salary negotiation, or the upper end of any salary range posted with an advertisement. The actual salary will likely end up less than that, but there is always the possibility that the company agrees to give you what you ask for.
Rearchitecting GitHub Pages
After having been asked this several times, I've begun to make it clear that I will only engage in these tests if I'm compensated for the time. It's a delicate thing to do, really, telling someone that, no, you're not going to work for free, just on the hope that you might get a job.

But it doesn't only happen in this industry: my niece is a graphic designer & has been asked to provide samples of her work on projects ... to the interviewer's specification. She's done it, because she really needed the work, but felt terribly taken advantage of, and I'd agree: it's predatory.

I have the luxury of telling people that, no, I won't take their 1) IQ test, 2) Personality Test, or 3) their Coding Challenges. Not everybody does, certainly.

The appropriate thing to do is to either state up front that you'd need to be compensated for your time, or acknowledge that you're giving away work as a way to possibly get in the door & just write the best solution you can write - not leaving it incomplete, necessarily, either, as that is a sort-of halfway position that makes you look bad.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141208/06160229348/uk-we...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/03/david-c...

I mean you can deny these things happen I guess? Before Cameron started meddling, this stuff was far less frequent and far more reasonable.
I think the point was (and I'm extrapolating here) that `except:` exists at all, and doesn't require any special foresight to use. That compared to Rust, which thinks about safety first.

Or so it seemed to me.
New HBR research urges CIOs to lead in digital transformation
Sounds like the FA/Premier League that controls football (soccer) over here.
On the subject of apt-get/urpmi I'm really disappointed how it seems RH adopted the worse of all options: yum.

Today it is not so bad, but it was awful, in the beginnings of Fedora.
The web is for documents