skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Shared Database/Distributed Commit Log as a Service?
Is there a need for a Shared Database/Distributed Commit Log as a Service? How would you implement it? What technologies would you use (e.g. CouchDB, Kafka, OAuth) ? What business model would you use? What are some use cases? How should conflicts be handled?

I just wanted to brainstorm ideas with anyone who is interested in something like this. Thanks.
Who takes on debt if you pay off your mortgage early?
Make any markdown cheat sheet, documentation or reference much cooler
Hey guys,

I made a Chrome Extension called ownsheet (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ownsheet/mffibchemnbeleefiicbipeofabkkamj) which let's you convert ANY markdown text into a really nice looking and rich view, have a look at the screenshots.

It also comes with some extra features like support for Github-Flavored Markdown, import/export functionality and built-in table of contents.

I think it is especially appealing to developers/hackers since most of you probably know markdown and create or read at least some markdown documents.
Maybe I should also mention that you can simply copy/paste a lot of cheat sheets, documentations etc. from github and it will simply work without any adjustments.

the source code can also be found on github (https://github.com/BastiPaeltz/ownsheet)
It's interesting the amount of hate and either rumors of bad experience or bad experiences directly. I interviewed for an SRE position last September and they were clearly trying very hard to make it a good experience no matter the outcome. I flubbed a couple of questions and they didn't make an offer, but the impression that they cared about my experience as an interviewee lasted. I wonder why my experience was so dramatically different from many here.
What tools are you using to do API management on top? Have you seen the Open-Source KONG? http://github.com/mashape/kong
Next, a solution to the Middle East crisis.
I think you may have left with the wrong impression. If you ask Googlers or Xooglers alike, most agree that the people here are actually the best thing about Google. Like anywhere else, there are some bad apples, but compared to most other places the people here are on average more talented, nicer human beings and more helpful. Certainly compared to your typical startup or other BigCo.

In my nearly 3 years here, that is my experience as well. I've also spoken to many engineers who have left who lamented the quality of their fellow engineering talent at their supposedly 'hot' startup, compared to their former team at Google. Or having to deal with way more unprofessional (or crazy) management, prima-donna teammates, etc.
Re: "and Homebrew is a Mac thing AFAIK." -> FYI There is a fork of Homebrew called Linuxbrew now. http://brew.sh/linuxbrew/ FYI.
Here's definitive proof that Apple is no longer an innovator
Massive crunch culture where Tim checks the lot for cars late at night and on weekends and complains when there are not enough cars there.
I would agree with what you said if you replaced resume with reputation. Anyone can fill out a nice resume.

One of the challenges with Google's interview process [0] is they are very worried about hiring mistakes, and also know that the process is very noisy. As such, they interview a tremendous amount of people for hiring. In addition, they've found it more efficient to just keep a high bar (missing many good hires to keep out 1 bad hire) than to conduct more than 5 interviews.

The one thing I've wonder is - if they want the top 100 computer scientists in the world to work for them, will this process produce that? Or is there another process for them?

I think the most effective way to get a job there is to build a small company and get acquihired.

[0] I don't work at Google, but I've researched the process in anticipation of an interview.
Not to complain about terminology, but appliances used to be precisely the sort of stuff you could repair. I've fixed my microwave, I did not carry it to a genius bar. This is the reason why I fear this pernicious business model will spread: it promises lock-in for everybody, from John Deere to coffee machines makers.

As far as the iwatch being just a watch, the same thing could have said of the iphone. It was a phone, only cooler. Almost a decade later, ios devices are the platforms where many users do a significant fraction of their computing. And while ios devices may not require on bitcode submission, they limit the users freedom in a way that is fundamental. Image a world were every x86 computer sold post 1995 (outside of the server space) could only run Windows.

Besides, even if you own a "creation machine", you'll often be catering to the market of restricted devices (case and point: gecko on ios).

EDIT: I'll grant you may be right in the specific sector of non-computing electronics (watches, calculators, etc).
I'm the author - thank you! Always great to hear positive feedback. Most of what's been said here stems from truth in their publishing process. They do seem to churn out a large amount of content, and I sense that their higher quality titles stem from the author having to make the push for excellence.
Sure, but they now have the money back and can lend it again, which may even work to their advantage if interest rates have risen since the loan was signed. It seems impossible to me to say that the net effect is a sure loss.

And that's entirely beside the point that "not making as much money as I had hoped" is not the same thing as "lost money".
Why we are dropping CxO titles at our startup
With virtually none of the bankers/financiers going to jail or paying in any meaningful way for their actions?
Well, yes, it was a joke, but many people are probably confused about that. It's worth noting.
This sounds like a poster child for stress corrosion cracking - which would greatly impact the toughness of the material. Most steels (including stainless) become significantly more brittle under stress when exposed to high chloride environments like seawater while under load - much more than standard fracture mechanics would suggest. Basically there's chloride penetration and then hydrogen generation at the grain boundaries within the metal structure, which significantly reduces the toughness and allows for rapid and catastrophic failure easily.
Food delivery startup Spoonrocket shuts down in Seattle 4 months after launch
But you can still discharge them through death, can't you? So there's still risk of non-repayment, if the borrower stays poor until his/her death.
Perhaps during an electrical storm. Unless you think there's a long-term high-voltage short that nobody's noticed?

Welders use Phosphoric acid and an electrified scrub brush (electrified lead wrapped with tough cloth, dipped in Phosphoric acid) to scrub welding scorches off of brushed stainless steel. Phosphoric acid on its own will etch stainless steel (and teeth), and electrifying the set dramatically increases the reaction rate, leaving bare metal after a couple of gentle passes.
Please, please can we stop with the attitude that PCSOs are pointless. They certainly are not. To deter low level crime - the only type of crime "foot patrol" prevents - a PCSO is far, far better value for money than a PC.

We are losing any ability to conduct neighbourhood policing, and that's entirely because the public fetishises police officer numbers, so we fire a bunch of far cheaper, more competent and specialized police staff.

A lot of crime prevention and fighting is walking through areas, talking to people and giving out leaflets. You really want PCs doing that and being paid for it?
You need green/user-space threads if you want to use co-routines effectively, because if a coroutine blocks, it would block off the entire OS thread from doing anything else.
I mean, that's a little strong. My undergrad degree is in math, so I would be thrilled if I was sitting in an interview and was being asked questions like that instead of stuff about how computers actually work.
So would you say that someone deciding not to take out a student loan at all also "costs the taxpayers money"?
Do not forget the Netherlands, phone tapping world champion.
A fighter-jet that no one wants as well... It's not even a jack of all trades/master of none type of deal. It literally sucks at all of the things it was built to do...
First sentence..

> In soccer-obsessed Brazil, going to a match means a chance to see some of the best players in the world—and face the possibility of getting beaten up or even killed.

To say nothing of the sweeping stereotypes here there's also a glaring inaccuracy. Sorry, but by most definitions of 'best players in the world' this is simply false, sadly.

Brazil is perhaps the best example of a country that consistently produces world-class players yet struggles to keep them playing in their domestic league. The best players mostly all go to European clubs.
Gen X Was Right: Reality Really Does Bite
because I'm not good at other things they need.

It's not that you're not _good_ at it, but you're not able to demonstrate under time constraints, lack of references, lack of iterative code/compiler/REPL feedback, and while being stared down by someone whose default mindset is "why am I wasting my time on this person?"

It's never 1 reason why you get rejected, it's the total score.

That depends on how far down the interview process you are. Often they'll cut you off at a phone interview if you stumble. Sometimes they'll cut in-person interviews short if they think you're not worth it. So, they don't always get a "total score" to judge against. It's often just summary judgement off subjective feelings.
What are stackless coroutines? What do they look like?
Isn't education something that US taxpayer should choose to pay for?

It doesn't seem right that the government is charging students - taxpayers - un unfairly high rate of interest, one so high that commercial lenders can typically undercut the rate by a significant margin.

That's stealing from Peter to pay Paul.

The government should reconsider whether it's right to charge such a high amount to students remaining on the plan, that is, the students who don't qualify for refinancing. Isn't this just an exercise in taking money away from the poor?
In the U.S. these things are kept incredibly secret (even through strenuous efforts to keep the details out of court testimony) and it takes many years to learn more about them.
It depends how your interviewer is ranking/scoring you. One interviewer might be impressed with your ability to talk through and solve the problem from first principles, where another might ding you for not instantly knowing the answer. The former type of interviewer would be happy to give you hints and prompts, the second is a stone wall. I try to be the first -- it helps assess how a candidate responds to coaching too! -- but there's a spectrum between "nudging" and "telling them the answer straight out".
CS fundamentals like BSTs are definitely not used to teach programming--things like video game projects are--they're used to teach algorithm design and analysis. CS is an academic science, it's not a technology trade.
If the answer to the question is yes, then is the net present value of the remaining interest payments greater than the present value of the loan payout they just received? It is, but not by a huge amount. If I was the government is be happy to get all this cash from loans paid off early and I would use it to make more money (loan it out again to something more lucrative, mitigate the risks of likely to default student loans).
Yup. According to Snowden, the GCHQ is worse than the NSA.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret...
It's nice to see this make the headlines, I was at Microsoft M&A group in 2012 when the acquisition became public. Satya has received a lot of praise for the direction Microsoft has been going in, but I still feel that some of the groundwork was laid by Steve. PPI is a good example with the acquisition becoming public in summer of 2012.

When most people today talk about Steve, they often make it sound like he was aloof to the needs of the industry, the fact that Microsoft needed to be re-organized, etc. I don't feel like he didn't know these things, but more-so that it took a change of leadership to rally the company with different goals. [edited to add more commentary]
This should be posted over to r/clojure
It's because The federal govt is making a nice profit off these low risk borrowers, which in turn subsidizes the high risk borrowers. Lose the low risk borrowers from your portfolio and your overall expected return drops. In more concrete terms the Kellogg MBA in the article was paying the govt 6.5% interest, but the free market would do the deal for less than half that.
Just tangentially related, but I believe one of PG best essay (imo) would be appropriate for all parties involved: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Apache Spark Streaming example project released
My 2cents here - I respectfully declined to answer any JavaScript/CSS questions prompted by a recruiter.

Being a front-end guy, I proactively request for hiring manager or a senior front-end engineer from the team.
Translation: The bondholders must be paid. That's the most important thing. If the students can't pay, taxes must be raised so the taxpayer can pay.
I am speaking from personal experience here, they don't count a lot of factors while rejecting a candidate, you make one mistake on their particular set of questions, you are out. They don't even look at your resumes until all your 4 interviews are completed. However, selecting a candidate is a different matter, in that decision they might consider everything.
It's not "just as easy". A maven plugin is necessarily a maven module, a first-class module like any of your libraries; unless you go out of your way to make it not, it has versioning, tagging and the like. Even more importantly, since the plugin itself is built with maven, it naturally has dependencies and unit tests, arranged in the same familiar structure as the rest of your code. Everything guides you towards good development practice; of course you could manage your scripts in the same way, but you'd have to do so by hand, and with the best of intentions I've never seen any team that used scripts have the discipline to manage them properly.

Good developers can make good things with bad tools and bad developers can make bad things with good tools yes, but even so, tooling and defaults are extremely important.
> But to say that Fallingwater is simply a meditation on nature would miss the point—which, sadly, I did. I walked away from Fallingwater thinking that the house was a beautiful representation of the juncture where nature and architecture meet and nothing more. Then I emailed Neil Levine, a professor of history and architecture at Harvard University, to ask for an interview.

> Levine replied promptly, but to my dismay, he told me he was too busy to talk. Furthermore he mentioned that I would do better not to engage with jargon like “organic architecture.” I was slighted, yes, but also intrigued.

> In 2011 Levine published an essay titled “The Temporal Dimension of Fallingwater,” where he argues that time—and not just nature—is crucial to Wright’s design. This temporal element was a direct consequence of the natural setting. The stream, including the waterfall, isn’t only a place where the horizontal meets the vertical, but also where the motionless meets the turbulent, the silent meets the thundering, and the finite meets the infinite. The stream is some combination of both sides. By placing the house above the falls, Wright furthers this juxtaposition.

It's worth understanding here that just because Levine has a Ph.D. doesn't mean he's right or the author of the article is wrong. Levine's imperative as a research scholar is to come up with different and novel ideas about the architecture he studies, and as such, when looking at a long-studied work like Fallingwater, it's no surprise he might try to come up with a new opinion.

But ultimately, it's just an opinion, and the barrier of evidence for such opinion is pretty low. It's not math where there are proofs, it's hypothesizing about the meaning of something which is experienced subjectively. One could make persuasive statements about the intentions of Wright, or about the experiences of people experiencing Wright's work, but to talk about a building as if it's objectively a temporal work is just wankery. And if Levine wants to argue that point as if it were objective truth rather than an interesting way to view Fallingwater, that makes him a wanker.
I made this word up a long time ago, but the "nice tech career you have there" move can be called 'bluelisting' -- i.e. censorship of someone's outside-employment speech via threatening someone's at-employment livelihood. I think it's a problem, and an increasingly huge one.

People who are virulently anti-libertarian inexplicably adopt very libertarian "employers should be able to hire/fire anyone they want" responses when this practice is criticized, as if they don't see any kind of problem with the ability to readily get someone fired for arguing controversial beliefs outside of their workplace.

But, think about it this way: you obviously can't deeply engage the views of others at work, unless you have a very open-minded workplace or those views somehow relate to your job performance. (I doubt questions like "is it immoral to do [insert drug]?" or "should prostitution be legal?" would ever be workplace appropriate, but they're sincere views people hold that dictate drug policy via public opinion for example.)

So, if you can't talk about these things at work, where the hell do you talk about them? I'm guessing on the internet, because colleges are the next option and they're only available to a fraction of the population for four years at a time. So the internet is no longer an option, where? I'm asking this question rhetorically. If society has no battlegrounds for beliefs, democracy is permanently is screwed, because you need some kind of battleground for beliefs to refine beliefs in concordance with reality in the first place.
I find it ironic that she is against sexism, yet her entire company is comprised of only women and designs games only for women.

She also regularly uses words like "cis" and other offensive pejoratives aimed at men.

She is only hurting her cause for equality.
Disagree, this is not some PR campaign of a corporate drone, a real person felt frustrated with the process of hiring in Google. Is it to instigate debate on HN, I doubt it. He is just venting out, that his body of work which is public is effectively ignored in favor of a pedantic exercise.
Obviously I think that is unacceptable.

But being realistic if you aren't able to afford to eat, then you need to find another job before you leave this one. So I'd concentrate on that, finding something else. Unfortunately you'll have to put up with this for a little while, so you could start documenting what goes on if you wish to make some legal complaint (although that might be expensive, unless you can find a lawyer who will work on a % of the potential winnings).

Nobody should have to put up with racism and abuse in the workplace, and I have no strategies for dealing with that except to get out ASAP. The only thing I would say is, try and ignore the things he doesn't which don't directly impact you (e.g. flirting with female employees, it really has zero impact on you, your work, or anything).
That's not what the interview process is like at all.

They're more interested in how you approach real world issues (the questions I got asked were conceivably real-life issues a company like Google would face with its products). If you can solve that issue by applying efficient and well understood data structures and algorithms, then that indicates you understand the problem space and solutions that may apply.

It's not like they get you in a room and ask you to draw a linked list or a binary tree.
What are you basing this on? Flash Networks said "The javascript mentioned does not collect or store any user data but is used to deliver user messages." and I haven't heard anything to contrary.

In fact, it doesn't sound like it was even going to be used to inject ads except for offering users to upgrade to larger plan when they were near their data expiration.

I agree that any code injection is shady and unwanted but you're just making stuff up.
"not making as much money as I had hoped" is not the same thing as "lost money".

It depends on how you account for it. Technically you shouldn't assume all your future interest is materialized (IANAA), but if you run forecasts and see you have a million people who owe you a billion dollars total on a 7% interest rate over the next 20 years, you expect to have, within reason, that money.

If something incredible happens and all those people suddenly pay off their loans this month, that drastically changes your future (especially if your loans were at a higher interest rate from the past you can't re-charge today).
I wasn't trying to deny their usage, in fact I have no problem believing these things are out there. I'm just trying to understand the data log that was posted.

I work for a company with a huge dataset of cell tower observations, and so I was interested in locations that I could investigate. I'll try your suggestion and see if I can find anything suspicious.
Oddly enough, Google shows me interview questions where "inverting a binary tree" means something quite different — for example, flipping it upside down, and making the left leaf the root, the right leaf the left leaf and the root the right leaf.

If this was really about "reversing" the tree, as you mention, the question seems more likely to address how the candidate approaches the situation. Like, he should start by making sure they both agree on what the question actually means.

Once that's out of the way, it seems relatively easy to come up with a naive solution, without having memorised any algorithms. It seems more like a case of brainfreeze to me, which can be sort-of fixed with practice (which in turn many candidates refuse to do: the dreaded "If I have to cram for the interview, I don't want the job" statement.)

So maybe he really wasn't a good fit for Google, despite apparently being a rockstar developer. Hey, startups need rockstar devs too.
Not knowing the particulars of the bridge CP system in place, hydrogen embrittlement is possible but it sounds more like stress corrosion cracking is the major culprit.
Nice implementation, I like how the toplevel lifting is done. I was exploring similar things from a slightly different angle (using PEG natural extensibility): https://github.com/combinatorylogic/clike
The notion that one should consider pharmaceuticals as a solution to not deriving happiness from a desk job really is outrageous. And that's just from a statistical standpoint. It's very unlikely to be the "right" solution for that person.

Same goes for ADHD medication for boys (yes, predominantly boys) in grade school because they can't sit still and concentrate as they're expected at such a young age. I find it absurd how commonplace this is becoming. Humans have not fundamentally changed their genetic makeup in the last few hundred years. It's much more likely the case that the environment has become unreasonable, rather than that the kids are failing their roles as humans.

But wait, if you want mindless drones who do as they're told, contribute to bottom lines, buy shit they don't need to satisfy misery they don't understand, then by all means, humans are failing. Let's fix that. Let's over-medicate. Let's teach people how to cope with a life devoid of meaning and passion.

These are the trends I see when I tune into mainstream narratives and general societal expectations. And it pisses me off. Can the right medication help a small subset of the population who are a few standard deviations off in terms of brain chemistry? Of course it can, that goes without saying. Doesn't mean we're not facing some disturbing trends in the developed world.

And I'll express myself however I please within HN's guidelines, thank you very much.