skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> postmortem heap analysis is often much easier on a C-based system than in memory-safe languages.

For a specific kind of leak. Java heapdumps and MAT are great postmortem heap-debugging tools (of course, Java Flight Recorder is even awesomer, but unfortunately not part of OpenJDK).
> Why? To prevent the vast majority of companies with the money to actually support and grow such a project the way LLVM has, from doing so?

You mean the ones that haven't provided LLVM with changes for the compilers they are selling?
Is there supposed to be a link to the whiteboard problems? What are "the alternatives?" Your post seems a bit vague and pretentious.
>“In the past, people thought of offenders as impulsive, indiscriminate, opportunistic – they didn’t think they were very clever because they usually aren’t well educated,”

There's two categories of burglars: those that are clever and those who actually are impulsive, indiscriminate, and opportunistic. To group them all together is really untrue else "crimes of opportunity" wouldn't be a thing.. I've seen cases of some really dumb and obviously unplanned burglaries - including the time my own house was burglarized. I've seen even dumber petty thefts - those that were impulsive, indiscriminate, opportunistic to a T. Example: a friend of mine had a bottle of Gatorade stolen from her car but the robber left the cash in the (unlocked) glove compartment.
must have, because it was going directly to the commit which didn't have any useful information.
I don't enjoy doing anything with other people, but it's a necessity given that we need jobs to survive. I could be happy just hacking on something in a basement and never talking to a soul if I could. I can wear a smile if you need me to, but I definitely wont mean it. Sorry.
How does your team manage to accomplish all these tight deadlines while having to use paper and whiteboards to rewrite stinky code? Do your production servers run A4 or legal? What's your cardstock uptime? I've had trouble switching to glossy for all but the most specialized of tasks, I'd be really curious to hear about your paper stack.
Those aren't equivalent. Mortgage payments include principal as well as interest. Interest is only paid on the outstanding balance, not the full, current value of the house. Even at 3% APR, the mortgage payment is typically 2 - 3 times the amortized tax payment. The actual separation depends significantly on mortgage term, value financed, value movement since purchase, and homestead laws.
Note that schools being supported primarily by local property taxes is how you consistently get bad schools in poor areas, which tends to be a self-reinforcing cycle.
Thank you, I'm well-aware that other large companies are able to do all these wonderful things but it really is a different beast.

I think a huge part of it is that the tools do not lend to a very collaborative workflow. Excel and Powerpoint do not exactly have a robust version control system or any great way of leaving any useful comments so that alone makes things difficult.

And honestly, it's probably around the same amount of money if not more expensive to keep a leaner crew but for the type and nature of the work, it's probably more efficient.

And don't get me wrong, there is some outsourcing going on, just not on some "well if all they're doing is powerpoint and excel, why don't they outsource the whole thing" level.
Debugging software in production is a hard unsolved problem, the available tools are pretty primitive, and it doesn't help that people often don't plan it into their development and deployment cycle.

We had a client once using our system, who would see anomalies only after long uptimes at sustained high loads. It took six months to find the cause (a race condition in the database code) because we had so few tools at our disposal to look at the post-mortem state of the program. Running the software at those loads for the weeks or months it took to reproduce the problem under a debugger was obviously not a tenable proposition, and reproducing the variability of the particular real-world traffic was difficult to do in a controlled environment. And the software wasn't written with any eye towards making state available for post-mortem debugging.

I guess "don't write complicated multi-threaded software in C" is a pretty good response to the above too. That particular bug couldn't have happened in say Rust (though it could have in Java).
I love how he addresses 100,000 people as "Team".
In my experiences this is generally not true, bad programmers cannot talk the talk.

I've found the problem is sometimes missing good candidates because that particular one found you intimidating in some way. You can try to mitigate this some by having multiple interviewers to try to find someone on your team they can relate to. But really even this tends to work in your favor, because if they don't click with anyone on your team they probably won't do well even if they are good.
Is the purpose of this to make ad blocking harder? It's much harder to work on an executable form than a declarative one like HTML/CSS.

Really, how many useful web pages need to execute much code? Games, sure. Other than that, not so much. Is this trip really necessary? We just got rid of Flash, after all.

(And, of course, it's basically Java, round 2. "Write once, debug everywhere.")
If I was part of the Google marketing machine and a developer wanted to make that nightmare image public, I'd veto them in a Mountain View minute.
We use collectd extensively and it is wonderful software. Brubeck and collectd do very different jobs.
cool, it reminds me os DOS's debug.
This would require a meaningful and physical support presence, for certain. It would also enable users to really prove support times. These are costs and risks for Stripe respectively. I doubt they implement this.
Wikimedia Labs outage
appears so. sorry!
Sentiment analysis of movie taglines
Good customer support is important for a good customer experience (CX). These unusually high call volumes (cough, IKEA) are getting quite frustrating and provide for a terrible CX.

Terrible CX is endemic in business. I don't understand why Stripe can't set the bar higher. They clearly have money to throw at this problem.
Ask PG: Can we delete very old inactive users with no submissions/comments?
I doubt you have to dig that far down to find a reason. Just think of the kind of person that gets described as "humorless". Then imagine marrying one of them. Women aren't thinking about their hypothetical future children; they're thinking about not hating their own lives in six months.
In practice, I think that what we're actually seeing is what happens when customer support is seen as a cost center. The company could spend more on support, or they can add a notice to the call waiting and call it a day.
Having a debugger is not the only way to debug. Thinking otherwise is not thinking.
I felt the same. I think the main aspect about these images that makes me like them is how everything feels connected, which, is what the AI is trying to find: connections. Honestly, can anyone tell me where I could order large prints of some of these?
This was an awesome article. It's been up here before. For relevant discussion check https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6654905
Russian Official Proposes International Investigation into U.S. Moon Landings
Objective-C syntax aside, keyword arguments are great for readability and maintainability.
Beats are not high-end headphones, they are high-end fashion accessories. The hardware used is beside the point.
Yup. Let's dive into this a bit.

The thing is that when you invoke 'they' you don't mean Facebook. Facebook as a corporation doesn't care about the general public seeing how prisons are run.

The government - and where it shares coffers with private prison moguls - cares.

The government and the private prison industry are able to project their goals through Facebook.
that's what the synopsis of the post should have been, thanks
So my grandmother storing her jewelry in the freezer was not insane? Or, rather, not for that reason :P
It's important to understand this isn't a comparison of "can I find an apartment that's cheaper than buying a house". This is a comparison of like-for-like housing units. Check your local market, what can you rent an entire house for? What's the mortgage for buying a similar house look like?

One thing renters often don't understand when making claims about the personal expenses buyers have to go through to maintain their property is that renters are paying for those things, it's simply amortized over the period the property is up for rent. The money has to come from somewhere, and it comes from the renters.

When a renter moves, there is $0 from their rent that they are able to capture and move forward to their next property. While an owner can sell their previous property and carry forward their equity. To make an analogy, it would be like a renter being able to turn a $1000/mo rent into a $500/mo rent simply by having paid all the rent on-time at their previous place. This doesn't happen with renting, but it happens with buying, where a buyer can carry equity from a previous home into the purchase of a new one and turn a $500,000 loan into a $250,000 loan (assuming the equity they're carrying forward is worth 50% of the loan amount).

The length of time you will live at a place is also unimportant. You always need to live somewhere. Suppose I need to start housing myself at 20 and die at 90. I need to sort out shelter for 70 years. By buying a place you pay for it for 30, then get it for "free" (minus taxes and maintenance) for 40 years. With renting, you pay for shelter for all 70 years.

You can also rent out your property and make somebody else pay for it. Or rent out part of it for the same. In most rental markets, you can individually rent bedrooms for a total that exceeds the single unit rental price for the entire property.

What about markets where the rental fee is lower than the mortgage + taxes + maintenance? The property owner probably bought the property when property prices where lower, or owns it outright or is expecting to capture the delta when selling the property.

But rent here is so much lower than owning? For how long? If you purchase a home now, your 30 year mortgage will cost you the same per month for 30 years (or less if you pay off principal early). Thus a $2000/mo mortgage today will cost $2000/mo in 30 years. While rent only goes up -- usually with inflation. It's likely you'll be making more money in 30 years, so while renters will continue to pay the same share of income on rent, owners will not, their share of income for shelter decreases over time.

The local property market has to be extremely strange for decades for buying to ever be a worse idea than renting over the long-run. There are some advantages to renting, but they're very rarely, if ever, financial over the long-term.
You have to 1) think out loud and 2) finish as fast as you can. Those are often in conflict.
Google shut down the newspaper scanning operation in 2011, to "concentrate instead on newer projects that help the industry, such as Google One Pass"[1], a paywall system. Google One Pass failed and was canceled in 2012.

[1] http://searchengineland.com/google-shuts-down-ambitious-news...
What sort of SaaS product has a 2% chargeback rate? That's huge.
I'm not sure the average holding period is a useful thing to measure. For eXample, if you are trading a spread it's how quickly you put on the second leg that matters, and who cares how long you hold the pair for. So, 42 minutes has nothing to do with it.
I made a linguistics professor listen to a Blink-182 song and analyze accents
You really haven't seen embedded Java have you?

http://www.atego.com/products/atego-perc/

Just one example.
In languages like C it's an unsolved problem. Doesn't mean it's an unsolved problem everywhere (see, e.g. Erlang, which even allows for hot patching without even taking the system down).
My problem, prior to my current position, was that I wasn't allowed to explain these things to people.
Yes. They refuted two conjectures

1. From 1998 [1] that the biggest gap in this model between quantum and classical was quadratic. (they got quartic)

2. From 1984 [2] that the biggest randomized/classical gap was something like N^0.75 (they got quadratic)

The reason I call these "major" is perhaps not exciting to people outside of academia: smart people tried to do better than [1] and [2] but couldn't for > 10 years. These works definitely deepen our theoretical understanding of the differences between quantum/randomized/classical computing. But you have to take it with the grain of salt that a major breakthrough is relative to the incentives and motivations of academic researchers.

[1]: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9802049

[2]: http://www.math.ias.edu/~avi/PUBLICATIONS/MYPAPERS/SW86/SW86...
Amazing the future is now! How does it perform?
In the QCon talk you referenced in [1], you said that it's impossible to debug a Python or Ruby application from a core file. Why is this? Would an mdb module for Python or Ruby, to delve into the interpreter state and expose it in the debugger, not help or not be feasible?
Again it's important to understand that this site is comparing like-for-like properties. The rental rate for a property in NJ that would sell for $500k is going to include the taxes the property owner is paying. Landlords aren't going to service those taxes (or maintenance or whatever other costs there are) out of the kindness of their heart. They've built that into the per-month rent they charge.
http://www.atego.com/products/atego-perc/

Used in missile radar control stations and battleship weapons systems.

Is that fast enough for you?
In a way, you're always paying "rent". If you buy, you pay rent to the bank (principal and interest) for 30 years and rent to the government (property taxes) forever. You also pay utilities and insurance, maintenance and improvements. Homeowners tend to spend money on renovations and stuff, which is a hidden cost.

Then there is the psychological cost of ownership, which to me is a mental burden knowing I have debt.

The way I see it, there's no such thing as ownership. You're always paying someone. Suppose you own your house free and clear - can you paint your house pink? Can you have a collection of junk cars on your front lawn? (The neighbors will complain.) Can you build a patio? (Not without a permit.) Can you blast music really loud?

I recently bought a mortgage note (which makes me the lender) and let me tell you, as much as the homeowner thinks she owns the property, in my mind I have all the control.

Just my two cents, from the perspective of being a lender and a landlord. And yes, I rent.

To me, the only time it old make sense to buy a house is if I would buy it as an investment. Or if I have a family and the price is right. Personally, I value flexibility and less stress.
Sure, fizzbuzz is trivially easy – under normal circumstances. But some people find these types of exercises irrationally difficult in the context of an interview, especially when coupled with the artificiality of writing it out by hand on paper.

> For a professional programmer, anything less is just an excuse or an attitude problem.

You're entitled to your opinion. I disagree. I think you're projecting your personal experience of the world onto other people, which is your prerogative as the interviewer. However, speaking from personal experience, I know some people who would otherwise make excellent teammates, top contributors, etc., will fail this test, and many who pass this test will make terrible employees.

As I said elsewhere, you will get many false positives and some false negatives. Thus, I think it's a bad test and a waste of time.
A company that accepts support emails silently, without giving an immediate acknowledgement and a ticket number, isn't serious about support. If you're serious about support, you have a tracking system visible to the customer.
> No no no no. This is not right.

It's as worthwhile as the bugs they can find with it. I wish the author would tell us if he found the bug in the dns program.
The name is very similar but the products are not so similar -- ECS simply schedules Docker containers across the virtual machines you already have running on AWS. Triton schedules and runs containers on bare metal. Virtualization of course has performance and I/O overhead.
As I think of myself as a nice person, I have to say I see your point, but I guess you didn't understand me right. It has nothing to do _what_ you have to say, rather than _how_: People tend to craft crazy long articles and software, tools and howto's not to hear what they made all wrong. They did this in order to bring benefit to the world (mostly). And they wouldn't publish it if they thought they are not right. If you disagree with their opinion, please do so in a respectful manner. Respectful more often than not also includes being 'nice' - it won't kill you. Still, we are all just normal people, no matter from where.

I guess you also knew that _the_ definition of the word 'nice' is _not_ being ignorant. It's maybe _your_ definition, which is perfectly okay. Well, if it wouldn't mean that you basically just said that all nice people are ignorant. You see where that heads to hopefully...

In contrast to the text above I could've also said the following, which hopefully raises some emotional and super red flags on all ends:
Your answer is not really surprising, as people who are attending church on a regularly basis are more often than not very arrogant and also narrow-minded [0]. I react to these answers mostly with disgust. Seeing people who bring invalid examples is as necessary as a car accident[1]. Being arrogant about just anything and anyone who is not agreeing and justifying it with what was once heard in church won't take anyone far on the Internet.

[0] With that sentence I made everyone unhappy, not just you, also everyone who attends Sundays Mass

[1] I didn't mention you, still its offensive.

I hope you see the difference. Be humble, be kind, more people will listen and accept your comments. Not just here - also in your real life. Be to the point. That is my opinion, feel free to disagree.
200k is downright ordinary in the Bay Area, unfortunately. But, yeah, some places have lower typical down payments, but rents tend to also decline commensurately with home prices. Roughly speaking.
The problem is entirely with how the 2008 bailouts were structured. There wasn't actually any market /correction/.
WikiLeaks – Sony Archives
Not in finance they're not. Finance wants the best interns who can actually perform at least some work, and doesn't want to get busted for breaking employment law in regards to unpaid interns.
I don't think the idea is "Java-in-the-browser" it's "browser-in-the-Java".
How did you like it? Have you looked at Sift Science, by any chance?
There are definitely differences in the property stock that's available for rental vs. buying--though the specifics doubtless vary depending upon what you're looking for and where you're looking. In general, it's probably fair to say that renting standalone houses with the expectation that you won't have to move--with the costs and hassle that implies--can be difficult.

Buying a house is certainly something of a financial bet and clearly makes you less mobile. On the other hand (barring foreclosure), nobody can force you to move and you have a lot more flexibility in what you do with the property. For most people, as time goes on, the ability to pick up and move to another city without too much thought becomes less important and having more stability in their residence more so.
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I had a case recently with a neighbor running a business out of their home. At one point they had 30 customer vehicles parked out in the street and around the neighborhood. In my previous HOA-free area, we had a similar problem but had no recourse except to try to convince the county zoning commission to be bothered to do something -- we eventually had to move as the local homes each had 10-20 vehicles parked out in front.

In my current HOA neighborhood I sent an email and made a phone call and the problem was solved in a couple weeks.
Yet another task management tool? Or is it something different?
Exactly this - if banks didn't think people could pay off mortgages, at least some chunk of the people, they wouldn't be offering them.

I agree that buying a house in central London (for example) is probably outside the reach of mere mortals, but I think that problem occurs several steps before the "paying off the mortgage" bit applies!

Many very interesting replies to my initial comment; it certainly is useful to see things from a different perspective.
I'm pretty sure debt financing is available to private companies. My wife works in impact investing, they do a number of debt deals and bridge loans to private portfolio companies.
It is really about teaching Bloomberg readers how to commoditize expensive programmers.
I don't think you're understanding my point. These people believe that the existence of closed source software is a violation of their rights, so they too would make the argument that your freedom ends where my freedom begins.
Relevant: http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html (scroll to "Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away")
Being able to talk about past projects is not passion, it is simple professionalism. How can you work in a field for long without being able to talk intelligently about it.

I also don't find testing for actual coding skills to be a problem as most candidates don't make it to the interview if they don't have some sort of portfolio of code samples.
The blog post you referenced in [1] doesn't mention managed language runtimes itself, so let me make sure I understand the point. If I understand your point correctly, it's that with managed language runtimes, particularly mature ones like HotSpot and V8, the C heap isn't used in the typical C way; instead, the runtime has its own heap, closely integrated with the garbage collector. In that case, Go probably has the same problem, just because it tries not to use libc at all. I'm guessing that CPython isn't as bad, because it doesn't use a garbage collector. No idea about Ruby.
It's still marketing. "Something you've done" could be the 'is-negative' repo that was briefly on the frontpage today [1], and the candidate could launch into a heart-rending speech on the virtues of modular programming. It doesn't say anything about whether they can actually program. Or "something you've done" could be an incredibly sophisticated engine and the candidate isn't good at marketing and comes off worse than the first guy, despite being a top-rate programmer.

[1] https://github.com/kevva/is-negative
The answer is always very much it depends, of course! And I'm in the process of purchasing a house myself, so I clearly don't think it's an insane decision.

It is, however, more complicated than the train of thought that says, "After 30 years, you'll own your own place, instead of having thrown away hundreds of thousands of dollars to a landlord."
You can't live in a McDonald's franchise. You can obviously sell it and buy, er, a house though!
How Google Go thinks it can knock Java off the charts
I've re-sent it. I have DKIM and SPF set up for my domain so if my emails are actually being dropped you must have a very aggressive spam filter!
I loved this. Thanks.
Why would you want a multi-process VM anyway?
> To me, the only time it old make sense to buy a house is if I would buy it as an investment. Or if I have a family and the price is right. Personally, I value flexibility and less stress.

You are comparing two different kinds of things, financial sense and the intangible sense.

Over a lifetime, renting almost never makes financial sense.

Renting can have some benefits, but they tend to be intangible ones.
Successor for Lisp syntax
My not-so-humble opinion is that valgrind has saved C (and C++) from oblivion, at least for large scale programs.