skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The future is here it's just not evenly distributed, as they say. Besides a bubble either bursting or continuing to inflate it seems likely that mature tech companies like Yelp, Twitter, Salesforce, and others will realize they can't afford to keep paying their average developer $250,000/year and relocate people to cheaper second tier cities. Yes, you need superstars wherever they are but instead of treating everyone like a superstar can you differentiate between mission-critical and non-mission-critical roles and locate them appropriately? I haven't seen this happen yet but it makes sense that at some point it would, due to the diminishing quality of life in the bay area. Or do they wait for the capital markets to turn on them before doing this?
It reminds me of the game console crash of '83. It's a great product, but when you gouge your customers you can create a lot of bad feeling that doesn't go away quickly. A company like Groupon could easily be profitable charging businesses a fraction of what they do, but they chose not to. This is the opposite of what most start-ups do (delay profitability until later.) The short-term thinking of overpricing has long-term repercussions for them and any other business that resembles them.
+1 to your general sentiment.

I have fond memories of listening to my grandmother tell stories about how her father installed the first (private, consumer) electric generator in the state of Alabama and how at night, you could see their farm glow for miles around. And I often contemplate how my 2yo daughter will think it's totally normal to have all the world's information at your fingertips 24/7. The pace of change is accelerating, and while we don't know what the future holds, this is a damned exciting time to be alive.

However, I bemoan the scarcity of good bagels, and it saddens me if Lender's is your concept of a "Bagel". That's like having McDonald's or Dominos be your concept of a Hamburger or a Pizza. They're the same type of food, in general, but you really won't understand what all the fuss is about until you have a more authentic, less processed version.
Yeah, I'm really concerned about this too. I assume it's fairly good storage if they're dogfooding this for their backup product, but explicit is better than expectations in this case :)
For the record: Groupon does remind you to tip on the full price when getting the coupon, now.
This place [0] was one of the best in North America for real bread but they are now long gone.

[0] http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Tassajara-Bakery-to-close...

Sorry. Maybe they have a spiritual heir that someone here can identify.
Facebook seeks patent on process that would ID your camera and images
> responsible for the establishment of civilization

"I would beg leave to suggest the propriety of erecting public Distilleries in different States. The benefits arising from the moderate use of strong Liquor have been experienced in All Armies, and are not to be disputed"
--George Washington to John Hancock, 16 August 1777
I'm guessing most people will miss the reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvine... so I'll just add a link.
I actually quite like the question. As somebody who has done some hiring, if you've got past the CV perusal stage then it means I think you're probably good enough and I want to hire you. Trouble is, there are 5 candidates and only 1 position.

So I have to come up with a way to kick your tyres, and try to figure out what you're like to work with. What do you love and hate? What kind of person are you?

You might prefer me to ask more transparent and common questions, but how will I know you are not just giving rehearsed answers from a book? So I ask questions that are a bit more oblique and original, designed to raise genuine discussion.

How do you answer them? Be honest! It's not an excuse for me to get rid of you, because I really want to hire you so I can end the extremely dull hiring process and get back to my day job. I'm looking for how you answer the question, not the exact words, but whether you clam up, tell a joke, go on a long-winded story, get all excited, or whatever it is that you do.
This comment just blows my mind! I remember when I stopped playing pen-and-paper RPGs regularly. It was after an intense Sunday session that felt more like an unproductive work meeting. I remember thinking "fun shouldn't be this much like the work I'm dreading going to tomorrow."
Disagreed. The techniques explained in the article worked quite well for me, and resulting projects are well-structured and very well maintainable for years.

As ever, we have to apply common sense: as I mentioned in the article, 1-level inheritance is quite good, or maximum 2, but if we have more, it gets too verbose. Luckily, for most cases, 1-level is quite enough to create common API and reusable modules.

Maybe you overuse it? Of course if you try to build huge hierarchies like this, you most likely will end up using typecasts in client code, and the entire thing will quickly become a mess. The article proposes solutions that don't have typecasts in client code.

As I said before, we should apply common sense. Engineering is all about tradeoffs. If I were you, I wouldn't argue against any approach as aggressively as you just did.
If you find your datasets using too much disk space, simply enable compression: http://www.bzip.org/
You should write about all the problems with major game publishers and name names. It would be a great article! However, considering how most game sites circled the wagons for the case of Nathan Grayson and an unknown indie dev, I don't have high hopes.

Also, saying there was no conflict of interest between Grayson and Quinn is bunk. He had hung out with her, flirted online, planned a trip to Vegas with her, and been thanked in the credits of Quinn's game. A journalist outside of the games industry would have let someone else cover the Game Jam, given that level of involvement.

Quinn should be blameless in this - there's no handbook of ethics for indie devs - but Stephen Totilo absolutely shouldn't.
I can see your blue eye peering through a bagel's hole into the heart of modern times.
See what your code does – as you type it [video]
Apple to Alert Users Who Installed Apps Compromised by XcodeGhost
>If they say yes, then I'll probably entertain myself by asking how they'd run the company while mentally moving on to the next candidate.

How condescending and arrogant do you have to be to take this kind of attitude to someone who answers the question you just asked them? What's the point of asking the question if you're not going to listen to people's answers and think about them? I can't imagine someone who takes such a dismissive approach to candidates is much of a good boss.

>I immediately exclude discussion of company, title, and salary, because these are the things people think they want but can't really affect my decision.

>Sometimes the scope of this question is too big for people to grasp

>They are just indicators to dig deeper, you're not going to trick someone who knows what they're doing.

>* In most cases, the candidates have thanked me for the exercise because it helped them really narrow in on what they're passionate about and what type of job they should be looking for.*

The arrogance and of the author and the lack of empathy and respect for the people they're talking to is really offputting. I'm sure people are just lining up to thank this guy for this stimulating and amazing question that saved them and helped them figure out who they really were. Christ.
And Dropbox is aligned with the US government as you surely know. Does that matter though?
Presumably then controlling population growth is another way to save energy. I took that "how many earths does your life style require" - the evil half of my brain thought "if my lifestyle requires 1,5 earths, then it would be sustainable with one third less people than we have not"...

Afaik China for example is trying to actively manage the population growth/consumption problem, and sometimes they managed to introduce some environment friendly things that took other countries decades (like making filters in car exhausts mandatory, making plastic bags illegal, and so on). Not that China is a model of environmentalism, just saying that it's not a given that third world countries have to take the same route to modern living as US+Europe.

As for why would anybody save energy: it doesn't always have to equate less convenience. For example, even if you gave me the biggest possible car, with some magic CO2-neutral power source and what not, I would still not like commuting. So a solution that involves less commuting could both save energy and be more convenient (for example cool new houses could be build that make it more attractive to live in the city - in fact less cars would make living in the city a lot more attractive).

In general it seems to me that if "convenience X" involves a lot of energy, it will also involve a lot of nuisance (machines that make noises or need a lot of attention - lots of energy passing through it means likely it will break down sooner).

Or better insulating your house could simply be cheaper than paying for the energy to heat it - why wouldn't you then choose to insulate the house?

And so on.
I was confused for a moment: http://spoilrs.co/posts/amGpfCV2JLGTlDBRKloP0g

Perhaps to make it Javascript-disabled-friendly there can be styles that are removed when the pop-up is dismissed (or that exist when javascript is disabled via <noscript> ?)

I'm also not sure there is a demand for this sort of thing. [spoiler] tags that require to be clicked/highlighted are hard to accidentally click/highlight and in scenarios I know a [spoiler] is used as a link to a pastebin, etc. User behavior I've seen is to middle click the link and view it later/after. Which requires the user to also switch to the tab.

It seems to be a bit of a redundant failsafe, in my honest opinion. But it looks nice and functions! :)
Powering MailChimp Pro Reporting
...but there's all sorts of confounds there, too.
Like is a lifestyle that features moderate drinking more likely to include longevity promoting things like exercise, friends, and financial security?

I am not sure how easy this could be to study-- swearing off alcohol for life as part of a science experiment sounds like a sitcom plot; anyone who goes along with it may not be representative of the general population.
>They seem to imply that source code is required for independent testing.

That is most certainly NOT what the EFF is implying. They are asking for an exemption to the DMCA, not access to anyone's original source code. When they say "Automakers argue that it’s unlawful for independent researchers to look at the code that controls vehicles without the manufacturer’s permission," they're not talking about "you should have a legal obligation to give us your human-readable source code," they're talking about "You shouldn't be able to sue us for copyright infringement when we analyze the firmware on our cars." Car manufacturers argue that people don't really own cars, and that any attempt to look at the software that manages them is in violation of the DMCA.You can read more about it here:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/automakers-say-you-don...

The kind of thing the EFF is trying to legally access is already shipped in every vehicle that goes to China (or anywhere), where they don't have the DMCA and probably are already examining it - just not for our benefit.
Ursine?

Interesting idea... got a name for the game? I'll try it out on my friends. Although making the puzzles might be a challenge in themselves.
For a norwegian (ØÆÅ, there you go, proof enough?), seeing someone
misspelling traffic as "træfik" immediately makes me think about some
guy from out in the country, with a semi-thick norwegian dialect and
bad, bad norw-english pronounciation.

"Træfik".

Americanized, with full prejudice, my best træfik character-impression
would be "Hey y'all. Howdy doodely do! What'cha got going on here in
the barn? Because that ain't no country or western I know!"

You get the picture :)
There's no shortage of conspiratorial comments and posts about Russia and China on HN either. There's something about conspiracies which captures our imagination but there needs to at least be some basis in the facts.
This is probably a stupid question, but here it goes:

Embedded platforms tend to have size limits. Would this increase the size of the source code? Seems a bit verbose to me.
Getting on the subway as the new status symbol for tech?
This is awesome. I absolutely love <company>engineering blogs like this.

There's no real reason for companies to educate external devs/hobbyists/students like this, but some do, and it's really awesome.
> The "wiseguy" in me would say: "That's a trick question, my ideal job takes Mondays off."

So say it. If your future boss loves someone with a quick sense of humour, they might laugh and give you a bonus point.
DOS isn't an OS at all. The BIOS did the hardware-specific stuff, including the floppy driver(!) DOS was almost pure software services.

For cases where DOS had used an instruction that would change, Intel rolled over and crippled that instruction in 16-bit machines (at least for a while) so it would behave the same.
It's less self-fulfilling than you would expect. Research shows that tip amount isn't very affected by the quality of service, but much more affected by the person doing the tipping.
Why Europe isn't creating any Googles or Facebooks
"The ridership growth follows the trajectory of the Nasdaq."

If you look carefully at the graphs, it's actually a lagging indicator.

Which makes the hook, "Wondering if the Silicon Valley’s tech boom is waning?" meaningless.
Yes, it seems like a lot of money to burn through, but as someone who only casually watches the overall startup market I've sort of lost the ability to be surprised when a startup burns through a ridiculous amount of money in a very short time, so it still seems like a plausible thing to me, though I'll reiterate I have no actual knowledge of what happened in this case.
> I don't know why people think the US should be in love with every anti-US regime and any attempt to hurt that regime is suddenly "OMG EVIL USA" when we see the same realpolitik everywhere else without protest.

You may have heard the phrase "two wrongs don't make a right."
"so we ported his C++ implementation to C to be backwards compatible"
If I were the interviewer, you would get bonus points for being risk-taking and funny.

As long as you followed up with the actual, hopefully reasonable answer after that :-)
A few people in this thread have ignored the very next Monday aspect of the question. I guess it could go either way in real interviews - either people are stressed and miss the next Monday bit, or the interviewer very carefully stresses that bit - but still it seems to weaken the question.
I have been doing quantitative data analysis in the investment space for about 10 years.

Happy to hear/talk about methodology if you want to write/talk about it.
I assume its for this reason (and others) that even Amazon.com still uses Akamai. Stuff like product images/banners still get served from domains like g-ecx.images-amazon.com (which resolve to Akamai)
That's a rather absurd set of constraints. Do you hire people to only work 100% alone on projects ? Would Linus Torvalds be a "red flag" because he's accepting contributions to Linux ?

Why 10 people ? There is no link between popularity and code quality. Presumably the developer won't be also in charge of marketing.

Did the piece of code you posted to usenet have tests, doc, a website and a mailing list ? How do you know that you had 10 users who never contacted you ?

In our industry programmers aren't allowed to be simply professionals. They are always expected to be "passionate" and if they don't program day and night and in their spare time then it is suspicious.
I admire that at announcement time they already have a neat name and mascot that distinguishes this project and makes it more memorable.
But I fear it might be a little close to an existing open source project also using a little lemur dude graphic... http://www.lemurproject.org/
I'm downloading the Workstation beta now mainly to have a look at Gnome 3.18. I have quite liked Gnome 3 since around 3.4 (used the Debian Wheezy manifestation). I can't seem to get on with KDE but that is probably just me.

For the 'just do stuff' laptop, I find xfce4 reassuringly gradualist. I'm using version 4.10 with whisker-menu bound to Mod4-space, and with the panel brought down to the bottom of the screen. I hand this laptop to students who are used to Windows and they have no problems with the navigation at all. Slackware as underlying OS but almost any of the larger distros will package a full xfce4 desktop session.
> They use Blowfish. Says it all really - their default encryption is a long-obsolete 64-bit block cipher you might have picked in 1999 because it was faster than 3DES.

Not defending it, because I know it's old and there are weaknesses, but aren't Blowfish and 3DES both still technically secure? This is a genuine question. It was my understanding that if implemented correctly, with a random key etc., that neither has been formally broken. 3DES is 2^112 no? which is still not practically accessible by brute force. Not that this means anyone should use them, of course, AES is a standard for a reason...

As you say, I had just assumed the migration cost was too high to move to something newer, but I don't think it necessarily means data stored there is unsafe?
Take in mind that I'm not familiar with WoW but I do have extensive (and I mean extensive) experience on WC3 as you read this:

> If you could design an encounter what would the mechanics be?

Is actually a different sort of question than that posited in the OP. Your answer to this question would be more specific, as you are asking for mechanics - the other question is more open-ended and has many more opportunities for pitfalls, as has been much of the discussion here on HN.

And this is all context of the applicant aside. Certainly some of the most brilliant minds play WoW (and getting a job at blizzard is tough!), but at the same time, you will also have to sort through additional chaff that would have already been filtered out in the resume before the OP's question was even asked.
very nice! I'll try it with my kid
...and it shouldn't matter, if he had the right to carry a firearm. Anyway, putting it into checked luggage erases the difference between the two.
The value they added at first was the viral nature of the deal - you only got the deal if enough people signed up. This prompted people to tell their friends, which created buzz. Once they got large enough, there was never a sense of urgency and that value was decreased.
I'll never forget the Gawker article on it.

It was actually worth $30 Million

http://gawker.com/we-gave-canada-one-job-dont-lose-all-the-m...

My favourite quote:

"""
The Federation of Québec Maple Syrup Producers (three magical elves) noticed that the syrup was missing during a routine inspection of the warehouse, which is maintained as part of the world's "global strategic maple syrup reserve."
"""
Thing is, though, Lender's bagels, and McDonald's hamburgers, are tasty.

Certainly there are better, I've had much better bagels when I've lived in big cities, but in my relatively small home city that I've retired to starting my day with a Lender's bagel, as I do almost every day, is not a bad thing.
High end raiding is a lot more work then a game.

2-3 hours per night of highly focused extremely performance critical labor.

Follow with 1 hour of meetings where you discuss performance, review reports of your guilds performance vs other outfits. Write reports about this, discuss potential strategy initiatives and if there is a need to recruit I.E.: Hire new talent.

At the same time you need to manage monetary income. Your outfit sells off good its acquires during raids, and you use this to purchase materials your raid group needs in game.

Its literally a business inside a video game :| If it didn't take me 6 years to realize that. In retrospect I wish I could list it as management/leadership experience without getting laughed out of boardrooms :)
My Favorite Database Is the Network
> Humans were not responsible

Well, yes and no:

"TEPCO, that operated the station, had been warned their seawall was insufficient to withstand a powerful tsunami, but the seawall height was not raised in response." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Powe...

I agree with your general sentiment, but I would say that humans are the biggest threat in nuclear power.
> Everything short of that is a lie.

I think most people would do some kind of "work" even if they didn't have to work for money. Especially true for developers.

If I could create my dream job with a dream team of mentors (say "I'd work with Carmack and a few other guys working on a new game engine for VR") I'd certainly do it for free if I was already rich. And I'd do it for half my current salary regardless.

I could make up 100 such dream jobs within an hour, and I wouldn't need to lie, nor be unrealistic about what I'd do in the position.

I think it can be a good indicator of what the candidate is passionate about, what their interests are, what their insights about their capabilities are and so on. Not saying it's the bestest interview question ever, but just like my favourite "Tell me about some code you wrote that you really like" it can give an insight into what drives and motivates a developer.
It comes from http://phonemicchart.com/transcribe/?w=TRAFFIC ;)
They don't have a million sales people -_-, 11.8k employees total is a better estimate [1], dropping to 10.7k soon.

Maybe fumes was not the right word. The things they offer as "deals" are fumes. I just loaded the Toronto section, and saw "$179 for $2392 worth of laser hair removal" with >200 sold. I don't believe that the $2392 figure is not grossly inflated. Also "$430 for a $899 iPhone", but then you notice "condition: refurbished".

These things don't come across as credible promotions, but rather the result of someone packaging something up to appear to be a promotion, but it's just a normal price disguised in some way. Perhaps there are some actual promotions on there, but these pseudo-promotions reduce the credibility as a whole. So what's special about groupon again? I can get normal price things anytime/anywhere, and not have to go through the hassle of buying the coupon in a specific time frame, and only be able to use it in a different specific time frame and another dozen restrictions.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/snapshot/snapshot.a...
Depends for what purpose. If you sense your mind is beginning to work like a finite state machine and you're stuck in an unfavorable cycle, a few good drinks can certainly break the pattern, at a price of a few brain cells. Its good in moderation.
I'm guessing you're not from the US? That's pretty much how it works here, except for government or unionized jobs. Most employees, whether hourly or salaried, don't have any kind of employment contract.
It's an ok question, it just reveals who has a realistic grasp on what a real job is versus a fantasy job. I think that distinction becomes pretty obvious to anyone who's been working awhile, so the question might be redundant.
Since a majority of the U.S. is at-will employment anyway, a formal probationary period isn't needed because it's built in to the law. (Unlike some other countries where it becomes much more difficult to fire an employee, as noted in other comments.)
One key insight that they're missing is that the 'trendy' office location has shifted from Silicon Valley to San Francisco over the past few years.

The result is that people who may have settled in the valley now find themselves commuting to the city. It's much more comfortable to spend that commuting time on the train than in rush-hour traffic!
But what if "take Monday's off" (to work on whatever personal side projects I want) is my actual, reasonable answer? Now I've just shot myself in the foot.