skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Was that the show where they said "My name is Wednesday... it was a Tuesday?", might have been on right after 3-2-1 Contact? That show was awesome, now I'm going to have to find a few episodes for my kids! Thanks for the reminder.
A few days ago, it looked like they were ditching Thunderbird so they could concentrate on their phone products. What's left besides Firefox?

- "WebMaker", whatever that does.

- Rust.

- The $60 Mozilla hoodie.

- Their world tour of meetups.[1]

- The really fancy headquarters overlooking SF bay.

A tight focus on Firefox might be a win. I'm looking forward to an all-Rust browser.

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/events/
Simply because it's possible to deconvolve a dolphins sonar clicks into a 2 dimensional representation approximating our visual senses doesn't mean they have any such similar experience of it, on top of that, the whole linguistic angle seems to be wild speculation.
Ubuntu Phone looks interesting and has great potential with the conergence
Showing privacy-respecting ads in the browser does nothing to improve the state of the advertising on the Web itself.
Remember this is the same jerk who had a tantrum when a Secret founder used a cash-out to buy a Ferrari. The thing that made me livid was this: he wanted investors' money back because Secret failed, but suppose in some (incredibly) hypothetical universe Secret turned into a multi-billion dollar company and that say 5% cash-out cost the founder $250 million. Would Bill have traded the shares back for the cash-out price? Fuck no. So his whining can be condensed to "if my deals don't work out, I want my money back. Call the whambulance!"

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/the-lessons-google-...

All VCs talk their book, but perhaps Bill more than most. I'm sure his thoughts on companies benefiting from public market discipline are unrelated to IPOs returning his investments.
It matters because it changes how we would try to stop it. If it's caused by something we're doing, we could just change what we're doing. If it's natural, then we need to find a way to alter nature. That gets into terraforming, which we really don't know how to do, and it'd probably be safer to to learn to live with the climate change rather than trying to stop it.
3.
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wut?
This article might help explain that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10659600
I know a guy that was a CTO I the valley( I think he may have reported to Vint at one point) and in the UK and he commented that he got the same amount of work even though the UK firm was ex civil service and had 5 + weeks leave
We're also affected, our app runs in EU datacenters. We had auth errors on both Cloud Storage and BigQuery.
BigQuery seems to work now, but not Cloud Storage.
Our last outage was 2013, but this has been going on for over 12 hours..
According to the psychometrics books I have read structured interviews are as good as IQ-tests when it comes to predicting job-performance.

All types of hiring tests/interviews had some predictive power (except handwriting analysis).
The truth is that controversy sells, truth does not. Truth is the first casualty.

The use of propaganda has increased significantly as a substitute for research and robust argument. Today, it's rare to find a media source that is unbiased and honest (I'm struggling to think of one). What concerns me more is that the propaganda is getting worse. Maybe, it's a side effect of free news on the Internet as there's no money in journalism anymore.

I agree with most of the sites that have been criticised in this thread. However, I'd rather see a list of media sources that people respect. I used to love ArsTechnica until about 18-24 months ago. Something happened in their management because they started with prejudice and politics in their articles (read Casey Johnson, San Mechkovich and Megan Guess articles as an example) and by dumming their content (someone used a camera/drone rubbish that appears almost daily).

These days, HN is one of the better (not really media) resources around for openly challenging propaganda. I think it struggles with Political Correctness but it's significantly better than most other outlets.
"Customer success is not simply renaming your sales or tech support team." - this seems to be a very misunderstood tactic
Indeed so what, but do you program on weekends anyway? At least sometimes? Earlier in the thread you complained about golden handcuffs. That indicates there's something you'd rather be doing than your work, but the pay is too good to leave. I scratch my own itches with occasional weekend or night coding and usually it's for the fun of it, learning or keeping up with the trends can be a side benefit but not the goal. Often I work with one-off projects like coding a game using a new engine in a functional language. If I didn't need or like money as much I might just do these fun projects all the time. I think this personality of programming-as-hobby is pretty common in the field, and when we run into people who program strictly on the job and never any other time, who started programming only in college when they decided to get a degree and only did work for assignments or internships before getting hired, they may be really talented programmers on the job (which is why you can say "so what") but something feels off culturally. It'd be like meeting a guitarist who rocks with the best of them on stage while being paid but never plays off-the-clock or seems to have any interest in the instrument or the scene or the genres of play beyond their ability to make money. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7423626 makes the point well that for many programmers, we're just potheads whose potheadery became valuable.
Unfortunately, to show the Earth and the orbital positions to scale, it was not possible to show the pieces of debris to scale.
>"If you build it they will come"

The feedback I received from the people that tested the platform development wise was that they had not built it yet.
But that correspondence is artificial. For example, the Latin languages are more similar than the Chinese dialects. The main reason why Spanish is a language and Mandarin is a dialect is political.
I'm not at all an expert in this area, but it seems like the codes are poorly designed.

Changing them to be less descriptive, and allowing for more codes to be applied to a single case would be more efficient. "Bitten by" and "Orca" should be two different entities applied to the same case, and together they describe the incident.

Although given that these codes are probably used in hundreds of thousands of systems, changing their fundamental structure is probably nearly impossible.
Having spent more than three years of my life writing tooling to deal with such a vendors APIs, I wish people would stick more closely to the pattern of error messages in 200 responses. The application stack is not the webserver and I don't rely on status codes when dealing with the api through various transports.
>Yes, people are really doing this. It's stupid, but to not do so puts you at a competitive disadvantage against other candidates. Competition for programming jobs is fierce.

I'm suspecting that this is a "Valley" thing, would that be wrong?

>It is not enough to be able to implement quicksort. One must have the algorithm thoroughly memorized so that it can be scrawled onto the whiteboard in one smooth motion of the dry-erase pen. If you pause to say "hmm..." while re-deriving quicksort on the spot, you will be branded as "slow" and obviously inferior to the candidate who spent three days bashing his/her head against an algorithms textbook.

If someone has years of experience in this field, and a strong portfolio, why would they need to remember how to do quicksort? They probably haven't done it since their university days. That shouldn't even remotely be the focus of an interview for someone who has done real work in this industry.
I've done SpEn (3), MiFi (3 & 15), DDEE (3), but I still find the game incredibly hard. I've been playing MfIE and getting wiped out repeatedly before even collecting a rune. And that's _still_ an easy combination.

Brogue does sound interesting though. But perhaps beyond my skill level.
Why Gadget Warranties Are (Almost) Never Worth It
Our culture is rejecting the one effective test we have.

Do we care about equality, or not? I tried not mentionining this aspect, hoping people would realize on their own. But a remote work hire test is also mostly anonymous. It doesn't matter whether you're black, white, male, or female. All that matters is whether you can do the work.

On the flipside, what you're saying is that you genuinely want to spend a vacation day meeting a new company instead of with your family or working on your own projects.

And it's like, if you think you're a good dev, why wouldn't you leap at the opportunity to show it off? I get that it's a little annoying to spend a few hours on it, but the standard interview is literally random noise. Why subject your future to a random process?

I don't know. I respect your view. I'm going to bow out now. Have a good week.
Why Finland might soon pay every citizen $850 per month
Don't forget the nature programs. I watched Wild America exclusively as a toddler
I had it. As far as I remember, it was a reasonable phone, especially for the price tag. The hardware was working ok and most of the issues were OS-related. The USB socket broke down after a bit more than half a year, however, I dropped the phone quite a few times, so couldn't blame the manufacturer.
As I just posted to his blog:

How about instead you use proper names? "Results" is a terrible name. So is "i". That is why you can't understand that code. Your 'fix' is still unreadable - the struct is rarely near the for loop, so you are going to have to go searching anyway to figure out what the hell is going on.

This is completely readable, IMO:

for (auto employee : sorted_employees) {
StoreEmpoyeeInFoo(employee);
}
Show HN: Polishing Up a Calculator App with Ionic Framework
Most of this is fixable by driving YAGNI into their heads.

Beyond that, I would claim that most people startups look for (recent graduates) have no ability to understand the reason behind popular opinions. Because they don't have the experience to do so. They might be able to parrot it though.

Interestingly, I'm used to working in a pretty fluid environment without a lot of specs. But we recently started developing something with very tight rules and an extremely picky end user. It's much less efficient without a set of specs, which the project managers didn't have the constitution to make since we aren't used to doing so. As a result I basically have to constantly go back to them on things, which isn't very productive.
There was a lot of money and work invested by Mozilla and their strategic partners in FxOS (e.g. Telefonica) to actually make a dent in the market.
The Appification of Immigration
What if your type system was rich enough that a "datatype error" was a logic error?
GitHub Issue Drama [List]
I should work in finance.
If you're getting paid for a week of work, you can take a week of unpaid vacation from your day job.

No vacation days burned. No money lost.
Impressive, nice work :-)
Type checking is static analysis. Languages like C have crappy type systems, so the type checking static analysis is also crappy. This is a property of the type system, not the universe...
I have to mostly agree on this. I don't know why MS & Google feel the need to create a one OS fits all mentality. Some concepts just don't work for a tablet, phone or desktop. Some need to be different. I also don't like productivity with a touch screen... smudges and blurry parts of the screen don't work so well.

I've been a pretty big fan of ChromeOS... I only hope that the Android experience doesn't really destroy things here. On tablets, I find the android experience starts to break down a little, mostly in the system menus (slide down from top)... Other apps may or may not scale well. The GMail app does better than most, but some are just bad.

It's not easy to make an app that scales from all sizes/orientations, and this will just muddy things imho.
Why does this contradict the myth that silicon valley is ageist and only wants to hire fresh college grads?
Yes, sorry. The not-to-scale aspect meant it jumped the shark almost immediately for me as well. As small as possible, following the initial display of the object, might have conveyed the idea better - and that would have made the Chinese explosion a little more fun.
The Time When Sesame Street Was Disrupted
Most of those interview questions, don't really have much to do with the way someone actually works. I just went through one of those SV gauntlets at a YC startup, and got a yes, but at no point I thought any of the interviews were any good: Not enough time to actually learn about the interviewer, or solve a problem that a recent graduate couldn't solve. I know some awesome people that wouldn't have passed my interview, and I know people I'd never want to work with that would have passed.

The whole thing made me see why the situation in SV is so screwed up: If we can't really ask for things that show real experience levels, and it's all about short term first impressions, set by interviewers that aren't even necessarily any good at interviewing, how can we improve?

I've always much preferred interviews that asked for the same amount of time, but where people could show a picture of their real output, instead of a little puzzle.

Imagine you are hiring a chef to man your restaurant, and what you ask him to do is get through Chopped: Give him secret ingredients, and ask to make a dish using all of them in 15-20 minutes. You'll be testing something: Some people will do better than others. But are the things you are testing really going to matter, in practice, when what a chef really has to do quickly is to execute a well known, practiced menu, along with kitchen management skills?

We don't test for the things we do at jobs, and therefore, we can't hire. Not a surprise.
There is an interesting paradox going on with the unification of the markets in EU.

Last year Denmark voted for the Unified Patent Court. The obvious argument was that it made it easier for the little inventors to get their patents approved across all of europe. It removed bureaucracy and it made it cheaper.

But here is the thing. By making it easier to get your patents approved in one country to be valid in all of EU countries you are also opening up for patent trolls because now it's much cheaper for them to try and get patents.

So in a weird way many would argue it's going to have the opposite effect. It's going to make it easier for those who specialize in patents to start getting access to markets it was too expensive before. (In fact a US patent troll has been setting up their office in Ireland exactly because of the expected unification of the Patent Process)

For startups the unification is also presenting itself as kind of a headache because when you unify something a bunch of countries have to adhere to whatever the unification results in. So again it sounds great on paper but the consequence might well be unfortunate.

And now this. Which sounds great but is going to present more problems than it's solving.

What Europe really need is for the taxation side of the markets to be unified NOT the legislative process yet this is exactly what the EU does again and again and it's hurting more than it's helping.

I wrote more about this issue in this essay for those who might be interested: http://000fff.org/why-is-europe-failing-to-create-more-unico...
The Economist's Technology Quarterly: New Materials for Manufacturing
So - score my understanding of this. A lens performs a fourier transform, right? So the idea here is that instead of doing the transform with a lens, we grab the raw information and do an fft in software?
Good point. There is a short list of big companies that are taken as positive signals (Google tops the list), while most others are negative. I think that this gets at a contradiction.
Romio App: We lied, manipulated, and stole from investors and employees
Yeah. Right now, it is largely based on trust. We're hoping to implement some kind of one-time "seal" and new token that a user can verify after receiving a bill to ensure that someone else can't activate it with a picture or by saving the token. That obviously comes with the downside of making it more difficult to transfer.

As a proof of concept, and being based on Venmo, I think it is and will be largely based on user trust as long as the bill creator keeps the funds (Venmo allows no bot accounts).
Will Windows Phone/ Windows Mobile be around 2019, as a die-hard WP user, I hope so. I just do not like those icon based OSes.
Thats great!!
haha. Looks like it's from `libdpkg`

https://searchcode.com/codesearch/view/21331804/#l-244
I should point out that the rascal responsible for that cause of bleary eyes in many a grad student is among us and even gloating about it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10686686

;-)
> Asked about “drowning and submersion due to falling or jumping from burning water-skis,” Buckholtz replied, “You can’t stop, drop, and roll in the ocean.”)

Given the title, I am disappointed at the lack of a funny anecdote about burning water-skis. People do jump through rings of fire, but I don't expect that water-skis would ignite quickly enough.
> We do our interviews without looking at resumes (in order to find great people who look bad on paper)

They don't ask for a resume, but the first thing that comes up in the interview is "where have you worked in the past, and what did you do there?"
Have you considered asking an attorney?
"Master / Slave are perfectly acceptable words in the English language and are very well understood and widely-used term in technology. Leader / Follower as a metaphor does not describe the relationship as well. This change is objectively pointless and introduces inconsistent terminology. If you are offended by this term in some codebase then you most likely have too much time on your hands. Perhaps we can ask them to also change the name of the repo? Apple offends me and is inconsiderate because I think of Adam & Eve and the devil..."

https://github.com/apple/swift/pull/165#issuecomment-1619463...
ChromeOS needs a good general mail client as well, there's been some work in this space, but from what I've seen it's still not there yet. I actually like GMail for general email... though account switching with more than 2-3 accounts is a pain.
But how do I know the information it sends to me hasn't been MITM'd if it isn't SSL'd?
Who funds Saudi Arabia? Nobody "funds" Saudi Arabia. It's a sovereign nation with massive reserves of oil and independent wealth, not some Silicon Valley start up. To the extent that the money comes from somewhere, it comes from all of us, because we need to get to work and gas costs money.

The point is that the US has its own set of deeply vested interests in these markets, and they're more than willing to tolerate what the Saudis are doing to underwrite jihadi terrorism and the Wahhabi strain of Islam that animates it if the alternative involves seriously consideration of changes to the way the developed world produces and consumes the energy it depends on.
I am rather fond of Wild Kratts. It is a victory in the house if the kids pick that over Power Rangers.
Still, Google is a corporation whos only porpose is proffit, trust them blindly is foolish.
Musk's Secret Sauce
There are many migrants as well.
It took genius to blend the qualities Henson did, and the resulting ability not to get too stuck in sentimentality was a comedic superpower.

The OP points out how some of the older Sesame Street monsters have an edgy quality to balance their cuddliness. That was distinctive of Henson. His regional TV commercials from the 1950s already showed something similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3929121.
I get what you are saying. And equality is tremendously, spectacularly important; I have more than once been That Guy at companies, making management uncomfortable when asking why the whole place is White Dude Central. But I very strongly feel that your value prop isn't an effective one from the perspective of the employee. You are not telling me why I should give a damn about your work-hire test, as somebody you need to hire to make your company work. What are you offering, aside from Yet Another Startup with Yet Another Startup Problems and Yet Another Startup Under-Market Salary? Why should I be your monkey?

And, FWIW, when salaried, I not once have taken a vacation day to interview. I've said "hey, I'll be in late," and because this industry is so deranged as to think that 50+-hour weeks are normal, no manager has had the temerity to get mad at me for taking a morning off because invariably it will be cashed in when I have to pull a sixteen-hour day to deal with a problem. (The days around Heartbleed earned me some goodwill at that gig, if you follow!)
The Wayfarer
The New King of Toys
There's a bit of hyperbole here, though I am largely in agreement based on my interviews. In my interviews experience, it is unlikely that you'd be asked to implement quick sort, but that's because you'll be asked a question that requires realizing that a the question reduces to quick sort (this is how companies can avoid hiring people who just memorize solutions). For instance, instead of being asked to create all permutations of a string and all its substrings, you'll be asked a question that involves analyzing a set that needs to be permuted a similar way (this is my example, not from an actual interview, but I'd say it would count as about a medium level difficult question). If you don't know quick sort cold (or, in the case of my example, how to print all permutations of a string), there's no way you'd be able to program something that requires modifying and adapting these algorithms in 45 minutes at a whiteboard.

And yeah, again YMMV, but you definitely do need to largely solve the problem, so speed absolutely does matter here.

The really frustrating thing about all this is that if the experience causes you to go back, study algorithms, buy cracking the coding interview, and getting incredibly good at these questions, your next interview will involve… detailed questions about ruby syntax, followed by another interview with questions about how the JVM works, followed by another interview with questions about how MapReduce works[1].

Not saying this is good or bad, just that this is how it is, at least at the harder interviews.

Based on the final paragraph, it looks like triple byte does see the market opportunity here. The frustrating moving target of interview questions could correlate very well with what type of programmers a company is looking for. Considering that every interview requires a day (or more) off and a stressful and mentally taxing series of in-person exams, there's only so much one candidate can take before giving up and just staying in his or her job (assuming the candidate is currently employed). So if a company becomes aware of how to align candidate type with interview path, if you can line up with the algorithms style interviews, the person can slowly learn until getting a job offer, rather than experiencing a reset button. I wish them luck with this, because they'd be adding real value to a developer's job search, which isn't something devs typically expect from a recruiter.
The problem is not that the merchant stores a number, but that all the merchants store the same number. Why not just use OAuth?
FWIIW, Inbox has been created by the Sparrow team (among other googlers oc), so at least it is not a case where an acquihire ends with the people working on completely unrelated things.
Simulation Program: Leader Election in a Hypercube