skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the "two week trial period" (or one week, or week-of-evenings, or whatever)

Good God, is this actually a thing? I mean, a probationary period after hire is one thing, but if somebody actually had the gall to tell me I'd have to spend a week or two working for them before they decided whether or not I was actually working for them, I believe I'd walk out on the spot.
Having used the Oculus many times and slapping haphazardly around my desk for my keyboard and mouse, this looks like a promising step towards VR controls. And, as always, seeing a gif of prototypes from beginning to production is amazing to see for the progression of a product.

I'm curious why they went with half-ring finger mounts opposed to slipping the finger through an adjustable full ring.
Anything that is widely used (open source or not) will be blocked because of common names or other patterns that can be recognized and blocked. If you need exact statistics you need to roll your own sooner or later. Or at least heavily customize some other product.
Summary: These things I loved as a kid are now slightly different and therefor RUINED. In an unrelated note, get off of my lawn you damned kids.

Seriously, more hard hitting journalism by the folks that brought us "Snaktaku reviews the Big Mac" and "We really pissed off some game devs and had to buy our own copy of games" authors.
IoT is an open opportunity in general, but it doesn't really mesh with what Mozialla has done in the past.

Mozilla very well could change their focus and compete in that space, but a newcomer without any entrenched ideas would be better off. So would a big company with the resources to spin off and fund a relatively independent branch to work in IoT.

Mozilla's only big success has been Firefox. Firefox succeeded because it was competing in a market with only one other player, and that player wasn't innovating at all.

Now the browser market is different and firefox remains popular because of free software nerds, people who like its customization power (something that Mozilla is risking with its recent changes to addons, although it looks like they're treading carefully), and people who switched to it from internet explorer because their kids told them to and don't care to use Chrome.

Mozilla is good at disrupting, including both developing a superior product and getting people to care about it, but they're bad at... basically everything else, business wise. Like any organization they can get better, but doing so would require a level of change that might ultimately just make them less good at what they are good at. It seems that's what they're trying to do, and it seems that's what's happening.

gkoberger's toplevel comment[1] might offer a good opportunity. They started down this path with personas, but then abandoned it when they couldn't make developers care about it. Maybe they've lost their touch.

It pains me to say it, since they've done so much good for the things I care about, but Mozilla's time might be ending.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698997
Rust uses "let" to declare local variables using implicit typing.

let one_to_one_hundred = (1..101).collect::<Vec<_>>();
>How unfortunate why? Is it unreasonable to ask a candidate to know CS101?

Not at all. For a junior position. But that's a difference of opinion with which we may have to live. For more experienced candidates, I'd be far more interested in what they've done to apply their knowledge in real-world scenarios. I need them to be able to do more than hypotheticals.

>I would never work for a company that didn't ask engineer candidates those questions.

And that's fine. Small point to add: I see at least one regional difference, with regards to the terms being used - I never see software developers called "engineers" unless they have an engineering degree. Maybe that's just my part of Canada, I don't know. Perhaps it is more of a protected term here.
Writing code that breaks if someone changes the type of the collection is not a bug in any sense that I ever saw the word used in. At most it's a failure to make the code as pliable as one might desire it to be - but the author is not very likely to value the ability to easily replace an array with a list (it appears he'd be concerned about the performance implications and would want to review all the relevant code anyway.)

Also in reality making sure that your arrays can be replaced with lists means you can't store indexes into the array but instead you must store iterators, which sucks when you have to declare them (auto won't work in many contexts and typedef will expand into the ugly underlying type in many contexts), and sucks when you have to print them ("5" or "342" reads better than whatever garbage you'll have to resort to when printing out an iterator, and it persists better between program runs and across platforms, too.) So if I have an array/vector I'd rather not try to pretend that it's a "non-ordered collection" until I absolutely ought to use random access; I'd just treat it as an array/vector from the start.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, not only is it not a bug but the attitude of people who write such non-bugs has many advantages.

(And BTW caring about performance is not the main point. A nice thing about your typical dynamic language is that there's not much gratuitous polymorphism. You get a few basic collection types and you use these and most code doesn't jump through hoops to be able to replace the standard collection type with some polymorphic replacement only satisfying a subset of the interface. So-called "type-rich" programming gets gnarly, I prefer "type-poor" on any day. Which isn't the main point, either, the main point is that things that work nicely in practice (like treating arrays as arrays) matter more to me than things that sound "right" from an abstract viewpoint (like being able to replace your collection types with other types.) And calling it a "bug" is, I guess it kinda bothers me and hence the wall of text...)
What do you mean? Here, "auto" is being used to define a variable, just like the way "let" does in other languages.

for (let i = results.begin( ); i != results.end( ); ++i)

This matches the use of "let" in Haskell, Lisp, Rust, ES6, etc.

(Note that when I say "variable" in this context, I am using it as the hypernym, not in the sense where it denotes only mutable variables.)
What about we academic programmers who have real experience and knowledge about ML. Is that still a negative sign? Or does the academic part make it worse :)
This

The problem is not the auto keyword. The problem is C++

And auto is a very welcome improvement. No I don't want to type SomeCollection<MyStuff> items = new SomeCollection<MyStuff>();

The compiler already knows what 'items' should be, I don't need to repeat myself.
Operator overloading would be fine if everybody had some standard for how to employ it sensibly. Unfortunately, the C++ standard library (over)uses it poorly all over the place, so it's really not setting an example of moderation.
Occam's Razor suggests old-fashioned sexism
Take a look at Kotlin https://kotlinlang.org/
I know there is also Scala and other JVM languages. But I'm also an Android developer and Kotlin works really fine with Android-Studio (both from JetBrains).
1.2 Billion Whatsapp users with phone number only

800 Million Messengers users as phone number only

20+ Apps with 100m + users as phone number only.

Together these PN based winners outstrip the combined usage of almost all web apps. I mean you are all downvoting me -- but its kind of funny how out of the loop the thinking is here.
I agree, but this is also a management failing, in not noticing the pattern.

I've been able to successfully hire good people by noting that some interviewers are never satisfied with any candidate. Once the pattern is clear, I either remove them from the hiring process, or politely disregard their opinion.

Hiring only with 100% consensus is a sucker's game. Some of my best hires have involved judging which "no" could be overridden safely.
> This rant is typical from someone who's still thinking very low level and who hasn't spent any time upgrading his tools to embrace the new level of abstraction that modern language concepts offer.

OP is an undergrad whose public projects look like vanilla reimplementations of Box2D, so this isn't too surprising in that light.
I think the problem is the apparent lack of familiarity with STL containers, and the ubiquitous prevalence of .begin(). end() and knowing that ++ against an iterator will advance it. I looked at the for loop and it was obvious that it was a container of some sort that offered a ForwardIterator.

The replacement code is a struct that uses a pointer to a char array with no constructor or destructor. That is far more dangerous.

What the heck is "char * *" meant to be? Who owns the data inside it? How does it get cleaned up? What is its initial value? (clue: absolute garbage).

eg. Results x;

then read x.entries - KABOOM.

This is horrible C-style code. The problem is nothing to do with auto. The problem is no obviously-defined lifetimes of data and throwing pointers around as a solution.

EDIT: I heartily recommend the first couple of chapters of Stroustrup's C++ Programming Language Fourth Edition, where suddenly everything makes sense and you never want to see naked new, delete or double pointers ever again. Use references everywhere, and ensure you have sensible constructors and destructors.

I have to deal with crappy code like this all day in a brand-new C++ project where my superior pulls confused faces when expressions like RAII, copy-constructor, iterator, const-correctness, references etc. are used. I am pretty cheesed off with it and hate seeing code like this any more, particularly in brand new code (littered with uninitialised variables, double-lists with new items pushed onto them so nobody has a clue who owns items, C-style casts etc. etc. I weep).

Life in C++ land is now simple: Use the STL. Don't cast unless you have to. Use references. Use const correctness. Let the compiler do the work for you. Let it check for you. Don't make life hard for yourself.
Oh man, names still don't come much more badass than Wouter van Oortmerssen.
Lots of headlines at HN from Mozilla these days.

Tried Firefox OS emulator and it's fine, but not impressed enough to actually to get a real device.

Yes they better focus on privacy/identity and revamp Thuderbird to make it a unique product.
Pop Quiz, what's the difference between

auto x = y;

and

ConcreteClass x = y;

The difference, of course, is that y wasn't actually of type ConcreteClass and you've just performed a potentially incorrect or inefficient cast.

auto isn't perfect in this regard, though. auto x = y where y is ConcreteClass& makes x ConcreteClass, not ConcreteClass& (there are reasons for this, but it's still a potential source of nasty perf bugs).

And yeah, you're going to have to relearn how to reason about code. This isn't a bad thing.
I wonder what will happen if the frequency of requests is faster than the counter refresh rate. Does the counter stay consistent ?
What privacy? Your IP and the hostname of the website you're connecting to isn't encrypted over HTTPS anyway. The content isn't sensitive and there's no cookies on the site. The only remotely personal data would be your accept language header (which could be guessed from your IP) and user agent string (which you can just spoof anyway if you're really that paranoid).

The MITM argument has more merit, but even there I can't see it making much difference here given it's niche appeal. Plus given it's tech-savy bias, most people will be running a reasonably hardened system (latest patches, et al) anyway. Not the best argument against running TLS I'd admit; but still a point worth raising since the only argument for running HTTPS is to prevent malware injection.

Obviously in an ideal world everything would be served under TLS. But let's be pragmatic about which sites we bully into switching.
Show HN: Champics – Bookmark pictures and comment with drawings
I would never leave a job before finding a new one. Too much uncertainty especially in today's rough hiring market. You'd want at least 6 months of living expenses saved up to burn while you job search, probably more, and most people don't have that.
Why don't we let the interviewee choose between a few interview methods? Or bypass it if they think their public code proves their ability?
I don't think DTN is necessarily bad on its own merits at all. Certainly there is much worse: Dora, Barney, Caillou, to name three. But compared to its predecessor it pales, significantly.
> The product name was "Opera Platform".

Thank you - I didn't know about this.
The person I was responding to just said "credit card information". CVV, PIN, and CC # are all verboten.
Thanks for sharing my notes! Happy to answer any questions anyone has about the class.
React basics
Can't wait for Kubuntu to package it up and release it!
We're not longshoremen. Virtually nobody has a contract saying "just show up when and if you feel like it, and we'll pay you for that".
Two days ago when Mozilla discontinues Thunderbird, people cheering "oh yeah, finally they can focus on firefoxOS", the same people are yelling Mozilla should focus on their mission (the browser)?

Not to mention rust, it's adoption is nowhere comparable to Java, see what happened to Sun, I would boldly say Mozilla's mission has completed.
> And yes, I realize that users don't care about privacy. But nobody cared about web standards, either: it's all about packaging. That's Mozilla's strength.

The difference with browsers was that improvements in the browser led to clear improvements in web browsing experience, which even the least technically minded could notice. What changes in privacy and identity are Mozilla going to pioneer that result in obvious benefits that those who don't know anything about these issues (i.e. the majority) will notice and clearly attribute to Mozilla's products? I really wish there were such things but I have yet to see any presented.
The one thing keeping me away from Java still is the awful experience around modeling data.

Compared to something like a case class in Scala or even autoproperties in C#, writing classes with a bunch of getter and setter methods just to keep state is really tedious.
IMHO, C#'s tooling and is definitely ahead. Java is starting to get there, and I can see why the JVM is still popular. But given the actions of Oracle and MS as of late, I think I'd take MS. VS starter projects are easy to setup and run... Every Java application I've worked on has been an exercise in frustration just getting the environment setup.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/542371/a-tale-of-do-it-...

Had to look up what you referenced, hadn't heard about this before.

Side note: I find it amusing that two main people in this article are the CEO (Parrish) and a researcher (Church), and a man named Fossell is an anti-aging researcher.
I think the point is the assembling of random photos/videos into a convincing representation of textures and animation (without devoted hardware, bringing the person in for a scan, etc), not that 'this is bleeding edge visuals'.
How big is the ratio of people using adblockers/YouTube downloader add-ons etc vs. those capable of writing them?
Uber's Testing a New Mass Transit Alternative
How Does Israel Regulate Encryption?
Oh dear... the Nexus Q reborn in tablet form as the Pixel C.

From the moment they mentioned it was Android a few months ago [1] I had my doubts about the "vision" driving this product, and now after reading what Arstechnica and the Verge have to say I feel genuinely bad for the engineers who worked on this. It looks like a lot of love was expended, and then maybe schedules pushed out whatever the heck this half baked thing is.

Pixel C, I really wanted to like you...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298410
I think average surgeon's skills are probably pretty sharp (pun intended), however, in my experience the knowledge of a regular small-town GP's indeed usually is not very up-to-date.

Regarding the OP's question: new hip languages and frameworks evolve way faster than human body, and "it works" is more important in medicine than "iterate and fail fast" (hopefully:)

My personal theory is also that partially the high expectations are due to open source / hacker ethos (there's generally no medical open source movement, or in any profession outside of IT AFAIK, at least on such scale). The cycle goes like this:

- some folks want to do something cool for fun and/or to get some fame for showing it to the public, or get famous for inventing a known lib/framework

- companies see they're smart and hire them

- other companies follow the trend, and require open source contributions or at least building space shuttle over the weekend

- a number of devs don't want to lag behind, so they join the bandwagon, and they create even more cool stuff and even more open source MVC frameworks

- now, the cycle reinforces itself, everyone is doing cool stuff and contributing to opensource, if you don't, you're excluded

edit: fixed typos
“What happens if the variables are sorted independently before regression?”
Spy Agency Bets on IBM for Universal Quantum Computing
Every Firefox OS article on HN seems to have gotten 50 comments from excited people. These are apparently the 50 phones they sold worldwide.
Someone said consumer apps (Carousel and Mailbox in this case) couldn't be open-sourced because they use "internal" APIs.

My point was just that any API over HTTP that's used by a consumer app is not private or internal. It is a public API with unfriendly documentation.

(Note that when I say "unfriendly documentation," I'm not even talking about sniffing. Most consumer apps can be decompiled by non-experts, and then the text-based API calls would be readable.)
The fair sharing sequence (aka Thue-Morse sequence)
I'm a CS student and most students I know dislike whiteboarding too (and by extension many, if not most, YC startup employees do too). But I'm pretty okay at them now, having had lots of practice. The key advantage for students I think is the ability to have sustained practice over the course of a month (e.g. > 4 onsites over the course of a month), which most students can afford since their schedules are flexible. Also, I've recently had interviews at a few YC companies you've heard of, and they had me code on my laptop. I didn't whiteboard at all except for system design questions.

Reply to below: Most companies have me do at least one non-technical system design and/or talk-about-a-project interview.
I'm also a fan of C# but deploying .NET has been a sticking point. I'm hopeful that Microsoft's open source efforts fix this.
Also, I wonder how the public would react by hearing "Firefox""OS". The browser running the computer, would the idea inspired or confused them ? ChromeOS is from Google, they're known to make smartphones and Android so it's less strange to jump the shark. But Mozilla ...
It reacts to a pulse, so you could solve that with a queue in software, without that, my guess is that it would be missing clicks (pulses would overlap, since I'm assuming there is some minimum required width of it)
As a Chicagoan I'm excited, but also worried it will lead to the incarceration of multiple public officials and a raw deal for the city, somehow.
It will probably take a century or two of debugging to get human editing right. Generations are just too long.

Backwards compatibility may be a problem. Pfizer people may not be able to mate with Genentech people.
Yes, it's still true: http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/09/demographics-of-key-so...
I am one of the devs in the pictures. We often have measurable improvements -- the shark hat (meant for performance improvements) is obvious. Results are shown in our performance monitoring tools.

The impact of our rainbow-hat (meant to enhance the codebase, contribute to some open-source projects we use, do what you think makes the world a better place) is harder to put on a graph. But we could count code metrics, documentation, merged features in OOS projects etc. We don't do that , though.

What we do is talking about what we did with our hat time after each sprint when choosing the new hat-wearers.
BitTorrent Still Dominates Internet’s Upstream Traffic
yeah, except there's a solution to "trusting trust" : http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/
Los Angeles will be an impressive feat. The ridiculous number of jurisdictions will generate an ungodly amount of red tape.
Root Server Operators = rootops
This is a common sentiment I think, but operator overloading, at least in the context of numerical analysis, has perfectly sensible standards already, as in Matlab, R, python, julia, and the like, yet C++ under-uses it and doesn't even provide anything overloadable for matrix-multiplication (like `.* ` vs `* `) or a linear solve `\` operator. C is even worse, since you can't even define arithmetic operators for a custom numerical type.
This is probably it. I bit the bullet and scheduled 2 weeks off, and filled up those days with onsite interviews. It sucked to have to take those many vacation days but ultimately worth it.
Beyond ethical issues, the repercussions for services under its the Alphabet-Google umbrella would be bad. I can easily imagine YouTube videos suppressed simply because Google's speech-to-text algorithms, anyone who's try its auto Closed Caption probably has seen some insanely bizarre mis-translations. It's easy to start conjuring a lot hypothetical issues with this, from YouTube comments to Blogger posts.
If you make decisions with money riding on the answers, it costs a lot more than CPU and DB.

Perhaps systems administration is somehow very cheap for you, but I'm willing to bet it is still not "nothing" - even if the cost is you personally not watching a TV show you like because you're patching the web server on your analytics box for your personal vanity domain, that's still a cost.

For most operations, sysadmins are somewhat expensive, and because of that, busy. This is why Urchin was such a good idea, and why Google bought them - the proposition is to trade your users' privacy for the admin time it takes to support another internal app. There's an absolute no-brainer, assuming you don't care about your users' privacy (IIRC, they were going to sell the service before Google ate them, but that's ancient and trivial history).
Computing theory and information theory apply to much more than just Von Neumann architecture computers.
Always on scrubbing has a number of factors depending on the provider you use. All charge for clean traffic but some charge for number of netblocks/ASNs, number of routers, number of attacks mitigated, etc. It can get extremely expensive depending on your traffic needs and all the other variables. Paying an extra $250,000+ year for 2 Gb/s of traffic is extremely expensive to me.
imgur.com is a good resource for uploading images, in the future
Absolutely.

Although the market for centralized secure messaging is currently being served adequately by the likes of Signal and Telegram, centralized messaging platforms inevitably leak metadata.

I don't want to belittle the work done by teams that have already started work on distributed messaging platforms like Tox and Matrix (and my own proof-of-concept, Toc [1]), but Mozilla is in a much better position to tackle the problem of decentralized, private messaging that also has great UX, and not just in terms of sheer resources:

1) They have (or at least had) a decentralized identity management platform in Persona.

2) They have a decentralized, zero-knowledge data sync platform in Firefox Sync.

3) They have a lot of influence in the web standards community that they can leverage to push a new federated messaging protocol to succeed XMPP.

This is the kind of work that I think Mozilla should be doing, because they can do it better than anyone else who's willing (i.e. not for-profit corporations, because they have very little to gain by building decentralized apps and federated protocols that have no lock-in whatsoever).

[1] http://toc.im/
Yahoo will not move forward with Alibaba spinoff