skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The filters that companies and recruiters use mostly trend in a meaningful direction. There are a higher percentage of good programmers among MIT grads than SUNY Potsdam grads.

Imagine how mistaken that would sound if you substitute "startup founders" for "programmers."

The reason you feel company filters are anything except random noise is personal bias. It's disheartening that your article notices that company preferences are essentially random noise, and then you don't really internalize that fact or take it to its logical conclusion:

Interviews where programmers do anything except work-hire tests tuned to the signal that the companies want are doomed to fail.

And it's almost impossible to do a work-hire test in an interview. A real work-hire test. The type of test where you actually do some work and then show that yours is effective.

We're so backwards that people probably read this and think I'm saying whiteboard work or something stupid like that. No. Real, actual work. The problem you're working on can be fake, but the problem needs to be literally the same type of thing that the company does on a day-to-day basis.

Want a 100% success rate? Do that, and then don't pay attention to anything but the results. Including whether the candidate has an MIT degree, or any degree at all. If you actually set up a work-hire test, a real one, and then stop asking about all the other stuff that doesn't matter, then you will get a 100% rate. Again, you have to tune the test to what the company is looking for, but that's not hard. "Here is an iOS app. Find and fix these bugs, then add a new feature."
Hacking Your Manager in 4 Steps
Mozilla is shifting to use their web platform for connected devices and IoT efforts. The IoT space is a mess right now and I think that Mozilla could do a lot of good there.

I think that Firefox OS as a phone operating system will always be available for hackers to port and install on their own devices.
It's funny you say that. I can't name one factory pattern off the top of my head... Never needed to learn one. I should clarify -- I'm in my late twenties, and I've spent my entire career (10 years) writing Java code. I don't understand how that negatively hiring managers against me.
> So, why there are no PowerWalls available? Seems that there are production issues.

Because production is starting up, with equipment being moved from Fremont.

http://cleantechnica.com/2015/11/04/tesla-gigafactory-ahead-...
Towards the bottom of the extremely short article/message:

3. Analysis

This event was notable for the fact that source addresses were widely
and evenly distributed, while the query name was not. This incident,
therefore, is different from typical DNS amplification attacks
whereby DNS name servers (including the DNS root name servers) have
been used as reflection points to overwhelm some third party.

The DNS root name server system functioned as designed, demonstrating
overall robustness in the face of large-scale traffic floods observed
at numerous DNS root name servers.

Due to the fact that IP source addresses can be easily spoofed, and
because event traffic landed at large numbers of anycast sites, it is
unrealistic to trace the incident traffic back to its source.

Source Address Validation and BCP-38 should be used wherever possible
to reduce the ability to abuse networks to transmit spoofed source
packets.
> I don't think you should dismiss somebody because they provoked you with their work. Your statement, your imagery of blasting him into space, is ultimately the execution of his piece. He built a frame and your comment filled it in.

But it's not like it's an interesting reaction, it's so obvious. It's like when kids say "Hey look at that over there" and then "Made you look" when you look. You don't have a reason not to look, it's maybe funny the first time because it's so stupid but after it's been done over and over (and appropriation has) then there's nothing left. Or like an older brother who maneuvers his siblings hands and then says "Stop hitting yourself". These produce exactly the same reaction as the provocateur is intending but it's not an interesting reaction at all.

Personally, I think the only reason that this guy is famous is because some very wealthy people chose him specifically because he can generate an endless stream of his art so that they can buy and trade them to make more money. The art is an investment for them and has no aesthetic value.
To be honest I was honest at time as well and announced loud and clear that I knew nothing about Java. For those people smart seemed to matter more than experienced.
Introducing the Swift Package Manager
Interviewing is ridiculously important for any small company. The problem is most people have little idea how to do anything except look for people like them.
~8 years ago, I worked at one of the largest retailers in North America (top 5). Credit card numbers were absolutely stored in logs accessible to me (an on-the-floor employee who processes returns, etc.). It was useful as I could use them to find purchases if someone lost their receipt but had the credit card. It was also incredibly insecure. I believe they've changed it since then, but it would not surprise me at all if other retailers were in the same boat.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ indeed! The outdoor game is gonna be great.
The error seems to be specifically around App Engine apps accessing Google APIs. I'd guess that this is a failure regarding fetching credentials, like what's described at https://developers.google.com/api-client-library/java/google....
Really nicely done! I like how entities, concepts, etc. are color hilited in the original input text, and the Wikipedia links with thumb nail images shown in the results.

I have something similar that I have been working on for years as a side project: http://kbsportal.com/ I also resolve entities to DBPedia URIs.
Not surprising. They rolled ChromeOS into the Android group.
It's interesting that searching for "CRISPR" in the essay gives 0 results.
> It's so bad that I've actually heard people advise startups to pass on some enterprise revenue if they can afford it (pass on REVENUE!) if it might lead them down an "enterprisey" path, since doing so would in the end result in a systematically inferior product.

Yes, because it's much better to have an architecturally pure product nobody uses than something generating millions in recurring revenue.
Whoops, it seems I kept editing without seeing your reply. Sorry, bad habit of mine. I don't know how random the customer-portion is, but I assume/hope it is. I put some napkin-math in, but AFACT javawizard's right about the basic issue.

It might be a different story if the system required users to also enter in data like the exact customer first/last name.
> Almost no one passes all their programming interviews. This is true because of randomness in many interview processes (even great people are bad at some things, and an interviewer focusing on this can yield a blocking no).

Reading this is somewhat reassuring. I've been over some interviews lately and I had some trouble getting past the tech phone screen.

One particular rejection was very frustrating, because I've spend quite some time preparing for the interview. Failed the first one. Got a second chance. And I knew it was over about 5 minutes after it began. "Can you write an algorithm that would sort efficiently this k-sorted array with a complexity strictly inferior to O(n log n)?". Yeah. No. Neither my job nor my hobbies includes sorting almost sorted arrays of integers, and O(n) complexity calculations.

It really seems to me that, being hired by a tech company is just completely random. Tech interviews in general are completely random. "Just a numbers game"
The hardest part of the watch portion is just the testing and debugging. It takes a long time to install on the device and get a real feel for the speed of the app.

The other hard part is figuring out what feels right on the wrist, that part I'm still figuring out.
XXX+HOTEL+BILL+-+Golden+Diamond+Escort
Typically what you see are "amplification attacks". That's where Alice wants to DOS Bob, so she spoofs a request to Charlie that appears to come from Bob. This results in a message from Charlie to Bob. The message from A->C is crafted such that it results in a much larger return message from C->B (hence "amplification"). That lets you create an attack that produces a multiple of the bandwidth that you actually control. Then you have a bunch of machine spam the message.

In that case, you see many messages from the same source address (meaning the target under attack, i.e. Bob), but the data requested may vary. In this case, the source addresses were uncorrelated, but they all wanted the exact same address, so basically the opposite.

I can't say that I know what it is, but when you see massive spikes like that it's usually a botnet of some kind (whether it's infected machines, injected connections, or whatever method). Perhaps a bunch of bots resolving their next C&C master?
The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)
I don't think Prince is even that good at marketing. I think what makes his work appealing as an investment is that a near infinite amount can be generated whenever requested.

He's just a money printing machine
There is no substance on earth more addictive than Elmo is to a two year old.

In most television shows and movies what people are looking for is somebody that represents them - call it an "avatar" if you must. When kids watch Sesame Street they relate directly to Elmo.

He's younger, smaller, has an insatiable curiosity, and is in a permanent mode of questioning and discovery. He even has similar mannerisms to children - he laughs a lot, has lots of energy, and is frequently confused as to what's happening around him.

The reason the author doesn't like Elmo is because Elmo acts like a two year old. The reason two year olds love Elmo is because Elmo acts like a two year old.

Sesame Street was created for two-year-olds, not bitter Internet pundits.
Design-wise the only thing that I don't like, is the full length of code window. Maybe a 3/4 container with a thin border would be better looking, can't tell without trying.
Patchman Automates Vulnerability Patches to Save Web Hosts Time
I think you can get that info with webmaster tools without using analytics.
Just waiting for the follow up clickbait

"Sorry Kotaku, acutally ___insert controversial person___ ruined sesame street"
How does your startup contribute back?

Everything we do[1][2] at Fogbeam Labs is Open Source. And I mean, really, truly Open Source, not "faux-pen source". Our code is on GitHub, most everything is Apache ALv2 licensed, the issue tracker is public, and we use open mailing lists / IRC for project communication.

We try to avoid the "throw it over the wall" style of development in that sense. The biggest wart with our approach right now is that we don't have a lot of community collaborators who aren't part of Fogbeam, so there's not a lot of discussion with "the community". But that's because we haven't grown much of a community yet to discuss with.

We are also open to receiving pull requests / patches and don't ask for a CLA or any copyright assignment. The only expectation is that any contributions are licensed under the Apache ALv2 or corresponding license (which will always be a mainstream, OSI approved OSS license, not some weird license we make up ourselves).

[1]: http://fogbeam.github.io/

[2]: https://github.com/fogbeam
HIPAA Checklist for Application Developers
This one would have been really fun if it was on the client resolver.
2) 15-25 days of vacation a year

Really? 25 days is 5 weeks; I feel like the standard for PTO is 10-15 days, and often it's 10 days, but you get bumped up to 15 after you work at a place for a year or two.

3) "Unlimited vacation," which is usually a hip facade for 1 or 2.

Is that really true? I have very limited first-hand experience; only two of my employers have offered unlimited vacation. For one of them, it was as you describe. For my current company... well, by the end of this calendar year, I think it'll add up to a little over 5 weeks, which is fairly unusual by US standards.
https://microcorruption.com/

nuff said. Hands on exercises through MSP430 hackmes. Only problem is that it won't hold your hand through it other than the first one, and you may need to read online solutions to kinda get the hang of it.

That's how I learned ASM RE, and I tried x86 hackme's in a hackathon and I came out first. I have completed less than 10 microcorruption challenges. So there's that.
Ars dont seem to like it: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/pixel-c-review-new-ha...
Holy shit do I strongly disagree with this.

> Although 12-bit color depth with JPEG comparable compression levels would sure be nice.

Exactly: there are so many features - like higher bit depth, alpha transparency, different colour spaces - missing form JPEG.

IIRC, JPG2000 wasn't adopted because back in the day we only had Internet Explorer, which required a special plugin, it was too slow, and there weren't many export options.

BPG and FLIF are good contenders in the lossy/lossless area though.

http://bellard.org/bpg/

http://flif.info/
There's many great modern shows, just like there's a lot of crap from the past. Try watching some steven universe, for example.
I am pigeonholed.

Sure I know other languages: Shell Scripting, Perl, HTML/CSS/JS, Groovy, SQL, C#, etc, but 80 percent of the code I write is in Java. I'm at a Java shop and have golden handcuffs. It's Java or bust for me.
Cloudflare is a WAF/Proxy that can handle DDoS, it isn't a DDoS specific product. If your actual network space is getting hit (e.g. 8.8.8.8) cloudflare will not help you.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shJoZQW7JMQ

Gameplay starts ~4mins in, check out the epic setup at ~6mins.
Why WeWork.com uses a static generator
Ask HN: Does down voting a comment or post cost some karma?
Sometimes I see comments down voted for not enough visible reasons. Curious if down voting a comment or post cost some karma ?
Important to note that his Instagram ripoffs haven't been tested in court. He has prevailed in previous court cases with art pieces that had a stronger "transformative" argument, which is a key aspect of fair use. This time the infringement seems more clear-cut. He's not transforming anything, but merely adding his own caption to an existing work. The original work is unaltered.

I was talking about this with a friend, and she said if that was sufficiently transformative for fair use to apply, then one could simply write notes in the margin of a book, call it art, and claim ownership of the book's contents.
Well, they sort of are, just not explicitly. The standard process is to have 2 to 5 interviewers, each asking their own question, and pass everyone who get at least one strong yes, and no strong noes. This ends up with a random factor, but ultimately favoring people at least one real strength. The interviewer who sees this strength will fight for them. We've seen people with high skill variance (great at one thing, bad at others) pass interviews at a higher rater than people who are just OK at everything.
I like IO from http://smashthestack.org/ - IOARM is also a lot of fun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_list_of_lists_of_lists
The difference in skillset and mindset in a large organization vs a startup is pretty huge. A large organization values stability and conformity (your software must work within usually a much larger picture), whereas in a startup the organization values speed and flexibility (large business changes or new data may come in at any point). The challenge when coming in from a big company is convincing people you can "hack" it to get things done quickly while still bringing the monolith of process and organizational knowledge from the big company.
I just jumped in. Learn basic commands. Use ? (the help command) a lot, and learn new concepts as you need them. You'll die a lot, but so long as you have fun, it's time will spent.
And the person responsible is not the guy without password, bit a coward who didn't push for 5x 9 SLA.
Yes, this includes hard real life access time analysis. If failing to remember a silly password takes longer than k minutes, it should be a breach of contract. Likewise if total disruption due to password changes is too high.
It's silly to implement a horde of govt rules while neglecting the basics.
The contribution is an implied "I think that stance by the manufacturer is ridiculous, and I won't even engage them." It's helpful because it highlights the ridiculousness of the manufacturers system. Sure, it could have been articulated better, but I think it's still contributing.

> which is not particularly helpful in any way, and has resulted in an off-topic metabranch

I would say that your statement has done more to forward this metabranch than the original statement ever did.
Care to explain a little? Did your friend mean that talented engineers like working on novel problems and companies facing hard problems are thus more attractive?
Even more bizarre, because WhatsApp use phone numbers as ID, I see people exchanging phone numbers willy nilly!

For example a married woman that wanted to cheat on her husband that is not having relations with her, sent me a message with her phone number asking me to talk to her on WhatsApp (but at least remembered to ask me to not call her...).

I am not into that stuff, still, that was only ONE example, in that day, I joined a evangelical christian chat when I was bored, and there was there lots of old guys clearly looking for sex (they had nicknames like "big cock 57" while moderators were out), and I saw a girls younger than 16 posting in the open chat their "watsapp" numbers wanting to chat, probably without realizing this were their personal phone numbers.

Also I've seen people going to great lenghs to stay anonymous online and then exchanging whatsapp number without realizing you can use this to track their real name down (unless the person was conscious enough to create a fake ID when buying the phone number, something I doubt that most people do).
Mixing units when not appropriate.

Heating is a great example, solar hot water heaters or sunroofs can cheaply collect a lot of heat. Heat pumps can also extract energy from air pushing up there numbers.* Further, insulation can make a large difference without directly showing up on heating or cooling numbers. All of which make the "Heating, cooling 37 kWh/d" a meaningless number.

Transportation is another area, we don't care about the energy content of gas when IC engines have such terrible efficiency numbers.

"not on my street", "not in my back yard!" page 109 are also complexly arbitrary issues. Consider, farmers love wind power as a very small footprint brings significant revenue. Sheep can happy eat grass under a wind turbine.

(*): A solar room can collect heat which is then redistributed though a home or even concentrated by a heat pump at extreme efficiency to heat a house without being uncomfortably warm or ugly.
Well CloudFlare works if you're mainly worried about responding to HTTP(S) traffic. In this the company was responsible SMTP, POP, etc which CloudFlare doesn't really handle.

Additionally as is mentioned in the article - If the attacker knows your public IP address they can easily bypass CloudFlare by simply directing the traffic to you and not CF.
They have both, most users use the client side javascript. I'm not familiar with how well the log analysis works.
>I'm also older than the average age of a start-up employee (late twenties)

I took this to mean that the average startup employee is in their late twenties, and he is somewhat older than that
oh wow yeah, those awkward monologues about how great and supportive the viewers are are also very uncomfortable to watch.
Why is root-servers.org not https?
> But people donate, and the people living off that money choose arbitrarily to spend those resources on IOS, that is just plain irresponsible.

Note that when people donate, they're donating to the Mozilla Foundation, an entity that does _not_ work on Firefox directly, but does advocacy, outreach and education work. This is where your donation goes.

Mozilla Corporation (which is solely owned by the Foundation) works on Firefox (Desktop, Android, iOS, Focus, etc), and does not benefit from the donations that are sent to the Foundation. That work is funded almost entirely by revenue generated by partnerships with search providers.

People who want to donate to the corporation do so via patches, bug reports, testing, documentation, evangelism, etc.

(Full-disclosure - I'm a Mozilla Corporation employee, but speaking for myself and not on behalf of the company)
I never understood why that was a prerequisite. I program for 60 hours a week. So what if I don't want to do it on the weekends too.
Aren't domain controllers likely to run DNS services?
And yet the USA is the richest country in the world, with a culture steadily dominating and extinguishing all other cultures. There is a McDonald's in Red Square right now.

You don't make an omelet without enslaving some chickens their entire lives, keeping them in barely one cubic foot of space from birth to death so they can push out eggs at maximal productivity, killing them as soon as they're no longer at peak performance, and of course, breaking the eggs.

In other words, you get what you pay for.
On the one hand, there's only one Star Wars novel there. On the other hand, it beat out Gene Wolfe.
Really great paper, glad you guys posted it!
Oh, you must be right. Silly of me.
Come on, anybody that has Christine Chenoweth as a sister can't be all bad...
"We’ve seen that most engineers only have the stomach for a limited number of interviews. Investing time in the wrong companies carries a high opportunity cost."

Yet it's amazing how many companies treat candidates' time as basically worthless, and infinitely replenishable.
The tone is of course hyperbolic as it must be these days, but I do agree that Sesame Street used to have a very interesting adult/child dynamic, which may be gone (haven't watched the show in years). I always loved the interactions between Grover and Mr. Johnson... even as I see myself becoming more like Mr. Johnson every day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQPLY9uxiss
What's wrong with Android? I mainly use iOS these days but I'm still holding out hope that Android becomes a real option on the "desktop".
The moon doesn't generate as much money as ads.
Yup. Before I went into independent consulting, five weeks was a non-negotiable point for me. And I largely went into consulting specifically to take more time off. Life's too short.
Anybody who expects you to know every new technology is a fool. The most important thing is being able to teach yourself the new technology and figure out its kinks.
I the biggest change I've seen in Germany is that Aldi started to accept VISA and MasterCard. Before it only accepted the German EC card system because credit cards probably had too high transactions fees in comparison.
Thanks, I had not thought of that.
I'd be curious to hear about the inverse. Have you found there are skills/disciplines that companies are highly interested in but no candidates are?
It looks quite nice, but personally I still think Surface still has the upper hand for (some) developers by offering a full blown OS where I am able to use Visual Studio and friends.

The tools available for coding on the go on Android like AIDE aren't as compelling to me.

Maybe that is something for an upcoming Android version.
Ah, I missed the dot. Thanks.
Escape Dynamics
I guess Snapchat has finally brought App Engine to its knees.
Drawing with the lack of self conciousness that a child has is not easy!
So you would not hire someone of a Microsoft or Google background?
That's how Amazons S3 works, secret or non existent resources return 403.
The author wrote that article too.

The author says he's a teacher, I'd be interested to know if he has children himself.