skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do JavaScript experts consider JSBin a decent environment for this task? JavaScript is a bit verbose and I would resent simply the aspect of having to write a substantial amount of JavaScript without autocomplete.

I just played with JSBin and it doesn't have autocomplete out of the box.

Edit: whoa I just re-read the OP and found this

> Most [candidates] tend to use the laptop & JSBin provided

That's super hypocritical, OP (see your paragraph headed "Comfortable situation")! If you "provide" them with an environment of course most are going to use what you provide since that is what you are suggesting. So now you're filtering for people for whom that laptop model and the JSBin tool are familiar and comfortable.

Or in the case of those that reject your environment and choose their own familiar and comfortable laptop and editor, you are filtering for those with the self-confidence to reject the suggestion of the interviewer, which doesn't really help with your stated goal.

It's a shame because I like some of your other points :/
Control someone's Christmas lights remotely
I think the confidence and competence applies in any profit-driven business, in my experience.
There is a definite issue with the Facebook bug bounty program in that there are many serious issues with the platform that don't fit within the relatively narrow parameters of the program. I reported an issue that enabled anyone to customize a wall post that says it goes to any site of my choosing in the post (cnn.com, whitehouse.gov, etc), completely customize both the content and photo of the post, and have the link actually go to a URL of my choosing instead of the domain it shows in the post. Examples at [1] and [2].

This issue, which enables uber-credible phishing and other attacks with the assistance of Facebook (since Facebook falsely reports to the user that the link goes to a credible domain of the attacker's choosing while actually sending them to any URL controlled by the attacker), was rejected. Not only was I told that it was not a bug that I could be paid for, but that it really wasn't a bug at all, and that they would do nothing about it.

If these kinds of serious issues are essentially ignored because they don't meet the very narrow guidelines set forth in the bug bounty program, Facebook is going to miss a massive number of problems with its platform.

[1] http://prntscr.com/9fj40t

[2] http://prntscr.com/9fj46h
> people there routinely download and install new applications

You should look at the data on that.
This discussion might be a little above my pay-grade, but you're seeming to conflate "unknown participants" with "untrusted participants" from this response. It's possible to know someone without trusting them. I think that it's pretty apparent that there is a difference between an unknown anonymous actor, and an actor that you know, but just can't 100% trust.
Tech Predictions for 2016
My wife has a PhD in nutrition, so I don't think it's overstating things at all. We're well-aware of how nutrition studies are done and their limitations, but these are clear results shown in study after study for years.

I would seriously question the credentials of any PhD nutrition researcher at a decent university that disputed any of those factors.
$ echo | openssl s_client -connect www.instagram.com:443 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -dates
notBefore=Apr 14 00:00:00 2015 GMT
notAfter=Dec 31 12:00:00 2015 GMT

AWS bucket creds are not the same thing as SSL certs and were most likely specific to only relevant s3 buckets which are totally separate from any load balancers.
I find the JavaScript world exhausting right now, there are too many frameworks popping up and dying for me to spend the time investing into learning something new only for it to be gone in a few weeks. I rarely do node on my servers, but when I do it's still plain old express with some simple middleware, nothing too fancy.
> This part is important:
> Having a consistent test also allows me to compare candidates easily and without bias.

No, it isn't. The person who performs best on the test is often not the person who will perform the best on the job.

Tests like these should always be pass/fail.
Yes, I do...but I haven't only worked in the financial industry. I still think an understanding of how business leaders think is helpful in any industry.

"Tech Industry" is pretty broad...Facebook does advertising, marketing, and communication....all areas that benefit from an MBA.
Enjoyed the article. Agree totally on using the empirical evidence: managers understand numbers and will buy them if they're the right ones presented in a straight-forward way. Not always, but often works well enough.

I'd like to see a follow-up on how they used the genetic algorithms. Always neat seeing how they get applied.
Approximately 10x as many scientific documents produced in the U.S. as in S. Korea.[1]

Ratio of U.S. to ROK scientists is about 6:1.[2]

OK, so # of scientists isn't 10:1. But in terms of scientific activity, the U.S. is far and away more productive.

1. http://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php
2. http://chartsbin.com/view/1124
I might point out that it's not in the company's best interest to answer any questions about your performance. If an interviewer gives you feedback, and they say something wrong, it could open the company up to a discrimination lawsuit.

You're better off asking questions about the business and trying to determine whether they're a good fit for you than you are deciding whether they're impressed by you or not. By assessing their business and their fit for you, you'll decide whether you want to accept any offer they may or may not decide to offer. If they don't offer, they weren't impressed, and they still shouldn't provide you much feedback because of aforementioned liability issues. If they do offer, then they were impressed, and you can ask those questions.
I like the Arc idiom for this. Here's how to sort a list (say of stories) by some computed value (say a function called score):

(sort (compute > score) stories)

If score is expensive, you just wrap it in memo:

(sort (compare > (memo score)) stories)

Now it will compute each score once, save them in a table, and throw the table away when done.
The waypoints are not distributed regularly, but the track points are.

Here is why performance mattered in my case.

I needed to predict future positions of the cyclist (see https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/jfp/entry...). The computation relied mostly on weather forecasts provided for each track points.

I then needed to know where to start my computation, i.e. find the track point closest to the current location of the cyclist.
"I want to keep this out of the hands of lawyers" is almost universally understood to mean "please do what I say so that I don't have to sue you, which is what I will do if you do not comply".
Solve this riddle
green handle

New account, IIRC less than 2 weeks old. The name is colored green. But I've seen it not be consistent, where some posts are green, others aren't. All in the same thread.
Exactly. The lack of actual information is a reason to disbelieve Yudkowsky on this topic, not to assume that it's true for Secret Technophile Mystery Cult Reasons.
Thanks for taking the time to fill in some of the details!

This is the most detailed explanation I found regarding the VBA method: http://www.toadworld.com/platforms/sql-server/w/wiki/10392.e...

And the company you linked originally gives away a generic VSTO add-in: https://www.ablebits.com/excel-addins.php#sql-server

The part I was missing was when you said 'audit tables [and] audit trails' (etc.)... it sounds like this would all be build-it-yourself.
Hell yes! Or even hardware acceleration for starting in random parts of videos on my PC so they don't break up and delay as often. This is the digital era. It's supposed to work more reliably than old, analog tech. I used to be able to stop my rewind or fast-forward on VCR within a few seconds of the target moment with clean play. Still not reliable with digital streaming. (sighs)

Note: I do like how, even with errors, it still takes under 20 seconds for me to get to any random part of the vid. That's an improvement over the rewind/fast-forward speeds. :)
I think the bigger problem is not training the cars to drive more aggressively, but that doing so will probably require them to break traffic rules
New account.
Because you can do both, you're not sure approximately when someone might have written your note observing that markets and then supermarkets became more convenient?
For all the problems Flash had, one problem it didn't have was a lack of mature tooling (compared to its alternatives at any given point in time). A lack of tooling makes making HTML 5 games very difficult, the abstraction layers that existed for Flash don't for HTML 5, at least not to the same level. Even if HTML 5 were capable of precisely the same level of performance, or better, as Flash today it would still be some time before the experience of a content creator reached parity with what already existed for Flash.

At no point has the debate between Flash and HTML 5 content ever included "Content creators will have an easier time with HTML 5". It's an ecosystem that has to develop over time, and HTML 5 the content platform has only approached feature parity with Flash in the past couple of years.
I agree, I suspect at this time there's more room for progress to be made by augmenting human intellect than AI.

Think about how long it takes you to imagine a program vs actually coding it, or imagining an object you want to create and actually building it, there are at least two or three orders of magnitude for improvement over the keyboard.
We should have had a standard like WebAssembly from the beginning. The lack of it is the reason for the outrageous explosion of features in web browsers. At first html made sense: it was ideal for quick transfer and rendering of documents. But today that's not enough. So we keep tacking on layers atop already fat abstractions. And all this fat is trying to support a moving target. At first it was about rendering text, but then it was animations, and then videos, and 2D games, and advertisements, and now 3D games and full fledged apps. Notice that operating systems don't play this game trying to build an abstraction for every possible use of a computer because it's unwinnable. And now, some 25 years since its inception, the web is learning the same lesson.

Web browsers have been like operating systems all along, because they execute programs, albeit with different performance and safety characteristics. That the two are converging upon the same solution to the problem of hosting apps should be reassuring, not concerning.
ISTM the special capabilities of the special bike should be accessories that anyone can install on most any bike, rather than only available built into this one bike. A startup should specialize in those special capabilities, and leave the production of existing products to existing product companies. That is especially true for bicycles, which are both standardized enough that parts and accessories are largely interchangeable and differentiated enough that most cyclists already have their favorite bike(s) that this company can't hope to replace.
Process Noisy OMR Scanned Sheet Images and Optimize OCR Process in Java Apps
Then why the immediate escalation?

Wouldn't it have made more sense to contact the researcher directly, rather than using his position of power to pressure the researcher's company's CEO?

Why not assume good faith? (Which is what I would think a white hat bug bounty program should assume)
This kind of "de facto legal" thing really bothers me, because that really just says you are concentrating more arbitrary power in the hands of the justice system.

For me, it's not legal until you can do it while calling a cop an asshole.
For the people who are confused (I was) between uberPOOL, uberHOP and uberCOMMUTE:

uberPOOL most will know matches a rider real-time with another one heading in the same direction. The riders split the cost between them.

uberHOP is like a bus service - uses designated pickup locations and matches people going on similar routes. It costs riders a flat fee of $5 for each ride.
Difference between uberHOP & uberPOOL - uberPOOL does not require riders to walk to pre-determined locations, instead having drivers pick up passengers at their exact location. The cost is variable and not a flat fee. For uberHOP riders have to walk to a predetermined spot (something like a bus stop).

uberCOMMUTE is less formal than the other two carpooling options and is designed for everyday people (ex. an office goer) that want to share space in their car. In other words, one temporarily becomes an uber driver when they are driving to their office. On their way to office a person can pickup passengers and gets compensated for that.
For passengers, it’s Uber as usual. They simply input their destination and then uber matches them with a driver going the same way.
Let's make code for IoT and Linux easy and modular
First of all, The Google case is a long story. It boils down to Google HQ, especially the three founders, didn't grant much power to local team. I remember there was a news report that one of Google China's partners was trying to lobby a chinese official by gifting gifting the latest iPad, Brin heard that and shutdown that operation completely. While I appreciate the moral high ground and respect FCPA laws, the problem is that other US companies and non-US companies, can and successfully exploited this chinese "culture" and influenced policy makers.

Secondly, for every hostile Chinese policy, there must be someone benefited. Local Chinese internet giants are actively exploiting every possible way to lobby policies for their own good. US capitals can deploy lobby operations via VIE.

Finally, the thing that troubles me is that after all these years, Google is making a coming back to China[1], I mean wtf? seriously? Many hardcore Google fans in China a disguised by this awful act.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/4/9262479/google-china-app-st...
Guy discloses vulnerability. Facebook is not as impressed as guy would have hoped. Maybe it's because he's one of several people to disclose the same vulnerability. Maybe there are just a lot of vulnerabilities (they've paid out 4.3m in bounties).

Guy's reaction to rejection: take hostages and threaten Facebook. Facebook moves to defense and cuts guy off.

You are not a good neighbor for kidnapping someone's family to prove to someone their busted lock is a big deal. You show them their lock is busted and trust they can figure out what harm that could lead to. The alternative is companies being hostile to people just looking around their locks, which is the world in the 1990's and 2000's that responsible researchers are trying to avoid going back to.
I would rank the classes in order:

1. Accounting - It's the language of business. Like learning English before you become a pilot. This class helped me start asking deeper questions when meeting with business people.

2. Finance - Holy cow, the ability to put a value on cashflows and understand the cost of capital really opened my eyes to the big picture. I also use my Finance classes to help when deciding to take Job X or Job Y...

3. Strategy - My FAVORITE class of my MBA. It's helped me when a complex situation arises--I can objectively measure the different components of the problem and look for solutions.

4. Economics - Really impacted me to ignore the hype of the news. "CHINA WILL OVERTAKE THE US ECONOMY IN X YEARS" So what, it isn't a zero-sum game.
Most places don't have medallions, actually.

Uber fought pretty hard against consumer protection laws here in DC. For example, DC requires cabs to carry highr insurance and to get cars inspected more frequently.
Apache Myriad releases v0.1
The nice thing about these cars and all the dash cams we have from regular drives is that we can now tweak the laws to reflect reality. The robot cars should do what they are supposed to and drivers or law makers should adjust.
I hear you, though some folks will feel as if you are dismissing the impact of their products (e.g. Watsi). If it helps, check out (to name just a few randomly):

http://www.helionenergy.com/
http://bikanta.com/
http://ixchelsci.com/
http://www.standardcyborg.com/
https://www.detroitwaterproject.org/
http://www.oolusolar.com/
http://bagaveev.com
true. Usually, i just stumble upon those framework. If i see something nice, i will integrate it to my barebone hapijs project template.
Ok, so here's the thing. Your $2500 payout was not commensurate with the severity of the bug. It ought to have been more. A LOT more.

You're basically telling bounty hunters to not go any further to "prove" the severity of the bug because you're saying, "Trust us. We'll measure the maximum impact and reward you fairly"

And yet, you're not being fair at all. So the bounty hunter needs to "prove" the severity of the bug for you. You're digging your own grave here by not acting in good faith. The next guy who finds a good bug is not going to disclose it to you - he's going to sell it on the black market for a few hundreds of thousands. Or millions.
My lawyer friends tell me it is actually "innocent until proven broke" -- lucky for him, this guy has that area covered.
Good point. I'm not sure off the top of my head if Shapely has a specific function for what you're trying to do. It does have highly-optimized distance functions though. Might be interesting to compare those to your version.

One way I've approached this problem that seems pretty fast is to load a set of points into a PostGIS-enabled database, then use the `ST_Distance` function and order by distance.

[Edit]

Shapely solution:

points = MultiPoint(((0, 0), (1, 1), (4, 4)))
point = Point((3, 3))
sorted(((p, p.distance(point)) for p in points), key=lambda item: item[1])
I don't think it does. Wes asked for communication via Facebook's own tools for it, didn't get it, and they went around him to his boss. That's crap.

Now, Wes exfiltrating data rather than just looking at it? Not cool. But Facebook's side of the story is just as biased as his.
Dabbling in and reading on AI for over a decade makes me laugh at any of these articles writing about a connection between OpenAI, AI research, and risk of superintelligence. Let's say we're so far from thinking, human-intelligence machines that we'll probably see super-intelligence coming long before it's a threat. And be ready with solutions.

Plus, from what I see, the problem reduces to a form of computer security against a clever, malicious threat. You contain it, control what it gets to learn, and only let it interact with the world through a simplified language or interface that's easy to analyse or monitor for safety. Eliminate the advantages of its superintelligence outside the intended domain of application.

That's not easy by any means, amounting to high assurance security against high-end adversary. Yet, it's a vastly easier problem than beating a superintelligence in an open-ended way. Eliminate the open-ended part, apply security engineering knowledge, and win with acceptable effort. I think people are just making this concept way more difficult than it needs to be.

Biggest risk is some morons in stock trading plug greedy ones into trading floor with no understanding of long-term disruption potential of clever trades it tries. We've already seen what damage the simple algorithms can do. People are already plugging in NLP learning systems. They'll do it with deep learning, self-aware AI, whatever. Just wait.
People usually didn't get sick from food before there was regulation and people still sometimes get sick despite it. What they really do is allow you to trust unfamiliar merchants whose reputation you can't know and so expand the reach of commercial society. But just as the rise of trucking meant that rail travel was no longer a natural monopoly and could set its own prices tools like Uber mean it's now safe to use reputational systems with drivers for hire. If there were some universal registry of restaurants that everybody checked for health ratings before going in to eat then maybe we could worry less about regulating restaurants too. But I don't see that happening soon.

An important difference between this and things like pollution is that in the case of pollution the negative effects of the seller's malfience don't fall upon the purchaser but upon third parties who don't have any say in the matter, what's called an externality. That's another case where we really do need regulation for a good result.
Add a new transaction to the end of the chain saying that counterparty X has paid you $1B. Publish this transaction. Counterparty X, of course, publishes a version of the blockchain where you have paid them $1B dollars. How do participants in a private blockchain determine which published version represents reality?

Or alternatively: Pay counterparty X $1B. Then immediately turn around and pay counterparty Y the same $1B, before they've gotten an updated ledger from counterparty X. When counterparty X and Y share their ledgers, who owns your $1B?

The point of mining in Bitcoin is to resolve conflicts like this. By forcing whichever node digitally signs the latest block to perform a computationally-intensive problem, it represents that the latest block is the consensus of a majority of the network, as measured by computing power. Any node is free to publish a fraudulent block, but then any other node can inspect the block, see that the SHA256 hash doesn't match, and then reject it. Or if they get lucky and happen to find the right SHA256 hash, they will get outpaced on the next block (the Bitcoin protocol specifies that clients should assume the longest chain is correct), and the rest of the network will ignore their fraudulent transaction.

What's the alternative in private blockchains? I'm genuinely curious; I have little invested in Bitcoin, but I did spend some time understanding how the protocol works and why it includes the features it does.
It's more complex than just creation date. Somewhere in there it involves votes cast on your posts, which is why you might see someone's name switch colors from one post to another in the same thread (the system doesn't go back and switch name colors on previously-created posts). IIRC the exact mechanism isn't public.
>And by extension, it means that in every interview cycle, some portion of interviewees are losing interest in joining your company just because they didn’t think they did well, despite the fact that they actually did.

I hate the assertion of causation here. As always, this relationship means that A causes B, B causes A, and/or A and B have a common cause (or even more possibilities, given that we're essentially conditioning on this event taking place). Aline argues that "some portion of interviewees are losing interest in joining your company just because they didn’t think they did well," but I think it's more plausible that there is something that happens in the interview that simultaneously makes the interviewer think they did poorly and makes them think poorly of the company. If you're rating me on my ability to name country capitals in a statistics interview, I'm going to think you don't want to hire me and I'll think you're an idiot I'd hate to work for. Or if you're being kind of a jerk or being impatient and checking your cell phone every 30 seconds, I'll think I'm doing poorly and that you're rude and I wouldn't like to work with you. Common cause seems much more likely to me.
If you're biased, you should do the ethical thing and stay out of it, honestly. There is a ton of asymmetry here, and you and your Facebook CSO friend are being bullies. This is pretty grey, you don't have first hand knowledge, and obviously Alex can do no wrong in your eyes.
Your question makes me wonder: Are questions (by themselves) copyrightable?
> The researcher NEEDED TO HEAR THAT.

I don't disagree. But why go through his employer, when they already had a direct line to the researcher himself?