skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I mean you should know how the basic data structures work

Oh I'm not discounting that. I'm just saying that off the bat binary-tree traversal don't really test my understanding of the data structure. Recently in an interview I was asked a problem which eventually required using a binary-search-tree to improve the running time. This, I believe, is the right way to test but it requires the employer to spend more time designing interview questions rather than relying on a problem bank[0]. (which is a strong filter for good companies in itself)

> But they completely ignore the other 80% of the job which is design, soft skills, estimates, timelines, code reviews etc...

This is true but this is really really hard to test. In the interviews that I've been giving, I've indeed been asked design questions. I assume soft skills are implicitly tested while speaking to the interviewer (to some extent, at least). But other factors, AFAIK are very hard to test. Also, I would argue that a candidate doesn't need to know everything coming in. Estimates, timelines etc can be learnt on the job.

IMO, if somehow employers could find a way to reasonably trust that the code I have on my Github is indeed written by me then I think that should be strong indicator of my competence. Evaluating candidates who don't have any code in the open is a different matter altogether to which I have no solution.

[0] - http://leetcode.com
This is good for manufacturers. I wonder if it will incentivize companies to create shells to get around 500k limit?
Ask HN: Could a digital collectible be as valuable as a physical collectible?
I am curious to know of any digital collectibles that exist (only as data in a cloud) can be traded, sold & grow in worth over time, similar to a physical collectible such as a baseball card or antique.
Gobby is better than Etherpad if you're editing code though.
It makes more sense than you might imagine...

Linode, Github, Stackoverflow, Imgur, they've all been targeted. But what do they have in common? In a word: popularity. The core reason these sites are targeted is because it is impressive to others.

The source of this is typically two fold:

- For the lolz. Someone with a botnet just wants to show off, taking down something known gives them more notoriety.

- For a sales pitch. Someone has botnet capacity that they want to sell, and "I took down Linode" is a great way of demoing that to potential buyers.

The first one is more common when someone finds a new method of traffic multiplication and just wants to show it off (i.e. they trick a third party into DoS/DDoSing a target). The second one is legitimate criminal enterprises.
I'm glad to see that this information has now been publicly disclosed. In July 2015, we suffered a compromise at PagerDuty via the Linode Manager. I hope that we can provide a bit more of an official in-depth post-mortem of our compromise, but I'd be happy to disclose some of the details here.

Using the access gained within the Linode Manager, the attacker reset the root password on a few systems, and used Lish to gain root access. We were alerted to this activity and fully revoked the attacker's access within 60 minutes of the first node being compromised. Working with Linode support, we discovered which user account was being used and completely deactivated the user. We also isolated the VMs, and performed forensics on read-only copies of their disk images.

In our situation the attacker knew one of our user's passwords and MFA secret. This allowed them to provide valid authentication credentials for an account in the Linode Manager. It's worth noting that all of our active user accounts had two-factor authentication enabled. An interesting data point was that the user who had their account compromised was no longer in possession of the MFA secret themselves. Their cell phone had been reset (thus deleting all data) 8 months prior. The user could not log in to the Linode Manager if they wanted, so it was our determination that the key could not have been obtained from the user and was more likely on Linode's side.

We also have evidence from access logs provided by Linode that the attackers tried to authenticate as an ex-employee, whose username ONLY existed in the Linode database. It was absolutely unique and was not used elsewhere by the employee making the username an accidental honeypot. This was another piece of data supporting that Linode was the source of our compromise.

We immediately reached out to them not only to inform them of their compromise, but to assist them in investigating it. We were confident that the Linode database had been breached, and that the secret key used to encrypt information in the database had been compromised as well.

In addition to reaching out to Linode, we also worked with a third-party security firm to audit our work done during the incident. Likewise, around the same time we reached out to law enforcement to assist in investigating the attack. I believe our public disclosure includes this information[1]. This was in the middle of July 2015.

We did not get confirmation in July that there was a breach of the Linode Manager or any associated credentials.

In the end, we migrated away from Linode because of this breach (even before it was publicly disclosed) in Aug 2015. We also never were able to confidently disclose that Linode was the vector due to lack of confirmation from their end. While all of us who responded to the incident were confident they were the source, we now thankfully have the data to confirm it.

[1] https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/july-2015-security-announceme...
Doctors and professionals are probably not as concerned about Bayes because cancer isn't identically or independently distributed across the population.

Also, endocrinology diagnostic platforms usually don't have identical accuracy rates for positive and negative results, varying by test, machine, controls used, etc.
As a former Linode employee, I find all of your comments very interesting. But if it's true that you're being prosecuted, why are you incriminating yourself here?
Except as the candidate, I'm not happy. Companies already hold the balance of power. Pre-threatening me just means I'm not going to leave my current job.
This was my post from SomethingAwful, it was copied/pasted here. No idea who copied/pasted it.

Rather than writing up a huge reply with more info, I'll link to another reply with more details on this same thread since someone else already did the writing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10845985
On mobile it still appears broken enough to essentially require the use of their mobile app (and the corresponding paid premium membership) for anything beyond extremely occasional access.
Using the Best Date Format
The Flynn effect mystery is exactly the same as the mystery that in most countries the younger population is taller than the previous generation. The fact that the Flynn effect only occurs in the bottom half of the intelligence distrubtion is a bit of a clue as to what is the cause.
> It's like someone sold carrots claiming they improve vision, and got thrown in jail.

No, it's not. It's like they were appropriately fined for profiting off unproven medical claims.

> Testimonials being paid for shills? Like, say it ain't so. Every damed commercial you've ever seen in your life has fake people presenting fake testimonials. It's assumed.

And they're labelled as an actor representation. Giving them a pass because it's "assumed" is irresponsible and harmful to those who might not otherwise know.
No, like 50 cents.
You can always use https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/ as well.
I ordered a laptop from Dell, providing no information about my small employer. I ordered it from my own laptop but it was on my work's WiFi when I ordered it.

They called to confirm some BS about the order, and mentioned my employer's name. I was pretty stunned. I'm thinking they correlate IP address of your purchase on Dell.com with employer, I've heard such databases are available, but it's pretty surprising to me... not sure what else they do, except yeah, maybe googling their customers.
Canonical puts a lot of time and effort into making Ubuntu "just work" for most non-corner cases. That's the one I recommend to people as a "baby's first linux" even though I personally run Debian.

Debian Stable is of course rock-solid but it's also often sporting fairly old versions of software (firefox, etc) which can be offputting to the novice. Sid is my daily driver but I'm comfortable with things not working for short periods of time.
DoubleMap [http://www.doublemap.com/] | Indianapolis, IN

DoubleMap creates software for public transit, including GPS tracking, reporting, and ADA features. We're a small team working on two primary products (DoubleMap and TapRide) and we're looking to grow our team and product.

Full-stack software developer | Full-time | Indianapolis (Onsite)

This person will fix bugs and create new features based on client requirements for our transit software. Our software features include scheduling, bus ETA prediction, voice announcements, on-demand ride hailing, and more.
* Substantial PHP or Python experience
* Experience writing web apps
* Linux expertise
* Knowledge of UX, HTML5, Unix

QA Tester | Part-time | Remote

We're looking for someone who has enough technical knowledge to run our software, understand it, and find bugs in it - no programming expertise required.
* Good troubleshooting skills and an eye for detail
* Excellent communication via email and other online tools
* Understanding of web technology
* Familiarity with Unix a plus
* Familiarity with public transit a plus

Web designer | Part-time | Remote

We're looking for someone to help us with a visual revamp of our web platform. We have designs from a talented designer and need someone with good HTML5 skills to adapt and implement them.
* Understanding of mobile and responsive design.
* Understanding of HTML5 best practices.
* Can show a portfolio of previous work.

If you are interested, please email careers@doublemap.com with your resume and which position you are interested in.
If they make the limit infinite, you'd end up being paid -1/12 of a cent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-I6XTVZXww
Native code is bad for you
Technics 1200 returns after 6 year hiatus
I love YIFY as well as buying Criteron. My advice is don't bother with Kurosawa, I think Wreck-It Ralph is probably more your speed. Just an well-meaning, honest guess.
> The FTC is being very heavy-handed here.

It might be done to make an example out of them. Also imo a more accurate comparison would be Dr. Oz and the "wonder powder" he advertises
I disagree wrt. carrots and shills. We already tolerate too much lying to people, but there have to be some limits. Common misconceptions are one thing. People trying to defraud you (and let's call a spade a spade - if you're lying to me to take my money, you're defrauding me) by turning common misconception into what looks like a scientific fact? That's way out of line.
Are you investigating efficacy for ADHD at all? I know "cognitive training" has been used in therapy for it, and the symptoms overlap with TBIs.
Define "modern." It has been in common use for at least two centuries.
4K Stitching Possible in Real Time
Statistical Learning with Sparsity (excellent new eBook)
That was 2 days ago. This is now.
Sure -- but Lumosity can't be prosecuted under FDA regulation, unless the scope of "food and drugs" has undergone some fairly significant expansion. I assume supplements are still subject to the FTC.

There is no plausible argument that it's fine to make unsubstantiated health-related claims in order to sell your edible product that is intended to be bioactive, but not in order to sell your video games. In terms of potential harm to consumers, the ratio there could best be approximated as 100-to-0.
I posted quick after spotting the project on Twitter, then did a search and noticed it'd already been posted a couple times. Yet this thread seems to have gotten some visibility.

I figured the HN algo check for dups but I guess not.

tldr; sorry for the repost and excuse my rookie-ness.
Woah. I like this. Signed up. This is the specific reason I wanted a system like this.

Please don't spam me with updates :P. Just awaiting access to Beta.
Same topic but differently presented by Quanta Magazine https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151216-physicists-and-philo...
#unexpected #amazing #surprise #dorseydoesit #humanitysaved

Seriously: Jack Dorsey is definitely worth his 100 millions if he can come up with innovations like this; raising the number of character? Holy shmoly, what a genius! A veritable dare devil!
Guns in America, by the Numbers
Looks like the crowd agrees with my post (currently at 38 upvotes), but it suddenly got pushed down below several others a few minutes ago. Perhaps intervention from the mods?
Paid less maybe but save a massive amount on costs. Overall they'll come out with more margin and more time.
> Their inability to come up with accurate priors is completely lost on many of the folks who follow this kind of thinking.

Mis-specified/faulty priors are absolutely a possible pitfall of Bayes, but Jeffreys Priors are a means to circumvent this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffreys_prior

Another thing not mentioned in the article is that Bayes DOES converge to the frequentist result in the limit of big data.
Getting to zero exceptions is not a sensible goal (in languages where error handling is done through exceptions). Not all exceptions are bugs. What's supposed to happen when a network connection goes down?
The reason why doctors and other professionals find it difficult to understand is because they are paid for treating people. As Upton Sinclair observed “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
The character limit is a massive problem though. Tweetstorms, replying to yourself, and posting images of text are all ridiculous hacks for a basic use case.
Here's the critical issue: how do you re-seed? This is actually far, far more difficult than it sounds.
"This paper was published anonymously so it's garbage"

and

"We'll publish this paper anonymously, clearing our industry of any wrongdoing - and it'll look like good science!"
Too true, although you could have stopped after the word "writing". :)

I quickly decided that the article was full of crap and closed the tab. I only learned that it was written by one of the authors fullest of shit in a world full of many full of shit authors due to your comment.
But after a nanobot fails, it just become dust that casually slides through your cell walls.
We need a new word that non-figuratively means "literally", then.
It would most likely only create incentive to fake the value of the car so that it seems lower than it is.
It also hides when people are funded by X industry or Y interest group.

Anonymous papers will be a pile of garbage.
Faster than Ruby or Python doesn't mean anything if it's objectively slow. And it is. I've only been able to serve a small handful of concurrent users at a time with Express. I'm talking 5 or 6 before things get out of hand.

You should aim to have the bulk of your payload be static, and all of the static payload be served by apache or nginx. It's the difference between getting good feedback from a Show HN post or completely missing out and looking like a fool.
I've often wondered how I'm effected. I'm half-Korean so I look Asian but I was born and raised in America and now live close to Georgia Tech. I wonder how many people assume I'm foreign.
He could leave out the whole 2nd sentence and not change the meaning substantially though.
That's a great perspective on this project.
OG Command and Conquer in HTML5
I get a few requests a month from random recruiters. If I'm happy where I'm at, I decline or ignore. If I'm not, I may respond.

If I'm interviewing at a company I'll connect with the people I interview with or talk with people at the company a bit before I interview.
Then requiring the code to be published and runnable would have a salutary effect on the whole circus.
One thing I've wanted to see tried with Twitter is the idea that you have your typical stream of tweets (vertical), but that any tweet can have depth (by swiping horizontally). Your "my thoughts" example would indicate "1/8" automatically, updating as it was created.

Means that someone can read as usual, or delve for the full series of tweets. They could provide an indication to the writer of what percentage of people read to which depth, for example.

It could work well for presenting news articles (sentence or paragraph at a time), photo galleries/essays, slidedecks, stories, advertising, etc. Using a news article as an example, some people will be interested in just the headline, others in the first three bits, a few in the full story to its end.
Ok, but I don't know if anything you just said entails the claim that "Anyone who says LSD makes you smarter is stupid" -- I may be stupid, but I don't think the argument that (a) LSD offers a temporary alternate form of consciousness that (b) can lead to valuable insights and discoveries which (c) improve your overall cognition is a bad one.
How about not setting limit to any length, but using a text summary generator to reduce the tl;dr version to 140 characters?
believe it or not, being sued by a private entity is actually worse than having the IRS after you. Not to downplay the IRS, but some of the fears of the IRS tend to be exaggerated and sensationalized. Pop culture an the media has done a good job instilling fear in the IRS, but reality paints a more pleasant picture.
No, that was "Mousing around" for the original Macintosh. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pwammW5syw (Mac boots at around a minute in; the audio is from one of the two audio cassettes that shipped with each Mac)

More info at http://gizmodo.com/heres-how-a-macintosh-tutorial-taught-peo...
All of the people involved have been very open about their identities and what they've been up to. It's sort of their MO. Pure speculation on my part, but I imagine it's basically a giant middle finger to everyone else.
Thank you very much for the useful pointers!
It clearly isn't, but it starts to feel like it once you get used to JSX syntax as sugar for nested function calls with attribute object arguments.
To add another reason why his analogy was irrelevant and misleading, no one got thrown in jail. Lumosity got fined 0.01% of what some bank fines have been over the past few years.
To speculate on the final question in the article, I think it will take a lot for the FCC to do anything about it because time and time again we discover that governing bodies are woefully inadequate at understanding such technical issues.
Double jeopardy, I was previously convicted of 50700 counts of unauthorized access to various coldfusion sites. Among those was linode.
?! The sum of powers of 2 up to 20 is 2^21-1, which is ~$20k; so not $100k, but definitely not 50 cents.
Yeah I was surprised to see it posted again. Regardless, thanks for sharing :)
Well, there's this: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=3301

And there's another project that I can't seem to find right now, lost in my bookmarks or RSS feeds.
$10K
See also "What a Deep Neural Network thinks about your #selfie" at http://karpathy.github.io/2015/10/25/selfie/ . To summarise the "What makes a good #selfie" section:

- Be female.

- Face should occupy about 1/3 of the image.

- Cut off your forehead.

- Show your long hair.

- Oversaturate the face.

- Put a filter on it.

- Add a border.
The Tech Policy Battles of 2016
I don't think so.

First of all nobody sane would take a job where they are expected to measure up to some unspecified measure or else get fired on the spot. And any competent HR department will tell you that carrying through on the threat will risk the potential for lawsuits. (They want a paper trail showing that the person should be fired.)

Secondly it takes a surprising amount of time for an incompetent programmer at an average organization to get discovered. You usually spend a period of time studying how things are set up before anyone expects you to do anything. And by the time you can be evaluated you've certainly used a bunch of other people's time with your questions. It is far more efficient to determine this in the interview process.

And thirdly, a creative company can more easily solve the problem by offering a choice of ways to demonstrate competence. See http://www.starfighters.io/ for an alternative to traditional interviews.
The arty styles are very simple and it's practically the same genre so at first glance it seems like a clone.
Positivity Is the Key to Sustainable Weight Loss
5 Tech Predictions for 2016
Darn it, you hugged it harder than my tiny Amazon box could handle. Resizing the box now.
The FTC is doing it's job. You can' make arbitrary medical claims, and not expect to have to prove them.

This is the same sort of thing that a lot of people criticized the FDA over for going after Cheerios for making claims about being healthy for your heart.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124216077825612187

It's a good thing that there are parts of the government out there making sure you can't just make up whatever you want to sell a product.
actually we get the implementation, but it is bad UX practise. it adds friction to the reading experience and will increase the quantity of tweets with truncated text within the first 140 chars. Twitter poorly handles this already with its URL preview cards. from a UX side, it's bad no matter how much spin Twitter will bring.
I've begun wondering if there's a market for recreating original technologies that have evolved beyond their original intent.

For example, a new site that allowed you to broadcast up to 140 character messages.
I think the core value of a blockchain (as opposed to any general database) is that the most recent blocks contain a hash of the state of the system up to that point. This provides a tamper-resistant historical record of what's occurred previously.

I think your second point is what some of the critics of the bitcoin obsession are talking about. Not every blockchain needs to be as attack-resistant as the bitcoin network. Many of the speculative blockchain uses like for the Internet of Things could benefit from a history of all transactions but don't depend on it. Proof-of-stake might work fine for many cases.
Relax, I was just posting a deliberate piece of hyperbole to test whether someone might want to fine me.
While that is a good counter example, it would be nice to have 0 exceptions (ERROR and the like) logged on most days.

I have seen too many apps/modules that throw up and log just because of bad user input. This noise gets tedious to wade through to find the real problems.
I'd like to elaborate. The cryptographic PRNG has lots of entropy, and it probably happens to be enough entropy. You need ~226 bits, and most cryptographic PRNGs will be more than that—but not all! Information-theoretic entropy is actually a stronger requirement, and it's why we use /dev/urandom (which is secure and fast) instead of /dev/random (which is information-theoretic secure, but slow).

So it might be possible that your secure PRNG still cannot generate all permutations.
17 silver Sickles to a gold Galleon, 29 bronze Knuts to a Sickle.
It won't. Why should I install node in /opt?
Mostly I install server-side or desktop apps there (which most other people do aswell (Chrome, Atlasssian))
They don't need to be in path since they are mostly called by initd or sytemd or .desktop file.

Also they don't screw the system as others do that won't get installed with the package manager.

Don't touch any directory without the package manager, if you still do use /opt.
By the way, your statistics are for English.

For German, where we have 14.3 characters per word on average[1], we get:

10'000/14.8 = 676 words.

676 words @ 250 wpm is 2 Minutes 42 Seconds.

A 2½ Minute article is very short, like a short comment in a newspaper, and would fit very well into a microblogging site.

[1] http://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/durchschnitt...