skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I'd hire someone without a degree. Some of the people who have impressed me the most thus far in my career have had no formal education. In the security industry especially (primarily where I work), it is not uncommon to see incredible work done by those who dropped out of, or simply never attended university. This is true even in cryptography (though it's rarer).

This doesn't mean it's necessarily a winning bet to drop out of college. It depends on what you want to do. If you have solid skills and want to drop out to start a company, great, go ahead. History has shown many people beyond just Gates or Zuckerberg who succeeded that way.

In general, the more hands on the work, the less a degree matters if you have other ways to prove your skills. Research is harder to just break into.
There is a disincentive, at least when employees recognize what they are signing and how it limits their options. Informed workers that think ahead would see it as a more restrictive job.

Of course, its usually slapped in front of them AFTER they've accepted a job. Having accepted a straightforward offer in good faith, the terms are then altered, slightly.

Perhaps it should be more clearly stated in a written offer that must be considered before accepting.

And perhaps that's why its better to not allow these. It makes it easier for employer and employees to deal with each other. And it makes companies compete more on merit, rather than manipulation.

It doesn't hurt the companies ability to compete with each other, as long as they all live under the same rules.
I still have no clue what practical uses there are to something like Etherium. Can anyone give an example?
This is from May 2014. Most of the concerns in this article were addressed in the getrandom syscall for Linux, proposed in July 2014:

https://lwn.net/Articles/606141/

The claims about /dev and chroots indicate that the author doesn't really have a coherent threat model -- chroots don't work that way, and any attacker who can subvert /dev can as easily subvert the application's binary itself, read the application's virtual memory and extract the private key, etc.
What you say is very true, so cant think why you got downvoted. Compilers are so much easier to write in dialects of ML. Anything that has algebraic data types and pattern matching makes life a lot easier. I think one can save a lot of effort by writing large parts of the compiler in a language that has such support.
I was going to upvote you even though I vehemently disagree with you and your technical assessment of the crypto at play, simply because I don't think the downvote should be used as a disagree button. However, your last three paras are quite insufferable and if I were you I would reconsider your relationship with the HN community.
Can you provide any numbers on the results of these optimisations? They seem to be missing from the website and blog post.
The usual time I've been concerned has been after creating a new virtual machine. Right after creating a new DO droplet I need to do a bunch of things to set up my application, like seed my CSRF token generator.

Of course, /dev/random would block for ages at that point, so I instead generate the seed on a different machine.
Weird, I don't think I'd seen a company's landing page as a Show HN before.

Though the thing I'm picking up might be more the fact that this company didn't just launch today. I.e., they're not showing us something new today. Their product has been out for, what, at least a year? So if "Show HN" is ok here, then really any company's social media person can just repeatedly post links to themselves...
First step would be to call the hotel to verify / check to see if the reservation exists for you. Depending on if they used their card or yours, you might be able to possibly grab it by making sure the contact information/authorizations on it is for you. This is risky especially if they didn't use your card for the reservation because they could get mad and try to cancel it if you refuse to pay more.

You could try to contact the hotel directly and see if you can appeal to someone to get you a deal. If the prices are similar to the new quote from the travel agent, if it were I, I would just tell the travel agent to stuff it and book directly.

If the wedding is something beachy, note that August is in the middle of hurricane season. Travel insurance is something you might want to consider too.
Rents in SF are out of control.

https://medium.com/@TomPJacobs/what-housing-crisis-3c0568a5d...
There's no one you can really blame it on, but I think her thinking that is a result of the fact that we live in a very sexist society. Women are expected to grow up as essential gears in that machine, keeping each other in check and never fumble, god forbid someone would see that. I think it's present everywhere, but we're seeing it blatantly with women in technology because it's such a maverick industry, and that very tenacity which makes it successful is a trait that is so strongly frowned upon for women in our society to have.

Beats me on how to fix that. You can't just tell someone that no one cares, or that their worst critic is themself, when their reality is structured around believing elsewise.
Some laws of natural philosophy and sir isaac newton part 3
>Why do you think it's sped up?

Primarily because of the extreme precision when moving the arm over a long distance
Compared to modules I don't think header files have even a single redeeming quality. They are a historical artifact.
> C++ is a baroque language with way too many conflicting features, conflicting cultural standards, and general all-around cruft. Isn't it?

This is a really common sentiment, but when pressed to name a specific thing that should be removed (ignoring backwards compatibility), people really struggle.

The standard library has a lot of cruft and poor legacy decisions, but it's several decades old. Any code that's been around for several decades is going to have cruft. Any language that is as successful as C++ will have the same problem when it reaches the age of C++. It's inevitable. Anything looks elegant and free of cruft when its only a few years old and has low enough usage that the maintainers can make breaking changes without breaking billions of lines of code.
This mentions being able to build very simple faux-conversational interfaces within a hackathon. I've got one such hackathon coming up in a few months, could I go from zero knowledge to working proof-of-concept?
I think the key difference is in "originates in" vs. "claims to originate in." If you said, "The book claims to originate in 600BC," or, "The story within the book is set in 600BC Jerusalem," there would be less objection.
Facebook f8 2016
If by done, you mean "a team designed a rigid flow-chart and rules-based engine where you can painfully map out every specific interaction in your system"... then yes!
> a new feature called Goals that uses machine learning to help you figure out when you have time to pencil in stuff like spending time with your family or exercise.

Spending time with your family is a goal/something you need help finding the time for?

What the fuck Google? How busy do you think the average person is?
Business for Asia with Global InterGold to live and work wherever you choose
So, you're saying that she's unworthy of selling pencils to people? That sort of implies that there's only 1 pencil salesperson in the world. All others are beneath her level and must never attempt selling pencils. Going further it means that there's only one person per any kind of job. The One. Most knowledgeable, with undeniable passion...

High horse called, you've been on it for way too long.
Are you hiring international students for the Software Engineering Internship position? There wouldn't be any sponsorship required - CPT should cover it.
> It seemed like Dan may have wanted to write this book before even taking a job at the company.

This seems pretty likely to me.
Outside of Earth orbit, space objects become incredibly rare, and outside the solar system they are rarer still. There are much bigger problems to worry about, believe me.

By the way, dark matter is likely passing through your body right now. It's effects can only be seen on the scale of galaxies.
Hey thanks for this, I finally got around to watching it. That's a very interesting way of handling it.
There's a BBC documentary about this, also created for the 50th anniversary, starring his son, who happens to be a semi-famous singer-songwriter with the band Eels:

http://eelstheband.com/parallel_worlds.php

It's available in full on Vimeo and embedded at the bottom of the above page.
No, it doesn't. The scientific method seeks to refute existing knowledge by testing falsifiable theories and predictions. Faith is an opinion on a belief that is not falsifiable.
0.007
http://playground.tensorflow.org/#activation=tanh&batchSize=...
That's not the point here. The point is whether the Hebrew bible is simply a transcript of tradition and religious beliefs that were previously transmitted orally, or whether some people wrote it Hubbard-style, with the express intention to scam and defraud people. Since stylometry has shown us that it is a document written by many authors over a longer period of time, and since Judaism was very much a tribal religion then, the former is much more likely. Then, there's no point in deriding the Hebrew bible as "just a made-up thing", since it served an important socio-cultural function, so strong in fact that Judaism managed to survive as a religion and culture to this very day, while most other cultures and religions of the bronze and iron age have long been forgotten, or have been assimilated or superseded by others.
Is sexism a side effect of engineers being assholes or is engineers being assholes a problem because sexism exists so much in the first place? It's very easy to blame a company or a subculture as being sexist, but no one thinks about how the entirety of Western society is still damn sexist. The fact that makeup exists, for example. Women are universally expected to be subordinate and seen before heard. Women keep getting pushed around because that's what our social structure expects them to do. Engineers not being assholes isn't going to solve the problem. Women being assholes, and everyone getting used to that, just might.
At 25, its certainly hard to imagine how those funds were raised any other way.
Could be good, but Hong Kong is massively expensive and mainland China is censored, with slow int'l data connections, presumably because they have to scan for words like "Panama Papers." Goodbye Google, Facebook, real news... well you can have (need) a VPN, but that could also be attacked at any moment. You also kind of end up having to be a member of the Party, and are reliant on fickle gov't approval. Which makes one think that for quite a while China may be only for Chinese. Hong Kong, we'll see.
Having configuration files provides a superior experience to the Windows registry.
I'm a free market guy, and I also agree with certain notions of contract law - like you cannot sign away your inalienable rights. You have those rights regardless.

Also, in order for a contract to be enforceable, there must be an exchange of value. I would agree with the validity of a non-compete clause if there was specific compensation tied to that. For example, "we'll give you $50,000 after you leave the company if you don't compete with us for a year." But tacking it onto an employment agreement, no.
Can Israel build big, sustainable companies?
The billy club puppets a puppet play by federico garcia lorca
How does someone with such a pedigree not know how to program before university? I grew up poor in an immigrant neighborhood and even in the early '80s (really bad time in NYC), I was coding Basic in sixth grade on a Commodore Vic-20. In high school, I was doing Pascal on PCs and assembly on a Zilog Z-80. Did I mention my family was dirt poor? My parents never even have a chance to go to high school.

Let's face it, writing software is not for everybody. The author is such a person.
I look at SF and I see the strangest thing. Many new buildings that are built at 4 stories max. A big innovation is to give a whole 2 story density bonus! Wow 2! I know of small towns of 250'000 that build buildings that are 20 stories regularly!

12 SFH homes on a block can be purchased for $30 million, have 400 unit buildings built on them and make far more than that selling it off. Then take the massive increase in property tax revenue and use it to fund an expanded rail system with right of way. But they can't do it effectively because of the law.

Build 250 of those 400 unit buildings and you will have filled the 100'000 unit backlog. 250. You can easily fit them all 0.5 miles from bart and muni tunnel stations. Everyone knows the solution, the planning department and SF NIMBYs don't want to happen, and they fight it hard.

250 high rises wont even make SF approach hong kong or manhattan levels. Not even 1000 of them. SF and it's people has it's head so far up it's ass it's comical.
Chatbots: Igniting Division of Labour in Artificial Intelligence
There's that, or:

"Comments in JSON

I removed comments from JSON because I saw people were using them to hold parsing directives, a practice which would have destroyed interoperability. I know that the lack of comments makes some people sad, but it shouldn't.

Suppose you are using JSON to keep configuration files, which you would like to annotate. Go ahead and insert all the comments you like. Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser.﻿"

https://plus.google.com/+DouglasCrockfordEsq/posts/RK8qyGVaG...
Not sure if this obvious, but this person is a "troll." They have no posting history other than this article. And the story he is weaving about his family's history with pencils is pretty outlandish.

They're just doing some creative writing and having fun riling people up.

> pencils are not a passion, they are a way of life.

That's funny, not serious.
That's numerology, you just have many outputs of SHA1 with different inputs.
It's just weird syntax in my view.
Indeed. Cheers!
Ugh, yes, the practice of short-lived machines throws off the assumption of "when it was last shut down." You are totally right that this is a concern.

The ideal solution to this would be for hypervisors to just pass a random seed to their guests. (There is even a full virtio-rng device in qemu, it just seems to have /dev/random semantics from a quick glance.) I don't know how we get to the point of convincing the big cloud providers to start doing this, though.
Monorail, Chromium's open-source issue tracker
Which is based on UCL [0].

[0]: https://github.com/vstakhov/libucl
I find it interesting that this substance is psychoactive in so many animals, from hornets to frogs to humans. Are there any other examples of something like this?
It is indeed out of control. They have so much stuff in their app that an update takes over 2 minutes to run on Marshmallow on a total high-end device (Snapdragon 810). No other app comes even close to taking that long to precompile for ART.

Which is surprising really, considering their Messenger app is excellent, fast and lean.
It's interesting how the word "faith" has many meanings in common usage. I don't think scientists would use the word "faith" to describe their tendency to extrapolate from prior evidence. Here are a couple of articles from one particularly vocal scientist about the distinction between religious faith and scientific confidence:

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/09/06/do-scien...

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

---

I'll also note that science generally relies on empiricism rather than induction. Sure, scientists will expect the future to be similar to the past (because the present is like the past, and the past was like the more distant past, etc.), but they will also test that expectation with continued experiments.
Why Steve Jobs Killed the Newton
The part of this myth is down to what those circumstances are.

What's generally accepted is that, early during first boot, urandom still produces 'random' data without enough entropy for it to be sufficiently random.

What's a myth is that 'entropy can run out' and somehow a sufficiently seeded CSPRNG needs to block after a few reads while it gathers more entropy.

The problem in these discussions is that one, edge case, but valid concern, becomes a cargo cult of "why you shouldn't use urandom" and introduces a messy anti-pattern.
I believe that this is what VS Code has been using for a couple of releases now... I mostly ignore it, but if VS proper is switching, hopefully that will improve intellisense, which can cause VS to become unbearably slow in larger web/js projects.

Also looking forward to some of the .Net Core changes coming into play in the future, as it may get me working with C# again.
Maybe Google now uses machine learning to think up these products
Basically, if memory serves right, I based some of this on what I could glean from the organization's website. The company in question was a small (20 person) national/regional satellite of a larger (1500 person) multinational, daughter company of an even larger (30k) national/government corporation. To simplify, this is Europe, specially the Nordic region, so small national populations require their own footprint, and a massive player in one country may not be heard of in the neighbouring country.

From the website, I could clearly see that the company ambition wasn't anywhere near the reality I was presented (and even from there I couldn't quite grasp what they actually did, though to clarify with hindsight, information logistics basically entails accepting massive amounts of documents for distribution from large businesses, interpreting and transforming those to a destination format and layout, running distribution optimisation, and finally multi channel distribution to electronic archives, postal services, electronic invoicing, email, et cetera..)

Given the attitude of the CEO, it was clear he was painfully aware of the disparity, and I decided that the position I was being hired for had the potential to do something more should I be up to the task (though fairly clear that the CEO had given up on humanity in general and didn't have any idea of how to get out of the rut except doing more of the same to keep up with demand).

To be clear, this could all have gone terribly wrong, and if I hadn't spoken out of place at a few occasions, it would have.

Generally though, the first thing I consciously did to put myself in a position to gain the trust of the employees (which is always fundamentally critical in a transformation) was to clearly request that I start work early, in a low position. In my case, that meant working the floor of the print house, dealing with the Xerox dp180 printers and some Pitney Bowes enveloping machines. This was a menial area, relatively devoid of tech except the so called production control system which was a bastardized as400 running some of software from 1994 which had been repurposed to be the finance system at some point..

I think I would generally equate this to starting out in helpdesk or local it support for a few weeks. Absolutely invaluable.

Once progressed to my position proper, it was far easier for me to make correlations between production problems and related inefficiencies to systems design, maintenance, etc. Essentially I started asking questions no-one had asked before and started bridging the divide. Less than a year later,i had the mandate and ability to tear the whole system apart, causing the casualty of the most senior programmer there at the time (he didn't agree to anyone other than him touching his baby, so he left).

Long story short, in desperate situations where management have exhausted their known options, and are bound by higher powers, they will accept reasonably formulated and logical arguments - provided it actually solves THEIR problem. Stepping over the roadblocks above you to meet those issues face oh is a necessary part of that.
Next to that i don't think that you would hear about them usually anyway, but our media (Switzerland) certanly had a few times when they reported about more than one drone attack per week by the U.S.
We have a rating system in place, and thats about it currently. Background checks seem like a good idea! We'll look into it
So you don't think some of these details will not be automated away in the near future so that it doesn't require a specialist to do operate a neural network?
Wow, usa really is controlled by the companies instead of the people.
Sure you do, it is when the machine either hangs or suddenly reboots. X is very good at it.
Whenever I've gotten a job, I'd list on the employment contract all my outside projects and get buyoff from management that those were my projects, not the company's. Before I'd start a new outside project, I'd write it up and get management buyoff on it that it is not part of my job.

The key is full disclosure, in advance.

And I never had any trouble over it.
I own a small brick and mortar store and sometimes need a bunch of help unpacking or moving inventory. I can see myself utilizing this
I got to play with some hackmes in a hackathon and my teammates got frustrated by the crippled IDA demo version that they just downloaded a pirate version.

Amusingly the readme for the pirate version said "I cracked it with IDA Pro" or something along those lines.
Uh huh, passion, and $80,000 of "personal" funds which she had laying around after she finished art college in London and then travelled the world.
If they had given root access, the following things here would be up to the community to create. I don't know why you listed all of these things as if Apple owes them to us.
I found flights to Lampedusa on flychecker at € 186
They know where you got picked up, where you got dropped off, how you paid
Some countries in Europe allow non-compete clause. But employer has to pay full salary for duration of that clause.
> ITT: Hacker news believing that sexism isn't a big deal

It would be better not to anthropomorphize Hacker News. You're as much a part of it as anyone, after all.

When people diss Hacker News for 'believing' and 'saying' things, it's usually as a rhetorical device—the opposing 'opinion' of pseudo-Hacker-News makes oneself the underdog. But these rhetorical generalizations are nearly always wrong, and they worsen the divisions in the community.
The problem is that Google has built most of it's products and business around the concept that they can automate away manual intervention. I think they are quickly starting to discover how faulty that concept is.

Some of the "AI" startups that mix automated intelligence with human fallback have probably got it much more right: Sometimes, you need people.
That would be an interesting feature... given that FB has more users than anyone except google, it could work. Then again, google/apple pay aren't exactly sweeping the nation either.
I'm totally with you. We're big users of CoreOS and while there are aspects of cloud-init that I find janky, it's at least mostly easy to read and understand. The use of JSON is nuts. Just looking at the one-shots consolidated to a single line with \n's gives me a headache. This is moving forwards?

What I would prefer is a compiler. You feed it a directory of unit file drop-ins and app config templates and it builds a single artifact that can be served over HTTP and pulled by the server booting up. This could allow for dynamic configuration and automation but still makes it easy for the admin to piece the config together.
I use WebFaction and so far they're totally quite if there is any plan to support Lets Encrypt. Just does not gel with their "Hosting for Developers" tagline. Contemplating moving my sites to VPS at other host.
World War I in Photos (2014)
Creating an urban landscape which doesn't require use of automobiles would decrease them further.
that sounds unsafe
I've found companies to be very reasonable if you want to negotiate the terms up front, treating it like any other business deal (i.e. calmly and professionally).