skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
DEC hardware the power on self test (POST) which included a RAM test was itself tested prior to starting. And as computers used to be so much more unreliable in their hardware there was a lot of work dedicated to error checking the hardware.

In today's hardware you can run a CRC check on your bootloader prior to starting it using only registers. When you start it, you can check a portion of memory from the bootloader, then using that memory, check the rest of memory. If you use ECC memory and initialize it properly, it will do a machine check if multiple bits get flipped. Multiple systems doing the same calculations should get the same answer, using three systems and flagging any system that disagrees with the consensus will identify failing hardware. I/O channels can use ECC as well, and software that is running in ECC protected I/O and memory can use data protocols to detect data corruption in flight (channel errors) or in situ (storage errors).

As with most things you can never be perfect (aka the halting problem) but you can make failure statistically rare enough that you are willing to risk it. It doesn't mean that bad things will never happen. We live with risk every day and still drive to work.

And the trick is it is easier to just say "Whoops, something isn't right here, we're resetting to a known state." but that can make functioning really difficult (see Kepler's safe mode, or the challenges Armstrong had landing the LEM when it was constantly resetting the flight computer). Sometimes you just break. And in those situations the best you can do is to break in such a way that you don't cause any additional harm.
I think "intellectually lazy author", "in the mind and shallow analysis", "conditioned to believe" etc tells more about your stance towards Scalia than the author's.
I interviewed with Netflix for a front-end JavaScript position a few years ago. I had two technical phone screens. One with the engineering manager and another with a senior engineer on their team.

Those went smoothly so I was asked to fly out to Los Gatos, CA.

On-site I was supposed to talk first with the senior engineer I had already interviewed with over the phone. He was out sick so they changed at the last minute.

In walks a guy in a fedora with full tattoo sleeves. He glances at my resume and laughs saying he hasn't looked at it at all and really knows nothing about me.

He proceeds to ask me detailed questions about Node.js. I told him that I was very clear with them on the phone, that I've played around with Node, but I hadn't used it to any serious degree (at that point in my career).

He continued with the Node.js questions for a while, some of which I knew because they were the same as the browser (console) some of which I wasn't familiar with at the time (EventEmitter).

He then asked me some simple JavaScript, Backbone, CSS questions all of which were easy. He then asked me a C# question and I knew that too.

We shook hands and after he left, the engineering manager came back in and I was basically escorted out. He said I was good but that I wasn't what they were looking for.

I've had some retarded interview experiences but that one took the cake.
I added a sneaky edit (sorry!) that may address some of this, so I think we probably largely agree. I'm responding to a relatively specific claim, frequently heard by bootcampers and inexperienced engineers in web development, that foundational CS isn't useful, which my experience is somewhat representative of, though you are correct it's still anecdotal.
>> build a feed with notifications for HN users, which will notify about the following items:

>> - When a user you follow comments on Hacker News (e.g. ptacek, patio11, dang)

Reddit has something like this but they didn't invest in it at all, and even with that it's a terrific source of content for if you as a user invest the effort in collecting friends.

If you could take this feature on reddit to the max(for example advanced filtering) and package it as sort of mini-magazines, it would enable users to build terrific resources/magazines/feeds on many varied subjects, by experts, with great content quality, far above the bullshit of ad-driven media.

And why reddit and not HN: the best reason is the variety of experts, not availble in HN. Also you could filter by subreddit and other stuff, there's an API, there's already a notification built into reddit(which increases virality).
> Books are tempting, they have glossy covers, they are about mastering a subject.

A lot of the books recommended on that site are about expanding horizons rather than mastering a subject. You google for an answer when you know what you don't know. Books can be great for those times when you don't know what you don't know. :)
"Google Plus is now all but dead". Hearing that a lot but I don't see any evidence of that. Where is the proof?
An adapter like that will have the exact same problems as DVI->VGA adapters: HDCP. The software will refuse to send the data to the port without an HDCP negotiation. And just like the VGA adapters, I'm sure it will be possible to make a "striper" that fakes the HDCP handshake, with all the associated legal problems.
You'd think people would respect NDA's, right? Not so... I've had people submit proprietary code samples during the interview process.
Functional Programing 101 with JS
>Honestly, say what you will about Google, but I can't imagine them ever threatening another software company with software patents.

That is a naive fanboy outlook towards a company. Its a well known fact that Google bought Motorola only for the patents. Google has also managed to use the patents to sue other companies including Microsoft. Although I still believe it is the game that is flawed and not the players. Google has also done things that could hold back the Windows Phone ecosystem. However, none of that should discount how much Google has contributed to betterment of the web just like Facebook or Microsoft. Open-Source is open source, the only thing that matters is license here and it is as liberal as it could get MIT.
In dev workflows you can deal with the extra few milliseconds of transpilation time just like you deal with the extra few milliseconds of overhead from any of your other dev tools.

Plus, even a bunch of dev workflows are increasingly using tools like gulp-watch in the background of their refresh cycle (for whatever reasons), and Typescript's watch support has gotten very good.
> In my previous phone screen they were looking to hire a single person.The perfect fit. Probably not me

What country was this in? In Ireland that qualifies as employment discrimination on the "civil status" ground.
Ask HN: Any 3rd party solution to query data from MongoDB?
Dell XPS 15 or ThinkPad T560, perhaps refurb to save money.
You mean like a CTRL F? It just did a Google Search for me
>We've long required the state to provide an attorney to those that cannot afford one. It may now be necessary for the state to provide scientists to those that cannot afford them as well.

Well, the state provided poor people bottom of the barrel attorneys, who didn't care much about the defendants (and had not much of a financial motive to), and urged them to plea so that they can move ahead, in a hell of a lot of cases.

So, this "state scientist" process to exist, it should be really to work better than that if it's to do any good.
But the MIR definition of "safety" must be more encompassing than LLVM IR, right? LLVM IR has no concept of a borrow. Where in the MIR pipeline does borrow checking happen?
> at the low bar for due diligence in startup funding

In the case of Theranos you also have how she was well know by Tim Draper (DFJ investor) apparently friends with his daughter. So he must have been smitten by her intellect possibly in comparison to his own daughter (my speculation but wouldn't surprise me).

http://www.mercurynews.com/michelle-quinn/ci_26147649/quinn-...

"Tim Draper, the venture capitalist, said Holmes, who was friends with his daughter growing up, is the first entrepreneur he knows who kept quiet about her business for so long "so that the competition wouldn't get a chance to start."

"She had a winner and knew it," he said. His firm DFJ Venture was the first to invest."
From one obscurist to another, it's mostly water.
I'm torn.

On the one hand: the interview processes this post describes are hilariously broken. Stand up at a whiteboard and implement breadth-first search from memory! You know, like no programmer at their desk staring at their editor ever does. I think "that's the one where you use a queue, right?" is a fully valid and complete answer to that dumb question.

I also think you're within your rights to demand that your interviewer implement Kruskal's minimum cost spanning tree from memory at the same whiteboard before you have to do BFS. That's an extremely simple and important graph theory algorithm that nobody memorizes either.

These interviews are nerd status rituals. Really good candidates know this and game them. If you know anyone like this, ask them for stories. I've heard some great ones. But obviously, this isn't a good way to select software developers.

On the other hand...

The idea that "front-end developers" shouldn't need to be able to implement a BFS (at all) bothers me a lot. If you're a software developer, you should grok basic conceptual computer science. You should be able to work with a graph. If you're doing web work, you're working with graphs all day whether you grok that or not!

I've been doing front-end work for the past month, and I've had to do more low-level profiling and performance work here than in the previous 4 years of low-level systems work.
I assume nikolay would prefer native Android notifications.
Google Calendar for Android: Find a time for my meeting
Having dealt with recruiters who simply scraped the web and job boards, I'm curious about how potential positions are discovered, evaluated, and acquired.
Integrating Customer Service in Mobile Apps
> A project under MIT license and accepting PR is good enough for me

He is not pretending to be an arbiter but speaking generally to what many people, including myself, believe. And in any case, you attempted to refute what you reduced down to his own subjective opinion, with your own subjective opinion.

Working against software patents is part of the larger essence of OSS, and it was just a specific example of it. If you are for software patents, and somehow magically "for" open source, then you aren't really "Open Source" you are just hiding behind that facade so you can now accept free labor when it serves your purposes.

So, in that regard, it isn't difficult to see where the negative sentiment is coming from in regard's to the recent media blast of the "new Microsoft."
30 years ago, when I started working as a professional software developer, I encountered people in their 40's who had been professional software developers for 20 years. So no, software development is NOT young. FORTRAN was released almost 60 years ago, in 1957. Cobol was released 55 years ago in 1960. It's been half a century since thousands of people have been programming professionally.

How old is a 60 year old industry? It's the time it took to go from the first Write brothers airplane to jet airliners and rockets into orbit. It's less than the time from the discovery of DNA to full sequencing of the human genome. Between 1850 and 1910, steamships went from barely worthwhile to gigantic ocean-going liners (RMS Olympic) and battleships (HMS Dreadnought).

The software industry is not young. The third generation of developers are entering the workforce. Some of them have grandparents who were professional software developers. The industry has completed (or failed at) 100's of thousands (if not millions) of major projects.

IMO, far far too many people working in the industry simply refuse to learn from the past. But that's a rant for another day :-)
Have a look at this website - http://cctld.uz/reg/
What is the cost for something like that? Any way you can give an idea w/o giving away specifics you don't want to disclose?
35 New Ways to Do Your Work Right Inside of HipChat
It's more the confusion about seeing two kinds of numbers.

If I see:

123,456

Is it a list of two numbers? Or a single number with a decimal?
>The UK could take bits of land it owns, chuck homes there

"Chucking homes there" would be a good place to start improvements, actually.

Designing zero-energy homes and offices is not hard, but housing developers have been slow to adopt the practice. Looking around, it seems like most modern house plans/blueprints have no preferred orientation to the single greatest energy source: the sun (or if they do then housing developers ignore them). When there's literally no "sunward"[1] on the map, then the cheapest of all energy reduction strategies -- passive solar design -- is all but impossible.

Why isn't the climate zone given on a house plan? Because the assumption is that you'll just consume energy (typically fossil fuels) to make up the difference. We're designing buildings totally backwards: starting at form and bolting on function.

The ideal would be adjustable parameters based on local conditions. South facing windows based on heating-degree-days, overhangs based on latitude, floorplans that adjust to ground topology and microclimate, etc. So you punch in the site conditions (or sense them), hit "compile", and it spits out blueprints for a zero-energy passive building specifically suited to those exact local conditions.

This is more similar to how plants develop -- by sensing and adapting to local conditions, they incrementally design themselves to suit their habitat.

[1] that is, south in the northern hemisphere and north in the southern hemisphere
Actually terrorism could actually be targeted against the EU.
It's really hard to say if there wouldn't be any without the EU. But I really think that without opening the borders as it was done with some EU contract, it wouldn't be as worse at it is now. If these days somebody would bomb some citizens it's really hard to say from where these people would come. In most parts of the EU you could've just go in and out whenever you want without many controls.
It changed lately but still a lot of people are here now which could be good or bad, we don't know, we actually don't know anything about them and they don't know anything about us.
This could lead to terrorism as well. I mean if some groups can't correlate with other groups that will be troublesome.
Hopefully everything goes well.
Indeed, read a infectious disease news collection source like http://promedmail.org/ long enough and you might be surprised we have anything to eat beyond Soylent Green. Everything you love to eat has a host of pathogens that want to eat it first.
i want nothing to do with any of you
Or going even further, how exhausting this is for someone who's not good at it? Why not just be genuine?

Yes, I do. I don't act genuine because when I'm my genuine self, I glare at everyone in the room with the rage of a thousand suns.

I don't know if people can tell that I'm hiding it or not, but when I try to hide and act enthusiastic, I get the job, when I don't, I don't.
we needn't just shrug and say, "They made a bad investment, so what?"

Well I haven't made a statement on that either way - but I wouldn't advocate for that.

It is however up to their own judgement how much to do in any case. They represent shareholders, so they do have fiduciary duty there to be sure (though I am unsure if that is true for the high profile members of the Theranos board as it seemed to be largely advisory).

The fact that Holmes has 50+% of the company makes the point in this case pretty much moot. Aside from leaving the board en masse and abandoning whatever shares they have, they really are pretty powerless.
That page requires an Oxford University username and password.

I'd be interested to read this.
Show HN: Best growth hacking tool – launch your biz
Thanks for all of your work Evan :)

Vue was the first JS framework that made sense to me for projects that needed more than online jQuery and not a full SPA app.
If I understand this correctly, basic income could eliminate poverty (by that specific definition). It would need to pay people half the median income, but tax the median income at a rate that means that exactly offsets the basic income payment (and, probably, tax higher incomes at higher rates).
Have you ever served on a jury?

Anecdotally, I've been on two juries. In both cases, I think the jurors did a good job with the facts as presented. One was a not guilty verdict, the other a guilty.

I don't think that it's either appropriate or a reasonable expectation for a juror to judge the legitimacy of an entire field of forensics.
Introducing yakbak: Record and playback HTTP interactions in Node.js
> To truly support Open Source, they should show a willingness to work against Software Patents.

See: http://www.cnet.com/news/google-microsoft-settle-long-runnin...

It is very hard for large software companies to unilaterally work against software patents because it puts them at a competitive disadvantage, at least temporarily. It's sort of like arms limitation talks where you can't put down your nukes before anyone else does or it's an open invitation to attack.
What's more it claims that friction is the biggest source of losses in an electric motor, when it's actually a very minor source of losses. The biggest losses are from resistive heating. See section "Motor Efficiency" at:

http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy/products/reference/15297
Well, you can always use BFS...
This story serves as an interesting counterpoint to Haseeb Qureshi's interview experience (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11552780). I think some discussion about how he and Sahat's experiences contrast would be useful.

I almost want to joke that it's Sahat should have done a bootcamp, since that seems to have been Haseeb's advantage; he learned everything about CS very recently and freshly, in an environment where he would be absorbing material that's tech interview fodder. Coupled with Haseeb's intelligence and quickness in absorbing said material, he must have impressed his interviewers. Whereas, an experienced developer like Sahat is worse off- ironically, by not being new to the field, he lacked the advantage of seeing like a fast learner. It's almost like ageism but specific to how long one has been programming.

And on the subject of hacker bootcamps- I've heard a lot of them not only teach programming, but how to optimize one's interviewing skills. If bootcamp graduates are doing well because of that, does that mean there should be bootcamps for experienced devs who want to switch jobs, just so they can ace interview questions? And is that really what this industry has come to? Memorizing algorithms and strategies for passing data structure logic puzzles in cram schools just to get a job?
Or, more likely, no one wants to spend the time to exhaustively prove that they do not contain sensitive information.
I think the point was that an Android app that needs to send a notification to a user of the app should use the built-in push notification functionality.
Radiant Zinc Fireworks Reveal Quality of Human Egg
Some sort of shooting incident apparently [0]

[0] http://www.tmz.com/2016/04/27/apple-campus-body-found-cupert...
OT Nitpick: I think you mean bulwark: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/bulwark
Hi jbob2000. I understand your concerns. In fact I have got a few people tell me that they like the HN the way it because of the great content.

Don't get us wrong, we don't want to change that. What we do want is to give some people the ability to make their experience richer. This is not for everyone but it can be helpful for some people.

Personal anecdote -- I asked a question one time but no one answered it. I deleted my question but as I was doing that Kevin Hale (a YC partner) responded back. After he posted it looked like he was talking to no-one. Fortunately, dang emailed me to notify that there was a response and asked if he could bring back my post. If I had gotten a notification about a response, this peculiar situation could have been avoided.
I'm not convinced. Compare:

https://youtu.be/ynLMfzLTc8M?t=8

and

https://youtu.be/Ak7xP8eghog?t=13

That was the best run in that video. The wheel spun less than 180 degrees after being carefully placed on the ground. In the original video the wheel was in contact with the ground for seconds before it got free to spin. It then spun for more than 180 degrees and seemed to be accelerating.

I know such motors are supposed to stop when you stop pedaling, but it could be a different one. There's still enough evidence to look damning.
Nor the Russian space station.
Think about captcha and why you might use an image of a cyphertext to defeat automated tools.

Could be combined with barcodes as well.
The early years were different, though. It was illegal to get any help. In one famous case, a rider got a 3 minute time penalty because he let a boy operate the bellows while he welded his own bike (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Christophe#1913_...)

And aside: alcohol works! The correlation between "drinking champagne during a stage" and "winning the Tour de France" is surprisingly high, even in recent years.
There is nothing surprising in this fact. I always argued that even a very simple language needs not one, not two, but dozens of consequent IRs. Why? See the recently opensourced ChezScheme.
Philadelphia metro area.
Duration Anxiety
Rapid Development and Code Complete by Steve McConnell. Those books are prescient.
I'm so glad to see movement in this direction. I work on a team with lots of non-technical people who need to share passwords and secure information, and store their own private bits. So we use LastPass. It's the only thing that works for us, but man does it need some competition. It makes me sad several times a month.

I would love to be able to move away from their central repository and host our own solution with something like this. I just hope that any user testing is being done with some non-techies who don't know or care what a PGP key is.
A strange Firefox address bar behavior
That program is completely misguided. You don't need thousands of "cyber soldiers", just a few good computer scientists, mathematicians and engineers. Because a system built from trusted and provably correct components (hardware and software) is infinitely better than a swiss cheese with dozens of people attempting to keep it from falling apart. And from that point on, you only need to teach soldiers to operate their equipment correctly.

The challenges of information technology w.r.t. warfare are fundamentally different from usual war tactics. You can't solve them by throwing lots of personel or big guns at them. If midst-fight your equipment or infrastructure fails because of security flaws, it's not because there's no personel to deal with it (for that it's already too late): it's because its designers failed at the drawing board.

It'd be better they concentrated on quality instead of quantity and the resignative "anything can be hacked" myth a lot of popular media is putting forward, as if information technology operated according to the same rules the physical battlefield does. These analogies only go so far...

(of course the same applies to non-military contexts as well)
From my understanding it was a suicide (buddy works at a news station in SF).

Edit: he just echoed the potential suspect involvement just like the linked article.
First 3D-Printed Superconducting Cavity
If I truly need a non-restful API endpoint, I don't worry too much about where to put it, because I'm doing it very rarely.

If I'm trying to break up a larger action into smaller ones often I'll parameterize the endpoint and use a service object or some sort of abstraction in the controller to keep the action from getting too big